The erotic is a point of infinite signification, a navel in humanity’s symbolic circuit. However, despite its resistance to formalization, it is always in the process of not being written. As Octavio Paz insists, the erotic is a metaphor indelible to the human. As such, it is unsurprising that the manifestations of the erotic in subjective embodied experience are variable and correspond to equally plural treatments of it across the academic panorama. This diverse archive is bound by certain distinguishable threads, in terms of the potentiality of the erotic, its singular relation to language, and to the sphere of sexuality.

Firstly, scholarship on the subject emphasizes the profoundly generative character of the erotic. Audre Lorde’s work in Sister Outsider insists upon this, conceptualizing the erotic as a profound source of power and nonrational knowledge for the feminine, simultaneously in conflict with structures of masculine domination and imbued with liberatory potential. Furthermore, in psychoanalytic practice, generative erotic transference can enable the therapeutic process by means of actualizing the body and discourse of the analyst for the analysand. 

Secondly, the erotic is associated with a dissolution of language and, as such, with the unsymbolizable vestiges of embodied experience. As Bataille notes, eroticism metamorphoses sensual pleasure into a ruinous and degraded landscape. The edifice of erotic poetry further illuminates this fact, where language is made to dance, pushed to its utmost limit. One can cite here the critics of E.E. Cummings, who, “when, they understood Mr. Cummings’ vocabulary at all, [said] that he has enriched the language with a new idiom.”

Lastly, as Octavio Paz urges us, any discussion of love and eroticism can be represented as 1+1=3, implying a reference to sexuality, the indelible third term to the dyad. Psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge offers a further instance of the erotic and the sexual as absent but necessary referents of one another. It can be said that Freud’s foundational finding in Three Essays on Sexuality is none other than the field of eroticism, unnamed and yet emerging in his discussion of the contingency and plasticity of human sexuality that distinguish it from animals’ sexual functions. 

As human artistic production readily reveals, our concern with the erotic is constant. Its presence is revered as much as its absence deracinates our experience. In his discussion of the illustrated magazine, Kracauer excavates the implications of photographic technology, which wrenches events from their context, renders them immortal, and infinitely reproducible. He proposes that the result of this is none other than a mass “strike against understanding.” The informational surplus produced leads to profound withdrawal from sense and, in turn, a defilement of experience. We understand the erotic as being condemned today to precisely the same fate. Reduced to automaton, entirely forgoing tyche, sexuality increasingly becomes a matter of bodily machination and mere structural necessity. In its incessant digitization and sterilization, sexuality, like the body in pornography, is bound to a 2-dimensional plane of vulgar literality. As such, with sexuality reduced to the literal, the metaphors of eroticism cannot but succumb to death.

The erotic is thus a question both urgent and resistant to exhaustive theoretical treatment. This edition of Flatus Vocis seeks work on the erotic today, driven by the hypothesis that we are enduring a historical moment wherein the ordinary violently expels the erotic. Following Benjamin’s prescription in The Origin of German Trauerspiel, when the object of study opposes direct observation, it must be approached at a slant, from enough directions as to fill the space around it. As such, the collection of interdisciplinary work to result from this call is an attempt to trace the contours of the erotic, in hopes of arriving at an understanding of the thing in itself. 

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

The erotic &

–––– today’s social, political, and cultural landscape

–––– the sexual: convergences, distinctions, causality

–––– the amorous

–––– the politics: the conditions and potentialities of the erotic; the eroticized, politicized body

–––– the gendered body

–––– the racialized body

—— the pornographic

–––– the textual: the erotic as a literary vessel; the writerly body; literary representations of desire, pleasure, and sensuality; embodied writing

–––– the visual: the erotic as a visual field; representations of the erotic in visual art

–––– the sonic: the erotic as a sonic gesture (a pant, a scream, a moan); musical representations of the erotic

–––– history: the emergence of eroticism; histories of erotic representation

–––– philosophy: ontology, ethics, and hermeneutics of eroticism

–––– the sacred: eroticism as a relation and an embodied state in religion and spirituality; the erotic in scripture

–––– regulatory norms: the normative functions of the erotic; erotic ‘deviance’ and ‘perversity’

–––– the poetic: erotic lyric or verse

Submission Guidelines:

Proposals, manuscripts, or visual media to be considered for publication must be submitted using this form: https://forms.gle/jW2wxhhaZ8bTDvzS6

Timeline:

Submission Deadline: July 1st, 2026

Notification of Acceptance: July 10th, 2026

Full Submission Deadline: September 1st, 2026

Who should submit?

We welcome academics and artists at any career stage to submit their work. At Flatus Vocis, we are committed to providing emergent thinkers, writers, and artists with the opportunity to showcase their work. We believe that maintaining a strict standard of quality for the material we publish should never prevent us from accepting work from a wide range of scholars and artistic practitioners. It is for this reason that submissions are considered in and of themselves, without consideration for the submitting party's background (academic, professional, or otherwise).

Any questions regarding the topic, submissions, the publication, or the review process can be addressed to info@flatusvocis.org

What is Flatus Vocis?

Flatus Vocis is a digital and physical publication situated between the visual & the writerly. It is a biannual publication, centered each time around a word, phrase, phenomenon, or gesture– for example, the inaugural edition is centered around the erotic today. In short, this publication seeks to address issues that concern us all. In this way, we hope to provide language, written, visual, and musical, with which our readers might interpret the world and the experiences they have within it. Each edition features creative labour that records an encounter between its creator(s) and the theme under consideration.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Physics. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Bataille, Georges. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. Translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, 1998.

Blackmur, R. P. “Notes on E.E. Cummings’ Language.” The Hound and Horn: A Harvard Miscellany (January–March 1931): 163.

Bollas, Christopher. “Aspects of Erotic Transference.” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 14 (1987): 579.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Kandel, Leonore. The Love-Lust Poem. In World Alchemy.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 421–436.

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

Paz, Octavio. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. Translated by Helen Lane. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.