Cloud Erotica: Stéphane Audeguy’s The Theory of Clouds (La Théorie des nuages)
Cloud Erotica: Stéphane Audeguy’s The Theory of Clouds (La Théorie des nuages)
Audeguy’s Theory of Clouds reaches far beyond the cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and nimbus forms we know. The Krakatoa volcano was “the largest cloud ever recorded,” a natural bomb that was duplicated decades later by the grotesque mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, and the ashes rising from the chimneys of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Humans have allowed themselves to be “denatured,” destroying themselves and the world in the process. There is an intimate relationship between the microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of nature, neither of which we can fully understand: a “confrontation between the limitlessness of desire and the unthinkable infinity of nature” (Audeguy, Opera mundi 39). Audeguy’s protagonist Abercrombie is a true “erotologist,” obsessed by the mysterious connection between female bodies (microcosm) and clouds (macrocosm).
Keywords: Stéphane Audeguy, La Théorie des nuages, clouds, Gustave Courbet, Mircea Eliade, Hiroshima, Prometheus, Terra erotica
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