Thoughts of Love Thoughts of Love Edited by Gary Peters and Fiona Peters Thoughts of Love, Edited by Gary Peters and Fiona Peters This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Gary Peters and Fiona Peters and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4871-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4871-8 CONTENTS Chapter One ................................................................................................ 1 Thoughts of Love Gary Peters Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 10 Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love Fiona Peters Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 28 Dangerous Ethics: Exploring Attachment and Destructiveness through the work of Judith Butler and Jessica Benjamin Polona Curk Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 47 Eros and Its Discontents: On the Taming (and Un-Taming) of Love’s Wild, Dangerously Unscripted Future Richard Ganis Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 66 Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject: From the Erotic to Master and Slave, Soldier and Philosopher Jane Connell Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 88 From the Works to the Problem of Love: The Aporia of the Neighbour in Kierkegaard George Tsagdis Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 107 I Want You to Be: Love as a Precondition of Freedom in the Thought of Hannah Arendt Rachel Paine vi Contents Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 124 The Art and Truth of Love: Foucault (and Lacan) on Plato’s Symposium Sanna Tirkkonen Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 141 Love and the Preciousness of the Individual Elizabeth Drummond Young Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 155 Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler Aleksandar Fatić Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 176 Love through Proximity and Distance in Goethe and Benjamin Sonia Arribas Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 192 “Excuse Me, Sir, What Does it Mean, ‘To Kiss’”? Thinking Beyond Universalism and Eurocentric Ideas of Love Sarah Lawson Welsh Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 207 A Stroll through Hell in Search of Love: Discovering Polish Responses to a Century of Suffering Gavin Cologne-Brooks Contributors ............................................................................................ 221 Index ....................................................................................................... 224 CHAPTER ONE THOUGHTS OF LOVE GARY PETERS Love is a fickle thing, fickle because it is not a thing. Love flows; we pour forth our admissions of love, are in turn swept away by its sometimes cruel and sometimes unloving intensity. One lover melts into the arms of another, a simultaneous emergence and dissolution of subjectivity and objectivity—one can never be an object of love, one can never be subjected to love—a dissolution that renders all dualism bereft. Badiou is right: love is a “procedure” to the extent that something proceeds, but he is also wrong: it is not exclusively a “two scene” (Badiou 2001: 51). He is right to resist the dialectical sublation of the two into the one, but the fidelity to two-ness understood as an eventual truth procedure needs itself to be resisted, not in the name of the one, but in the name of love, the poignancy of which is precisely the coexistence of two-ness and one-ness, as all young lovers will testify to (our conclusion). But why does love have such a good name? Does it have a good name? Surely its fickleness contradicts the honour it receives? Could one imagine a more unworthy recipient of such valorisation, of such glorification? Of such passionate commitment (the passion for love)? In truth, love is neither true nor false; it deserves neither a good nor a bad name. Love cannot be named, nor can it be evaluated, nor can it be judged: love is not of the order of truth, goodness or beauty (or passion), hence its resistance to philosophy and (vice-versa) philosophy’s resistance to it. Who would join a philosophy class to learn the secrets of love?1 But still we talk and write, make claims that are as grandiose as they are mystifying—“love is all”, “love is stronger than death”, “all you need is love” (a favourite…it’s my age), “love makes the world go round”— why do we so love to speak of love, of that which is not of the order of speech? Is there a danger that our love of speaking will displace the very thing that we are speaking of? Yes, there is that danger, but then perhaps it is a necessary risk, one that has to be taken if we are to ensure that silence 2 Chapter One is not inadvertently permitted to lord it over the radically inarticulate domain of love. Derrida repeatedly says the same when finding himself standing beside the dead bodies of his friends, one by one, and required to speak of his love for them and (of course) of their own writing and speaking (always in that order, it’s Derrida, remember). He speaks in order to keep the silence, ever-ready to impose its own unspeakable regime, at bay. The solemn profundity of silence is as much a sham as the clichéd, sentimental chit-chat that is also always available to impose its own form of mystification and obfuscation. Standing beside and speaking of/to his departed friend Althusser, Derrida speaks thus, and rather beautifully: Forgive me for reading, and for reading not what I believe I should say – does anyone ever know what to say at such times? – but just enough to prevent silence from completely taking over, a few shreds of what I was able to tear away from the silence within which I, like you, no doubt, might be tempted to take refuge at the moment….It is almost indecent to speak right now…but silence too is unbearable. I cannot bear the thought of silence, as if you in me could not bear the thought. (Derrida 2001: 114) Turning this around, love, like speech, is itself “almost indecent”, but, and this is the point, only almost. Through the pure force of its own dubious rhetoric, language is forever in danger of forcing love into the sterile chiasmus of an indecency of speech and the perceived decency of silence. Thus, most philosophical discourses on love reflect this very chiasmus and, as a consequence, perpetually restage the drama of love as a conflict of indecent and decent forces, a re-production that almost captures its theme—but not quite! But what is the nature and status of this “almost”, this “not quite”? Counter-intuitively perhaps, silence says too much while speaking/writing says too little: Barthes writes something similar in A Lover’s Discourse: My expressive needs oscillate between the mild little haiku summarizing a huge situation, and a great flood of banalities. I am both too big and too weak for writing: I am alongside it, for writing is always dense, violent, indifferent to the infantile ego that solicits it. Love has of course a complicity with my language (which maintains it), but it cannot be lodged in my writing. (Barthes 2002: 98) So, why put our thoughts of love into writing then? Indeed, why collect the writings of others on love, and to what end? Each of the writers here in this volume could, no doubt, provide their own answers to these semirhetorical questions, even if their writings do not—why should they? Writing is not just about answering questions! Jean-Luc Marion, who has Thoughts of Love 3 of course achieved his recent fame thanks to his writings on love, declares that philosophers have largely ignored the subject of love (Marion 2007: 1), so at least the present work, alongside his own, might signal something of a sea change—but what exactly is likely to change? Will more writing on love bring us closer to its essence, can we “know” love, as the cliché “I have known love”2 would suggest? Indeed is there any kind of relation between love and knowledge? Or perhaps knowing and knowledge must be distinguished in the case of love, and indeed not only there, which might make love a model, an exemplar of being—of being-with—that is irreducible to the lover’s (or any other) discourse, including this one.3 Of course, the essays collected here are not lover’s discourses; they are about love not the expression of love (that would be weird). But, having said that, the title of this collection—Thoughts of Love—consciously replaces the word “on” with “of” as a gesture (perhaps empty) intended to capture the fact that, whether consciously or not, intended or not, to write on love (in any way that is remotely meaningful) is to write from out of love. As in the French “de”, to write of love is to write from: love is originary. This, of course, begins to bring us close to the Heidegger of Being and Time who installs “care” as a “primordial structural totality” that is ontologically prior to, and constitutive of the human and humanistic existential categories of (for example) love and devotion. (Heidegger 1962: 238) But typically, as Marion would no doubt point out if he referenced other philosophers (which he explicitly, and rather annoyingly, does not), Heidegger conspicuously avoids the subject of love; there is only one reference to it in Being and Time and then only in a footnote on the anxiety associated with the love of God. (1962: 492: iv). As an existential category, love is far too ontical for him; too much of “the They”, too human. This is a pity because, for all of the richness of his account of “care” it misses, and thus fails to ontologically ground the molten core of true love, which, apart from anything else, is capable of extraordinary care-freeness (and, as we know, terrible care-less-ness). Judith Butler is no stranger to Heidegger, in fact she uses the related (very Heideggerian) concept of “conscience” in her own reflections on love as it relates to the Althusserian ideological “interpellation”. Butler’s view is that the turn to respond to the “call” of the law (remember, the metaphorical “call” comes from a policeman) bespeaks a love of the law that, as ideologically constitutive of subjectivity, amounts to a love of being—a desire to be. In this sense, all thoughts on love (indeed all thought) would be, ontologically speaking, thoughts of love: to repeat, love here is originary. And yet, as Butler acknowledges, Mladin Dolar in his critique of Althusserian “interpellation” claims love as an outside of 4 Chapter One the law and resistant to the “call” of ideology, a moment of passionate autonomy. Faithful to her mentors Althusser and Foucault, Butler is reluctant to accept at face value Dolar’s claim that love is what is “leftover” and “beyond” interpellation. (Butler 1995: 23), and yet she is clearly attracted by the idea that there might be some possibility of imagining a non-ideological space of true or pure love. The problem to be confronted though is that, if one can imagine a non-ideological love then it would have to be a love devoid of—or dissolving of—subjectivity itself, given Butler’s continued adherence to an Althusserian model of subjectconstitution. It is this concept of love, on the very edge of being and nonbeing that is so often ignored or repressed in philosophical discourse, even where love is the topic, as in Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, where the identity of “the two” lovers in their resistance to “the one” is always already assumed. But then his philosophy is, of course, set against the ontology of being, so the love of being or non-being is hardly an issue for his own mathmatico-erotico concerns. Butler’s consideration of a love that does not desire to be leads her into Nietzschean territory which, if nothing else (already a lot), directs the thought of love away from the moral and religious domains that, together, dominate what little philosophical reflection there is on the subject. Prior to the moralisation of the erotic, prior to the spiritualisation of the agapic, there is here identified (by Nietzsche/Butler) a raw willing of being that, Janus-like, faces both ways: the love of being/the dissolution of being; the love of the law/the dissolution of the law; the constitution of the subject/the de-constitution of the subject. Maybe this, the autodestructiveness/constructiveness of the amorous will, can replace the sterile philosophical chiasmus of decency and indecency passed over and above and rightly mocked by Nietzsche. But smirking at the “resentiment” and hypocrisy of the moral majority (“herd”) and exposing the malicious self-hate that necessitates the “death of God”, while philosophically entertaining, still does not sufficiently