| Abstract: | This essay explores the resources for human mindedness that counter-intuitively inhere in representations of human sexuality – coitus specifically. I maintain that the problematic relation between the aesthetic register of representations of the sexual act and the intellectual presuppositions of the readers/viewers of such representations is analogous to the interpretive problems posed by allegory. Drawing upon the mind–body conflicts that are dramatised in allegorical representational practices deployed by writers like Ovid and Dante, painters like Bronzino and Courbet, I argue that it makes sense to think of allegory as continuous with rather than antithetical to figura. Just so, mind may be grasped as continuous with physical experience. This continuity is interestingly and usefully revealed to be a presupposition of contemporary neuro-philosophical accounts of conceptual blending. Finally, my purpose will be to demonstrate that the conceptuality we presuppose in standard notions of allegory is inadequate to the burdens and responsibilities of existential cognitive agency–real personhood. This is specifically true if we come to understand allegory, particularly the allegory of love, as unselfconsciously involved in a form of thinking that brooks no distinction between feeling and knowing. |
