The sexual night of each corresponds to that first scene that we can’t know but to which we owe our existence, and whose secret we will not cease to search unconsciously. Hence behind every image we always look for an underlying image, says Pascal Quignard, who has made of this search the leitmotif of his essayistic journey, traces the cultural nuptials between sex and fear, between the Dream and the Rapture (in love, in death), […]
Amour fou involves non-ordinary sexuality the way sorcery demands non-ordinary consciousness (Hakim Bey, TAZ). Who mostly explored the incendiary effects of mad love were the Surrealists, but the paroxysm of passion that embodies this concept does not adhere to a time and place. It vibrates with different chords every chance. Its poetic possibilities has been plumbed as a way of short-circuit of established order by freeing the natural being of any social tie, so often […]
Licentiousness, yes, but subject to tight control. Architects, reformers and literati of the eighteenth century coincide in projecting or imagining houses of pleasure inspired by the panopticon of Bentham or anticipating its radial and controlling configuration: the ideal city conceived by Ledoux (in which could not be absent a temple for sex education, the Oikema) is built around that central eye; In The 120 days of Sodom, Sade gives semicircular form to the hall of […]
There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer. Humbert Humbert (Nabokov) evokes his sexual awakening and nostalgia for such purity, elusive as the grains of sand that shelters […]
De Quincey discoursed about studying a murder like if it was a painting or a sculpture, ignoring the moral aspects. Our morbid grounds are revealed in such situations, facing the uncomfortable fascination incites us sadism acts. A vast gallery of sadistic women splashes History with sex and blood, mixing chronic and literary lucubration. The real character is enriched with mythical attributes, and the aura that preserves the light of these legendary ladies grows amid darkness […]
In pagan periods myths and legends abound, stories and oral narratives in which coitus between species, far from being stigmatized, exalted the animist communion with nature, virility of gods and heroes, transmuting power of the erotic imagination… With Christianity, the priapic nature spirits become evil beings, the bucolic image of satyr chasing nymphs is replaced in the popular imagination by the goat copulating with witches. Secular societies labeled bestiality among sexual deviations, and then exploited […]
The nickname which the popular imagination of the late nineteenth baptized Edison, The Wizard of Menlo Park, realizes the degree of fascination generated by the battery inventions attributed to the engineer. The man who has made captive echo; in these terms introduced Villiers de L’Isle Adam the inventor of the phonograph, making protagonist of one of the most misogynistic plots in the history of science fiction: as a maker of its future Eva moved by […]
Eroticism bring into question the person as individual being closed in himself. Lovers dissolve each other into one body, hence the daily expression of dissolute life. The organs spill into the branch of the merger, wrote Georges Bataille, whose way of describing the erotic act as that part of sexuality that moves our inner found its translation in Hans Bellmer drawings. Although the emphasis that the French writer put on the religious component of eroticism […]
