It is argued that the pronouns `she' and `he' are disguised complexdemonstratives of the form `that female/male'. Three theories ofcomplex demonstratives are examined and shown to be committed to theview that `s/he' turns out to be an empty term when used to refer toa hermaphrodite. A fourth theory of complex demonstratives, one thatis hermaphrodite friendly, is proposed. It maintains that complexdemonstratives such as `that female/male' and the pronoun `s/he' can succeed in referring to someone independently of his or her gender.This (...) theory incorporates: (i) a multiple proposition view, i.e., theview that an utterance of a sentence containing a complex demonstrativeexpresses two (or more) propositions, namely the background proposition(s)and the official one; (ii) that the referent of a complex demonstrativeis a component of the official proposition expressed whether it satisfiesthe nominal part of the demonstrative expression or not; (iii) that thenominal part of a complex demonstrative only affect the background proposition(s) and (iv) that the utterance inherits its truth-value onlyfrom the official proposition. (shrink)

본 논문은 사랑을 성애로 환원하는 최근의 성적 환원주의와 사랑이 가능한 한 사적으로 유지돼야 한다는 자유주의적 이상에 맞서 고대 그리스의 정치-사랑 개념 쌍을 살펴보고자 한다. 이를 통해 현대 학문 영역에서 상대적으로 간과되고 있는 고대 그리스의 정치 이론에 나타난 공적 에로스론인‘폴리스-에로스론’을 고찰하려는 데에 그 목적이 있다.BR 성적 욕망은 에로스의 제한된 유형일 뿐이라는 논점을 위해, 2절에서는 헤시오도스의 『신통기』에 나타난 에로스 신의 기원에 관한 두 가지 설명이 차례로 분석될 것이다. 헤시오도스의 신화적이고 시적인 설명에 따르면, 고전기의 정치적 에로스에 대한 최초의 기원이 아프로디테 이전의 최초의 오래된 (...) 에로스라는 것이 드러날 것이다. 이 원초적인 에로스가 비성적이거나 성적인 것 외부에 있는 비육체적인 대상들에 적용됐던 정치적 에로스의 모태임이 밝혀질 것이다. 다음으로 3절은 시칠리아 원정, 페리클레스의 장례식 연설 그리고 뮈틸레네 논쟁을 통해 투퀴디데스의 정치적 에로스 담론의 지형도가 그려진다. 투퀴디데스의 정치적 에로스 담론은 더 많이 가지려는 욕망(pleonexia), 구혼자들처럼 도시를 사랑하는 자들(erastai)이 되라는 페리클레스의 촉구, 그리고 개인적 에로스와 공동체적 에로스의 공속 관계를 통해 잘 드러나고 있다. 그리고 4절에서는『향연』의 파이드로스의 연인군대, 파우사니아스의 참주정과 소년애, 아리스토파네스의 남성-남성 욕망의 합법화 그리고 소크라테스-디오티마 연설의 불사적 명예에 대한 사랑을 통해, 정치적 에로스에 관한 담론이 논급된다. 연인군대, 참주정과 소년애, 남성-남성 욕망의 합법화 그리고 불사하는 명예에 대한 사랑(philotimia) 각각은 정치와 에로스의 공속 관계를 다시 한 번 확인시켜 줄 것이다.BR 이상의 정치적 에로스 담론에 관한 헤시오도스의 신화적이고 시적인 전통과 투퀴디데스의 실증주의적 역사, 그리고 플라톤의『향연』을 통해, 우리는 에로스가 성애를 초과하여 좀 더 넓은 의미로 사용됐고, 특히 국가적 차원에서 에로스의 정치적 함의를 확인할 수 있었다. 그러나 에로스가 정치적 저항 운동의 에너지원이고, 완전히 다른 삶의 형식, 완전히 다른 사회를 향한 혁명적 욕망의 원천이라는 진단에는 에로스의 정치적 잠재성과 동시에 그것의 위험들에 대한 경고도 함께 들어 있다. (shrink)

Eros and Socratic Political Philosophy offers a new account of Plato's view of eros, or romantic love, by focusing on a question which has vexed many scholars: why does Plato's Socrates praise eros highly on some occasions but also criticize it harshly on others? Through detailed analyses of Plato's Republic, Phaedrus, and Symposium, Levy shows how, despite the apparent tensions between Socrates' statements about eros in each dialogue, these statements supplement each other well and serve to clarify Socrates' understanding (...) of the complex relationship between eros, religious belief, and philosophy. Thus, Levy's interpretation sheds new light not only on Plato's view of eros, but also on his view of piety and philosophy, challenging common assumptions about the erotic nature of Socratic philosophy. This novel approach to classic political theory will incite discussion and interest among scholars of classics, philosophy, and political theory. (shrink)

