-
Chapter 11. “Eros,” AIDS, and African Bodies: A Theological Commentary on Deadly Desires
- Augsburg Fortress Publishers
- Chapter
- Additional Information
181 ChApter 11 “Eros,” AIDS, and African Bodies: A Theological Commentary on Deadly Desires Edward P. Antonio ( ( in AfriCA todAy, “eros” and erotic desire are linked to sickness and death. Indeed, there is an important sense in which both “eros” and erotic desire have become agents of sickness and death. This can be ascertained through two simple observations that follow from each other. The first is that in Africa, HIV/AIDS is predominantly transmitted through sex or through “eros” as a representative of erotic desire. The second observation follows from this: understandings of “eros,” sexual love, and desire are now mediated through HIV/AIDS or through the death it represents. This means that AIDS is the radical framework within which sex, love, and death have become socially (publicly) thinkable as two sides of the same reality. Thus, HIV/ AIDS—through “eros” and sexual desire and their relationship to sickness and death—has become an aspect of the making and remaking of African identities. HIV/AIDS has become a site where the question of the survival of a people, a civilization, and a continent is being negotiated and decided.1 182 The Embrace of Eros This essay has a twofold agenda. The first is to describe and critique some of the ways in which the hegemony of Western discourses about HIV/ AIDS in Africa is resulting in serious misrepresentation of African modes of sexuality in the name of foreign value-systems. The second is to call attention to the challenge of HIV/AIDS for theology and to provide a brief theological commentary on “eros,” AIDS, and human bodies. The first thing this essay does is to recognize the idea of “eros” as unAfrican and as Western, specifically that it originates from ancient Greece. Since most of the proposed solutions to HIV/AIDS are Western, I am interested here in how sex and desire in Africa are framed through Western perspectives that represent a recolonizing logic. Not only does this logic distort, misrepresent, and elide indigenous notions of sex and sexuality, it also masquerades as scientific and universal, thereby serving as the basis for the discursive recolonization of African societies.2 This essay critically interrogates the status of the idea of “eros” in the non-Western cultures of Africa and its relation to Western cultural understandings. This focus on different cultural understandings of “eros” raises two important questions. It raises, first, the question of “eros” and reason—that is, “sensuality” and “rationality” or the always historically and culturally shaped forms of rationality that structure the organization of sexuality and, through this (for example, through repression and sublimation of sexual energy), of society and civilization.3 Second, this focus on different cultural understandings of “eros” also raises the issue of the universality of love and desire, which are inextricably bound up with “eros.” There is a tendency in some theologies and philosophies to posit Western notions of sex, love, and the erotic as somehow unproblematically universal or necessarily paradigmatic for all understandings of love and sex. If all human practices, including sex and love, are historical (it is hard to think of love and sex being anything else), then surely the historicity of sex, love, and the erotic ought to be a fundamental part of the structure of any adequate account of sexual desire. Regarding the second agenda item, I want to begin to name some theological challenges of AIDS that academic theology has so far neglected, and which pastoral theology often glosses over in the name of practical immediacy . I do this in relation to the categories of “eros,” sex, love, and death. I proceed in this way for several reasons. First, Christian theology makes the love of God central to the very possibility of human redemption and to the ethics of human flourishing. Second, sex and erotic love are, on many theological accounts, regarded as God’s gift both to be gratefully enjoyed as [3.137.178.133] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:12 GMT) “Eros,” AIDS, and African Bodies 183 such and also to be used for reproductive purposes.4 Third, and central for my argument, in Africa HIV is most commonly spread through sex where the figure of something like “eros” is at work. Given the devastating nature of HIV/AIDS, is “eros,” understood as God-given love, possible? Can we theologically make sense of “eros” as love in the presence of massive social death, especially where the latter is the effect of the former? What religious and...