Lust

About: Lust is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1334 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15053 citations.

Reading for the plot : design and intention in narrative

Abstract: Preface 1. Reading for the Plot 2. Narrative Desire 3. The Novel and the Guillotine, or Fathers and Sons in Le Rouge et le noir 4. Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative 5. Repetition, Repression, and Return: The Plotting of Great Expectations 6. The Mark of the Beast: Prostitution, Serialization, and Narrative 7. Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert's Perversities 8. Narrative Transaction and Transference 9. An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness 10. Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding 11. Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom! In Conclusion: Endgames and the Study of Plot Notes

Toward an aesthetic of reception

Abstract: w h i c h e x t e n d e d e v e n i n t o m y p a s t . . . a n d d o u b t l e s s . . . t o w h a t m i g h t b e t o . . . t o . . . come . . . t o co me . . . . ( I I , 5) The certainty of the cngito ergo sum is the error of Descartes and all philosophers who as philosphes sans mains et sans yeux overlook the fundamental role of the body in their systems, and thereby forfeit that certainty of present things as well as of present cohumanity, a certainty that is not only subjective and that alone can fulfill the instant (here along with past and future!) and make possible a "happiness" that is not only "spiritual." The motif of the cothinking hand begins in jest with Faust's "while I 'm awaiting my thought . . . the distracted hand pets and caresses" and Lust's "a beautiful kitty, very soft and warm" (1, 1). it is then elevated through the unexpected interpretation of the line from Lucretius—"the hand which touches and which is touched" (II, 5)-to a highly serious significance ("to introduce into the arid story of a metaphysical discovery a little bit of truth . . . secondly, a nothing of life, of . . . live? . . . flesh" 11, 5). Together, this gives Mori Faust an unmistakably anti-Cartesian turn. But perhaps it also allows one to think of a still more distant origin. The philosophizing Faust who needs his hand and an objet de tendresse to escape, through Lust, from the illusions of abstract thought, 134 D GOETHE'S AND VALERY'S FAUST is not lacking in analogy to the Old Testament creation myth according to which God took a rib from the sleeping Adam and made woman from it to provide the lonely man with the missing object de tendresse ("adiutor similis eius," Gen. 2:20-22). The Biblical narrative implies the creating hand of God ("aedificavit . . . costam quam tulerat de Adam, in mulierem") without actually referring to it, just as later in the iconographic tradition the creator stretches his hand toward the arising creation only as a sort of verbal gesture [Sprachgestus] (as with Michelangelo's creation of Adam). Yet there exists alongside this a literary tradition known to me from the Middle Ages, but also taken up by Milton, according to which it is the highest praise of female beauty to say that God himself created her "with the mere hand." Even if the interpretation I am risking -that the co-thinking hand of the philosophizing Faust appears in the invented biographic-mythic narrative in the place of the co-creating (if already heterodox) hand of the Biblical god of creationcannot be supported through any historically concretizable filiation, it would presumably not have displeased Valery. This may also be concluded from the fact that he himself used the Biblical myth of the Fall to answer, with this reprise, in his own way the old question of the possibility of happiness that springs from the fullness of human knowledge—through a provocative inversion of the Satanic prophecy, "Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum." The Christian myth that is supposed to explain the illegitimate curiosity through which mankind itself forfeited its happiness, winds up grounding Faust's and Lust's happiness at the end of Valery's four-act play. The common consumption of the fruit gets the jump on the traditional seducer (II, 6); seals an understanding inter pares that already began with the hand-play ("that is therefore born of you and me, and not of you or of me"); and refutes the theology of original sin and salvation through the "transformation (in the scene) of the state of Eros into the state of Nous" that was foreseen for the fourth act. Thus, after the process of theoretical curoisity had been exhausted, Valery in Mon Faust concludes that older process that Goethe —as the album-verse, used only ironically for the student, shows (v. 2048)-did not yet dare to touch: the revision of the Biblical judgment on man's claim to be like God. The surviving drafts of a fourth act offer to the state of affairs after the eating of the fruit a meaning opposed to the Biblical tradition: "We would be like the Gods, the harmonious, intelligent ones, in an immediate correspondence with our sensual lives, without words —and our minds would make love with one another as our bodies can do." GOETHE'S AND VALERY'S FAUST D 135

The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class

Abstract: Linking the personal and the political, Anna Clark depicts the making of the working class in Britain as a 'struggle for the breeches.' The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed significant changes in notions of masculinity and femininity, the sexual division of labor, and sexual mores, changes that were intimately intertwined with class politics. By integrating gender into the analysis of class formation, Clark transforms the traditional narrative of working-class history. Going beyond the sterile debate about whether economics or language determines class consciousness, Clark integrates working people's experience with an analysis of radical rhetoric. Focusing on Lancashire, Glasgow, and London, she contrasts the experience of artisans and textile workers, demonstrating how each created distinctively gendered communities and political strategies. Workers faced a 'sexual crisis,' Clark claims, as men and women competed for jobs and struggled over love and power in the family. While some radicals espoused respectability, others might be homophobes, wife-beaters, and tyrants at home; a radical's love of liberty could be coupled with lust for the life of a libertine. Clark shows that in trying to create a working class these radicals closed off the movement to women, instead adopting a conservative rhetoric of domesticity and narrowing their notion of the working class.

The Psychology of Love

Abstract: Essays discuss theories of love, types of love, the maintenance of love relationships, marriage, and lust.

Defining the brain systems of lust, romantic attraction, and attachment

Abstract: Mammals and birds have evolved three primary, discrete, interrelated emotion–motivation systems in the brain for mating, reproduction, and parenting: lust, attraction, and male–female attachment. Each emotion–motivation system is associated with a specific constellation of neural correlates and a distinct behavioral repertoire. Lust evolved to initiate the mating process with any appropriate partner; attraction evolved to enable individuals to choose among and prefer specific mating partners, thereby conserving their mating time and energy; male–female attachment evolved to enable individuals to cooperate with a reproductive mate until species-specific parental duties have been completed. The evolution of these three emotion–motivation systems contribute to contemporary patterns of marriage, adultery, divorce, remarriage, stalking, homicide and other crimes of passion, and clinical depression due to romantic rejection. This article defines these three emotion–motivation systems. Then it discusses an ongoing project using functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain to investigate the neural circuits associated with one of these emotion–motivation systems, romantic attraction.