A title, in which, the author meditates on a collection of illustrations of sexual imagery, that presents a reflection on the sexual image that psychoanalysis calls "the primal scene" - a concept introduced by Freud as the first sexual scene witnessed by a child; a scene that is unexplained, unforgettable, and ultimately haunting.
Pascal Quignard s "The Sexual Night" is an essay built around a remarkable collection of illustrations of sexual imagery from the annals of global art, ancient and modern, from Bosch and Durer to Rembrandt and Tintoretto, from Caspar David Friedrich and Caravaggio to Bacon and Jean Rustin. It is, initially, a meditation on the image that psychoanalysis calls the primal scene, a scene that necessarily precedes the birth of each of us but which we, since we were not born at the time, never see and which, nonetheless, in some sense still haunts us.
In 27 concise chapters that draw on the mythological and artistic resources of Western and Far Eastern culture including chapters on Dido and Aeneas, Mary Magdalene, Lascaux and Golgotha; on voyeurism and melancholy; on Saint Augustine and Freud the book is a short but remarkably dense, disquisition on vision, temporality, generation and creation in all its forms. As the French publisher so concisely puts it, [Quignard] raises the question of the origin of being and gives expression to the ineffable .
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