¿Qué cabida tienen, o pueden tener, las éticas y las políticas de la alteridad en el horizonte filosófico actual? En el contexto de la filosofía española reciente, la obra de Gabriel Bello Reguera (Dehesas, León, 1943) ha afrontado el reto ético-político que plantea el tomarse en serio la alteridad. Ha desarrollado su carrera académica en la Universidad de La Laguna como catedrático de Filosofía Moral y en su trayectoria cabría señalar tres giros fundamentales, si bien relacionados entre sí. El primero (...) podemos derivarlo del impacto de la lectura de la obra del neopragmatista Richard Rorty, que incidió en su crítica al fundamentalismo autoritario de la tradición filosófica despertó su interés por la narratividad, ligada a la conversación, como herramienta edificante de la ética. El segundo es debido a la influencia del pensamiento de Emmanuel Lévinas, a partir del cual problematiza las relaciones entre las categorías éticas de identidad, diferencia y alteridad. El tercero, y más reciente, le llevará al terreno del análisis de las migraciones internacionales en su contexto postcolonial como acuciante asunto necesitado, precisamente, de un nuevo marco filosófico, ético y político. En este libro colectivo, a través de la obra de Gabriel Bello, afrontamos con rigor la contextualización de las éticas y las políticas de la alteridad, proseguimos la discusión en torno a estas a la vez que elaboramos, conjuntamente, un balance crítico de una línea de investigación, de sus posibilidades y límites. Con todo ello, además, seguimos la tradición de prestar reconocimiento y gratitud a nuestros maestros y a nuestras maestras. En este caso, reconocemos la trayectoria docente e investigadora del Profesor Gabriel Bello Reguera y su dedicación rigurosa y concienzuda a la vida universitaria. Su obra, que, recorre cuatro décadas, es testimonio de cómo la filosofía en el contexto del Estado español, tras abandonar el erial instigado por el franquismo, participa de los debates transnacionales actuales en los que las éticas y las políticas de la alteridad, especialmente, plantean desafíos insoslayables. Hemos, pues, recreado el ritual académico del Homenaje, algo tan central en la filosofía alemana como la Festschrift, con el deseo de dotarlo del sentido más relevante que, a nuestro juicio, puede tener: el del debate intelectual crítico. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.1 (2004) 148-152 [Access article in PDF] Paul W. Ludwig. Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiv + 398 pp. Cloth, $65. This is a very ambitious and very important, but also importantly flawed, book. It issues from an excellent stable, the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and admirably maintains that (...) stable's thoroughbred tradition of sophisticated interdisciplinarity and equally sophisticated interfacing between the ancient subject matter and the target contemporary readership. It aims not merely to interpret the ancient world but also to change the modern. It takes for its subject matter rival constructions of eros (unitalicized, since this is mostly not used as a mere transliteration of the Greek word): a sometimes deadly, sometimes fructifying, amalgam of altruistic and selfish passion, emotion, and reasonable calculation. The flaws lie not so much in the conception as in the execution. This is one of those books in which the whole is palpably less than the sum of its parts, some of which are quite exceptionally thoughtful and thought-provoking. It is partial, too, in that it selects its source texts very precisely and deliberately but neglects others that a less partial (in another sense) reader might have expected the author to tackle at comparable length and with comparable assiduity. It suffers, probably, from an overlong period of gestation. It would have benefited, certainly, from a Maxwell Perkins in the editorial cutting room.Eros is currently, if the pun may be permitted, a sexy topic in ancient or classical studies. Ludwig's own generally accurate listing of works cited (381-92—not, he stresses, xiii, a "bibliography") includes nearly a score of articles and books in the titles of which "eros" or "erotic" appears, one of them a translated article by Freud (Ludwig cites in all eight Freudian works, having no truck with feminist or other rejections of any or all versions of Freudian psychodynamic theory). To these could be added (exempli gratia) Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.'s Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value(which appeared early enough, in 1999, for Ludwig to have taken it into account) or Thomas F. Scanlon's Eros and Greek Athleticsand Victoria Wohl's Love Among the Ruins. The Erotics of Democracy(which did not—they were also published in 2002). It is odd, however, that Ludwig seems to have overlooked Wohl's 1999 article, "The Eros of Alcibiades," which treats a subject that Ludwig himself could hardly not treat, and unfortunate that he did, in that the article appears in revised form in Wohl's new book, the chief premise of which is that "the erotics of democracy is not merely a trope but a dense point of convergence within Athenian social relations and subjectivity."Both Plato's Symposiumand Greek athletics bulk large in Ludwig's account, the former understandably more so than the latter. Indeed, Ludwig begins with a minutely detailed account of—just one speech from—the Symposium, that attributed to "Aristophanes," to which he counterpoints the views that he thinks he can confidently attribute to the "real" Aristophanes, the author of the extant comedies (on which Ludwig concentrates especially, including Clouds, Wasps, and Birds; he promises to return to Lysistrataand Ecclesiazusae). Besides [End Page 148] Plato and Aristophanes, Ludwig's author of choice is Thucydides, at any rate the Thucydides of the Periclean Funeral Oration and of the account of the Athenians' "erotic" decision to go to war in and over Sicily in 415. As for Wohl's claim (above), Ludwig could not agree more. The devil, however, is in the details.And, this is a very detailed book indeed. Ludwig first defines what he means and understands by eros in a variety of subtle and acute ways. It is a "predicament to be experienced and perhaps ameliorated rather than a problem to be solved once and for all" (18); it "occurs in cases in which the desire, whether sexual or not, becomes obsessional" (13, my emphasis); and it was... (shrink)

