ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the reconfiguration in Purgatorio xxvi of the poetics of eroticism as Dante presents the poets of the Italian lyric tradition themselves confronting this question. It uses this reading to reread and reconsider what passes for sexual desire within the darkness and tumult of the Second Circle of Hell. Desiring and knowing, sexualities and knowledges, emerge as so fundamentally interimplicated in both these cantos that the geometry of submitting reason to desire becomes untenable, opening the way toward a different metaphysics in which such oppressive binaries do not take shape. In both Inferno v and Purgatorio xxvi, Dante the love poet implicates himself as rooted in a regime of phallic masculinity that does precisely this, not only to the female body but to the male body as well. The resurrection of the sexual body from this 'death' has nothing to do with restitching a material body to a transcendent soul.
