Electric Blue

Abstract After briefly considering Symonds’s death in Rome, this chapter looks back at his time in and writings about the Italian city that most captured his imagination: Venice. It is there, it is argued, that the blend of the aesthetic and the erotic that had long characterized his work found its finest expression. Particular attention is paid to his meditations on the nature and language of color, including in the title essay of his late collection, In the Key of Blue. In Venice and on its lagoon, the queer intersubjectivity that Symonds sought to explain and enact reaches even beyond the human, toward the material and the environmental, a move that resembles but arguably surpasses analogous ones by Walt Whitman. Consideration of the “death drive” in Freud and Lacan leads to the book’s conclusion, in which it is argued that Symonds corrects psychoanalysis by offering a robust account of contact.