Between the '60s and the '80s he argues, there transpired neither a sexual revolution nor counter-revolution but a heightened conflict over the meaning of sex, its relation to pleasure, romance, and self-identity, its proper moral role in private and public life. In part two Seidman's primary purpose is to analyze moral arguments over sexual norms and practices. He chooses the sex debates that occurred within feminism and the gay male community in the late '70s through the '80s as his sites (...) for moral engagement, as it is here that the debate over sexual ethics has been given its fullest elaboration. In conclusion, Seidman offers a pragmatic ethic that revolves around the concept of sexual and social responsibility as a bridge between libertarians and romanticists. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics and Eros in Aristophanes' Speech:Symposium 191E–192A and the ComediesPaul W. LudwigFor many of Plato's modern readers, Aristophanes' encomium of eros is the most memorablnvincing speech in the Symposium. Yet a key passage in the speech is not well understood. About three–fifths of the way through the speech, Aristophanes asserts that boys who are unashamed to lie with men are the most manly boys by nature. A great proof (...) of this, he says, is the fact that they alone end up in politics, where they become "real men."1 Since the same connection between sex and politics is the object of derision in Aristophanes' comedies, 2 many commentators have seen irony in this assertion.3 More have implicitly favored a straight reading, however, relying on the strength of the speech taken at face value. The type of irony at issue, dramatic or verbal, is also open to competing interpretations. Nor have the implications of either type of irony for the rest of the speech and for the dialogue as a whole been adequately treated. Does Plato make his character Aristophanes speak more wisely than he is aware of, in playful revenge for the comedian's own distorted portrait of Socrates?4 Or does Plato make use of the professional jester to clear the way for Socratic morality, on the assumption that Aristophanes' views about male homosexual eros were sufficiently well known to leave little doubt that his explicit praise of pederasty was tongue–in–cheek? [End Page 537]I. The Passage in ContextSymp. 191e–192aThe safest exegesis would first make sense of what Aristophanes professes to mean, comparing the philosophic content, which ought to stand or fall on its own merits, with the rest of the speech and with the other speeches in the dialogue, especially Socrates'. Irony could then emerge either as an alternative or as a supplement to the face–value reading. Assessment of the dialogue's own internal logic, as well as comparison with other Platonic dialogues, should precede recourse outside the authorship of Plato, viz. to the Aristophanic comedies.Aristophanes not only legitimates male–male desire, he asserts that it is best. He argues for his assertion on the grounds that male–male desire is connected to politics. This argument resonates with two themes sounded earlier in the dialogue, by Phaedrus and by Pausanias. The former praises male–male relations by saying that if by some chance a city or armed camp could come into being made up entirely of lovers and their boyfriends, their desire to refrain from all that is shameful and to seek honor in one another's eyes would result in their city's having the best possible government. If such were to fight side by side, even if their city or army happened to be small, they would well nigh conquer all mankind. For an in love would rather die than be seen in any act of cowardice () by his boyfriend (178d 4–179a 2). In other words, lovers make the best citizen–soldiers because the private aim of impressing the beloved serves the public goal of bravery in battle.Pausanias plays a variation on the same theme. He argues that barbarian tyrants outlaw pederasty because they are afraid of strong attachments arising among their subjects. Since proud thoughts are engendered by love, Pausanias reformulates the unwillingness to tolerate disgrace in battle into an unwillingness to acquiesce in tyranny. He cites the example of Harmodius and his lover Aristogeiton, who, in popular lore, dissolved the tyranny of the Peisistratids at Athens, thus clearing [End Page 538] the way for democracy (182b 6–c 7). Like Phaedrus, he mentions unmanliness as the crucial political defect that breeds tyranny (cf. 178d 4–6 with 182c 7–d 2). Like Phaedrus, he sees manliness as the willingness to take up arms, this time not in battle, but in a tyrannicide. And like Phaedrus, he sees male–male relations as the breeding ground for manliness.Unlike Phaedrus, Pausanias is especially concerned with education. The mature lover is assumed to possess already the civic virtues as well as a modicum of philosophy.5 He can initiate his younger... (shrink)

The Passionate Statesman explores the intersection of passion and politics in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, with special emphasis on how he represents the influence of erõs, or erotic desire, on the careers of some of the most prominent statesmen from Greco-Roman antiquity.

This article discusses Charles Taylor's analysis of the ‘politics of recognition’, which reveals that the major versions of the latter share an ideological conception of Eros as a binding, unifying force. Such striving for oneness is seen as key to forming harmonious, just communities and nations, and ultimately global cohesion. I refer to this as the ‘ideology of Eros’. However, Taylor highlights an ironically divisive opposition concerning how to realise such oneness, based on incompatible foundational principles: ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’. Instead (...) of a choice, Taylor opts for the demanding political task of ongoing negotiation between them. I augment Taylor's analysis by re-evaluating the figure of ‘non-recognition’ arising from Lacan's critique of the ‘ideology of Eros’, which is centred on Socrates’ encounter with Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium and to which he adds his notion of genuine love, which affirms an ethic of healthy ‘non-recognition’. I argue that this ethic supports the difficult political task that Taylor rightly calls for. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 126.1 (2005) 138-142 [Access article in PDF] Kathy L. Gaca. The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reformin Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity. Hellenistic Culture and Society 40. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. xviii + 359 pp. Cloth, $60. As the current attention to same-sex marriage attests, religious communities and politicians today are concerned with sexual activity and rules, (...) viewing [End Page 138] them as correlated with particular kinds of social orders and values. Since second-wave feminism and Foucault, classicists and historians of early Christians have given considerable attention to how ancients themselves were concerned with sexual activity and its bearing on social, political, and religious life. Kathy Gaca's study contributes fresh insights about the saliency of religious ideology to understanding the different kinds of "sexual blueprints" produced by Greek philosophers, biblical authors and their interpreters, and early Christians. The Making of Fornication takes as its starting point a challenge to Foucault's argument for fundamental continuity in sexual morality between Greek and early Christian thought. Gaca argues instead that historically successful forms of Christianity are more discontinuous than continuous with Greek philosophy.Porneia exemplifies the break Gaca charts: "the Greek biblical sense of 'fornication' should not be confused with in the non-biblical Greek sense.... as 'fornication' requires biblical monotheism to be intelligible as a sexual rule, insofar as sexual intercourse and procreation are fornicating, and forbidden, by virtue of not being dedicated to the Lord alone. In the non-biblical Greek sense, however, means 'prostitution' and has nothing to do with worshipping God alone" (20). Sexual activity in non-biblical Greek understandings was nonetheless closely linked to piety, and philosophers crafted their moral sexual visions in accordance with their understandings of how sexual desires, practices, and reproduction relate to the gods and cosmic order. Gaca argues that the combination of Greek biblical ideas and non-biblical Greek associations of sex with the gods led to Christian "practices of intense sexual asceticism among converted Greeks and other gentiles.... Since alien gods such as Aphrodite remained so potent a presence in human sexuality, it seemed critical to put an end to exercising her sexual energy rather than to defy God" (304). She sees this ascetic trend differently expressed in the first-century writings of Philo of Alexandria and Paul of Tarsus and the second-century writings of the Christians Tatian and Clement of Alexandria.This three-part work unfolds as a study of different views about sexual activity, even as it builds a larger argument about "the motivating philosophical and religious principles behind Christian sexual asceticism" (9). In each part's chapters, Gaca charts the range of visions for how sexual activity does and should correlate with social order held by Greek philosophers (Part 1: Platonic, Stoic, and Pythagorean), biblical texts and their interpreters (Part 2: Septuagint, Paul of Tarsus, and Philo of Alexandria), and three second-century Christians (Part 3: Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, and Epiphanes).For Gaca, Tatian and Clement of Alexandria craft their respective Christian ideals in monogamous heteroerotic, reproductive terms adapted from biblical traditions as well as some aspects of Platonic and Pythagorean thought (notably an emphasis on the regulation of sexual desire and procreative ideal for sex, respectively); their two versions of sexual norms (Tatian rejecting all sexual activity, Clement conceding only non-libidinous procreative marital sex) should be understood as a response to the religious associations of sex and sexual desire [End Page 139] among gentiles, especially Greeks (303-304). Epiphanes represents a historically unsuccessful alternative trajectory for early Christian sexual norms, in its basic presuppositions (of egalitarianism as a norm for community which extends to a rejection of marriage), in its relationship to Greek philosophy (in continuity with many early Stoic ideals about egalitarian communalism), and in its interpretation of Paul (using Gal. 3:28 as an interpretive key over 1 Cor. 6:18).In Part 1 Gaca aims to correct for a lack of attention to early Stoic material among classicists and ancient historians... (shrink)

