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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Banquet'
Witty, sexy and radiantly beautiful, the Shelley translation of Plato's great Dialogue on Love, The Banquet (or The Symposium) is by far the best in the English language. It has been described as conveying much of the vivid life, the grace of movement, and the luminous beauty of Plato -- the poetry of a philosopher rendered by the prose of a poet. Although a masterpiece in its own right, the translation was suppressed and then bowdlerized for well over a century. In 19th century Britain, male love at the heart of the dialogue was unmentionable. The Banquet and Shelley's accompanying essay, A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks, were not published in their entirety until 1931, and then in an edition of 100 copies intended for private circulation only. For many years, the Shelley translation has been unobtainable, new or used. Pagan Press now offers a new edition, which is complete and authentic. In terms of both typography and editing, it is the most readable edition ever published. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bourgeois Experience-Victoria to Freud: Education of the Senses'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Defiant Desire'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Diana'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Education of the Senses'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud'
In this work, Peter Gay draws on an array of primary sources to re-examine 19th-century sexual behaviour, overturning a number of stereotypes, especially about women and sexuality. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Family Sex and Marriage: England 1500-1800'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Family, Sex and Marriage in England, Fifteen Hundred to Eighteen Hundred Abr. Ed. Illus.'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Family, Sex, and Marriage'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader's Companion to the Writers and Their Work, from Antiquity to the Present'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America'
Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996, a history of gay life centered in New York, is packed with tales of writers and literature. Kaiser provides a kaleidoscope of details and stories that create a vision of how gay people lived, and illuminates a culture that had enormous influence on both New York and American society. Kaiser writes about such luminaries as Gore Vidal, Edward Albee, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin, but the real drive of The Gay Metropolis is how gay art and writings transformed the lives of everyday gay people. By the end of the book it is clear that gay artistic influence has transformed the American metropolis for both heterosexuals and homosexuals. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- And Postmodern'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Harem: The World Behind the Veil'
This book offers an insight into the harem and harem life, focusing on the famed Seraglio of Topkapi Palace. The author uses her first-hand experience to describe the absolute rule of the sultans, the slave markets and the eunuchs. The book is illustrated with paintings by Delacroix, Ingres and Renoir, Turkish woodcuts, Persian miniatures, photographs and film stills. Croutier investigates the middle class harems, looking at the polygamous life of ordinary Middle Eastern households, including marital customs, child rearing, medical practices, superstitions and the expression of desire and jealousy. "Harem" shows how this Eastern institution invaded the Victorian imagination, in the form of decorating, costume and art and how Western ideas, in turn, eroded a system which had seemed to be absolutely powerful. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex'
Sex is a wonderful, crucial part of growing up, and children and teens can enjoy the pleasures of the body and be safe, too. In this important and controversial book, Judith Levine makes this argument and goes further, asserting that America's attempts to protect children from sex are worse than ineffectual. It is the assumption of danger and the exclusive focus on protection-what Levine terms "the sexual politics of fear"-that are themselves harmful to minors. Through interviews with young people and their parents, stories drawn from today's headlines, visits to classrooms and clinics, and a look back at the ways sex among children and teenagers has been viewed throughout history, Judith Levine debunks some of the dominant myths of our society. She examines and challenges widespread anxieties pedophilia, stranger kidnapping, Internet pornography and sacred cows abstinence-based sex education, statutory rape laws . Levine investigates the policies and practices that affect kids' sex lives-censorship, psychology, sex and AIDS education, family, criminal, and reproductive law, and the journalism that begs for "solutions" while inciting more fear. Harmful to Minors offers fresh alternatives to fear and silence, describing sex-positive approaches that are ethically based and focus on common sense. Levine provides optimistic, though realistic, prescriptions for how we might do better in guiding children toward loving well-that is, safely, pleasurably, and with respect for others and themselves. Judith Levine is a journalist, essayist, and author who has written about sex, gender, and families for two decades. Her articles appear regularly in national publications, most recently Ms., nerve.com, and My Generation. An activist for free speech and sex education, Levine is a founder of the feminist group No More Nice Girls and the National Writers Union. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Herculin Barbin'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The History of Sexuality'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The History of Sexuality: An Introduction'
The author turns his attention to sex and the reasons why we are driven constantly to analyze and discuss it. An iconoclastic explanation of modern sexual history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Homosexuality in Renaissance England'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Invention of Heterosexuality'
Exploring the history of heterosexual and homosexual concepts, a study examines the works of such professionals as Freud and the influence of the church while challenging current opinions about sexual identity. Reprint. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Invention of Heterosexuality'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud'
This is a book about the making and unmaking of sex over the centuries. It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueur's story--the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm--but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe.
Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, woman's orgasm came to be regarded as irrelevant to conception, and he then proceeds to retrace the dramatic changes in Western views of sexual characteristics over two millennia. Along the way, two "masterplots" emerge. In the one-sex story, woman is an imperfect version of man, and her anatomy and physiology are construed accordingly: the vagina is seen as an interior penis, the womb as a scrotum, the ovaries as testicles. The body is thus a representation, not the foundation, of social gender. The second plot tends to dominate post-Enlightenment thinking while the one-sex model is firmly rooted in classical learning. The two-sex story says that the body determines gender differences, that woman is the opposite of man with incommensurably different organs, functions, and feelings. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues, science was only providing a new way of speaking, a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress. Making Sex ends with Freud, who denied the neurological evidence to insist that, as a girl becomes a woman, the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite, not because of, the body. Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice.
This is a powerful story, written with verve and a keen sense of telling detail (be it technically rigorous or scabrously fanciful). Making Sex will stimulate thought, whether argument or surprised agreement, in a wide range of readers.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty'
In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created themMasoch and Sadelie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles a part.
Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch's novels, was written in 1870 and belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found herefetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldnessthese do not eclipse the singular power of Masoch's eroticism. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Masochism; an Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty: Together with the Entire Text of Venus in Furs'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Merry Order of Saint Bridget'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Not in Front of the Children: Indecency, Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801'
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![[???]: Pearl [???]: Pearl](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1562011014.01._SL160_SCLZZZZZZZ__.jpg)
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Plato: Syposium'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Psychopathia Sexualis'
237 classic case histories of lustmurder, necrophilia, pederasty, bestiality, transvestism, rape, mutilation, sado-masochism, exhibitionism and other psychosexual proclivities. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Psychopathia Sexualis'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct A Clinical-Forensic Study'
This groundbreaking and unabridged classic from the founder of modern sexual pathology contains 238 case histories detailing every form of sexual perversion - with a new appendix of additional (previously excised) case histories, an essay by Krafft-Ebing on homicidal "menstrual psychosis," and an introduction by Brian King (author of "Lustmord: The Writings and Artificats of Murderers"). Translated from the twelfth and final German edition, Psychopathia Sexualis is essential reading for students of sexual perversity, criminal psychology, and European fin-de-siecle art and literature. First published in Germany in 1886, Krafft-Ebing's book was extremely successful as both a classic reference volume for psychiatrists and as a new form of pornographic literature for the sexually transgressive and perverse. Printed in seven languages and twelve editions during the author's lifetime, Psychopathia Sexualis was an influence on such notable figures as Sigmund Freud (a younger colleague of Krafft-Ebing's at the University of Vienna), painters Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, writers Marcel Proust and Frank Wedekind, and philosopher Georges Bataille and the surrealists. Psychopathia Sexualis is extraordinarily timeless in its factual depiction of the astonishing vagaries of sexual life. As a psychiatric text, it was one of the first books to extensively illuminate and define such subjects as sadism, masochism, fetishism and homosexuality; as a work of sexual literature, it has often been compared to the Marquis de Sade's classic, "120 Days of Sodom." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Psychopathia Sexualis, With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rereading Sex : Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sex: A Natural History'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sex in Georgian England : Attitudes and Prejudices from the 1720s to the 1820s'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sex in History'
Thoroughly fascinating.--New York Post [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Spring Fire'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Symposium'
'A model of the kind of text one needs for lecture courses: the translation is extremely readable and made even more accessible by intelligent printing decisions (on dividing the text, spacing for clarification, etc.); the notes are kept to a minimum but appear when they are really needed for comprehension and are truly informative. And the introduction admirably presents both basic information and a sense of current scholarly opinion' - S G Nugent, Princeton University. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Symposium'
Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato s immediate audience.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Symposium & Death of Socrates'
In Symposium, a group of Athenian aristocrats attend a party and talk about love, until the drunken Alcibiades bursts in and decides to discuss Socrates instead. Symposium gives an unsurpassed picture of the sparkling society that was Athens at the height of her empire. The setting of the other dialogues is more sombre. Socrates is put on trial for impiety, and sentenced to death. Euthyphro discusses the nature of piety, Apology is Socrates' speech in his own defence, Crito explains his refusal to escape punishment, and Phaedo gives an account of Socrates' last day. These dialogues have never been offered in one volume before. Tom Griffith's Symposium has been described as 'possibly the finest translation of any Platonic dialogue'. All the other translations are new. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Symposium of Plato'
A superb example of the bookmaker's and translator's art, this new edition of Plato's Symposium exhibits aesthetic, literary, and intellectual excellences rarely found together in a single volume.
