Erotics

A series of five mysterious, portraitlike images produced by Sandro Botticelli's workshop in the late fifteenth century shows the same female sitter, bust length, in profile, with an extremely ornate hairstyle. These images are difficult to classify. On the one hand, they follow the conventions of portraiture-they show a single, bust-length figure in profile against a plain, colored background or an architectural setting; on the other hand, because the woman is portrayed with decorated, loose, overabundant, waving hair and somewhat classical dress, she appears to be a more generalized typea nymph or goddess rather than a mortal woman. Besides being visually intriguing in their own right, these images have played a pivotal, although not always fully acknowledged, role in the historiography of Botticelli, of his famous painting Primavera (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), and, by extension, of Florentine culture and society under the rule of Lorenzo de' Medici. The various images have often been identified as portraits of Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, a Genoese woman married to a Florentine, who was the object of Giuliano de' Medici's unrequited love. Simonetta was Giuliano's "Petrarchan mistress"-a beautiful, chaste, and unattainable upper-class woman whom he adored from afar in the spirit of Petrarch's love for Laura. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many paintings by Botticelli were believed to contain likenesses of Simonetta. She was thought to be the model for Venus in Mars and Venus (National Gallery, London) and the Birth of Venus (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), for Venus or Flora in the Primavera, for Judith, and for the Madonna del Magnificat (all Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence), to name only a few examples. While many of these identifications are not now accepted, Simonetta continues to play an important role in the interpretation of Botticelli's images. Dempsey has recently reintroduced the theory that Flora in the Primavera represents Simonetta.1 For the most part, however, contemporary scholars are wary of the "Simonetta theory." As a result, they have severed the connection between Simonetta and the portraitlike images from Botticelli's workshop, preferring to call these images "ideal heads"-creations of a generic conception of female beauty.2 What, however, is meant by an "ideal"? Where does this ideal come from and what is its purpose? Can we be sure that these portraitlike images are not meant to refer to a particular woman? I will show that the effect of the images hinges on how they operate between the categories of portrait and ideal. They transform an actual woman, quite possibly Simonetta, into an ideal based on Petrarchan poetry. I will examine the way in which the artist invokes and combines two types of representation of womenportraits and depictions of nymphs or goddesses. I will argue that evidence that the images portray Simonetta is not as negligible as some art historians have assumed. Finally, I will compare the images to poems written about Simonetta after her early death. The correspondences between poems and images not only support the idea that the paintings refer to Simonetta but, more important, they reveal how dead young noblewomen could be idealized, even eroticized, in both poetry and painting. The late fifteenth-century "portraits" from Botticelli's workshop are early examples of the problematic category of Renaissance paintings identified by Cropper as "portraits of unknown beautiful women."5 In many sixteenth-century images, as in the Simonetta pictures,4 it is difficult to determine whether an actual woman, an ideal, a courtesan, or a goddess is represented. As Cropper says, "a portrait of a beautiful woman is not...simply a portrait with a female rather than a male subject."5 However, the new genre is not a vision of a generic female ideal, either. Indeed, the play between "real" and "imaginary" woman is central to the effect both of the Simonetta and of the later, sixteenth-century images. Although the Simonetta paintings can be seen as precursors of the many Venetian sensuous half-length images, of Raphael's Fornarina (Galleria Nazionale, Rome), and of the Leonardo school's "Mona Vanna" images, they have a different erotic appeal. Unlike the more sensual and direct address of the sixteenthcentury

W niniejszej pracy autor referuje pokrótce swoją interpretację poematu prozą Stanisława Przybyszewskiego Androgyne. Motywem przewodnim jest ukuty przez autora termin oniryzmu erotycznego. Autor wskazuje na jego słownikową etymologię oraz zarysowuje podobne motywy w innych utworach Przybyszewskiego. Następnie kieruje uwagę ku głównemu tematowi pracy. W sposób przeglądowy prezentuje senność wizji bohatera poematu, wskazując przede wszystkim na erotyczność wizji, majaków i snów bohatera utworu. Krok po kroku, autor przedstawia jak erotyka przenika w utworze Przybyszewskiego do sfery snu i przejmuje nad nią kontrolę. Autor przedstawia również własną interpretację zakończenia utworu, nie jako śmierci bohatera, ale utożsamienia sobie dualizmu swojej natury. Na koniec, podsumowując, raz jeszcze określa czym jest oniryzm erotyczny, w sposób jasny i klarowny przedstawia jego główne założenia oraz w jaki sposób realizuje się on w dziełach Stanisława Przybyszewskiego.
Praca napisana pod kierunkiem śp. dr Krzysztofa Fiołka

Una de las características fundamentales de la cultura griega clásica es la ausencia raigal de parámetros. En lo que respecta al comportamiento sexual, no existía un código consolidado que lo rija (Dover, 1978; Foucault, 1984). Según Foucault, entre otros, la moral griega se basa principalmente en el control o dominio de uno mismo (enkráteia). Sin embargo, en las relaciones homoeróticas, la “erótica común”, no se centra en el control de sí de ambos integrantes de la pareja, sino que el problema moral es cuándo debe ceder o no el amado a los pedidos del amante. Para poder comprender este conflicto entre una moral basada en el dominio de sí y una erótica que no parece considerarlo realmente, analizaremos la noción de enkráteia en la cultura clásica, que parece ser introducida como dominio de sí por Sócrates y sus discípulos.

