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), […]
The etymology reveals the divergences between contemporary moral parameters and those of the classical period. Pascal Quignard, in Sex and Terror, provides good examples of how the word “castites” had more to do with “integrity of caste” than with any kind of virginal purity. Likewise, virtus referred to manly vigor, to the power of the free man or “vir” against the servus. The Romans were obsessed with virile power, hence the phallus (Fascinus) was the […]
