Choice 評論
Also author of The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation (1991) and Shakespeare among the Moderns (CH, Dec'97), Halpern (Univ. of California, Berkeley) here traces a fascinating genealogy that ranges from the Pauline Epistles to Lacan's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60; Eng. tr., 1992). From Dante to Shakespeare there is an unmistakable pattern in which the idolatrous veneration of the male form and the practice of homosexual sodomy precipitate a powerful dialectic: the sublimation of sexual drives (the unrepresentable act) into aesthetic form (the sublimated "perfume" of homosexual desire) created some remarkable artistic expression. Halpern treats Shakespeare's sonnets as a case in point of the sublimation of the sodomitical sublime into the aesthetics of the beautiful, then turns to Wilde's elaborate, fictionalized interpretation of the sonnets in The Portrait of Mr. W.H., Freud's case history of the origins of Leonardo da Vinci's homosexuality, and, finally, to Lacan's scatological writing of the Heideggerian "Thing" vis-a-vis a parodic poem by 12th-century French poet Arnaut Daniel, who traces the origins of courtly love back to its sodomitical origin. Halpern's intriguing book traces an enigmatic core of ideas in some of the most beguiling works of Western theory, art, and literature. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. N. Lukacher University of Illinois at Chicago