Sex after death: Francois Ozon's libidinal invasions (original) (raw)
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Verbum et Ecclesia, 2023
Whereas the Song of Songs can be said to be about Eros, the Book of Job could be about Thanatos. Yet, the Song ends with a crucial reference to death, and in the Book of Job there are subtle traces of sexuality: the first chapter tells about probably promiscuous parties held by Job’s children who then die during such a feast. Job reacts by referring to the womb, which presumably has sexual connotations. The womb is once again an issue in chapters 3 and 10. Twice he mentions breasts, although negatively connoted. In his last speech, Job suddenly refers several times to hypothetical transgressions with women, which betrays his hidden desires behind his piety. In addition, apart from body-parts such as the feet, hands and heart, a tail, loins and even a nose might sometimes be interpreted as euphemisms with phallic hints. In the final chapter his three ‘new’ daughters are the most beautiful in the world, perhaps presenting him as eventually allowing his libido to be re-introjected. Through a psychoanalytical lens it is, however, possible to make sense of this unexpected presence of sexual traces in a book about death. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Approaching texts from a psychoanalytical perspective challenges historical-critical exegesis by questioning its assumption that universality dissolves into historicity. It adds unconscious aspects of a text, here interpreting unexpected traces of sexuality in a book about mourning. This is done in a divergent way by pointing out various possible understandings. Keywords: Book of Job; psychoanalytical; sexuality; mourning; Török.
Reading Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
2020
With this remarkable work of scholarship, Van Haute and Westerink continue their pathbreaking project of making visible a largely unfamiliar Freud. Their meticulous readings demonstrate not only the historical and conceptual significance of the first edition of Three Essays, but also its astonishing relevance for contemporary debates about sex and gender."
"Sexuality", in Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytical Political Theory, ed. Yannis Stavrakakis
Routledge, 2020
One of the oldest examples of sexuality's political potential appears in Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece are tired of the ongoing war between their cities. Under the unifying leadership of Lysistrata, they declare that they will refuse to have sex with their husbands until the war is over, and miraculously enough, a peace treaty is signed much sooner than expected. The different peoples reconcile with each other, and so do the different sexes. Indeed, sexuality expresses much more than an intimate interaction between two bodies. It also involves various elements such as power, dominance, control, pleasure, and pain-elements that are inherent parts of any human interaction, from relationships between two people to complex social structures. These elements, however, are not static and take diverse shapes and forms according to the time and the place of their emergence. Sexuality changes accordingly in both its praxis and its discourse, interacting with different norms and codes that define what 'legitimate' sexuality is. The interesting question for our purposes, however, is not so much how sexuality is shaped by history-a question that has been studied extensively-but rather how sexuality may in turn shape history. What is the political potential of sexuality, and how can we realize it? In this respect, psychoanalysis may serve as a powerful tool of investigation. Indeed, sexual-ity has occupied a central place in psychoanalysis from the outset, and this place, moreover, has been the focal point of many criticisms and attacks against psychoanalysis. It is as if the way that psychoanalysis conceived of sexuality profoundly disturbed and threatened to reveal something hidden in society. The introduction of infantile sexuality, for instance, provoked outrage and disgust among conservative circles, which accused psychoanalysis of decadence and nihilism and of seeking to destabilize family and sexual norms. Later on, however, a contrary type of criticism was raised, one that considers psychoanalysis to be too conservative and oppressive. Psychoanalysis is actually both revolutionary and conservative, not because of Freud's own personality or other external factors but because of the very nature of what psychoanalysis investigates. On the one hand, it introduces blind forces, which are the drives: Libido (or Eros, the life drive) and Thanatos (the death drive). On the other hand, it focuses on the ways these forces are restricted by social norms and the various symptoms that are caused by these restrictions. Neither wishing to undo these norms nor aspiring to conserve them, psychoanalysis is content with describing the norms. Its aim is to find a cure for the symptoms within existing restrictions rather than to create a society with no symptoms at all.