"The Wearisome Spectacle of Immortal Sin": an Affect History of the Libidinisation of Desire in Mediterranean Antiquity

Historians of sexualities in Mediterranean Antiquity have labored in the last four decades to give narrative life to neglected stories of bodies and effaced sexual-object choice desires. But only too recently scholarship began giving due attention to that sphere of sexuality we address as the emotional and came to terms that emotions are inter-subjective as much as they are intra-subjective phenomena, circulating between bodies and signs, affecting socialities on ways of doing affects. This thesis addresses the rise of that problematic Michel Foucault termed the “libidinisation of sex,” the transition of a moral problematization of sex centred on issues of power, status and the gender of who “penetrates” in the Greco-Roman context, to a new relation of self to desire mediated in the solitariness of one’s conscience in Christianity. I propose we look at this new problematic of sex through a history of the desiderative as emotionality, a perspective altogether absent in Foucault. In this heuristic move what is being challenged is the very idea that emotions (desire) naturally move from inside to out, that they just reside in individuals. Rather, emotions and affects enact the very Subject who is supposed to possess feelings. The Greco-Roman archive of physicians and moralists and most of Christian Antiquity took desire to be one of the Greek emotions (πάθη). Certain of these soul-guidance cultures proposed that there were better and healthier ways of performing desire. My second main challenge to hitherto histories of the “desiring man” is to look at these philosophical cultures of emotions as groupings that surrounded the emotional with strategies of power. Because emotions are bound to how power forms people as Subjects, they have been the target since Antiquity of relations of mentorship and technologies of domination. I investigate here the psychagogy sociality of emotions and map out how this tradition of emotion self-care is transformed in early Judaism and Christianity into a form of government of Self and others that aimed the invigilation of the conscious, but also the less conscious moods, and into the déraison of the desiderative in bodies.

Department dc:contributor.department

Religion, Study of

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Ribeiro, Luiz Felipe Coimbra

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kloppenborg, John S.

• Desiring man
• Emotions
• Government of Self and Others
• History of Affects
• History of Sexuality

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/89686

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/89686