address the difficulty that remains here: how can this love be spoken, written, delivered in such a way that the silence, so dignified by morality and religion alike, can itself be silenced by another language of love. To be fair to Nietzsche, no one could have been more aware of the dead-weight of language and the “spirit of gravity” that would weighdown any communicative flights, whether amorous or not. But, that said, he was by all accounts very inexperienced in love, a view to be treated, however, with some considerable scepticism (he was certainly inexperienced in sex, quite a different thing). But, experienced or inexperienced, he does perhaps offer a way forward (or should we say backward?) in his Thoughts of Love 5 promotion of, if not young love, then certainly youth. And, significantly, he does in fact mention love in his promotion of the “unhistoricality” of the young. We know, indeed, what history can do when it gains a certain ascendancy, we know it only too well: it can cut off the strongest instincts of youth, its fire, its defiance, unselfishness and love, at the roots…(Nietzsche 1983: 115): The sign that guarantees the superior robustness of its own health shall be that this youth can itself discover no concept or slogan in the contemporary currency of words and concepts to describe its own nature, but is only aware of the existence within it of an active power that fights, excludes and divides and of an ever more intense feeling of life (1983: 121). Where Heidegger places his emphasis on the remembering of a forgotten being, Nietzsche proposes, indeed demands, a forgetting of an all-too-remembered history. In truth, they are of course both speaking of, if not the same (Nietzsche is no ontologist), then of very similar things: the need to forget in order to remember. But what does Nietzsche wish to remember? Above all he wants to re-connect (or re-root) his thought in the destructive-creative force of the will; a will that is strangled by history and silenced by language (concepts/slogans). But, more than this, and prior to the originary act of the will that creates and destroys the infinite becoming of being, Nietzsche’s love of youth is itself an attempt to remember a youthful love that makes possible the self-creative/destructive act: For it is only in love, only when shaded by the illusion produced by love, that is to say in the unconditional faith in right and perfection, that man is creative. Anything that constrains a man to love less than unconditionally has severed the roots of his strength: he will wither away (1983: 95). But, as Butler would no doubt remind us, how can we forget the very discourses of love that have allowed us to “know” what love is in the name of a pre-linguistic, pre-cultural, pre-ideological (and thus presubjective) will to be/not be that is “left-over” once this masterful voice has spoken? Maybe we can’t; although Butler’s response to this aporia is to suggest a different mode of occupying such discourses, one that highlights the performativity of language through the parodic, the ironic and the deconstructive. She has been criticised for certain idealism in this respect— and to be sure it is certainly easier said than done! But then so is everything concerned with academe. Chapter One 6 A different, if somewhat ingenuous (i.e. non-“philosophical”) approach, might be to actually look at young love and its own faltering attempts to avoid the concepts and slogans of its own historical repression: why not? So, in conclusion, here are some passages from an anonymous, but genuine love letter written by one young person to another. Dear X I know this is really lame writing a letter, but I feel it’s the only way I can tell you how I really feel. I think I always had a soft spot for you… You’ve made me truely (sic) believe that I am worth someone’s time… I really don’t know how to express how I feel about you, have felt and will always feel, without it sounding too cliché, so I will try my best to do it in the least lame way… I just love looking at you, every single outline of you is perfect and you create this perfect shape of presence… I’m completely terrified of considering what the future will be like, it’s too difficult for me to lose you, but I know it’s what you want, for there to be no us… It’s almost as if you have helped me expand my mind and to be a better person, I feel like my dreams will be so much more colourful and vivid now that you’ve helped me see things. But without you, I know those dreams will crash in on themselves and I’ll be stuck in a continuous loop of sadness… I know this letter may seem really jumbled up and confusing, but I just put pen to paper and wrote exactly how I feel (I probably still haven’t finished)… You are the best thing that has ever happened to me, nothing can ever come close. I’ll never forget you or how you’ve made me feel. I love you From Y Like speaking of the dead, there is something indecent about reading other people’s love letters and, worse still, plundering them for philosophical gain or the gratification of an academic audience keen to “wanna know what love is”.4 But then if, as Butler suggests, “conscience makes subjects of us all”, then the feelings of guilt that will inevitably accompany the following remarks might be understood as themselves constitutive of a subjectivity that is here attempting to comprehend its own Thoughts of Love 7 “love of the law”, its own desire “to be”—a likely story (but a story nonetheless, and one necessary to bring these thoughts to a close). Back to the love letter: don’t ever say that young love is full of joy and optimism! This letter is almost overwhelming in the tragic balance it strikes between hope and regret, happiness and sadness, dreams and reality. It is young, so innocent, and yet already old, already dying at the moment of its beautiful birth. If there be any doubts about the intensity and searing pain associated with the ironic-parodic predicament played out within Butler’s notion of performativity, then here would be a good place to start. The very writing of this love-affair — by such a young hand — a writing already dependent upon age-old clichés and the lameness of a world-weary code,5 is itself the originary force that, through its very pronouncement, establishes the thing which can now be lost. So, unlike words addressed to the dead, words drawn forth from a place of loss, these words passed from one young lover to another originate in an overpowering fullness; the gain rather than the loss of the other, the “perfect shape of presence” (what a beautiful phrase!) rather than the absence of the departed. But, to say again, this presence is at its birth already haunted by its own absence, a gain full of loss, a beautiful “now” under the curse of its own future. Thus, to be accurate, the birth of young love is a sublime rather than a beautiful moment, it is always a pleasure filled with pain. If, as Dolar maintains, love is in excess of the “interpellation” of the ideological state apparatuses, it is also in excess of itself: the spatial alterity of the loved-one; the temporal alterity of an anxious, because terrifyingly uncertain, futurity. “I’ll never forget you or how you’ve made me feel”: such is the future-loss already in excess of the beautiful moments of love and the lover’s presence. This, perhaps better than anything, demonstrates the manner in which, as Nietzsche has shown, the love necessary to create, indeed to create itself, must have the strength to suffer the necessary destruction that accompanies the creative act. It is precisely love that creates the possibility of its own loss, without love there would be nothing to lose: this is the heart-rending discovery of young love. To witness this realisation, as we do above—accepting the guilt that such an intrusion brings with it—is a moving but also sobering experience. “I have always had a soft spot for you”: what could be more clichéd, what could be lamer than that? And yet, like all clichés, such a phrase, one bordering on the trivial, speaks volumes. And not only that: it simply speaks, and speaks simply when philosophers (and not only them) have preferred to stay silent. Of course, silence has many forms, philosophical discourse (very occasionally on love) being one of them. But in the end 8 Chapter One the “softness” of love is what makes it so hard to articulate, so hard to predict and so hard to bear. The melting beauty of love and the terrifying sublimity of the experience produced or created by its infinite movement is not something unique to the young, but it is ontologically youthful to the extent that it is only here that we catch a glimpse of an originary desire “to be”, to “expand”, to be “better”, to be “valued”, and (if the infinite willingness of love is to be protected) the desire (filled with pain) “not to be”. And one last reminder, if one were needed, of the power of the cliché: the final “I love you”, with all of its hopeless hope, is “truely” (sic) true, and truly unbearable. If nothing else, it would be good to think that the essays collected here and the thought that originated them (and was, in turn, originated by them) share a common love of love’s eternal youthfulness and the thinking that such a thought might allow. References Badiou, Alain (2012): In Praise of Love, trans. Peters Bush. London: Serpent’s Tale. Barthes, Roland (2002): A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage Books. Butler, Judith (1995): ‘Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All’ in, Yale French Studies, No. 88. Derrida, Jacques (2001): The Work of Mourning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin (1962): Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Marion, Jean Luc (2007): The Erotic Phenomena, trans. Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1983): ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thoughts of Love 9 Notes 1 2 The same people who take a six-month course on ‘the Blues’ perhaps. Silver Apples, I Have Known Love, Kapp Records, 1969. I have known love and love has won. I burned my fingers on the sun. I’ve been imprisoned on the moon. I have learned what truth denies. I drank the teardrops from her eyes. I surrendered much too soon…..we can safely skip the rest! 3 Barthes’s point of course. I Want to Know What Love Is is a 1984 power ballad recorded by the BritishAmerican rock band Foreigner. The song hit #1 in both the United Kingdom and the United States and is the group's biggest hit to date. 4 I wanna know what love is I want you to show me I wanna feel what love is I know you can show me 5 Who said hyphenation was a dying art? CHAPTER TWO LITTLE LOVE AFFAIRS: PSYCHOANALYSIS, TRANSFERENCE AND LOVE FIONA PETERS This chapter aims to investigate some of the ways in which the psychoanalyst articulates the discourse of love. Traditionally at least, psychoanalysis as a discourse has not been particularly vocal about the question of love, concentrating instead on attempts to understand desire and sexuality in their various intertwined (and pathological) formulations. Indeed, many of Freud’s critics critiqued (and continue to critique) him as being ‘obsessed’ with sex, ignoring the ways in which both the theoretical and clinical aspects of Freudianism work together to undermine and challenge the conception of sexuality as being “about” sex in the generally accepted genital meaning of the term. However, on closer reading it is clear that psychoanalysis is in fact all about love, from the first manifestations of subjectivity as narcissistic to the “love affair” of transference that dominates the analytic situation. Importantly, the existence of the transference first manifested itself within a proto-analytic situation, in 1882 (the “Anna O” case history) from the patient herself, emerging as (at the time) a surprising and unwelcome development out of the ‘safer’ hypnosis therapy. Transference (and counter-transference) is pivotal to the analytic situation, showing that the experience of therapy is in fact a love relation that echoes (and hopefully alleviates) the strain of the vicissitudes of the patient’s other relationships, past and present. According to Adam Phillips: The technique is a calling up, an evoking of the patient’s desire, and then instead of acting on her desire the patient must be encouraged, against enormous resistance, to understand it. Like the analyst, she must speak but not touch. Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex (Bersani & Phillips 2008: 112). Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love 11 This chapter will take up the question of the role and function of sexual love in Lacanian psychoanalysis, and then continue to outline the centrality of transference within the psychoanalytic situation. Lacan argues that love touches the other in the Real. This does not mean however, that for Lacan love has a “true” reality, on the contrary he means that it is something always tantalisingly beyond our grasp as human subjects trapped within a world of symbols and words. Love, for Lacan, is the condition that reveals most about the impossibility of the sexual relation insofar as it reveals both the desire to engulf and dominate the object into the self, and the ways in which the loved one can never “live up” to the projected fantasy invented by the besotted lover. As Lacan puts it: “I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you” (Lacan 1981: 74). Here, love becomes inexorably bound not to any transcendent aspects of the loved one, but remains on the side of the “victim” of the “sickness” that Freud believed constitutes “falling in love.” As Slavoj Žižek puts it: …"man’s love for a woman – his very ‘spiritual’, ‘pure’ love as opposed to sexual longing – is a thoroughly narcissistic phenomenon: in his love of a woman, man loves only himself, his own ideal image” (Žižek 2007: 199). These examples illustrate a masculine relationship to love within a Lacanian framework; the paper will conclude by explicating the different relations of the masculine and the feminine to the paradox of love. The conception of love that Freud offers needs to be separated from the notion of the drive, itself distinct from the purely biological instinct. The concept of the drive in Freud brings us closest to a recognition of the workings of the unconscious – insofar as the drive “drives us” – the impulsive nature of the drive reminds us that it can lead the conscious mind to places that it doesn’t want to go – where control is lost – a drive without some form of violence or aggression is a contradiction in terms. Freud makes a distinction between drive and instinct – drives being specifically human, and in his 1915 paper ‘Instincts and Their Vicissitudes’ he outlines the four components of the drive, pressure, source, aim and object. By 1920 in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, when he introduces the concept of the death drive, Freud realises that what he had presumed prior to that, that human beings’ drives are purely towards pleasure, or attainment of the object (always part objects) are continuously disturbed by an internal contradiction – opposed to the pleasure principle and yet at the same time aligned to Eros. This will lead Freud towards the theorisation of masochism and sadism as erotic positions, reinforce his belief that there can be no “normal” sexuality and also influence his work 12 Chapter Two on repetition (of painful situations) and the ways in which self-destructive tendencies thwart the pursuit of happiness, leading to his argument in his late (1937) paper ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, that, at the “completion” of an analytic treatment “…if a patient who has been restored to heath in this way never again presents a disorder that puts him in need of analysis, you never know how much of this immunity may be due to his good luck in not having to face any tests that are too hard for him” (Freud 2002a: 177). In this paper Freud uses the term “transference love”, but how does he discuss love more generally? Freud tentatively works through problems such as why the human being cannot merely follow the path that the pleasure principle might be seen to lead us on – for gratification, immediate and at all costs. He developed beyond the pleasure principle to begin to explore the self-imposed limits on this, forever restricting our attempts for love to keep us together. Freud speaks most often of love in his papers on technique – those that set out and deal with the practice of psychoanalysis – the analytic situation. He came upon the phenomenon that he called transference (and its necessary correlate, counter-transference) through his colleague Breuer’s patient Anna O, who was initially treated by hypnosis but came to speak of her treatment as her “talking cure” as Breuer allowed and encouraged her to speak of her distress in the form of stories she told him giving rise to the new practice of psychoanalysis. During the course of her treatment she apparently “fell in love” with her doctor who, caught between his patient and his jealous wife, abandoned the “talking cure” and left the incipient birth of psychoanalysis to Freud. Even at this early stage in the long history of psychoanalysis we can see the recognition of what we could term the “public”, structural dimension of love that Žižek points out is essential if it is not to implode: “The more we progress from the outside to the inside, i.e. the more a love-relationship loses its support in the external symbolic texture, the more it is doomed to fail and even acquires a lethal dimension” (Žižek 1992a: 102). In the paper on technique ‘On the Dynamics of Transference’ (1915) Freud remarks that this “…almost inexhaustible topic” allows the analyst to trace the particularity of the symptom as it is displaced into the relationship established between analyst and patient. As in his analysis of the drives, Freud argues that this can manifest itself both positively or negatively, in other words through a transfer of feelings that are affectionate or hostile – transference can be “about” the aggression that exists at the heart of every love relation, as Freud sees it. However the transference that is manifested in each particular analysis, is always a reworking, according to Freud, of that which psychoanalysis holds to be Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love 13 the primary and overwhelming love relationship, that of the child and the mother. That primacy of the dyadic relation with the mother (or first object) is maintained by Freud – and later by Lacan – as one of the first principles of psychoanalysis. It is useful when thinking about love, especially sexual love, insofar as it “haunts” our subsequent object choices in ways that, it can be argued, reiterate the idea that love is viewed in psychoanalysis as an exemplar of the impossible striving that Lacan labels desire. In Lacan’s reworking of, or “return to” Freud, he takes Freud’s ideas, developed partly from the experiences of transference, to theorise the child’s move from the all-encompassing totality of its demand for the mother, and no one else, to becoming a human subject within a world where exclusive ownership of another exists only within the realms of fantasy and pathology. Clearly, the child must develop an identity separate from the mother to become a subject, to enter into culture and civilization, and to transform its bodily drives and the misrecognition and narcissism of the Imaginary into inter-subjective relationships that at least attempt to gain recognition. The problem is, we never fully achieve this, and this is what Lacan means by “there is no sexual relationship”. The separation from the mother that the fort-da game in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ illustrates, builds on the loss instigated by and through the mirror stage. Thus psychoanalysis is fundamentally a tragic discourse, all about a loss that can never be refound, it is the condition of being human and it can be explained perhaps most comprehensively with the example of sexuality, desire and love. This leads onto Lacan’s concepts of Need, Demand and Desire, corresponding roughly to Freud’s notion of the Oedipal and Castration complexes. Need, that which the child is born with, as every other baby animal (for food, comfort etc.) are satisfiable (e.g. with the breast) which also strengthens the dyadic bond. There is however no sense for the child at this point that the care giver is distinguishable from itself (it has no self) and it has no sense of itself as a discrete object in the world (it is everything). It is need and these needs can be satisfied. But in order to move from being a baby animal to a human it has to separate from this attachment and enter the world of discrete identities. This is what involves loss. At the point of the mirror stage the child, initiated into the state of loss, begins to demand more than the mother can ever provide. This demand is not for food, to be changed, cuddled and so on, but is for the absolute, unconditional and dyadic love that is an impossible thing according to Lacan. This is often illustrated as a concurrent awareness that the child is not all to the mother, that the mother 14 Chapter Two has other concerns as well as it; in Lacanian terms the third term, the third element that splits the dyadic unity forever. This aligns to Freud’s castration complex and the internalisation of the prohibitions that form the super-ego. The child sees in the mirror its “ideal ego” an object, a perfect and whole object, while it still feels all over the place. This is the source of the fictive nature of wholeness and also the belief that we can somehow find the “other” part of us in the love object (you complete me…). We see ourselves as whole but we are not. So, as a consequence, human demand is for total love that is ultimately impossible. Desire emerges where physical need is subtracted from impossible demand. So, needs can be satisfied, demand is total, that place between the immediate satisfactions and demand is what Lacan terms desire, and it is itself impossible—sexuality finds its place here. Lacan argues at this point in his work that the death drive is operable in the speaking being as a reminder of what we are not, of what is lacking in us. The notion of the Thing takes its place here, as that which is both life giving and deadly and that reminds us of the Real and its continuing presence in our everyday lives. “The Thing is that which in the real, the primordial real, I will say, suffers from the signifier, and presents itself to the analyst in the gap produced by the signifying cut” (Lacan 1981: 205). What does Lacan mean? Well, that there are objects that cut in and remind us that we are simply not all-knowing and that the Symbolic cannot encompass all. The cotton reel, as Belsey explains is an example of what stands in for the Real, and Lacan develops the concept of object a to demonstrate that this is never achievable. The object of our love is only ever a replacement and an inadequate one, for the lost Real. Lacan argues in ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis’ that, contra desire, love exists as a drive, inherently attached to the death drive: You will now understand that – for the same reason that it is through the lure that the sexed living being is induced into his sexual realization – the drive, the partial drive, is profoundly a death drive, and represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed living being (205). In his seminar on Freud’s papers on technique, he goes so far as to argue that “we are all agreed that love is a form of suicide” (Lacan 1998: 149). He refers here to Freud’s concept of the death drive and its necessary link to both the arena of love and sexuality, and the impetus towards a return to an inorganic state that exists as the underbelly of the pleasure principle.1 Lacan echoes Freud’s belief that “being in love” is a sickness Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love 15 wherein the stricken person “impoverishes” his ego through the elevation of the favoured object, the beloved. The links between death, love and the Real are highlighted here. Alenka Zupancic performs a psychoanalytic reading from Lacan of “love as comedy” that argues that “In love, we do not find satisfaction in the other that we aim at, we find it in the space, or gap, between, to put it bluntly, what we see and what we get” (Zupancic 2002: 77). She takes Lacan’s argument that ‘sublimation raises, or elevates, an object to the dignity of the Thing, Freudian ‘das Ding’ (62), insofar as “sublimation is identified with the act of ‘producing’ the Thing in its very transcendence, inaccessibility, as well as in its horrifying and/or inhuman aspect” (62). This indicates that as the so called pure object of love is raised to a higher level this is an example of forcing the inaccessibility that I have shown marks the Thing (otherwise known as putting somebody “on a pedestal”). She then argues that Lacan surprisingly claims, in his unpublished seminar on anxiety: “Only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire” (62). Lacan, according to Zupancic, relates this