Vinculum Amoris: Renaissance Magic, Erotic Propaganda and Populist Reason from Culianu to Laclau

In this essay, we reassess Culianu’s political interpretation of Renaissance culture in Éros et magie à la Renaissance (1984), focusing on his reading of Ficino and Bruno’s magic doctrines, which he saw as the first steps towards modern theories and practices of erotic manipulation. His ideas were based on a comprehension of the relation between politics and symbolic forms as had been developed by scholars such as Cassirer, Warburg, and Wind. In addition to this, Culianu projected the concerns of his time about mass psychology and media manipulation back onto Renaissance culture. He regarded Bruno as the philosopher who reworked Ficino’s individualist psychology and magic towards a collective and practice-oriented art. We reassess the actuality of Culianu’s anachronism by relating it to today’s populisms. In this perspective, we establish an ideal connection between Éros et magie and Laclau’s post-Gramscian theory of hegemony and populist reason (1985 and 2005), according to which rhetoric and symbolism are the main constituents of groups and political society. We suggest that Culianu’s inquiry into Renaissance manipulative psychology and Laclau’s inquiry into the ideological construction of post-modern identities stem from a similar cultural-political concern about the connection between media control and mass democracy, although they interpreted the relation between the masses and their leaders differently.