Justice is a noble virtue, yet it seems everywhere incomplete, even when it seems complete. In Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1864), for instance, we read: As was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether” (Psalm 19:9). With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work (...) we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle…. (shrink)

This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of (...) Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers. (shrink)

Abstract The aim of this article is to make use of recent research on `political eros ' in order to clarify the connection that Plato establishes between eros and tyranny in Republic IX, specifically by elucidating the intertextuality between Plato's work and the various historical accounts of Alcibiades. An examination of the lexicon used in these accounts will allow us to resolve certain interpretive difficulties that, to my knowledge, no other commentator has elucidated: why does Socrates blame eros for (...) the decline from democracy into tyranny? What does he mean by ` eros ' here, and what link existed between eros and tyranny in the minds of his contemporaries? And finally, who are the mysterious `tyrant-makers' ( turannopoioí , 572e5-6) who, according to Socrates, introduce a destructive eros in the soul of the future tyrant? After a careful examination of the passage from book IX on the genesis of the tyrannical man (focused on the last stage of the metamorphosis, which is concerned with éros túrannos , 572d-573b), I will offer answers to these questions by turning to the writings of Thucydides, Aristophanes and Plutarch while examining the portrait of Alcibiades that Plato paints in the Alcibiades I and Symposium. (shrink)

" In this book, Laurence Cooper focuses his attention on three giants of the philosophic tradition for whom this inner force was a major preoccupation and something separate from and greater than the desire for self-preservation.

They do not understand that being brought apart is carried back together with itself; it is a back-stretching harmony as of the bow and the lyre. Herakleitus, Frag. 51 “Tell me, you, the heir of the argument,” I said, “what was it Simonides said about justice that you assert he said correctly?”“That it is just to give to each what is owed,” he said. “In saying this he said a fine thing, at least in my opinion.” Plato, Republic 331e (Bloom (...) translation). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Flesh in Public:Eros and Political TransformationBethany HenningAmerican Sexual CrisisWe live in a time of erotic dysfunction: In 2020, and again in 2023, there was a brief media frenzy in the wake of studies published by UCLA that concluded that Gen Z is having statistically less sex than millennials did in their formative years. The generational angle made for good headlines, but the same surveys indicated that people of (...) all ages are having less sex than they used to (Herbenick et al.; Wellingham). We needn't work hard to identify likely factors that might have led us here. The pandemic undoubtedly shifted our tolerance for closeness and contact, which has only reinforced the proliferation of technological commodities (devices, apps, platforms) that have made isolation ever more convenient. These studies also found an increase in "rough sex" (inclusive of choking) when people do manage to have sex—which is enough to generate a separate paper pondering the relationship between aggressiveness in the American psyche, the apparent anti-feminist backlash to the #MeToo movement, or it has given some a need to fetishize/work through profound feelings of powerlessness that arise in other domains of life (Skinner and Gottfried). But I tend to think that the recent decrease in sexual activity is the symptom of a wider pathology that should be understood as an "erotic depression."In 1998, as Queer Theory was just beginning to achieve a narrow but resolute foothold in academic life, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner wrote "there is nothing more public than privacy" (Berlant and Warner 548). This aporetic statement develops into their central claim that our negotiation of the commons is structured by a "core national culture" that "can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior" through the mechanism of "national heterosexuality." National heterosexuality (distinct from though similar to Adrienne Rich's "compulsory heterosexuality") [End Page 51] is the tacit assumption that family life with its reproductive and consumptive activities is the arrangement that authorizes/redeems desire. If this is the tacit assumption that structures public space, we needn't go through the trouble to represent sexual desires and practices in public. We then assume that normal, healthy sexuality occurs in private. The content of intimate life is presupposed, and protection of this private life and its material pleasures is the central concern around which American politics is organized. For Berlant and Warner, differentiating between what is "public" and what is "private" isn't thoroughly explicated. In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey offered a functional distinction between the private as transactions between individuals that are "immediately and directly engaged," and the public as the as-yet-inchoate collection of individuals that are affected by the "indirect consequences" of a private transaction (LW 2:244). The public, in other words, coheres on the basis of a problem that emerges while their attention is engaged elsewhere—presumably by their own private transactions. But, if that public is to cohere and advocate for itself, fellow-sufferers must find a way to recognize one another as such and then organize around their shared interest. The impediments to queer liberation thus indicate a general hurdle in democratic life: The search for the public involves qualitative work in an affective field that is troubled by the repressive mechanisms that split the private and the public into a strict dichotomy—if the dominant customs repress the crucial affective capacities of the inchoate public, would-be political movements are repressed before suffering can be expressed.If sexual life can be thought of as one possible expression of erotic perception, and if the Deweyan can accept an analogue between erotic perception and what Dewey calls "qualitative thought," then our erotic deficits amount to a diminished sensitivity and a failure of sensual attentiveness to a crucial layer of experience as a whole. Democratic life withers when we fail to perceive the connection between what we do and what we suffer. Without these rhythms of reciprocal response, the live creature becomes hopelessly alienated. The work of Dewey and of Merleau-Ponty represent some of the most successful attempts to think ecologically, because they are willing to take... (shrink)

