Nature and Desire: Ioan Petru Culianu’s Éros et Magie à la Renaissance, 35 Years Later

2019 will mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Culianu’s Éros et magie à la Renaissance, 1484, an influential and controversial work of early-modern intellectual history. The central claim of the book is that Renaissance magic, as a specific form of practical knowledge bridging natural philosophy, physiology and ethico-politics, can be characterized as the manipulation of desires, fundamentally erotic, via the imagination. Two figures, Ficino and Bruno, are central to the strongest moments of Culianu’s study. Ficino is the creator of a pneumatic framework—of nature and the human body—that captures the vicissitudes of love and desire. This framework is taken up by Bruno in his theory of vincula, where it becomes a foundation on which to construct a comprehensive theory of natural and human manipulation. Culianu expands Paolo Rossi’s idea of magic (as a form of practice-oriented natural knowledge) to include the possible social-political implications of the Renaissance magician as “precursor of modern professions such as director of public relations, propagandist, spy, politician, censor […]” (p.xviii). In light of over three decades of further research on Renaissance scientific culture, our panel will ask to what extent Culianu’s theses are still productive for research on early modern science today. In particular, how can Culianu’s reading of desire and imagination be extended to other branches of early-modern knowledge and activity: to medicine, to vitalistic forms natural philosophy, and to the promotion of practices, industries, and methods linked to the advent of the new sciences?