Tom Griffith's translation of this foundation work of Western culture is unsurpassed for the balance it achieves between readability and fidelity to Plato's Greek. For felicity of phrasing, freshness, care to match the sense of the Greek rather than its wording, and for its idiomatic rendering of the spoken word, it has no peer.
Originally published in a limited edition with facing Greek and color wood engravings, Griffith's translation is here presented in reduced format that retains the aesthetic quality of the original version at an affordable price. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Symposium of Plato: The Shelley Translation'
In the summer of 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley pulled himself away from a flurry of other projects to devote himself to translating Plato's Symposium. Besides being one of the very great lyric poets of Romanticism, Shelley was an accomplished Hellenist, and had a natural sympathy for Plato's way of seeing the world. The result of his labor was a translation of Plato's principal work on love that is, in both clarity and felicity of expression, unmatched by any contemporary translation.
Much of what the dialogue offers to today's reader - namely, its invitation to see erotic experience as the privileged locus of our contact with the sacred and the divine - is lost in translation by failures of tone more than by inaccuracies or simple infelicities. The elevation and sophistication of Shelley's prose makes his translation a much better English vehicle for Plato's writing than the rather chatty and colloquial translations current today. Plato's speeches on love need an English idiom in which myth is at home, and in which humor rises to urbanity rather than descending to mere wit and joke. With Shelley, we get a translation of a great literary masterpiece by a writer who is himself a literary master, and his mastery is of exactly the type required by Plato's text.
This translation came at the height of Shelley's powers, mirroring in language and conception some of his finest works, and so is itself a precious document in the history of Romanticism, for which the reappropriation of Plato is second in importance only to the massive influence of Shakespeare. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her husband's literary executor, upon publication of (a somewhat expurgated version of) the dialogue, boasted that "Shelley resembled Plato; both taking more delight in the abstract and the ideal than in the special and the tangible. This did not result from imitation; for it was not till Shelley resided in Italy that he made Plato his study. He then translated his Symposium and Ion; and the English language boasts of no more brilliant composition than Plato's Praise of Love translated by Shelley." If this goes too far, it goes at least in the right direction. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Times Square Red, Times Square Blue'
An award-winning science fiction writer, esteemed professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and celebrated essayist and memoirist, Samuel Delany is one of America's keenest observers. He was also a longtime habitué of many of the sex theaters in New York City's Times Square, spending, by his own estimate, "thousands and thousands of hours" at the Capri, Variety Photoplays, the Eros, and the Venus. In the 1990s all of these theaters were shut down through new restrictive zoning laws, part of a combined effort by the Walt Disney Corporation and the administration of Mayor Rudy Giuliani to gentrify the area, replacing these seedily memorable institutions with antiseptic, innocuous architectural and cultural creations in the name of health safety. But as Delany reveals in his new book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the decision to clean up Times Square had little to do with public health, and everything to do with corporate greed.
In the two essays that comprise this eloquent, provocative book, Delany grieves for the loss of this strip of sexual release. Though he is careful not to romanticize or sentimentalize the peep shows and porn theaters, he does illuminate the way in which these venues crossed class, racial, and sexual orientation lines, providing a delightfully subversive utopia--and a microcosm of New York life. In the first essay, "Times Square Blue," Delany details his shared erotic and conversational encounters with working-class and homeless men in the theaters (which primarily showed straight porn films) and the genuine friendships that resulted; these immensely personal reminiscences also provide a social history of late-20th-century Times Square. Drawing on historical and theoretical resources in the second essay, "Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red," Delany next builds a thoughtful and passionate argument against the gentrification of the area and the classist, characterless direction in which he sees New York heading. Read together, the essays of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue are both heartfelt homage to a beloved city and lament for a quirky vitality increasingly phased out by encroaching capitalism. --Kera Bolonik [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Untam'd Desire: Sex in Elizabethan England'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality'
In this sequel to The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, the brilliantly original French thinker who died in 1984 gives an analysis of how the ancient Greeks perceived sexuality.