_Eros, Wisdom, and Silence_ is a close reading of Plato’s Seventh Letter and his dialogues _Symposium_ and _Phaedrus_, with significant attention also given to _Alcibiades I_. A book about love, James Rhodes’s work was conceived as a conversation and meant to be read side by side with Plato’s works and those of his worthy interlocutors. It invites lovers to participate in conversations that move their souls to love, and it also invites the reader to take part in the author’s dialogues (...) with Plato and his commentators. Rhodes addresses two closely related questions: First, what does Plato mean when he says in the Seventh Letter that he never has written and never will write anything concerning that about which he is serious? Second, what does Socrates mean when he claims to have an art of eros and that this _techne_ is the only thing he knows? Through careful analysis, Rhodes establishes answers to these questions. He determines that Plato cannot write anything concerning that about which he is serious because his most profound knowledge consists of his soul’s silent vision of ultimate, transcendent reality, which is ineffable. Rhodes also shows that, for Socrates, eros is a symbol for the soul’s experience of divine reality, which pulls every element of human nature toward its proper end, but which also leads people to evil and tyranny when human resistance causes it to become diseased. Opening up a new avenue of Plato scholarship, _Eros, Wisdom, and Silence_ is political philosophy at its conversational best. Scholars and students in political philosophy, classical studies, and religious studies will find this work invaluable. (shrink)

This paper explores the value of the eros motif for critical pedagogy and citizenship education. The conceptual affinities between eros and democracy are identified and integrated into a theory of democratic political education. Long recognized as vital to the process of self knowledge, the ancient Greek concept of eros has nevertheless been largely erased from contemporary educational debate. By retrieving eros from the fringe of academic discourse and integrating it with critical pedagogy, the aims of radical democracy can be (...) more fully achieved. The essay emphasizes the civil society or cultural dimensions of democracy as against its legal or procedural aspects. Renewed emphasis on the associational qualities of democracy underscore the importance of eros as an educational principle. The ancient pedagogical motif of educating the desires is posited as an alternative to the liberal/modernist paradigm of education which de-values affective domains of knowledge. (shrink)

_Eros and Economy: Jung, Deleuze, Sexual Difference_ explores the possibility that social relations between things, partially inscribed in their aesthetics, offer important insights into collective political-economic relations of domination and desire. Drawing on the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this book focuses on the idea that desire or libido, overlaid by sexual difference, is a driving force behind the material manifestations of cultural production in practices as diverse as art or economy. Re-reading the (...) history of capitalism and aesthetics with an awareness of the forces of sexual difference reveals not just their integral role in the development of capitalist markets, but a new understanding of our political-economic relations as humans. The appearance of the energies of sexual difference is highlighted in a number of different historical periods and political economies, from the Rococo period of pre-revolutionary France, to the aesthetics and economics of Keynesian Bloomsbury, to our contemporary Postmodern sensibility. With these examples, Jenkins demonstrates that the very constitution of capitalist markets is affected by the interaction of these forces; and she argues that a conscious appreciation and negotiation of them is integral to an immanent, democratic understanding of power. With its unique application of Jungian theory, this book provides important new insights into debates surrounding art, aesthetics, and identity politics, as well as into the quest for autonomous, democratic institutions of politics and economics. As such, this book will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Jung, psychoanalysis, political economy, cultural studies and gender studies, as well as those interested in the field of cultural economy. (shrink)

Mary P. Nichols, Socrates on Friendship and Community: Reflections on Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 229. ISBN 978-0-521-89973-4. Laurence D. Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Pp. xii + 357. ISBN 978-0-271-03330-3.

In Eros and Revolution, Javier Sethness Castro presents a comprehensive intellectual and political biography of the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), investigating the Hegelian-Marxist, Romantic, existentialist, social-psychological, and anti-authoritarian dimensions of his thought, as well as his contemporary relevance.

Alcibiades is one of the most explicitly sexualized figures in fifth-century Athens, a "lover of the people" whom the demos "love and hate and long to possess" (Ar. Frogs 1425). But his eros fits ill with the normative sexuality of the democratic citizen as we usually imagine it. Simultaneously lover and beloved, effeminate and womanizer, Alcibiades is essentially paranomos, lawless or perverse. This paper explores the relation between Alcibiades' paranomia and the norms of Athenian sexuality, and argues that his eros (...) reveals an intrinsic instability within the sexual economy of the democracy: the desire he embodied blurred the categories that defined Athenian masculinity; the desire he inspired rendered the demos passive and "soft." This same instability can be seen in Thucydides' juxtaposition of the mutilation of the Herms and the legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. These two episodes (obscurely linked by Thucydides) together tell of an idealized citizen body under threat. The tyrannicide story figures the democratic citizen as an elite lover, whose sexual dominance is vital to his political autonomy. The Herms, with their prominent phalloi, symbolized this citizen-lover, and thus their mutilation was an assault on the masculinity, as well as political power, of the demos. The tyrannicide legend seems to promise a defense against this threat of civic castration; but instead of shoring up the sexually-dominant citizen, Thucydides' version of the legend merely reveals his frailty and fictionality: even in Athens' heroic past there is no inviolable democratic eros to cure the impotence of mutilation and tyranny. Reading these two episodes against the backdrop of Alcibiades' paranomia (as described by Plutarch and Plato), this paper examines the nature of democratic masculinity, the (eroticized) relation between demagogue and demos, and the place of perverse desire within the protocols of sex. (shrink)

The study of eros as passionate devotion leads back to the classical foundations of social and political analysis, in particular Plato’s philosophical anthropology, focusing on imitation and not rationality as the moving force of social life.

