Retour sur l’hymne homérique comme proème : la pragmatique de l’hymne 6 à Aphrodite

For the necessary anthropological return to ‘native’ categories, Thucydides (3.104) helps us for our modern understanding of the Homeric hymns. These poems in epic diction are prooimia to musical competitions. They are composed for a ritual recitation on the occasion of different cultic festivals in different cities. With the example of the second Homeric hymn consecrated to Aphrodite in our modern corpus, the study tends to show the different enunciative procedures aiming at such a ritual function, such a pragmatics through an astonishing portrait of the goddess of erotic desire. The procedure opens the possibility of re-performances of the hymnic poems in other ritual circumstances, in other cultic spaces.

Erotic desire as a woman’s way of knowing the divine

This article examines a Japanese novel written by Arishima Takeo, A Certain Woman (first published in Japanese in 1919), in order to explore women’s ways of knowing, focusing on the body and erotic desire as a locus where the human–God relationship is embodied. This novel shows a way of knowing the Divine beyond language and the sanitized notion of love, describing the life of a modern Japanese Christian woman who refuses both Japanese colonial woman-hood and Christian (Victorian) sexual ethics. Depicting the divine presence in the protagonist’s promiscuous and stigmatized body, Arishima asks theological questions about the role of eros and violence in the pursuit of God, and seeks radically free God and humans who may go beyond any existing boundaries.

A Neo-Platonic Dialogue on the Ethics of Love*

In his classic paper on “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato” Gregory Vlastos denied that according to Plato’s Diotima in the Symposium a human individual can ever be the proper object of one’s erotic desire, because what one (should) be enamoured with is the Form of Beauty. For the true Platonic lover, the beauty of an individual is only the starting-point for one to understand that beauty can reside also in more abstract levels. Hence, Vlastos argues that the beloved individual is for his lover only a means to an end, so that the lover recollects and attains to true Beauty, and that this is morally objectionable. The systematic Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus (412–485 AD) had already given an answer to this accusation. I will first present the altruistic side of Eros as an ontological entity in Proclus’s metaphysical system. My guide in this will be Socrates, as well as the Platonic Demiurge from the Timaeus and Republic’s philosopher-king. It will be shown that, according to Proclus’s interpretation of various Platonic texts, Vlastos was wrong to accuse Plato of the abovementioned “instrumentality” on the erotic field. However, my paper will close with a critical engagement with Proclus too, since I discern that in his view of Platonic love another sort of instrumentality, one which is akin to Stoic ethics, arises. Vlastos was wrong, but we do not need to be wholeheartedly sympathetic to Proclus.

Language, form, and imagery in John’s poetry

Chapter 3 turns to John’s poetry, the first genre in which he wrote and the foundational form of his thought. In their imaginative, narratival depiction of the inner life of the Trinity, John’s Romances explore the communicative nature of language, examining how the loving desire that constitutes the pneumatological bond of Father and Son is also is to be found in the creativity of language itself. John is certainly intrigued by the limits of language that are encountered in the spiritual ascent, which he explores in his glosa and copla poems by playing in various fashions on the theme of the paradoxes involved in human union with the divine. Yet his lira poems, which serve as the basis for his prose commentaries, show him to be chiefly animated by the value of the language and imagery of erotic desire for the depiction of the spiritual ascent. The form and imagery of these poems present a heightened sense of the erotic potential of language itself, which in its very superabundance and excess supports the poem’s accounts of the lovers’ yearning and consummation. Through his poetry, therefore, John presents erotic desire as a force that propels the soul towards its goal, and whose eventual realization in union with God may be meaningfully depicted through the superabundant deployment of images and language drawn from human sexual love.

Looking, Reading, and Intertextuality in Ding Ling's “Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日記 (Miss Sophia's Diary)

This article examines Ding Ling's 丁玲 (1904–86) practice of intertextuality in her famous 1927 story “Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日記 (Miss Sophia's Diary) by means of the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism. Sophia's diary is in dialogue with a plethora of texts she has read or encountered before. Ding Ling uses these intertexts to shed light on Sophia's negotiations with the New Woman's identity, as well as with the medium of the written word. At the same time, Sophia's diary is perennially in dialogue with anticipated readers or interlocutors. The story's thematization of reading is inseparable from the motifs of looking and gazing: just as Sophia is constantly preoccupied with how people look at her, she is anxious about how her diary will be read. Thus, her diary has an inherently dialogical stance as Sophia flirts with different intertextual ways of defining herself, always implicitly in contention with others who might view or read her otherwise. The article ends by reflecting on the resonances between Sophia's textual flirtations and the story's depictions of erotic desire, suggesting that the idea of promiscuity emerges as a figure for the practice of intertextuality during the May Fourth period.

“Thaz how u kno ur dum”

This study analyzes language use among a group of gay men who participate on an online messageboard (OnYourKnees), focused on the attainment of a ‘dumb jock’ identity. Posters align with a series of qualities that largely conform to ideologies of American jock masculinity, but at the same time satirize those ideologies: in particular, many posters view as an integral quality of dumb-jock identity ‘dumbness:’ an unwillingness/inability to engage in scholarly/academic pursuits. The repeated citationality of dumbness as a positive quality creates a distinct identity-type that posters link with erotic desire. Orthographic variation contributes to the attainment and recognition of a jock identity: posters who identify as jocks are more likely to display non-standard American English spelling than those who do not. This study thus highlights the importance of orthographic variation in maintaining distinct identities among local communities, especially in a space where traditional ideologies of masculinity are recontextualized.

Impulsivity and the Experience of Desire in the Choice of Erotic Stimuli

(1) Background: the relationship between erotic desire and personality factors is still relatively understudied. (2) Objective: to study the influence of the experience of desire, as well as impulsivity in the choice of videos, as the behavioral variable in the experimental trial. (2) Method: the sample consisted of 48 adult subjects, who took part in an experimental study that involved watching videos. (3) Results: the linear regression analysis revealed that the behavior involved in choosing videos is predicted by the sexual desire felt at the time of the trial, and not by stable personality factors, such as impulsivity or general self-report levels of sexual desire. (4) Conclusion: it is observed that the specific moment or situation and the behavior have a bigger impact on the erotic desire experienced at the time of the test than certain personality traits, as well as the previous and habitual levels of erotic desire of which an individual reports.