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- "and as one ventures into these inverse imaginative worlds sanctioned as punitive spectacle, savage custom, and heretic rite, eroticism becomes combined with cruelty--with unleashed aggression--so that a whole range of erotic and aggressive impulses become confused in a single narrative tableau.--a perverse oscillation between horror and lust, spectacle and censure, voyeurism and lament. (243)
- the last pages of this essay, which intwine roman depicitons of torture, and the material culture of martyology, as a kind of repression and expulsion, evades a psychoanalytic bent, but suggests that emphasis on disembodiment can allow for a spectacled eroticism, and takes Tertullian to task just for that.
- "tie him with his arms behind him and rack him upwards till the joints of his bones in every limb are rent asunder with a crack. Then with the cleaving strokes lay bare the ribs of their covering so the organs shall be exposed as they throb in the recesses of the wound" ( 229). Don't tell me that throbbing recesses aren't Wittig via Sade.
- but then we spend four pages talking about chariot races, and the point may be that romans just really liked death, lots and lots of death.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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