The Sexual Night
The Sexual Night
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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 Dürer 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.
‘Intelligible, mournful, and profound.’—New York Times
‘The Sexual Night explores much more thoroughly and universally than ever before this “invisible” sexual scene that founds and forever affects us [. . .] A thoroughly stimulating book.’—Arts Fuse
- ISBN: 9780857422064
- Pages: 124, 48 colour plates
- Size (inches): 6" x 7.5
- Format: Hardback
- Publication Year: January 2015
If you are ordering from India, your order will be shipped from Seagull Books, Calcutta. Shipping is free for orders above ₹999.
If you are ordering from the US or the UK or anywhere else in the world, your order will be shipped from the University of Chicago Press' distribution centre, Chicago.
Please note: For customers paying in currencies other than Indian rupee or US dollar, prices will be calculated according to the currency conversion rate at the time of purchase and may vary from the printed price.
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About Us
Seagull Books (estd 1982) has been crafting books with an eye to both exceptional content and radical design. What began highly risky business of publishing books-books on alternative cinema, philosophy, culture-continues to be a passionately felt need of the hour: manuscripts that need to see the light of day, instinctive and theatre, visual arts, to reach a readership, to stimulate minds, to change outlooks. Read More
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