Abraham Drassinower takes a fresh look at Freud, countering his prevalent image as a man pessimistically renouncing the possibility of social, political, and cultural change.

Plato’s work offers insights into the corrosive impact of eros, insights central for contemporary politics. The article combines an in-depth reading of Plato with a case study, arguing for the relevance of communism. This is because love also establishes a relationship of subordination to the object of desire, which can subjugate and entrap the lover in his or her feelings. Such instrumentalization of eros in communism was promoted by adherents being supposed to love the sufferers. The obligation that to understand (...) and help the sufferers one must become a sufferer turned suffering into an autopoietic system. The acceptance of such instrumentalization of love was rendered possible first by a sense of guilt due to the system of passionate interests (Tarde and Latour), connected to the rise of capitalism as a solution for the period of civil wars, and then by the liminal conditions that emerged, especially in eastern Europe, after two world wars; conditions that were purposefully perpetuated through staging a sacrificial system, paralysing social life. The character of such liminal leaders can be analysed through the figure of the trickster, developed by anthropologists, complementing Weber’s notion of charisma. While communism disappeared as a force, contemporary political life is increasingly reduced to a politics of victimhood and suffering, where the search for the good life is replaced by the double negation of eliminating all suffering from the world – an effort that only produces the opposite result, while public reality becomes torn apart by sex scandals, confirming Foucault’s insight about the investment of desire and enslavement to sexuality. (shrink)

Freud speculated that the course all living beings travel from birth to death is determined by a contest between a life instinct (Eros) and a death instinct (Thanatos). He believed that instinctual repression required by civilization tended to strengthen Thanatos. Herbert Marcuse argued that civilization did not require quite as much repression as Freud assumed. This joyous suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm by the countercultural political movements of the 1960s. I ask whether Marcuse was overly optimistic, given the fact (...) that humanity appears to be hell-bent on destroying itself due to its inability to deal with global warming. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the concept of embeddedness as the background against which eros is a force and a power in and through interactions. To go beyond an internalist account of eros, I engage in a dialogue with some philosophical accounts of desire from an enactive perspective.This enables me to shed light on the location of the embodied tension as “in-between” lovers and “all-around” them. Crucial to this tensional account of embedded eros is the intertwining between self and (...) others’ becomings in processes of participatory sense-making. Through participatory sense-making lovers make their worlds, creating new ways of being and knowing in the ensemble. I advance some steps towards an enactive ethics of eros where, I claim, the cultivation of the space in-between and all-around lovers is the key to avoid the traps of a degenerated form of eros. (shrink)

Après avoir précisé l'enjeu idéologico-politique que recèle la « perspective féministe » en tant que catégorie d'analyse appliquée à l'histoire de la philosophie et retracé les présupposés relatifs à la représentation de l'entreprise philosophique que ladite perspective enveloppe, communément parlant, on relancera la question ontologique du rapport entre le Logos philosophique, à ses débuts, et Éros, le démon originaire et dynamique du discours philosophique. Ce recours au Mythe aura fait émerger la figure originelle de la philosophie comme symboliquement androgyne . (...) On aboutira à la thèse d'une « perspective hermaphrodite » qui voudrait en finir — par la dialectisation opérée sur le mode plaisant — avec la catégorie « perspective féministe », pour ce qui en est de son application à l'histoire de la philosophie.To begin with, some of the ideological and political issues concerning the so called "feminist view" on the history of philosophy are brought forth. The ontological problem of the fundamental relationship between Logos and Eros is then analyzed, such as it occurs in the philosophical discourse of the beginnings. Finally, for a more dialectical approach than the traditional "feminist view", a metaphorical androgynous view is suggested — with one's tongue in one's cheek ! — as an alternative thesis. (shrink)

Xenophon's concern with morality in his more philosophical writings is evident. But that concern embraces also his approach to history. In the Hellenica this interest in morality is not to be written off as a matter of marginal comment, but, it may be claimed, is integral to the historian's purpose. He is one for whom the determinants of history are the personalities and actions of great men, and it is natural for him to observe the interaction between personal morality and (...) political and military actions. It is from this standpoint that the present article seeks to illustrate from Xenophon's writings one aspect of his outlook on these matters, – the role of self-control over homoerotic desire in the context of military history. How far we can go behind his text to determine ‘what actually happened’ or use his testimony in developing a wider understanding of erōs in classical Greece at large are matters for further enquiry. (shrink)

The Western democracies of the twentieth century have witnessed an unprecedented upheaval in their popular cultures' normative behaviour concerning gender roles and sexual identities. Concurrently, there has been a marked proliferation in the nature and distribution of erotic images and material. From the statistics concerning divorce to the legal accommodation of same-sex relationships, evidence of the impact of this sexual revolution is manifold. Perhaps this profound shift is most clearly reflected in the entertainment and advertising industries. The sitcom, that most (...) quintessential format of American television, has gone from idealizing a `nuclear family' to a celebration of openly gay lifestyles. Images that only a few decades ago would have been considered pornographic now adorn bus shelters as racy advertisements. A nexus of events has contributed to this radical expansion of accepted behaviour, and multiple modes of evaluation are possible. This paper will examine a single mid-century articulation from this century of sexual revolution.In 1951, Herbert Marcuse began a series of lectures which would ultimately be published in 1955 as Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. By the 1970s, this text had become one of the most widely known and influential manifestos of the on-going sexual revolution. In more recent years, Marcuse's work has fallen into caricature. Nevertheless, fathoming Marcuse's views is important for three reasons. First, it is arguable that Marcuse's interpretation of Freud's notions of Eros and Thanatos is more widely known than Freud's own views. Second and more importantly, in successfully explaining the links between psychoanalysis, philosophy, economics, and politics, Marcuse laid the foundations for what by the end of the twentieth century had become the politics of sexuality and alternative lifestyles.Yet for Marcuse the revolution would not simply affect people's sexual norms. Revolutionary Eros would change the way they work and play. This is the third reason why Marcuse is still relevant. The obvious changes in societies' sexual norms can overshadow the more subtle changes in economic relations. Marcuse explicitly and consistently insists upon a direct and appreciable relation between individual erotic and the organization of labour. Thus Marcuse provides the criteria for a reflection upon the state of the `sexual revolution'. Middle-class morality has changed since Marcuse's call to revolution. But has the lot of workers undergone a similar transformation? To answer this question, we must first broadly investigate what it was that Marcuse meant by Eros and its relationship to civilization.Eros has been an important notion concerned with self-reflection since at least the institutional practice of initiation into the ancient mysteries. Plato brought the discussion of Eros into public, albeit not in the agora. Rather at an intimate gathering of philosophically minded friends the nature of Eros was famously discussed. But while Plato succeeded in making Eros a philosophical question, the notion itself exhibits a recalcitrant independence from any particular discourse. Its nature remains somewhat mysterious and thought provoking. Marcuse was aware of the long and diverse traditions surrounding Eros. His essay Eros and Civilization is written and reads as a philosophical inquiry into Freud and therefore the psychoanalytic meaning of Eros and its associated Freudian vocabulary is employed. But Marcuse's use of the term Eros is more philosophical than strictly psychoanalytic. Indeed, as we shall see when investigating Marcuse's presentation of Orphic mythology, Eros is a complex notion whose historical nuances stretch back before even philosophy. (shrink)

