Alexander Lyusy. Pleasure as a duty

Pascal Quignard. Sex and fear / Transl. from fr. I. Volevich. - M.: Text, 2000.

We are the fruit of an event in which we did not participate, but which once and for all plunges us into confusion, constantly reminding us of ourselves in any shocking image. True, the mental nature of a person can perceive and express the problem of its own conception also in the form of laughter.

One of the leading modern French writers, Pascal Quignard, as follows from his masterfully written essay “Sex and Fear,” has no time for humor. The transformation of the organic and precise eroticism of the ancient Greeks into the frightened melancholy of the Romans is a rather serious topic, in any case, much more mysterious than the transition from antiquity to Christianity.

For both the Greeks and the Romans, the consciousness of sin or guilt never clouded sexual relations. Neither one nor the other made a distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality (the difference was different - activity and passivity, and the latter had the character of social initiation among the Greeks and had strict ritual and time frames). But in Rome, fear arose of the loss of social status; a combination of the most shocking phenomena and strict, limited morality was introduced into society. Every free-born, sexually active and unsentimental man who receives pleasure is a decent person, and any pleasure given to another is a servile service, a sign of lack of courage.

What broke the political career of Gnaeus Pompey the Great? Marital fidelity, falling in love with his wife Julia, Caesar's daughter, became the subject of universal ridicule (resulting in loss of power and defeat in the civil war). For what kind of “debauchery” was the poet Ovid exiled forever to the territory of the future CIS? Because he sang the reciprocity of voluptuousness.

But it was not by the will of the emperors, not by religion or laws that hyper-masculine Roman sexuality was suppressed, but by itself. Roman sexuality self-destructed, and its place was taken by sentimental love, also a strange connection, according to Kignard, when the victim turns into an executioner. As a result, fear killed the body, and it was nailed to the cross forever (although the patricians learned to distinguish between fear and desire). “Christians had no more to do with the invention of Christian morality than they had to do with the invention of the Latin language: they simply accepted both as if God had commanded it ,” says Kinyar.

A curious metamorphosis in the course of sexual education in the “Third Roman” space, in which the late sexual revolution unfortunately coincided with the wave of AIDS (like feudal fragmentation with the Mongol-Tatar invasion). The famous researcher of the vertical structures of Western European culture, Frances Yates (written by Yates), through the efforts of the translator and publishers, acquired the male gender and settled in ancient times (p. 75). Overall, the book is a pleasant and witty gift to the reader.