Session 6: Eros, Myth and Religion
Chair: Andrew Feldmar
Eros and Thanatos, Eros and War, Eros and Betrayal
Peggy Manouka
Director of Academic Advising, Department of English Language
and Literature, University of Indianapolis, Athens, Greece
Tracing the multiple theoretical and philosophical links between Eros and Thanatos, this essay aims to analyse their fusion and manifestation through the pairs “Eros and War” and “Eros and Betrayal.” Eros and War will be analysed in terms of the creative and destructive instincts and the ecstasy and explosion they bring about, as well as the blending of pain and pleasure. Cosmogony and cosmic destruction are constant incidents, strongly linked to the simultaneous existence of Eros and War, as they are strongly linked to the simultaneous existence of Eros and Thanatos. I will approach the holistic character of Eros and War by accepting the assumption that the activity of Eros is unifying-identifying, while the activity of War is dissociating-differentiating. Betrayal will be analysed from religious and psychoanalytical perspectives, as betrayal in family relationships, disillusion and non-fulfilment of expectations in romance and marriage, abandonment of lover or spouse, erotic deviance, and betrayal of the body. Betrayal will be presented as a phenomenon necessary for the human evolution. Rather than restricting, it marks and reveals human existence, leading the human being toward the discovery of the inner self, and constituting a medium of reaching identity. Betrayal will be treated as an unavoidable experience and as action necessary for the initiation of the human being in the mystery of life, death, and Eros. Betraying and being betrayed mean accepting a fate of questing full of victories and defeats, and identifying the self as a unique being that needs to be free from collective orders and models. The process of individualisation often demands conflicts; it demands ruptures that mark the individual's life, which means to betray. Without betrayal, therefore, there may be neither fulfilment nor transformation.
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The Erot(et)ic and Onantology
John Nijjem
Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Australia
In this paper I wish to examine phenomenological notions
of textual interpretation in the light of two categories which I will
call eroteticity and onantology. The
first of these categories, eroteticity a neologism combining
the in fact internally related ideas of the erotic and of erotesis concerns
above all the ontology of texts as in the first instance provocative,
question-arousing or erotogenetic, as well as texts both
in their irreducible cognitive plurivocity and as sites of epochic
(ep???) experience. Apophaticism as a phenomenon that
combines difference as well as the putative promise of telic
perfection will also be considered in terms of the erot(et)ic.
The category
of onantology also a neologism concerns in
perhaps Merleau-Pontean terms transcendental narcissism in relation
to self affective bases for textual interpretation that reduce the
erot(et)ics, the erotic erotesis, of understanding to a scope of a
priori im-positions. Above all, the notion of the onantological
presupposes the legitimacy of the notion of meaning, especially pretheoretical
meaning, and the possibility of the provisional stability
of textual sense. Onantological texts, however, are those texts constituted
in terms of the presumptive self identity of the interpreter or community
of interpreters. Such texts being axiologically closed will be understood
in terms of being denials of hypopositive meaningfulness in
terms of a purported and mistaken assertion of a meaning .
It will accordingly be argued that there is no such thing as a meaning
but only meaning networks or semantic holisms. The assertion of a or the meaning just
is an assertion precisely in the sense of amounting to an assertoric
or propositional blindness to contingency on a surplus of meaningfulness;
an insensitivity to the proposition's hypopositivity, that is, its
positioning within a network and mood of actually and potentially conditioning
questions, deficits, responses, desires, lacks, subjunctivities, possibilities;
the indicativity of the assertoric then as the plain denial of the
subjunctivity of the erot(et)ic. The very fact of anything like a meaning
must imply an in principle open ended array of other possible textual
meanings as well as a metatheoretical or phronetic capacity to move
between such meanings.
Every manifestation of or more so commitment
to a meaning has as its coefficient an infinite opportunity cost. It
is within this experience of loss that eroteticity and the onantological
articulate the implications and entailments of our interpretative decisions.