Shakespeare's Perfume

Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan

Richard Halpern

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780812236613, 9780812236613
• eBook ISBN: 9780812202151
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Starting with St. Paul's argument that the Greeks were afflicted with homosexuality to punish their excessive love of statues, Richard Halpern uncovers a tradition in which aesthetic experience gives birth to the sexual—and thus reverses the Freudian thesis that erotic desire is sublimated into art. Rather, Halpern argues, sodomy was implicated with aesthetic categories from the very start, as he traces a connection between sodomy and the unrepresentable that runs from Shakespeare's Sonnets to Oscar Wilde's novella The Portrait of Mr. W.H., Freud's famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci, and Jacques Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. Drawing on theology, alchemy, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary criticism, Shakespeare's Perfume explores how the history of aesthetics and the history of sexuality are fundamentally connected.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Shakespeare's Perfume
• CHAPTER 2 Theory to Die For: Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W.H.
• CHAPTER 3 Freud's Egyptian Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood
• CHAPTER 4 Lacan's Anal Thing: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments