Abstract:

Beginning with Durkheim’s analysis of secular rituals, this essay explores the spillover from love-talk to religious-talk in Plato’s ’Phaedrus’, Shakespeare’s ’Romeo and Juliet’ and Sacher-Masoch’s ’Venus in Furs’. Religious categories are deployed in these texts in three distinct ways: in Plato, the temptation to worship the beloved is present but is also avoided because of shame; in Shakespeare, the category of worship enables positing the loved one’s supposed holiness in order for it to be transgressed; whilst in Sacher-Masoch, worship and ritual in relation to the love object are literally acted out. I claim that such moments exemplify three ways of relating to erotic merging and three modalities of creating erotic force. The essay’s grander thesis is that the contemporary aggrandizing of love, the present-day "religion of love" in secular culture, can be understood through erotic love’s (rather limited) ability to channel and feed needs that were previously organized into religious experience.

Notes:

Cover Date: APR 2004.Source Info: 53, 151-166. Language: Hebrew. Journal Announcement: 39-2. Subject: LOVE; RELIGION; SACRED. Subject Person: DURKHEIM; KABBALA. Update Code: 20150211.