Throughout The Uses of Pleasure Foucault analyzes an irresistible array of ancient Greek texts on eroticism as he tries to answer basic questions: How in the West did sexual experience become a moral issue? And why were other appetites of the body, such as hunger, and collective concerns, such as civic duty, not subjected to the numberless rules and regulations and judgments that have defined, if not confined, sexual behavior? [via]
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La narración se sitúa en el banquete organizado por el poeta trágico Agatón para celebrar su victoria en las fiestas Leneas del 416 a. C. Tras la comida Erixímaco propone pasar el tiempo en mutuos discursos y a debatir un tema que Fedro ha tenido en mente. Erixímaco pide que cada uno de los invitados improvise un elogio a Eros pues, según comentarios de Fedro, siendo éste dios uno de los más importantes, rara vez es encomiado como mereciera.
Es entonces el propio Fedro el que comienza la serie, con un encendido elogio del amor, Eros, al que considera el más antiguo y admirable de los dioses. Tras él, el sofista Pausanias habla de la doble naturaleza del amor, distinguiendo entre uno vulgar y otro que aspira a lo bello y lo bueno. Erixímaco, el tercero en hablar, propone una visión algo más científica, entendiendo el amor como un principio fundamental que, junto al odio, domina a la naturaleza y al hombre.
Sigue entonces el discurso de Aristófanes, al que se debe sin duda gran parte de la fama de la que goza el Banquete. En él se introduce un mito según el cual hubo un tiempo en que la tierra estaba habitada por personas esféricas con dos caras, cuatro piernas y cuatro brazos. Tres sexos existían entonces: el masculino, descendiente del sol, el femenino, descendiente de la tierra y el andrógino, descendiente de la luna, que participaba en ambos. La arrogancia de estos seres provocó la ira de Zeus que para someterlos los dividió con su rayo, convirtiéndolos en seres incompletos y condenándolos a anhelar siempre la unión con su mitad perdida. De este mito viene la expresión "media naranja".
Tras el discurso de Aristófanes el turno llega a Agatón y después a Sócrates, que comienza con un irónico exordio en el que advierte de que no elogiará a Eros faltando a la verdad sobre él sino que contará lo que sabe del amor sin callar lo que no sea hermoso. Sócrates explica que fue instruido en asuntos amorosos por Diotima, una sabia mujer de Mantinea cuya veracidad histórica no ha sido aclarada. El concepto central de estas enseñanzas es la sublimación del amor, proceso por el cual el amor a un cuerpo bello ha de conducirnos a amar todos los cuerpos bellos y tras ello al amor de todas las cosas bellas y de la Belleza en sí que, para Sócrates y Platón, que habla a través de él, resulta idéntica a lo Bueno.
El diálogo se cierra con la bulliciosa entrada de un ebrio Alcibíades en la celebración. Éste elogia entonces la figura misma de Sócrates, alabando su templanza y su apego a la verdad, a cuya búsqueda vive consagrado. De esta forma se muestra al lector cómo el propio Sócrates es la encarnación perfecta de los preceptos que él mismo expuso en su discurso. Como ejemplo, Alcibíades nos narra cómo, a pesar de que entonces toda Atenas reconocía su belleza física, Sócrates rehusó el trato sexual con él.
Con TOC [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Banquete/ Fedro'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Banquete/banquet'
Con su entorno festivo, en fecunda conjuncion de vino y discurso, de juego y mesurada seriedad, el Banquete, una de las mas bellas piezas filosoficas de la antigüedad clasica, y de las mas influyentes en la filosofia y literatura de todos los tiempos, nos habla de la concepcion que Platon tenia del amor en relacion con la filosofia, pero tambien con la felicidad que este especial modo del saber ofrece a quienes buscan, sin plenitud de los dioses pero con innata vocacion de eternidad, trascender el limite de la muerte. El impulso erotico, comun a bestias y humanos, atraviesa todo lo viviente y enlaza de hecho, en un todo armonioso, lo divino con lo mortal. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Banquete/the Banquet: Criton Apologia De Socrates,socrates Apology'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Psychopathia Sexualis: 69 Historias De Casos'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Histoire De La Sexualite'
211pages. in12. broché. [via]
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Nachdruck der vermutl. 14. Aufl. v. 1912 mit Beiträgen von Georges Bataille, Werner Brede, Albert Caraco, Salvador Dali, Ernst Fuhrmann, Maurice Heine, Julia Kristeva, Paul Kruntorad und Elisabeth Lenk [via]
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