linkage of love and de-sublimation to his statement that “love is a comic feeling” (62), and that “In relation to comedy we can actually say that it involves a certain condescension of the Thing to the level of the object” (62). “The object of love cannot give me what I demand of him since he doesn’t possess it, since it is an excess in its very heart” (58), this stresses the idea that it is precisely the gap that allows a place for a form of exchange, as Lacan puts it: What the one lacks is not what is hidden within the other—the only thing left to the beloved is thus to proceed to a kind of exchange of places, to change from the object into the subject of love, in short: to return love (58). We can read in Lacan’s work the extent to which the loss inherent in the assumption of sexual difference leans towards a construction of the “One”, both holding out the promise of totalisation and concurrently withdrawing it: Love is impotent, though mutual, because it is not aware that it is but the desire to be One, which leads to the impossibility of establishing the relationship between “them-two” (la relation d’eux). The relationship between them-two what? Them-two sexes Lacan 1998: 6). Suzanne Barnard points out that the desire not for, but to be One that the sexually differentiated subject experiences (usually categorised as the 16 Chapter Two phallic signifier): “stands ultimately for the impossibility of signifying sex. As such, it can be understood to represent both a traumatic failure of meaning and the impossibility of ever fundamentally anchoring or positivizing the subject” (Barnard & Fink 2002: 2). Thus “ever achieving one’s gender or ever accomplishing one’s sexuality” (11) is barred from the subject as a loss that is inherent rather than a more or less pathological aberration. As Paul Verhaeghe points out, the desire for an imaginary dual relationship may persist but it can never succeed: The imaginary dual relationship is based on the conviction that it is possible to give/find/get “it”. In practice, this turns into misery and torture, with the result that there is often a swing to the other extreme, the conviction that nothing is possible, that there is no point in anything, and that everything is the same. This reaction remains within the dual imaginary relationship, although it is now tinged with bitterness and disappointment instead of hope and expectation (Verhaeghe 2011: 68). For Lacan, in his radical return to Freud, love is related to the status and centrality of what he terms the “big Other” – the symbolic substance to life, the set of unwritten rules that regulate our speech and our acts – what we believe to be true. This big Other is established within the Symbolic realm and, according to Lacan, there is no love outside speech: “Love emerges out of speech as a demand that is not linked to any need. Love is a demand that constitutes itself as such only because the subject is the subject of the signifier” (Salecl 2000: 17). As a subject in the gendered Symbolic realm in which the subject is always already constituted and marked by lack, the object cause of desire lies precisely within that lack or gap. This object is thus both what the subject lacks and also at the same time what is believed to fill that lack. The demand of love thus attempts to find the “truth” of oneself within the other, or as Renata Salecl puts it: “What love as a demand targets in the other is therefore the object within him - or herself, the real, non-symbolizable kernel around which the subject organises his or her desire” (18). So, for Lacan, the status of the big Other is the ultimate guarantee of Truth, even when (perhaps especially when) lying. He talks of this as the quilting point – master signifier that guarantees consistency of the big Other – revealed by Lacan to be a fake – we act as if the Other knows what we don’t. The point of psychoanalysis for Lacan is to enable the patient to break with the reliance on the master signifier. In his later work he moves from the concept of the symptom, to be uncovered through analysis, to that of the sinthome. Lacan developed the concept of the sinthome during the latter phase of his work, specifically in his un- Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love 17 translated ‘Seminar on James Joyce’ (1975). Prior to that point, he had concentrated on the triad of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, which emphasises the role of “decoding” insofar as the “traditional” psychoanalytic symptom was able to be traced, or deciphered, through the process of analysis. In the late phase of his work, Lacan shifts the emphasis from the realms of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and concentrates instead on the place of the Real, a move that pulls in its wake the new concept of the sinthome. The sinthome is introduced through a reading of a literary writer; thus it is marked from its instigation as a concept related to art or representation: “The whole problem is there – how can an art, in an expressly divinatory fashion, aim to embody the sinthome, in its consistence, but equally in its ex-sistence and in its hole?”2 In this Seminar Lacan brings, through Joyce, the notion of the sinthome into the previously triadic structure of the Borromean knot, a diagram he had recently begun to utilize, having first introduced it in 1972: “How was someone able to aim, through his art, to render this fourth term, which is essential to the Borromean knot, as such, to the point of approaching it as closely as possible?”3 So the sinthome at this point joins the diagram of the Borromean knot (the inter-linking Imaginary, Symbolic and Real) as a “floating” fourth element that drapes over and through each of the other strands of the knot. This four stranded knot of the Seminar allows Lacan to both introduce and pay due attention to the specificity of the artistic experience and effect, while at the same time refusing the category of “artist as suffering”, in other words reading the artist as a conglomeration of his/her symptoms. As Philip Dravers points out, it is the singularity of the artist that comes to the fore with the concept of the sinthome. He argues that in this seminar: Lacan uses art, and above all the question of what artists do with their symptoms, to supplement the logic that unfolds from the analytic discourse in the form of R.S.I. in order to explore how they each hold together at the level of a quite singular experience, while at the same time deriving a new kind of consistency at the level of their knotting.4 The sinthome is introduced as a lingering residue of the symptom while at the same time working to keep the other elements of the knot together. As Dravers states above, the R.S.I. triad represents an analytic discourse; the sinthome, while resistant to interpretation, keeps together the possibility of this type of communicative discursive practice. Yet the sinthome is not definable or reducible, but instead “leeches” onto each of the other three elements in a singular and individualistic manner. Art, according to Dravers, “brings out the very texture of the knot by casting 18 Chapter Two the subtle ray of its light-spun thread across rings which would otherwise have only the substance of shadow and in so doing it helps us to pick out the essential fourth element woven by its artistry.”5 Lacan identifies jouissance, or enjoyment, as the key element of the binding together of the four strands of the knot, an enjoyment that compensates for an originary “failure” of the triad Real, Symbolic and Imaginary. According to Dravers, the sinthome is a supplement that allows the creative subject, in this case Joyce, to secure an identity through artistic production: For such is Lacan’s thesis in his seminar, that, through his art, Joyce managed to construct his own supplementary means of securing R.S.I. in order to compensate for a specific mode of failure at the level of their original knotting – and, as we shall see, he did so by using his own quite singular artistry with the letter to spin a supplementary thread from the jouissance inscribed in lalangue which he then threads through the gaps and holes of the knot, according to the logic of his symptom and the fault it answers to.6 This lengthy sentence is worth quoting in full since Dravers gets to the heart of what the sinthome represents, specifically in relation to the writer. Lalangue, the language of the symptom, becomes melded with enjoyment, and weaves through the holes and gaps of the triad Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, to produce the specific sinthome that enthralls and fascinates the reader, while being irreducible to any set of tools, whether psychoanalytic, linguistic or biographical. Josephina Ayerza highlights the irreducibility of the sinthome: Always trying to get hold of the unspeakable, Lacan designated by sinthome what is irreducible to significance. Non-signifiable, however symbolized, the non-signifying will stipulate the condition of the split speaking being, the specificity of its jouissance (Ayerza 1990: 3). While I agree that the sinthome is “irreducible to significance”, it nonethe-less supports a consistency of signification by manoeuvring jouissance7 or enjoyment, through the communicative structure of the other three interrelated elements of the knot. The moment at which Lacan introduces the concept of the Borromean knot is also the point when he shifts in his writing from an emphasis on the Other, or communication (although that is never completely lost), and moves towards the realm of enjoyment (as desire or jouissance). The concept of the sinthome is linked to and developed from the psychoanalytic symptom; it shifts from this in the ways in which it loses the correlation of cause and effect, becoming not the representation of the manifestation of a trauma, a symbolic means Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love 19 of allowing the trauma to be read, but rather a means expressing the pleasure of non-representation. Sarah Kay explains that “the symptom becomes the sinthome, the manifestation of the subject’s enjoyment which he cannot give up but should embrace as ‘what is in him more than himself’, its symbolic dimension declines and the subjects’ imaginary relation with enjoyment correspondingly increases in importance” (Kay 2003: 80). The concept of the sinthome in Lacan’s work remains largely unexplored in current academic discourse; part of the reason for this, in the Englishspeaking academic community at least, is the problem of its nontranslation/translatability into English and the forbidding difficulty of reading Seminar XX111 Le Sinthome in the original. Žižek, however, utilises the sinthome regularly throughout his writing, often in relation to the writer Patricia Highsmith. What he does not do is explain it as I have done in the previous section. It is Žižek rather than Lacan who begins to utilise the concept in relation to popular culture, and he never claims that the sinthome is something peculiar to Highsmith. In fact he often evokes it as Hitchcockian, highlighting the ways in which Alfred Hitchcock denies the viewer of his filmic texts the “deep” meanings that he appears to be constructing, but instead develops his own genre out of a “level of material signs that resist meaning” (Žižek 2001: 199) and which “relate in a kind of pre-symbolic cross-resonance” (199). Žižek argues that these films exemplify the ways in which sinthomes slide away from meaning: “in contrast to symptom which is a cipher of some repressed meaning, sinthome has no determinate meaning; it just gives body, in its repetitive pattern, to some elementary matrix of jouissance, of excessive enjoyment (199). One of Žižek’s clearest uses of the sinthome in relation to Hitchcock can be found in the chapter ‘Why is Reality Always Multiple?’ (from Žižek 1992). Here he points to the “unique dimension” of the Hitchcock film as he perceives it, arguing that Hitchcock introduces motifs into his films that appear to provide meaning or depth, while in fact these cover a void that substitutes for meaningful explication. In other words, the enigma of the Hitchcock film is precisely its ambiguity of meaning, which enables different interpretations to be constantly read into it. He argues that Hitchcock: “invented stories in order to be able to shoot a certain kind of scene. And, while the narratives of his films provide a funny and often perceptive comment on our times, it is in his sinthomes that Hitchcock lives forever. They are the true cause of why his films continue to function as objects of our desire” (200). The key point to extrapolate from this reading of the sinthome is the way in which the argument revolves around the element of pleasure to be gained from the sinthome precisely in its lack 20 Chapter Two of hidden meaning. After all, who would want to reveal an absolute hidden meaning in Vertigo or Psycho? The pleasure lies in the nothingness which at the same time appears full of promise: “…yet this nothing was not an empty nothing, but the fullness of libidinal investment, a tic that gave body to a cipher of enjoyment” (200). ‘The Undergrowth of Enjoyment’ and ‘The Ideological Sinthome’ chapters from Looking Awry (Žižek 1992b) represent a clear link between Žižek’s abiding interest in both the sinthome and Highsmith’s writing. In ‘The Undergrowth of Enjoyment’, his reading of the sinthome is less narrowly defined than when writing exclusively on the specific effects of the Hitchcock film. Also, it becomes clearer in these texts to see how the sinthome need not be exclusively considered as a device that must be held within the text; instead, it may function as a ‘glue’ for sustaining an individual’s sanity, or warding off psychosis, in the sense already shown in respect of Lacan’s formulation. The sinthome is thus written here as a dilemma “for the subject, who is caught in the either/or, the Thing embodying impossible enjoyment or the Symbolic that excludes it” (Wright & Wright 1999: 13). As I have shown in relation to Lacan, the belief that analysis would resolve this impasse is replaced at the end of his work by another form of resolution: “For the late Lacan, this resolution comes about through identification with the sinthome, through a recognition of the singularity of this element, the particular form of one’s own enjoyment” (13). Žižek chooses Patricia Highsmith’s short stories as one of the ways to elucidate the “invisible kernel, that meaningless fragment of the Real” (12) that constitutes the sinthome. He argues that her stories focus on forces that are unexplained, and are at the same time both attractive and repellent. One of the stories he cites, ‘The Mysterious Cemetery’, provides him with the title of his paper; the ‘undergrowth of enjoyment’ of the story consisting of the strange growths that appear in a graveyard behind a hospital after experiments involving radiation are carried out on dying patients. Instead of being repulsed by these, as might be expected, the local people not only get used to them, but “poems are written about the uncanny and irrepressible ‘undergrowth of enjoyment’” (Žižek 1999: 31). By utilising films and stories such as Highsmith’s, Žižek in this article tries to explicate the ways in which the sinthome functions within popular culture, and how and why we as readers or viewers are “drawn in” to these particular subversions wrought by the sinthome. As an element of the Real, adrift within each subject, it holds the subject, or an inter-subjective community, together precisely because, as in the Highsmith text, it appears as something that a rational (or unequivocally Symbolic) universe would Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love 21 exclude or negate. The community of ‘The Mysterious Cemetery’, for example, is reassured and held together by the sinthome of the strange growths (which in themselves, of course, mean nothing). Weaving between Žižek’s examples from popular culture to aid him in explaining the ways in which the sinthome functions, is also a concentration on the individual and his/her attempts to avoid psychotic breakdown by constructing an individual sinthome that prevents the Symbolic from splitting apart: “The paranoid construction…is already an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull ourselves out of the real ‘illness’, the psychotic breakdown – the ‘end of the world’, the falling apart of the symbolic universe – with the help of a substitute-formation” (22). In this sense literary texts can exhibit both vacuity and discomfort along with a specific and powerful enjoyment that echoes Žižek’s claim for the sinthome as the One that evades even the residue of meaning that Lacan retains for object petit a. To indicate the specificity of this One, Lacan coined the neologism le sinthome: the point which functions as the ultimate support of the subject’s consistency, the point of “thou art that”, the point marking the dimensions of “what is in the subject more than itself” and what it therefore loves “more than in itself”, that point which is none the less neither symptom (the coded message in which the subject receives from the Other its own message in reverse form, the truth of its desire) nor fantasy (the imaginary scenario which, with its fascinating presence, screens off the lack in the Other, the radical consistency of the symbolic order) (30). Žižek asks the above in his conception of the sinthome, instead of the symptom seen as compromise: “the analysis is over when we achieve a certain distance in relation to the fantasy and identify precisely with the pathological singularity on which hangs the consistency of our enjoyment” (32). He argues that, contra objet petit a, the sinthome is instead a “certain psychotic kernel evading the discursive network” (132). The key point here is that there is no possibility of its inclusion within the Symbolic or the social order; in other words, it remains One, not articulated within the discourse of the Other (Lacan’s previous articulation of the theory and purpose of psychoanalytic discourse). Žižek defines this as follows: “In the field of the signifier as differential, every One is defined by the bundle of its differential relations to its Other, i.e. every One is in advance conceived as ‘one-among-the-others”’ (132). Objet petit a is in a sense a particle adrift within the boundaries of this configuration, the sinthome is not. Instead it is a particular One “that is not one-among-the-others, that does not yet partake of the articulation proper to the order of the Other” (132). Žižek takes this further in claiming that the sinthome is “a psychotic 22 Chapter Two kernel [that] can neither be interpreted (as symptom) nor ‘traversed’ (as fantasy)” (137). It must then, as Lacan argues in his final theorisation of the psychoanalytic process, constitute something to identify with: “The sinthome, then, represents the final limit of the psychoanalytic process, the reef on which psychoanalysis is grounded. But, on the other hand, is not this radical impossibility of the sinthome the ultimate proof that the psychoanalytic process is brought to its end?” (137). Both Lacan and Žižek relate the big Other/phallus/masculine logic of Law) to the sinthome as “feminine” logic; that is, only symptoms and the Law retain the logic of the one. The sinthome is not pathological - it loses the correlation between cause and effect – becoming not the manifestation of a trauma, a symbolic means of allowing the trauma to be read – but rather a means of non-representation that allows and elevates a perverse enjoyment. Sarah Kay explains: “the symptom becomes the sinthome, the manifestation of the subject’s enjoyment which he cannot give up but should embrace as ‘what is in him more than himself’ …its symbolic dimension declines, and the subject’s imaginary relation with enjoyment correspondingly increases in importance (Kay 2003: 80). Žižek evokes the notion of sinthome in relation to Hitchcock – highlighting the ways in which the director denies the viewer of his films the deep meanings that he appears to be constructing, but instead develops his own genre out of “a level of material signs that resist meaning” and which “relate in a kind of pre-symbolic cross-resonance”. The sinthomes slide away from meaning: “in contrast to symptom which is a cipher of some repressed meaning, sinthome has no determinate meaning; it just gives body, in its repetitive pattern, to some elementary matrix of jouissance, of excessive enjoyment” (80). The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed – and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the co-ordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: “through fantasy, we learn how to desire” (Žižek 1992b: 23). The sinthome is neither symptom nor fantasy – instead “the One of jouis-sense, of the signifier not yet enchained but still floating freely, permeated with enjoyment: the enjoyment that prevents it from being articulated in a chain” (23), that is, evades the signifying process. The ultimate moment of psychoanalysis may well be the identification with the sinthome, what it is that in each of us (differently) acts as our particular sinthome (love, writing, work…etc.). Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love 23 So, a sinthome is not an object of desire but the artificial symbolic framework by which means we preserve our sanity – by conferring narrative consistency on our experience. Our existence is held together by our sinthomes which are “little pieces of the Real.” Therefore, when Lacan argues that ‘the question I should consider is not if my love is a true one. I should ask for the truth of my love, which is something really different,’ he is saying that love is hidden in the subject and what sinthome constitutes the particularity of our desire. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, when somebody loves me they also threaten me – I am reduced to a mere object, the object of the other’s fantasy: I feel the inherent abject dimension of that object when I do not want to respond to the other’s demand for love. Then, when the other is attacking me with her/his desire, I am bothered, humiliated even. But love emerges when, from the very position of being reduced to mere object, I begin to long for the other. The confrontation with the fact that I am nothing but the object of the desire of the other is, then, neutralized or oppressed by my own desire, i.e. my love for my beloved Lacan (Lacan Undated: no page numbers). For Lacan then, love has the same structure as transference, as it does for Freud. He argues that when a patient enters analysis, he or she positions themselves as the object of the other’s (analyst’s) desire – the desire to be helped, either to recognize one’s symptom or, in the late Lacan, to understand that the sinthome, rather than constituting a pathological barrier to fulfilment, becomes instead something to embrace as “what is in him more than himself”, its symbolic dimension declining as the subject’s “imaginary relation with enjoyment correspondingly increases in importance”(Kay: 2003: 80). The analysis allows the subject to trace back the path to his or her relation with love – and Lacan argues that the analyst has to recognize that he/she is involved in a love affair, one that nonetheless refuses the analyst his or her own pleasure and desire. And in the arena of masculinity and femininity Lacan introduces the notion of the “act” in Seminar 15 (1967/68) where he uses it to theorise a turning point in the notion of the analytic cure. The “cure” is complete supposedly when the patient realizes that he is the subject of the desire of the Other, or that he is in fact the lack of the other’s desire, refusing to be “the one” or, in fact to return love. Becoming an analyst himself is at this moment constitutes the “psychoanalytic act”, insofar as when one becomes an analyst one recognizes one’s place as the “empty” cipher of 24 Chapter Two the other’s desire. In The Fragile Absolute Žižek argues that it is only women who can make this move, through their act: Lacan proposed as (one of) the definitions of a ‘true woman’ a certain radical act: the act of taking from man, her partner, of obliterating – even destroying – that which is ‘in him more than himself’, that which ‘means everything to him and which is more important to him than his own life, the precious amalgam around which his life revolves (Žižek 2009: 151). Žižek explains that the situation the woman finds herself in, as the object of masculine desire, can free her by and through the “psychoanalytic act”, thus recognizing other Lacanian claims, that “woman does not exist” and “woman is a symptom of man.” By this he means that woman can challenge and subject the “phallic economy” which he believes forces the symptom. The sinthome and concurrent radically feminine act thus refuse to “give body” to the ways in which “man’s love for a woman – his very “spiritual”, “pure love” as opposed to sexual longing – is a thoroughly narcissistic phenomenon: “in his love of a woman, man loves only himself, his own ideal image” (Žižek 1994: 99). The symptom is a manifestation of trauma, in Freud’s times often “written on the body”, the sinthome loses the correlation between cause and effect, saturated by jouissance it manifests the centrality of enjoyment that both disturbs yet supports the subject’s relationship to her reality. It cannot be “worked through” and we must, according to Lacan and Žižek, learn to “enjoy our sinthomes” It is, according to Žižek: “the point marking the dimensions of ‘what is in the subject more than itself’, and what it therefore loves ‘more than in itself…the imaginary scenario which, with its fascinating presence, screens off the lack in the Other, the radical consistency of the symbolic order” (Žižek 1999: 30). It is, according to Žižek, “a psychotic kernel that can neither be interpreted (as symptom) nor traversed (as fantasy)” (Žižek 1999b: 137)—the final limit of the psychoanalytic process, the refusal of the workings of fantasy. The workings of fantasy dominated Breuer’s “analysis” of Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O) in 1881-2. To repeat, it was she who coined the term “talking cure” and shifted her treatment from the previously used hypnosis to “speaking out” her symptoms. As mentioned above, she also “fell in love” with Breuer, imagining herself pregnant with his baby, amongst other symptoms. This is the first instance of a transference relationship and marked the “birth” of psychoanalysis, while at the same time signalled Breuer’s horrified departure from the new discipline. As indicated earlier, Freud analysed Ida Bauer (Dora) in 1900 (published in 1905), his “failure” in the case allowed him to recognise the Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love 25 centrality of both transference and counter-transference (the recognition of the analyst of her/his own place and role within the analytic situation. So transference relates to the relationship between analyst and patient, which Freud at first viewed as a resistance, an obstacle to the treatment, as in the “Dora” case). He then came to realise that it is both a positive, and more importantly a necessary part of the treatment. Within the analytic situation, early relationships, the loves and hates addressed especially but not exclusively towards the parents (the “family romance”) are repeated and then transferred onto the person of the analyst. In ‘Observations of Love in Transference’ Freud describes what could be viewed as a kind of “power play” within the analytic situation: At first sight, infatuation in transference seems unlikely to bring anything of benefit to the course of therapy. Even the most cooperative patient suddenly no longer understands the treatment and takes no further interest in it, and does not want to talk or hear about anything apart from her love, to which she demands a response. Having given up her symptoms or neglected them, she even declares herself healthy. The scene changes completely, as though a game has suddenly been replaced by the sudden eruption of reality, or the fire alarm sounded in the middle of a theatre performance. When you experience this for the first time as a doctor, it is hard to hold onto the analytic situation and escape the delusion that the treatment really is over (Freud 2002b: 69). An analysis with transference is impossible, however this is not to say that analysis creates transference, but instead that it exists, unrecognised and chaotic, within other institutions: “In other institutions where analysis is not the treatment on offer for neurotics, you can observe the most intense and degrading form of transference, verging on sexual dependence, and taking on the most overtly erotic coloration” (Freud 2002c: 23). However, it is within the analysis that transference is uncovered for what it is; revealing the repetition, displacement and transferral of emotions and feelings, since it provides a secure environment for the “playing out” of what otherwise may thwart the patient’s emotional and/or sexual development. But what sort of “love” is displayed in a transference?8 Lacan argues that: “Freud is so little concerned to evade the phenomenon of love, of passionate love, in its most concrete sense, that he goes so far as to say that there is no real essential distinction between transference and what, in everyday life, we call love” (Lacan 1988: 909). He goes on to claim that the emotions of love and hate are affects that can manifest through transference, but transference is actually the structure of any intersubjective relationship. He states that while transference appears as love, it 26 Chapter Two is always the love of knowledge (savoir, the knowledge of the subject, as opposed to connaisance, the knowledge of the ego) that it is primarily concerned with. In his 1964 Seminar XI The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Lacan speaks of transference as linked inevitably to that of the “subject supposed to know” – “As soon as the subject supposed to know exists somewhere, there is transference” (Lacan 1981: 232). For Lacan, then, as for Freud, transference is an essential structure revealed by and through the analytic situation, and as such, is, each time, a “little love affair.” References Ayerza, Yosephina (1990): ‘To Resume Again…’, in Lacanian Ink 2. Barnard, Suzanne and Fink, Bruce (eds.) (2002): Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge and Feminine Sexuality. Albany: SUNY Press. Bersani, Leo and Phillips, Adam (2008): Intimacies. Chicago: The Chicago University Press. Freud, Sigmund (2002a): ‘Analysis Interminable and in Indeterminable’, in Adam Phillips (ed.), Wild Analysis. London: Penguin. —. (2002b): ‘Observations of Love in Transference, in Adam Phillips (ed.), Wild Analysis. London: Penguin. —. (2002c): ‘On the Dynamics of Transference, in Adam Phillips (ed.), Wild Analysis. London: Penguin. Kay, Sarah (2003): Žižek: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lacan, Jacques (undated): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VIII Transference 1960-1961, trans. Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts. London: Karnac Books. —. (1981): Seminar XI—The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton. —. (1988): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, trans. John Forester. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. (1998): The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX, Encore 1972-1973, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.B. (1985): The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: The Hogarth Press. Salecl, Renata (2000): (per) versions of love and hate. London: Verso. Verhaeghe, Paul (2011): Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and Desire. London: Karnac Books. Little Love Affairs: Psychoanalysis, Transference and Love 27 Wright, Elizabeth and Edmund (1999): Introduction to Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Undergrowth of Enjoyment’, in The Žižek Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Žižek, Slavoj (1991): Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. —. (1992a): Everything You Wanted to Know about Lacan but were Afraid to ask Hitchcock. London: Verso. —. (1992b): Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Massachusetts: MIT Press. —. (1994): ‘Otto Weininger, or, “Woman Doesn’t Exist”,’ in New Formations 23. —. (1999): ‘The Undergrowth of Enjoyment; How Popular Culture can Serve as an Introduction to Lacan’, in Elizabeth & Edmund Wright (eds.). The Žižek Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. —. (2007): Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge. —. (2009): The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso. Zupancic, Alenka (2002): ‘On Love and Comedy’, in Lacanian Ink 20. Notes 1 “In fact what Freud was explicitly seeking to express by the term ‘death instinct’ was the most fundamental aspect of instinctual life: the return to an earlier state and, in the last reckoning, the return to the absolute repose of the inorganic”. (Laplanche & Pontalis 1985: 102). 2 Jacques Lacan, quoted in Philip Dravers, ‘Joyce & the Sinthome: Aiming at the Fourth Term of the Knot’, from Psychoanalytic Notebooks of the LSNLS 13, Lacan with Joyce, p.1. www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk. 3 Ibid., p.1. 4 Ibid., p. 2. 5 Ibid., p.3. 6 Ibid., p.5. 7 This term is used in the original French because, although it could be translated as pleasure, Lacan means it in a slightly but crucially different sense; as pleasure intermingled with pain. 8 Transference need not be “positive” or in other works consist of loving feelings. Freud considers the emotions within transference to be ambivalent, and if the capacity for transference becomes completely negative then the analysis cannot continue. CHAPTER THREE DANGEROUS ETHICS: EXPLORING ATTACHMENT AND DESTRUCTIVENESS THROUGH THE WORK OF JUDITH BUTLER AND JESSICA BENJAMIN POLONA CURK According to psychoanalytic conceptualisations, the other is constitutive of the self; in fact, subjectivity is seen as founded through a relationship of passionate attachment to another. But the same other is also ultimately unknowable, irreconcilable to the self, and potentially radically threatening to the self. This ambivalence at the core of the self accounts for a curious foundation for love and compels us to think about it in relation to ethics, and the latter as something to do with managing the link between attachment and destructiveness. In this essay I analyse this link through the psychoanalyticphilosophical dialogue between the works of Jessica Benjamin and Judith Butler. Two of the most seminal theorists working at this intersection in recent decades, Benjamin and Butler’s respective positions on the concept of destruction are, I think, particularly interesting for several reasons. For one, it would seem that the two theorists are talking about different levels of destructiveness, and, if one was to simplify the discussions on destructiveness into one question: “how can one survive the horror of another’s threat?” it would also seem that they give opposing answers. Benjamin’s view is perhaps most directly expressed in her 2002 paper ‘Terror and Guilt’ writing after the September 11 attacks, where she quotes Fonagy’s reflection that perhaps civilization depends for its existence on a universal splitting off of the inconceivable (Benjamin 2002: 481). Perhaps we need, she argues, a certain “veil of denial” over the fundamental threat from the other in everyday life. Butler, on the other hand, has argued in several works (for example, 2000, 2003, 2004) that it Dangerous Ethics 29 is through the acknowledgment of destruction and vulnerability that the possibility of a bridge between the self and the other can emerge. Another reason why the two positions are interesting is due to disciplinary fields that the two theorists come from. Benjamin is a practising psychoanalyst who bases her psychoanalytic theorizing in philosophy, whilst Butler is a philosopher whose work holds a special affinity with psychoanalysis. Are their apparently different views in their respective work an expression of ways of thinking in different disciplines? In a direct theoretical exchange between the two theorists published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2000), Butler argued that Benjamin’s seminal dialectic of mutual recognition was too hopeful, implying that it does not take into account the real depth and extent of destructiveness (Butler 2000). Benjamin’s reply, rejecting the view that her account does not give destructiveness its proper weight, attributes their theoretical differences to the gap between psychoanalytic and philosophical language, context and discipline; the gap between psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytic theory as it is deployed in the Humanities; and the familiarity with clinical contexts (Benjamin 2000: 299-300). Although there are some differences in their use of terminology, it would be too simple, I think, to attribute them to the interdisciplinary gap in language or (un)familiarity with the clinical contexts of psychoanalysis. A close analysis of their accounts exposes instead something inherently and imminently dangerous to the self in the character of ethical responsibility. Benjamin’s and Butler’s theoretical disagreements in effect consist of different answers to what response to this danger we should/can have. In this essay I want to look at the gap that I argue exists between theorizing ethics, which feels right, needed, worthy, even moral in itself, and ethical acts that can feel dangerous and unpleasant. The effect of this danger on the ability to act ethically is not usually explored in detail in theoretical accounts on ethics. In addition, taking ethical responsibility for someone inherently brings you into a somewhat intimately close relationship with them. The main difference between the two theorists, I argue, lies in the way they assess what is possible in a position requiring an ethical response. But the way we are involved with a particular position is ultimately essential for thinking about its ethics. The argument here is, that intentions are often not enough and that the focus on how being ethical in a particular position, in practice, feels is needed in order to better understand what motivates ethical responsibility and to be able to initiate a shift in bringing it into practice. I draw on two short film vignettes to illustrate parts of my argument. 