This article examines how Plato uses mythological symbolisms in the Lysis, specifically those of Hermes, to show how our experience of the good makes possible our capacity to love our friend as an individual, and in so doing overturns the static dualities usually associated with Plato’s ‘metaphysics’. Instead of appealing to allegedly impersonal ideas, Plato refigures Greek mythological understandings of Hermes to signal, first, that friendship is a movement of divine love in which human beings participate and to which they (...) are reoriented so that they may behold their friend as an individual, as a person, and second, that this reorientation is needed to place the dialectical inquiry into friendship upon proper starting points. Instead of eclipsing the individual in the shadow of impersonal ideas, Plato appeals to Hermes, the most human, most creative and thus most political, of Olympians, whose name means windfall [hermaion], to show how we must open ourselves up to the divine in order fully to love our friend as an individual person. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the conception and structure of the feminine in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, with an eye toward inquiring into both the continuity of Levinas's project and the political implication for the feminine that follow from his analysis. Levinas initially conceives the feminine as a transcendental structure that functions as the condition for the possibility of ethics by inaugurating the ethical relation via the birth of a son, and sustains the ethical relation by providing the intimacy of (...) the home, which is to be disrupted by the call of the other. In his later work, Levinas names the ethical relation substitution, and transforms the feminine such that it not only participates directly in the ethical relation, but, in the metaphor of maternity, it is the example of substitution par excellence. However, the history of feminist theory shows us that the maternal is not necessarily the best image within which to circumscribe the feminine, even if the image is intended positively. But to undermine Levinas's conception of the feminine is, potentially, to undermine the larger project. By revealing and then utilizing the Judaic roots at work in Levinas's philosophical thought, this dissertation offers a reading of Levinas's conception of maternity that helps to explain why Levinas would have picked such an image to convey his insight. That is, I offer a midrash1 on Levinas's work. Finally, this dissertation argues, that Levinas's work, with regard to the feminine, is not discontinuous. Rather, the dynamic movement of the feminine reveals an interesting developmental structure, whose work in Levinas's project is indispensable. ;1My intention is to employ a midrashic style of reading a text, though not necessarily line by line, in order to offer an interpretation of the images Levinas uses in his work. (shrink)

Plato inaugurated the Western tradition of political philosophy in his effort to vindicate the memory of Socrates and prevent future persecutions of philosophy. To attain this double objective, Plato embedded teachings and distributed themes with a view to appropriately revealing and withholding insights. The ultimate crucible for heuristically testing this Platonic method is Plato's distribution of themes of eros and force. Eros and force parallel the two cardinal features of the erotic Socrates who was suspected of guiding ambitious youths (...) to demagogic careers. Plato's metaphysics, dominated by his theory of Forms or Ideas, similarly originated in indignation at Socrates' legal murder and anguish about the future of philosophy. By positing fixed, eternal, and immutable standards, Plato seeks to preempt the litigious excesses, oratorical shenanigans and legalistic leeway that once made it possible to charge and convict Socrates. The reference of what is actual to a transcendent standard of truth served also to usher in the western tradition of textual embeddedness of meanings. This means that original political philosophy, understood as Platonic philosophy, is a relationship between form and content---between "how" something is articulated in writing and "what" is written. After the onslaught of the diagnostic critique of western thought, unleashed mainly by Nietzsche and Heidegger, the revival of esotericism in our century has been useful in unlocking Platonic interpretation and in showing Plato's text to be dependent on an inextricable interweaving between form and content. (shrink)

Plato’s work offers insights into the corrosive impact of eros, insights central for contemporary politics. The article combines an in-depth reading of Plato with a case study, arguing for the relevance of communism. This is because love also establishes a relationship of subordination to the object of desire, which can subjugate and entrap the lover in his or her feelings. Such instrumentalization of eros in communism was promoted by adherents being supposed to love the sufferers. The obligation that to understand (...) and help the sufferers one must become a sufferer turned suffering into an autopoietic system. The acceptance of such instrumentalization of love was rendered possible first by a sense of guilt due to the system of passionate interests (Tarde and Latour), connected to the rise of capitalism as a solution for the period of civil wars, and then by the liminal conditions that emerged, especially in eastern Europe, after two world wars; conditions that were purposefully perpetuated through staging a sacrificial system, paralysing social life. The character of such liminal leaders can be analysed through the figure of the trickster, developed by anthropologists, complementing Weber’s notion of charisma. While communism disappeared as a force, contemporary political life is increasingly reduced to a politics of victimhood and suffering, where the search for the good life is replaced by the double negation of eliminating all suffering from the world – an effort that only produces the opposite result, while public reality becomes torn apart by sex scandals, confirming Foucault’s insight about the investment of desire and enslavement to sexuality. (shrink)

