Attached to Paper Session
Meeting Preference
The project seeks to uncover within the philosophical tradition of aesthetics an account of the erotic appreciation of the beauty of another man's body as a means of communing with beauty itself. The overal project begins with Plato's account of desire, focusing specifically on the tension in the Symposium between an abstract longing for beauty exemplified in Diotima's speech and the concrete absence of desire in the account of Alcibaiades. It then moves to an analysis of Plotinus's neoplatonic rendering of beauty, drawing out how he both accentuates and denegrates the physical reality of the other. This is then problematicized in Christian philosophical accounts in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. The absence of the physical in beauty comes to the fore with Hume and Kant. However, a new resurgence of the importance of physical bodies makes its appearance first in Nietzche and then, more fully in Heidegger. The overall project seeks to show that gay desire can witness to an important lack in desire as it has been configured in the philosophical tradition. Thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Derrida, and most recently Kearney are brought in to support this. The argument is that what is often dismissed as gay men's promiscuity can be read as an affirmation of an essential, neglected, way of relation in which erotic desire is seen as a more complete form of relationship than a merely "Platonic" one. All of this will, eventually, serve as a prolegomena to a theological analysis.
In the presentation for the June online meeting, I would focus specifically on the commonalities between Plato's Symposium and Heidegger's On the Origin of the Work of Art to draw out the implications of this tension for an affirmation of gay erotic desire.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
The paper is an overview of a project underway on the philosophy of desire as a prolegomena to a theological analysis. The thesis is that gay promiscuous desire and activity, rather than being some disordered or fruitless endeavor, is a witness to a missing aspect of our embodied human nature. The philosophical analysis of beauty and sensuality has a complicated history. I will show that from Plato, through Plotinus, the medieval thinkers, to Hume, Kant, and Heidegger, there is a recognition of desire as essentially bodily that has often been negated at the service of the immaterial, intellectual, spiritual. In this overview, i will focus on the two framing points of the tradition, Plato and Heidegger, to show that both have in their thought the potential for grounding a robust affirmation of physical erotic interaction.