“Don Giovanni,” Sex’n’Roll, and Echoes of the Counterculture: A Brief History of Desire Read Backwards

Abstract

This article is an attempt to read the history of courtly love backwards, thus setting a perspective that enables the interpretation of the contemporary sexual revolution by revealing its historical and archetypal patterns. It presents the hybrid relationships linking operatic “archaicness” with film, philosophy, and music in their contemporary artistic forms. The central argument is that the widespread phenomenon of aestheticization of life is based on the illusion that one is able to achieve absolute fulfillment in a transient world. The myth of Don Juan embodies this very dimension of modernity, which gives the aesthetic (sensual) the rank of the absolute, while numerous artistic actualizations of this myth confirm that the Western European imaginarium has its affective substrate in the form of desire, which is impossible to satisfy.