Phenomenal Eros: For a History of Sensuality

Forty years of scholarship in the history of sexuality and gender studies have delivered a considerable amount of knowledge, framed by an encompassing premise: power is paramount. A preferred object of this kind of attention are the erotic cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. The focus on power leads contemporary scholars to adopt binary thinking, namely the attribution to ancient writers and thinkers of dichotomies such as domination versus subjection, or activity versus passivity. This is a fixist view that obliterates the dialectic of desire and, therefore, its fundamental mobility. Desire aims at the other person’s desire; roles are exchanged; age and social status can play in surprising ways; hyperactivity can become subjugation. It is time for a change. It is time to look at what mattered for the Ancients themselves: the subjective experience of sensations, bodies and situations; the felicitous, ironic, or tragic reversals of intersubjective games. More importantly: the quest for pleasure, rather than the use of pleasures. The Greeks thought the sexual experience as sensuality. And sensuality inflects what they thought about gender. In poetry, narrations and philosophy, concrete details draw our attention to the felt phenomena of lived bodies – in the plural. When we look for the logic of gender, we discover that bodies can be compared, not as totalities, but as bundles of multiple discreet qualities, ready to be combined and recombined, allotted and exchanged. Qualities can be bits and pieces of anatomy, manners and garments; but also fragments of experience, moments of sensory awareness. The logic of the concrete meets the phenomenal body. For the body is a challenge, to be taken up – as a cinematic life, frame after frame. Sensations can be shared across the boundaries of female and male, which are adjectives, not substances. A granular, corpuscular, pointilliste redistribution of traits, distinctive – or not. Sensuality is queer. Like Plato’s pharmacy, erotic materialism can deliver us, beautifully, cathartically, refreshingly from the modern strictures of binary thinking. This is what the Greeks have to tell us. Let us listen!