0.8 Unsaying eros: fractured androgyne

image --> If The Rose can be viewed as a symbolic embodiment of corporeal complementarity—a coincidentia oppositorum that coalesces into a complex pictorial expression—then the androgyny of the painting can be located in the ambiguous eros of its own unsaying. A slightly later painting, Fractured Androgyne (2006), both reproduces and reverses these themes in another instance of symbolic double mirroring, one that can be seen as an unsaying of eros.

At the outset, it is helpful to provide some brief background on the concept of the androgyne. Like the angel, the androgyne is a culturally and historically specific construction, even as this figure represents a recurrent—albeit decidedly unstable—motif in ancient myths, classical sources, and modern artworks. As I observe in my study, Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum , “The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the word derives from the Greek andros , or ‘man,’ and gune , or ‘woman.’ Taken together, the conjoined term signifies ‘male and female in one,’ and thus, ‘a being uniting the physical characteristics of both sexes; a hermaphrodite.' The Oxford English Dictionary , vol. 1, p. 452. …. The expanded entry on ‘Androgynes’ appearing in the Encyclopedia of Religion notes that, in ‘the visual image, androgynes may be horizontal (with breasts above and a phallus below),’ such as often found in Hindu typological images of the Shiva/Shakti androgyne, or ‘more often, vertical (with one side, usually the left, bearing a breast and half of a vagina, and the other side bearing half of a phallus)’—such as in the morphological typologies that recur in alchemical texts. The entry continues: ‘Androgynes may be regarded as…symbolically successful, when the image presents a convincing fusion of the two polarities…that is, when it is [not] a mere juxtaposition of opposites [but]a true fusion.' Wendy Doniger and Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” in Encyclopedia of Religion , vol. 1, p. 337. See also Doniger O’Flaherty’s extended discussion of this typology in Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 283-334. In this study, Doniger distinguishes the “negative chaos” associated with splitting androgynes from the “positive chaos” connected with fusing androgynes. In particular, while splitting androgynes must be severed in order to be creative, fusing androgynes typically consist of a male and a female created in isolation who then must fuse. Significantly, she also notes that the figure of the androgyne can alternatively represent ecstasy or barrenness, just as the typology can simultaneously express love in union or in separation.

“Perhaps most significantly, the figure of the androgyne is central to biblical accounts of the first human being. According to the Book of Genesis, on the sixth day of creation, ‘So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them’ (Genesis 1: 27). Slightly later, in the account of the creation of woman from the rib of Adam, readers encounter a figure who “shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2: 23). Thus the biblical image of the original human being—the initial anthropomorphic schema of Adam—represents a figural typology of gender dimorphism in which the female is contained within the male. For an extensive discussion of this trope, see Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being , ch. 4. Beyond Old Testament texts, androgynes appear in classical sources as cosmic embodiments of the duality and the union of the sexes. In Plato’s Symposium , for example, the androgyne is characterized as a ‘third sex’ incorporating a union of man and woman, a ‘being whose double nature’ is imagined as conjoined in a circular body. These mythic creatures were later severed by the gods and divided into two parts, thereby establishing the ancient desire for ‘reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.’ In the Platonic account, the androgyne occupied a circular body that could walk upright, backwards, or forwards, or “roll over and over at a great pace.” See Plato, “The Symposium,” in Dialogues , trans. Benjamin Jowet, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1955), vol. 7, p. 157. In both classical and modern accounts, the androgyne variously appears as a mystical figure of wholeness and fragmentation, of sacrality and transgression, whose metamorphic processes of separation and reintegration mark the fractured limits and the interwoven boundaries of humanity itself. The androgyne is also a recurrent figure in medieval and early modern mysticism, as well as in German Romanticism, Symbolist and Decadent imagery, and modernist artworks ranging from Balzac and Baudelaire to Brancusi and Klee. Moreover, as Patricia Matthews has observed, during the fin de siècle the androgyne served as a prevailing image that “denied sexual difference: the nondesiring but desirable androgyne” whose presence signified a “transcendent body…[that] offered an alluring promise of imagined wholeness and coherency in the face of the decentered, unboundaried experience of modernity.” See Patricia Mathews, Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 111, 114. Throughout its various incarnations, the androgyne thus instantiates extraordinary states of being that engender an ambivalent sense of difference within, and beyond, difference.”