This essay interprets Alcibiades I as representing Socrates' philosophical seduction of Alcibiades. Socrates and Alcibiades are both highly erotic characters, and Socrates attempts to provoke and then guide Alcibiades' erotic tendencies in philosophical directions. The erotic relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, including Socrates' attraction to Alcibiades, is central to understanding the themes, which also appear in the dialogue, of self-knowledge, political ambition, self-care, divine versus human guidance, and corruption at the hands of the Athenians. Along the way, the essay (...) responds to Schleiermacher's criticisms that the dialogue is poorly composed and therefore not suitable to Plato. (shrink)

(A chapter in the book edited by Ine Gevers, Robot Love: Can We Learn from Robots About Love?) Similarly to the method employed by Marx in his analysis of the capital and to de Saussure’s structuralist explanation of language, I suggest we conceive the categories in question as materially conditioned while resulting into full abstraction in the process of analysis. Thus, instead of theorising in terms of the anthropologically (and philosophically) conditioned phantasm of a “digital subjectivity” or a “cyborg self,” (...) let us radicalise and absolutise the concepts of the material and the ideal (or the mind understood in opposition to the material), arriving to physicality, regardless of whether organic or synthetic, and the automaton of signification as our main two categories of analysis. Therefore, let us also note that the category of “automaton” implies we are not dealing with a form of cognition but rather of language or signification. It is through operation with these categories that we shall postulate the sociopolitical and economic relevance of the cybernetic development for the post-human society and for the post-humanist self. The statement just made refers to a de facto political project, and it is impossible to arrive to results that would represent a fundamental change in relation to the humanist history of civilization/s without resorting to philosophical concepts. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s claim that thinking is the last defense against the moral outrages of criminal political regimes sets the problematic of good and evil in relief. Human freedom, Paul Ricœur reminds us, is responsible for evil. The avowal of the evil of violence is thus the condition of our consciousness of the freedom to act anew. Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics highlights our capacity to respond to exigencies in apposite ways. Exemplary representations of (...) the good, the right, and the justexpress a desire for being. Eros is accordingly the law of every work, word, deed, or act that answers to a difficulty, challenge, or crisis. Bound to living experiences, thought attains its true height through interrogating, demystifying, and vacating frozen norms, standards, and mores. Judgment actualizes thought’s liberating effects in answer to the demands of the situations in which we find ourselves. (shrink)

In his books Eros and Civilization and An Essay on Liberation, Herbert Marcuse offers a different, but complementary, theory of eros from that of Freud. While sexuality still occupies a central space in the pleasure principle, Marcuse extends the concept to embrace a wider understanding of eros. Now eros is termed the “new sensibility,” which, in his view, has been made possible by the end of scarcity’s rule over human life. In an epoch in which necessary labor can be sharply (...) reduced, we would have time to develop our capacities: arts and crafts, friendships, noncommodified intellectual pursuits, and, of course, love beyond procreation. The new sensibility can be dismissed as a utopian hope in a period of retrenchment of pleasure, but Marcuse refuses the prevailing tendency to ratify repression. (shrink)

Dr. Rhoades explains in his opening chapter that “Plato’s constant dramatic refrain is that the healing of a tyrannical eros is necessary to political wisdom. This implies that the study of eros is the study of politics and vice versa. Thus, the Platonic dialogues that we perceive as erotic are also political, and the dialogues that we classify as political are also erotic”. The working out of this thesis in his analysis of the Symposium and the Phaedrus (...) constitute the bulk of this work. But because Rhoades holds that Plato presents Socrates as having knowledge of eros, which is one of the greatest things, and maintains in the Seventh Letter that serious matters are in no way a spoken thing nor should they be written about, it becomes necessary to articulate where Plato and his Socrates stand on what Rhoades calls “their policy of refraining from writing or speaking about serious things” to which he gives the name “Silence.” The investigation of this issue requires a chapter on nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators on Plato and another chapter presenting an extended reading of Plato’s Seventh Letter. (shrink)

In the philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinasʼs early career, it is in a phenomenology of Eros that he claims to have uncovered the site of what he calls ʻtranscendenceʼ. This is no small claim. According to the argument of the later Totality and Infinity (1961), the history of Western philosophy is to be thought as the history of the ʻphilosophy of the sameʼ. Within this polemical generalization almost the whole of Western philosophy is characterized as a totalizing discourse which aims (...) to reduce everything to the categories of a thematizing consciousness. Conceptual structures are employed (or presupposed) in order to make diverse phenomena commensurable within a system, and according to Levinas this operation always constitutes a reduction of what is ʻotherʼ to the order of the ʻsameʼ. In agreement with a certain transcendentalism which is itself implicated in Levinasʼs critique, these structures of thought are then equated with consciousness itself; the thematizing project is one of mastery in which noemata will of necessity conform to noesis, in which the object is constituted for and by the subject. The experience of transcendence, so rare in this version of philosophyʼs history, is the experience of whatever is and truly remains other than me, recalcitrant to mastery through conceptualization and to the transcendental project of the subject to construe everything as originating from within itself. If, then, it is first of all in the erotic relation that the possibility of the experience of transcendence is said to arise, Eros can in no sense be dismissed as an unimportant or peripheral theme for Levinas, and a full investigation is warranted, especially given the current interest in Levinasʼs work, interest which is not limited to the discipline of philosophy. Furthermore, as the notion of Eros is closely associated, textually and conceptually, with what Levinas calls ʻthe feminineʼ, critical attention has been excited amongst feminist scholars of various persuasions, with claims – both positive and negative – being made for Levinasʼs significance as a resource for feminist philosophy and feminist politics. If assertions of a ʻLevinasianʼ feminism, no matter how qualified, tend to rest on the idea that Levinasʼs phenomenology of Eros, and analyses of ʻthe feminineʼ mark a break in or a new departure from a ʻmasculinistʼ tradition, this article seeks, in part, to argue to the contrary. (shrink)