The Sexual Night

By Pascal Quignard

In The Sexual Night , renowned French writer and critic Pascal Quignard meditates on a remarkable collection of illustrations of sexual imagery. He moves from the annals of global art to ancient and modern, from Bosch and D rer to Rembrandt and Tintoretto, from Caspar David Friedrich and Caravaggio to Bacon and Jean Rustin. The meditations are wonderfully woven together, presenting 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. Throughout the course of twenty-seven chapters that draw on the mythological and artistic resources of Western and Far Eastern culture--including the tragic love of Dido and Aeneas; the scandalous figure of Mary Magdalene; Lascaux and Golgotha; voyeurism and melancholy; Saint Augustine and Freud--the book is a disquisition on vision, temporality, generation, and creation in all its forms. Forty-eight brilliant and sensual color images accompany the text, as Quignard questions the origin of our being and explains the unexplainable, while noted translator Chris Turner lends a crisp voice to the entire collection.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0857422065
• ISBN13: 9780857422064
• Release Date: January 2015
• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Length: 124 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.1" x 7.7"