Posted by Nikoleta Zampaki, Andreas Markantonatos, Lorena Rojas-Parma, María Di Muro-Pellegrino on 2026-09-15
This special collection explores a simple but powerful concept: that love, or eros, as the ancient Greeks called it—is not just a personal emotion but a fundamental force that binds the universe together. From the cosmic particles of ancient philosophy to the algorithms of AI, eros appears again and again as a principle of connection, attraction, and transformation.
The collection asks: What happens when we take eros not as romance or desire in the narrow sense, but as the very stuff of relationship, interdependence, and change? How might this ancient concept help us think differently about our ecological crisis, our relationships with technology, and what it means to be human in an age of AI?
By bringing together scholars from classics, global philosophy, environmental humanities, posthumanities, digital and media studies, and comparative literature, we aim to show that eros offers a way of understanding the world that challenges the dominant Western emphasis on separation, control, and independence. Instead, eros invites us to recognise our fundamental entanglement with each other, with nonhuman world, and even with the digital companions we are beginning to create.
Three urgent contemporary developments make this collection timely: First, the climate crisis. We are increasingly aware that technological fixes alone will not solve environmental breakdown. What is needed, many scholars argue, is a deeper shift in how we understand our relationship to the natural world. Eros, understood as a force of mutual implication rather than domination, offers a framework for moving beyond the destructive mindset that treats nature as a resource to be exploited. Recent work by scholars such as Anna L. Tsing (2015), Donna J. Haraway (2016), and Timothy Morton (2013) has demonstrated the appetite for non-managerial approaches to ecological crisis, a conversation our collection extends through the lens of eros.
Second, the rise of AI and digital technologies. As we develop AI companions, griefbots, and digital afterlife technologies, traditional boundaries between life and death, human and machine, intimacy and simulation are becoming blurred. Eros provides a lens for understanding these new forms of connection, not as mere imitations of human relationships, but as genuine sites where our understanding of self and other is being reconfigured. Recent scholarship on digital afterlife technologies (e.g., Öhman and Floridi 2017, Savin-Baden 2021, Obadia, 2025) has begun to explore these questions, but our framing of digital intimacy through the ancient lens of katabasis and Orphic descent offers a genuinely novel contribution.
Third, a growing interest in cross-cultural and transhistorical dialogue. Scholars across the Humanities are increasingly seeking to move beyond Eurocentric frameworks and to bring Western and non-Western philosophies into conversation. By reading Greek eros alongside Sanskrit Kama and Taoist Yin-Yang reciprocity, this collection contributes to this vital reorientation of the Humanities.
While scholars have studied eros in antiquity, such as Anne Carson’s influential Eros the Bittersweet and others have explored environmental and posthumanist themes, no sustained work traces a continuous thread from ancient cosmic love to contemporary digital intimacy. This collection fills that gap by showing how eros recurs in structurally similar forms across vastly different contexts—as a force of binding, disruption, and transformation.
The collection also breaks new ground by bringing Western and non-Western frameworks of desire into direct dialogue, and by connecting the ethics of ecological care with the ethics of digital intimacy. In doing so, it speaks to scholars across multiple disciplines while remaining accessible to readers approaching the topic from other fields.
Potential Themes / Contributions
We invite contributions that explore eros as a recursive force across the following areas, while remaining open to other approaches that engage with the collection’s central idea:
· Cosmic and Elemental Eros: How ancient Greek thinkers like Empedocles understood love as a material force binding the universe, and how these ideas resonate with contemporary new materialism and speculative realism (e.g., Bennett 2010).
· Eros, Tragedy, and the Fractured Self: How desire in Greek tragedy disrupts the sovereign subject (Euripides’ Hippolytus, Sophocles’ Antigone), prefiguring posthuman understandings of identity as porous and relational, and resonating with thinkers such as Georges Bataille (1962) on erotic excess.
· Eros Beyond Death: How do ancient myths of descent to the underworld (such as Orpheus and Eurydice) offer models for understanding contemporary digital afterlife technologies and our relationships with AI representations of the deceased.
· Ecological Eros: How an erotic framework might reshape environmental ethics, building on Carolyn Merchant’s critique of the mechanization of nature (1980) and moving beyond both technocratic solutionism and apocalyptic fatalism toward practices of care, kinship, and mutual implication.
· Comparative Frameworks of Desire: Bringing Greek eros into dialogue with South Asian Kama and Taoist Yin-Yang reciprocity (e.g., Ram-Prasad 2018, Ganeri 2021), challenging Eurocentric assumptions and enriching our understanding of relationality across cultures.
· Posthuman and Digital Eros: How AI-driven intimacies, “desiring-machines” (Deleuze and Guattari 2000), and symbiogenetic processes (Margulis 2000) reconfigure subjectivity, agency, and relationality.
To ensure coherence across the collection’s interdisciplinary scope, we adopt a broad definition of eros as a force of attraction, relationality, and disruption that operates at multiple scales: cosmic, psychological, ecological, and digital. This definition is deliberately flexible enough to encompass diverse disciplinary perspectives, while providing a shared conceptual vocabulary. The collection will elaborate these dimensions, and contributors will be encouraged to define their terms clearly for readers outside their immediate field.
References
Bataille, George. Eroticism. Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. City Lights Books, 1962.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton University Press, 2023.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, & Helen R. Lane. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Empedocles. Fragments (DK 31 B17). In H. Diels & W. Kranz (Eds.), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (6th ed.). Weidmann, 1951.
Euripides. Hippolytus. Trans. D. Kovacs. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Ganeri, Jonardon. Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves. Oxford University Press, 2025.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Basic Books, 2000.
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Harper & Row, 1980.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Obadia, Lionel, “Deadbots, Griefbots, and Postmortem Technologies: A Computational Challenge to Mortality,” in Alger Sans Pinillos, Vicent Costa, Jordi Vallverdú (eds.). SecondDeath. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol. 76, Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98808-0_13
Öhman, Carl, and Luciano Floridi. “The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information.” Minds and Machines 27 (2017): 639-662. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-017-9445-2
Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenological Case Studies from Classical India. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Savin-Baden, Maggi. AI for Death and Dying. Routledge, 2021.
Sophocles. Antigone. Trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Harvard University Press, 1994.
Tsing, L. Anna. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Submission guidelines
Research articles:
Please contact the guest editors with your expression of interest to submit an article for the Special Collection including an abstract of 250-350 words including five keywords by 31 October 2026. Please email Dr Nikoleta Zampaki via nzampaki@wsiz.edu.pl using ‘Eros Across Antiquity, Ecology and Posthumanism’ as the email subject. If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to work with the guest editors prior to the submission to ensure coherence with the authors guidelines and with the thematic scope of this Special Collection. The word count for the articles is up to 8000 words. All research articles should follow the OLH Author Guidelines to be found at https://olh.openlibhums.org/site/author-guidelines/
Final submissions are due by 31 May 2027 and will be sent using the OLH portal: https://olh.openlibhums.org/submissions/. All research articles will need to pass a double blind peer review process to be accepted for publication.
Information about the publisher
This collection will be published in the Open Library of Humanities Journal (OLHJ) (ISSN 2056-6700). The OLHJ is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded diamond open-access journal with a strong emphasis on quality peer review and a prestigious academic steering board. Unlike some open-access publications, the OLHJ has no author-facing charges and is instead financially supported by an international consortium of libraries.
To learn more about the publisher, the Open Library of Humanities, please visit: https://www.openlibhums.org/
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