e Disguised Archetype

Androgyny And Otherness In Dionysus

WORDS BY Giorgiomaria Cornelio

One of many names behind which Dionysus conceals his total visibility is Lysios, ‘Th e One Who Unties’. Th is seal, this trace of wax, marks nothing but a seismic vow and a promise of otherness. Th us, another epigraph of this text could have been the alchemic motto: “Solve et Coagula” (Separate and Join Together), since the inclination of Lysios lies precisely in this imperative of dissolution. In fact, the very lineage of Dionysus is formulated under the umbra of a perpetual camoufl age which reveals that every genealogy is the erratic result “of a multiplicity of fl ows, of forking paths, of diff erent sedimentations.” (Georges Didi-Huberman). Th e stalking archetype that, more than the others, is tied to the fi gure of Dionysus is the androgyne, the fl uid creature that bears on its body the impression of an utter alterity that always defers itself, unfolding new spiral movements and rejecting the clinical bisection of the body. In the androgyne, what Mario Mieli calls the “innate transsexuality” of the human being is manifested beyond the necrotic domain of the Norma and declares its presence either as a sulphurous vocation or as a bleeding wound. In his treatise called  e Androgyne: Reconciliation Of Male And Female, Elemire Zolla provides an account of the subincision ceremonies of Australian aborigines, during which a cut is opened into the lower part of the penis, baring the urethra. Later in time, this wound is periodically made to bleed as a “proof of the adept’s link with the source of life and with the central archetype of the androgyne.” Th is passage says something more than just its anthropological account, unveiling what is buried in the word archetype, i.e. the ἀρχή (arche). Certainly, the arche is the beginning somewhat linked with the “source of life”, but it is also the power of the command, of an utter authority that must be acknowledged, being able to ‘pierce’ the body.

At this point, we can consider two examples or symptoms of this twofold nature that also belongs to the androgyne, i.e. the paradigmatic Dionysius of Th e Bacchae and Heliogabalus, the Dionysiac crowned

anarchist depicted by Antonin Artaud as a portrait of what is beyond-gender. Heliogabalus is the expression of a struggle, of an always impetuous attempt to make the reality androgynous through a subversion of the stable powers. When this young emperor dresses in female clothes like a prototypical drag queen, he exhibits what neither the history nor the power can tolerate or limit, i.e. an identity based on a communion of the contraries, on an uncovered otherness: “Th e entire life of Heliogabalus is anarchy in action, since Elagabalus the unitary god who brings together again man and woman, the hostile poles, the One and the Two, is the end of contradictions, the elimination of war and anarchy”.

From a theatrical point of view, Artaud’s Heliogabalus is the actorial machine par excellence since the emperor constantly fabricates himself anew through a multiplicity of prostheses and through a line of unpredictable shift ings, becoming the defi nitive suppression of the narrative character. He also embodies (in the most literal way) the abolition of political authority because he accepts and reintroduces in Rome what the king Pentheus vehemently refuses in Th e Bacchae, i.e. the Dionysiac and solar aspect of life. Heliogabalus comes from a foreign country, that is Roman Syria. In the same way, Dionysius (particularly the Dionysius of Th e Bacchae) is depicted as a foreigner (Xenos) who brings with himself the fever of the otherness, perturbing the common reality of the land. Hence, he is another expression of the uncanny (unheimlich or l’inquiétante étrangeté), a creature which unties (Lysios) the very knots of the heteronormative geography, being what Jung would have called a synchronic fi eld or perhaps another fi liation of the Dogon’s Aduno Tal, i.e the egg of the world described by the anthropologist Marcel Griaulae and used by Deleuze and Guattuari as a depiction of the body without organs. Th e very tragedy of Th e Bacchae consists in the missed acknowledgement of the authority of this innate (in-nata or mai nata, manifested but without an origin) alterity.

Nowadays, Dionysus lives a life upturned in a double camoufl age, like the Nonexistent Knight which has no-body underneath his armour, being himself the body or the printed character of an illusion. Nevertheless, he is still ubiquitous since his masked presence is necessary to overcome the confl ict of the opposites that otherwise would turn the world into a bloodshed. In this modern age, fi nding the androgynous trace of Dionysus is to witness the sudden appearance of an errant archetype.