Sacred and Profane Love Episode 30: The Seducer, Self-Creation and The Aesthete
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In this episode, I am joined by author and theologian Tara Isabella Burton. Tara and I explore the distinctive erotic pleasure one can experience in the act of creating a character out of another human being. This sort of seduction involves coming to possess someone else so as to transform them into a character in your own drama. This is a theme in the two works we discuss, Soren Kierkegaard\\u2019s The Seducer\\u2019s Diary and Oscar Wilde\\u2019s The Picture of Dorian Gray. We also talk about the influence of Joris-Karl Huysman\\u2019s novel, Against Nature, on Wilde. Wilde\\u2019s novel, like Huysman\\u2019s, is a study of decadence and decay, but the end seems fairly moralizing, in spite of Wilde\\u2019s allegiance to the aesthetic. Or so we argue, anyway.
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