On the Interest in the Art of Loving: Richard Shusterman’s Ars Erotica

Here, finally, is a book that takes the path of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality1 but goes beyond its limits. I refer to Richard Shusterman’s Ars Erotica.2 It took a little more than four decades, since the beginning of Foucault’s project of a genealogy of sexuality understood as an object of knowledge in relation to power, to develop a new, ambitious and complex project that does not limit itself to questioning Western thinking, and in particular that of the ancient Greek-Roman world. This book offers original reflections on the transcultural genealogies of the current globalized world; not from the usual economic and political perspective but rather from a novel philosophical point of view. In light of this, Shusterman’s Ars Erotica marks a movement of progress toward a new understanding of our globalized world: more precisely, a critical understanding, rooted in history but capable of offering a potential improvement of existing realties, rather than limiting itself to a mere confirmation of the status quo or to a sterile exercise of non-constructive critique. My contribution to this symposium on Ars Erotica will start from the author’s concluding hypothesis that, in a sense, also underlies the general thrust of his book: namely, the hypothesis according to which the traditional paradigm of modern aesthetics (starting from the eighteenth century) can and perhaps must be overcome by means of a return to the communion of eros and beauty that had characterized philosophical aesthetics over the span of time from Plato to the Renaissance. The idea is that as long as eros “was defined as the desiring love for beauty expressed by a longing to intimately know and somehow unite with the beautiful object desired,” and “beauty was conceived as