Eros plays a central role in Western thought. In the philosophical and spiritual traditions, it usually refers to physical love and desire. Eros is a recurring character in the pre-Socratic cosmogonies, and it is the main impulse of the philosophical quest for truth in Plato’s Phaedrus. In the Symposium, Plato also unveils its fundamental ambiguity as half divine and half human, where the desire to merge the opposing sides involves beauty and ugliness, profusion and need. Eros is at the intersection of gift and possession, of radical openness and selfish desire, of interested disinterest and mystical transport, mixing clairvoyance and blindness. Thanks to the manifold nuances of the erotic-sensuous genius that fascinated Kierkegaard, eroticism both produces and dissolves several dimensions of human existence, sociality, understanding, and speech.

This Special Topics issue of PhænEx wishes to give a new impulse to philosophical reflections on this fundamental and ambiguous phenomenon, following an interdisciplinary perspective at the intersection of phenomenology, post-structuralism, and social sciences (psychology, sociology, sexology, anthropology, linguistics, etc.).

Submission Information

Submissions in both French and English are accepted, and all papers will be peer-reviewed. Paper submissions must be made directly through the journal’s website. Please follow the online instructions, guidelines, and stylesheet.

Submission Deadline: October 1st, 2016.

Please direct any questions to the Lead Editors:

 – Élodie Boublil (CNRS-ENS), elo.boublil[a]gmail.com

 – Chiara Piazzesi (UQAM), piazzesi.chiara[a]uqam.ca