Abstract

The figure of the hermaphrodite from Ovid's Metamorphoses reappears in the Renaissance alchemical tradition, initiated by the famous Hypnerotomachia poliphili (1499). In the latter, the hermaphrodite seems to be a mere fragmentary trope but represents much more than a biological being or a cipher of desire. An entire poetic mode, a mode of writing and thinking, characterizes alchemy and ambivalence. A reading of Francesco Colonna's “strife of love in a dream” can profit from Sarah Kofman's analysis of ambivalence, metals, and writing in key texts of Shakespeare and Freud. The hermaphrodite, as we learn, is a trope, and more than that: it opens up a poetics that exceeds the double-sexed creature itself.