Distorsions de l’unité
Distortions of Unity

Summary/Abstract: Fecund in European myth and beyond, the androgynous (gr. andros – “man” + gyne – “women”) constitues, maybe the best, the desire for perfection, aspiration of all ancient civilizations. The synthesis of the male and female it is a mythic, philosophic or artistic fiction, part of archetypal nostalgia, spiritual ideal, but also erotic plethora. From Plato to Gnostics and to the Mystics of the Middle Ages, then to the European romanticists, aspire to this type of perfection, more rudimentary or more sophisticated, initiating rituals allowing the access to the primordial unity. A form of distortion of the androgynous myth can be the myth of Narcissus, where searching half is suspended, because the human being as she is, halved in the platonic myth, divided as female from the Adamic unique body – or androgenic -, it is itself sufficient. Another hybrid form it is the Hermaphroditic. In the mundane plan, this is considered as a kind of profane, a deformation, and a travesty. The world literature – in this case Plato, Ovid, Mary Shelley, Honoré de Balzac, Italo Calvino, Liviu Rebreanu, Scott Fitzgerald - retraces, in artistic way, the contents.

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