Symposium on Richard Shusterman’s "Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love"

This symposium presents five contributions from the Symposium on Richard Shusterman’s magnus opus, "Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love", published in 2021. The first text, written by me, introduces Shusterman’s comprehensive encounter with the ars erotica that Foucault, in his "History of Sexuality", initially considered an exciting alternative to Western scientia sexualis before later admitting that, from a scholarly point of view, he knew too little about it for it to be of real use in his own project. This is where Shusterman steps in, who not only goes back in time but expands our knowledge far beyond European territory (China, Japan, India, Islamic cultures) to explore all the true thinking concerned with aesthetic pleasures and forms of understanding, sensibility, refinement, skillfulness, ethics, and self-mastery that relate to sexual activity and the body. All the contributors are concerned with important avenues in and implications of Shusterman’s work. Catherine F. Botha (University of Johannesburg, South Africa) focuses on the rapport between Ars Erotica, Nietzsche’s legacy and the understanding of sôphrosunê; Leonardo Distaso (University of Naples Federico II, Italy) on the relevance of and the interests vested in the project of somaesthetics; and Leszek Koczanowicz (SWPS University, Poland) on the notion of beauty as negotiated between repression and coercion. This is followed by a substantial reply to the symposium contributions from Richard Shusterman (Florida Atlantic University, USA) himself, in which he critically contemplates the implications of discussing the rapport between sex, emancipation and aesthetics from within the cage of Eurocentric Modernity, which is not necessarily just a prison to escape but also a cage to protect oneself from external dangers and temptations. Shusterman’s works make us dare to know more about these somaesthetic zones.