Längtande Kroppar: Höga Visan som Pedagogik för Begären

Abstract

This study explores how the Song of Songs could and should be interpreted in its own form, i.e., as erotic poetry, and on the basis of sexual desire. The common interpretation of the Song of Songs as an allegory of the love of God for his people appears to have been an attempt to avoid bestowing any significance on the body– or, at least, of smoothing out the complexities of our embodiment. This thesis argues that, when read instead as erotic poetry, the Song works as a pedagogy of desire – a desire that is founded on the sexual but that opens up to the erotic, a more encompassing desire, confessing that sexuality has more to it than satisfaction of biological urges. Through the sexual desire presented in the Song, we learn the contours of a desire that surpasses its sexual dimension and shapes all other relations, be it with the human, the nonhuman, or the divine other: nearness, otherness, and reciprocity. As pedagogy, the Song’s narrative of sexual desire primes and shapes our orientation to the world and God through the effect its sensuous imageries have on the body. With the help of the Song, we are also able to intimate that God desires human beings in a similar way and with a similar intensity as the lovers in the Song desire each other. Through this bodily apprehension of the divine, God awakens our desire for Godself.