This paper focuses on the tendency of eroticising the body of the dying or dead Christ, evident in Renaissance and Baroque art, but also in religious poetry. It also discusses how these artistic works construct an erotic relationship between Christ and Mary Magdalene. Works discussed are poems by Crashaw and Herbert and Maltese 20th century poets Doreen Micallef and Marjanu Vella.

An essay accompanying artist Tommy Bruce's exhibition "Real Problems" (2020), at the AC[2]: Albuquerque Contemporary Art Center in New Mexico. The essay discusses the role of gender, sexuality, race and violence in the artist's work and performance through the fursona (furry persona) Atmus, a white-tailed deer.

I attempt to locate the "stutter of form" as described in Craig Dworkin's essay of that title in the realm of contemporary classical music. Lachenmann's piece Pression serves as a starting point which leads me toward Sept Papillons, a piece for solo cello by Kaija Saariaho.

This essay examines how capitalism and colonialism collude to produce a high value on the “end” of the erotic—the orgasm—and rather proposes an end to the hierarchical valuing of orgasmic pleasure. Through an analysis of film, literature, and the pleasures in their consumption, this essay makes the case for asexual pleasures that resist the telos of erotic settler time, moving into a queer, sovereign erotic temporality. In other words, how might we think differently about intimacies and reimagine the durations of pleasure when we interrogate the colonial construction of the normative sexual subject and imperatives toward sexual coupling? By exploring the possibilities of various nonsexual pleasures, we can question how and which bodies are constructed as healthy, desirable, and desiring subjects according to normative constructions of race, ability, age, and orgasmic potential, while also creating different modes of relationality and intimacy with the self and others.

Design research can include a range of actions but has gradually become assimilated into the production of theory. The making of theory in design has been widely discussed (Redström, 2017), but the kinds of cognitive operations that it entails is still to be fully explored. I will argue that contemporary theory entails three different ways of relating to objects: objectivity, critique and affect (Daston & Galison 2010, Kosofsky Sedgwick 2003, Massumi 2002). These three ways of knowing, inherited from modernity, protect us from the material reality that surrounds us, from the power of objects over humans. They all contribute together to create a distance between humans and the world we live in. In the following paper exploring the power of erotics, I will propose forms of design research that don't distance us from the objects we are analysing, forms of knowing/doing that allow us to establish interdependent relationships with them.

Mystery, seduction, and ecstatic charge are the place where the erotology and the ontology of small
things (a pearl, a grain, a bubble, a shell) touch, whose eruptive potential becomes the backbone of the
erotological complex of Andersen’s poetics. Small things become the zero degree of Andersen’s erotological
discourse, delineating the boundary of death through a liberation from life. Through the establishment of the
paradigm of orgasmic metamorphoses of small things (from pearls to bubbles), the erotological components
of the fairy tale The Little Mermaid are examined.

This chapter explores the complex interplay of meanings and the discursive practices of race inherent in the erotics of Olitz - a hashtag that largely promoted or 'shipped' the televisual pairing of Olivia Pope and Fitz Williams in the TV show Scandal. This also explores Olivia’s raced and gendered sexuality working silently and steadily throughout the show, in a way that challenges one-dimensional, stereotypical depictions of Black women on screen and this gradually unravels in the eroticized Olitz relationship.

A study of Artaud’s 1947–1948 writings (including To Have Done with the Judgment of God and The Theatre of Cruelty) in the light of Spinoza’s materialism and Nietzsche’s take on the death of God in The Gay Science, but also of Lacan’s distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, and Deligny’s “attempt” to explore the former independently from the latter, upon which I build a new interpretation of Artaud’s “body without organs”—in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy—suggesting that it denotes the body that we are instead of the body that we have: a yet-to-come, polyvalent, pre-subjective, and infinite surface of sensations and affections of which thought is but the idea; plus a revolutionary war machine whose activation prefigures the very possibility of a “transcendental erotics” against the (disembodied) regime of intelligible capture/appropriation characteristic of Western metaphysics, i.e. beyond any onto(theo)logy. If animism—or the experimental rethinking and renegotiation of the boundaries between Life and Nonlife, as Elizabeth Povinelli has it—is both today’s major question against the backdrop of new forms of capitalist biopower and the antidote to capitalism’s semiotics, Artaud’s poetics and philosophy of the body add to it the depth it otherwise lacks when it is thought of as relational rather than chaosmic.

Este ensayo examina varios textos redactados por Artaud en 1947–1948 esenciales para comprender su noción de un «cuerpo sin órganos» (CsO) e interpreta el CsO artaudiano en tanto que superficie polivalente de sensaciones y afectos y máquina de guerra revolucionaria cuya activación vendría a prefigurar la posibilidad misma de una «erótica transcendental» opuesta a toda onto(teo)logía, así como la exploración de lo Real frente a su captura imaginaria y simbólica.