30 Chapter Three Founded in Passionate Love Both Benjamin and Butler base their theoretical accounts within psychoanalytic understandings of the development of the subject. In her (1997) book, The Psychic Life of Power, Butler theorizes the child’s original passionate attachment to another as “love [that] is prior to judgement and decision” (Butler 1997: 8; added emphasis). This love is unavoidable as “there is no possibility of not loving, where love is bound up with the requirements for life” (1997: 8). Thus, ultimately love is connected to subordination/subjection at the foundational levels of subjectivity: the nascent “mental state” of the subject is characterised by the first “desire” as a desire to survive in a sense of ‘“I would rather exist in subordination than not exist”’ (Butler 1997: 7). In other words, subordination being a function of survival prior to any reflection Butler speaks of the subject’s attachment to subordination itself. There is a fundamental vulnerability in the child’s being so profoundly exposed to another that she is compelled to love them. Yet as is characteristic of psychoanalytically informed theories, Butler’s account understands multi-layered meanings and paradoxes: subjection also inaugurates the subject. The subordinating power is transformed into a psychic form that becomes part of the subject’s self-identity and the source of agency. Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency. “Subjection” signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject. (Butler 1997: 2). In other words, that fundamental vulnerability to another is actually agencysustaining. This paradox is mirrored in the nascent subject’s love. A child can discriminate between those she loves only after the formative requirements have been satisfied; whilst the primary passion is the effect of power. If we take into account psychoanalytic understanding of love as including identificatory processes, when we cannot choose whom to love we can also not choose who, what kind of subject, we will become. Primary love is thus described as so ambivalent as to be immediately denied1. In other words, subjectivity emerges through repression of the primary passionate attachment: If the effect of autonomy is conditioned by subordination and that founding subordination or dependency is rigorously repressed, the subject emerges in tandem with the unconscious. (Butler 1997: 7) Dangerous Ethics 31 The infamous psychoanalytic split, a foreclosure2, establishes the subject as a bar to its desire and at the same time condemns it to repeatedly re-enact in displacements that love which is the love of its own dissolution. The subject’s inauguration is a moment when the self’s and the other’s survivals are not in opposition: “I” survive if the other survives. The unconscious ambivalence at the core of subjectivity is for Butler not a sign of a fatal self-contradiction but a sign that the subject is not finally constrained by the working of power, the excess that allows for and forms the subject’s own agency. Butler’s account about a child—a developmental account one might say, although different from any classic psychoanalytic treatment of this theme—is in line with another important psychoanalytic viewpoint: subordination does not only form the subject but is considered as providing the subject’s continuing conditions of possibility. In other words, passionate attachments continue to be part of the subject’s existence, continue to be necessary for psychological survival. If primary passion is an effect of power, and exploiting it, as Butler notes, is an abuse, then, importantly, adults continue to be vulnerable to such abuse. If this vulnerability is understood precisely as a condition of, and even for, human subjectivity, it is not subjection/subordination itself that is problematic but its abuse. Here lies the need to look for analyses of destructiveness and I will look at Jessica Benjamin’s exploration of destructiveness as part of, and sometimes failure of, recognition, before I compare her and Butler’s accounts of destructiveness. Representing a shift towards intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis in that she refers to the capacity to represent another person as a subject, Benjamin’s early work was rooted in the Hegelian idea of the search for the “surviving other” to recognize us (Benjamin 1988). Importantly, Benjamin avoids seeing this dialectical search as necessarily collapsing into domination and submission. She theorizes the tension of interdependency as capable of restoration. Joining philosophical ideas with Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic work, which proposes that the attempts at destruction of the object in fantasy are important as the process through which the infant manages to establish the mother as something external to his mind, Benjamin develops a theory of mutual recognition. Mutual recognition is considered a capacity developed through a particular response to destruction by the m/other. Following Winnicott (2005/1971), Benjamin describes the role of the mother in creating the conditions for mutual recognition by her survival of destructiveness, defined as a particular way of neither giving in nor retaliating in response to the infant’s destructive impulses. This allows the child to recognize 32 Chapter Three another’s mind as a separate centre of subjectivity, external to and independent of his fantasies. Benjamin considers this an equally important developmental step as separation. Here, the first important type of “destructiveness” emerges, a destructiveness of the child’s fantasy through which she tests and establishes externality and the limits to her own mind. To a certain extent, this kind of destructiveness continues to take place between adult minds, as Benjamin points out. However, perhaps “mutual” recognition is not the best way to name this dialectic, as mutual implies symmetry. Benjamin does not elaborate on how the important asymmetry of this first relationship in her model transfers to adult relationships. The asymmetry determines the priority of recognition, which proves significant for theories of destructiveness and ethics. In her model, we have one person who already knows destructiveness, who is, hopefully, mostly able to withold it in her relation to the child, as well as to withstand the child’s destructiveness, a person who recognizes first in order to enable the child’s ability to recognize and to develop; and then we have another person who is just learning to become a human subject. What makes the first person maternal is her “deferral” to the child's needs (including a suitable response to destructiveness) which enables the space for recognition. And the maternal position’s power in comparison to a vulnerable child creates a space safe enough for her to do this, to withstand the child’s sometimes destructive testing of the other’s mind. Benjamin’s move to adult intersubjective relationships exposes the roles each party in this model plays in restoring the dialectic, and its problems. If recognition is achieved through surviving destruction, who is to play the part of the “surviving” maternal subject, offering recognition first? How are we to survive “adult” types of destructiveness? The human subject’s real flesh-and-blood existence opens the key question of how we can survive, and love, a destructive adult, who is both more dangerous and provokes more hatred than a destructive child. Who doesn’t only throw a tantrum but can also take lives; who ought to and claims to understand responsibility yet is often compelled to act in destructive ways; who continues to need intersubjective support but is a master of covering this need with ever more destructiveness. Benjamin’s later work does approach these questions. In her The Shadow of the Other, ten years after her first seminal work, she argues for alternation in expressing and receiving support (1998, especially 29). Further, she explores the adult’s ability to keep the fantasy origins of destructiveness in coexistence rather than fusion with reality (in other words, being able to separate fantasy and reality in one’s mind) (Benjamin 1994: 2004). Similarly to what Winnicott also believed (2005/1971), this Dangerous Ethics 33 ability could be taken as a key component of adulthood as certain psychological maturity. However, Benjamin’s intersubjective dialectic that can lead to mutual recognition is still a platform of power dynamics. Even an adult generally capable of keeping fantasy and reality in co-existence, is certainly not necessarily keen to admit or analyse this in critical moments of power struggle. In intersubjective negotiations the fantasy-reality dialectic is crucial for what is accepted as shared reality. In other words, the nature of subjectivity is such that the other’s perceived reality depends on this negotiation. When one’s destructive fantasy gives one (albeit undue) influence over the other’s reality, how willing will one be to admit to one’s fantasy beliefs and give up this influence? Will one be willing to stop at destruction only in fantasy? Longing For Recognition This is the concern that Butler expresses in her exchange with Benjamin: is destruction then something that is relatively easily survived or is intersubjective recognition a rare experience? Butler argues: Although Benjamin clearly makes the point that recognition risks falling into destruction, it seems to me that she still holds out for an ideal of recognition in which destruction is an occasional and lamentable occurrence, one that is reversed and overcome in the therapeutic situation and that does not turn out to constitute recognition essentially. (Butler 2000: 273) If, according to Butler’s reading of Benjamin, risk is a negation that is not necessarily destructive, then an intersubjective couple are able to handle the tension in a way that when aggression does end in breakdown, the task between them will be “to strive for the triumph of recognition over aggression” (Butler 2000: 274). This view, Butler maintains, presents destructiveness as an occasional, unfortunate occurrence that can be overcome. Benjamin does seem to argue that in a safe protected environment of therapy, destructiveness can somehow be neutralised: [T]raumatic, destructive experiences have to present themselves in full force in the microcosm of therapy. If such full-force destructiveness is met, then recognition is not an idealized, protected experience but one sturdy enough to face trauma. (Benjamin 2000: 298; my emphasis). 34 Chapter Three Benjamin theorizes an important provision for meeting destructiveness and restoration of mutual recognition, which she terms a space of “thirdness”: a co-created site between two partners that is a kind of “buffer” space against destructiveness, a container that “expands and collapses, depending on the quality of the destruction…” (Benjamin 2000: 300). Her ideas of thirdness are further elaborated in her 2004 paper ‘Beyond Doer and Done to’ and linked to the notion of “surrender” as a certain letting go of the self and freedom from intent to control or coerce the other. The main task is and the real challenge of intersubjective theory, according to her, is to get out of complementary symmetry, “which is the formal or structural pattern of all impasses between two partners” (Benjamin 2004: 9). This complementary-ness, formulated as either/or: “Either I’m crazy or you are” (10), can be overcome in therapy where positions can be analysed and dismantled. If, for example, an analyst admits the inevitability of hurting the patient she might be able to hold up both parties’ positions without destroying or giving in to the patient. The hope is that this might generate something cooperative from the patient and re-establish the space of “thirdness”. Benjamin’s detailed analysis is insightful and the “I’ll go first” of the analyst has a great potential to create “a position of forgiveness and generosity” (40). It forms a useful guideline for all intersubjective relationships. However, there are limitations to such principles outside particular contexts (such as therapeutic settings), in relationships that are, instead, mired in the subjects’ unmediated social, cultural and historical situations in the world. Most importantly, everyday life lacks the basic premise of any therapeutic setting, which is a safe space for all parties. The risk of “I’ll go first” may also be a risk of abuse, pain and even death. There is also no supervision to fall back on, to, as Benjamin puts it in another paper, help “break up clinches in the dyadic complementarity” (Benjamin 1999: 204) and no careful attention to fantasy’s and reality’s work. The values of therapeutic settings such as acceptance of uncertainty, humility, and compassion, avoidance of exchange of blame (Benjamin 2004: 33-34), which would allow for such attention, are not universally accepted; in fact, even a therapist might be ambivalent about their consistent applicability in everyday life. These values and analyses require safe spaces, mental energy, reflexivity, and even simply focused mindfulness. Instead, psychoanalytic postulations on destructiveness bring to mind other considerations including an enjoyment in triumph over the other and a defensive violence that negates one’s own position of helplessness in its enjoyment of inflicting it on others (what Freud might call sadism). It is clear from Benjamin’s detailed account, how difficult Dangerous Ethics 35 such surrender is even for the analyst. In fact, if certain parallels can be drawn here between a therapeutic response and an ethical one, meeting destructiveness is hard painful work. But in addition, outside specific protected contexts destructiveness is often also outside the space of thinking altogether. The request for it to be met with some kind of ethical response, such as recognition, is asking for something quite extraordinary. Benjamin is thus asking for something perhaps limited in everyday life. On the one hand, she seems to be aware of this: as mentioned in the introduction, she contemplates a certain splitting off of the inconceivable destructiveness, a certain “veil of denial” (Benjamin 2002) over the fundamental threat from the other in everyday life. On the other hand, her reply to Butler that “recognition is sustained only through survival of destruction” (Benjamin 2000: 298) seems to be referring only to a certain survivable destructiveness that can be contained within the buffer of thirdness. There is the buffering capacity and then there is the end of the intersubjective dialectic, which we cover with a protective veil in everyday life, which we are finally perhaps unable to respond to. “We” who have experienced loss Arguably, the theory of intersubjectivity gains its proper weight precisely through acceptance of the possibility of real and irreparable loss. The “mutuality” of recognition is limited by the other’s ultimate freedom, including the freedom to reject it: to not recognize us, to destroy us. Butler is less hopeful about repair or protection; she speaks about a fundamental, irrevocable change in the self as part of the dialectic of recognition. In her comment on Benjamin, she considers destruction a constant danger of a break that we are forced to live with inasmuch as, even if we survive the destruction, it is a survival that leaves us transformed through our subjugation to the other “not in order to return to itself, but to become a self it never was” (Butler 2000: 286). Throughout Butler’s work, the experience of vulnerability and loss becomes a platform for a kind of identification with the other. Explored via Freud’s notion of melancholia already in her seminal Gender Trouble (Butler 2006/1990) loss becomes understood as constituting an experience of “we”: Despite our differences in location and history, my guess is that it is possible to appeal to a “we,” for all of us have some notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous “we” of all of us. (Butler 2004: 20, my emphasis) 36 Chapter Three The awareness of our vulnerability to loss, inevitable due to one’s foundation in passionate attachment to another and our constant exposure to others both in our desire and in our physical vulnerability, is the only point where we can have some notion about the (unknowable) other, which becomes some kind of opening for identification. Loss is where we are the same even to the other. The sense of what could perhaps similarly be termed ‘surrender’ is more intense here: …one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance (Butler 2004: 21, original emphasis). Such recognition of the other that includes radical transformation of the self emerges with its full face of being extremely difficult, scary and unpredictable, involving mourning and surrender to the unknown consequences. Nonetheless, it is this agreeing; submitting to a transformation in the encounter with the other that also seems to open space for something new. If Benjamin’s model often predicted a determinate pattern, (as in “If the mother does not survive, a pattern is established in which there is no real other subject, no real feeling for the other...” (Benjamin 1995: x, my emphasis)), here the pattern is disrupted, as if the agreement to undergo a transformation of the self through loss originated a shift in the dialectic, towards something unknown, out of the pattern. There is almost a sense of mystery here, as Stephen Frosh puts it, “of something that goes further than what can be said” (Frosh 2006: 372). Loss exposes our intense link with the other, a surprising truth about oneself. Butler’s account of destructiveness returns us to a consideration of human vulnerability, perhaps more openly and uncompromisingly than the hopefulness of Benjamin’s model. It includes an acknowledgment that our good intentions do not guarantee reciprocity, and that, indeed, reciprocity is perhaps not to be expected. Submitting to transformation with unknown consequences includes the event of not surviving at the end. In fact, in her 2005 book Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler contemplates Adorno’s remarks that the relationship with the other cannot be about survival, just as self-preservation cannot be posited as the essence of the human as this would be merely a form of moral narcissism. She contends that one’s successful full protection against the potential injuriousness of the other would be, actually, inhuman. One precisely becomes human by “[p]ersisting Dangerous Ethics 37 in the vacillation between wanting to claim a right against such injury and resisting that claim” (Butler 2005: 103). The difference between the two theorists is then mostly in the question of how we are able to think about destructiveness. Benjamin is asking us to survive destructiveness but acknowledging the limits to the levels of destructiveness we are able to face. Butler seems to be saying that we cannot survive destructiveness but this is precisely what we have to face, what we have to surrender to. Nonetheless, whilst for Butler we cannot “repair” or survive, the idea of surrender as initiating a shift through which something unknown and different might emerge, is similar. And loss as a platform of identification can be understood as motivation for surrender in the first place, as well as for trying to re-build the space of “thirdness” that Benjamin proposes. The Way We Respond to Injury If Benjamin was asking us to show almost therapeutic capabilities in our everyday relationships, it is even more perplexing to contemplate such surrender that overcomes self-preservation. Contemplating even that, as in Butler’s reading of Levinas in the same book, a heightened sense of responsibility for another would emerge precisely from the experience of injury (Butler 2005: 99). How could emergence of such responsibility make sense? Such surrender would seem to require more than conscious reflection: pain, as she herself acknowledges, is larger than knowing and choosing, it hits one like waves, it foils one’s (ethical) plans. Any ethical task one might set oneself stumbles in the face of defensiveness, despair, and one’s own compulsive repetition. As much as it might compel us to find ethical resources, our continual susceptibility to the others—any other’s—violence is unimaginable and arguably, also impedes our ability to act ethically. It is not just that philosophical thinking about ethics extends much further than what we are able to do, but it is also that it feels right, it feels good, whilst an ethical task often doesn’t. Perhaps we even want to be ethical: we are concerned, we have good intentions, we discuss what is right and what one’s responsibility is. But psychoanalytic insistence on the blurred boundaries between volitional and impulse-ridden parts of self should make us think that even with our best intentions, we often don’t really want to make the effort that the ethical requires, even when we think we do. So I want to borrow just one scene, one facial expression, from a relatively unknown Chilean film Machuca (Wood 2004), otherwise a 38 Chapter Three complex story of the friendship between two boys from opposite ends of society during the social movements under Salvador Allende's government circa 1973. Towards the end of the film, there is a scene in which the rich boy Gonzago’s, mother takes part in the demonstration3. She is in a car with some friends when Silvana, a relative of the other, poor boy, walks by and spits on the windscreen of the car. The infuriated ladies step out of the car and attack the girl both verbally and with their handbags. Recognizing her son’s acquaintance, Gonzago’s mother makes an attempt to stop her friends with: “she’s only a kid”. But Silvana gives the boy’s mother a strong push. In this moment, the scene changes; suddenly there is only the woman’s face on the screen, the change from disbelief to indignation is tiny: “Hey! You fucking little bitch… I was sticking up for you, you little shit!” We might think we know, watching this scene, what the right thing was, what Gonzago’s mother should have done. The scene certainly conveys the complexity of the deep and inconceivable injustices and grievances of a society, when even spitting on a car has symbolic meanings. Yet on another layer of reality, this scene also presents a relatively clear-cut situation: the girl was just a kid that spat on the car without directly endangering Gonzago’s mother4. The latter wasn’t scared, just offended. The disbelief and indignation at the perceived “injustice” that happened to her when she was “trying to help”, is caricatured with the stark contrast of the film’s context of real and enormous social injustices and political violence. At least from the comfortable distance of a transposed viewer, then, a more ethical response from her can be imagined. Or is this only until it is not us that the girl, or our neighbour, spits at? The important difference is that we are not in the situation, we are just reading about it. In theoretical accounts, even the most difficult situation has the distance necessary for thinking, where the self’s experience of threat is just imagined. In this form, we can think of our best responses, how we should have acted, how we would like to see ourselves act, where we could find resources and understanding to act in this way. In our everyday situations with others, are we so different when somebody “spits” at us? In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler discusses Nietzsche’s remark that “we become conscious of ourselves only after certain injuries have been inflicted” (Butler 2005: 10); when someone in a system of justice asks whether we might be the cause of that suffering and thus interpolates us as beings accountable by this system. Nietzsche’s view is thus, Butler explains, that we become reflective upon ourselves only through a fearful response to interpellation. She contrasts this with Foucault, for whom Dangerous Ethics 39 reflexivity emerges through establishing a critical relationship to the system of moral codes (even if this is taking place within, and limited by, those same codes). Such ability for reflexivity is for Foucault a moment of self-formation as an ethical subject, which suggests morality is not (or not only) based in fear but rather requires inventiveness and deliberation. This morality sounds autonomous, free and agentic. It would seem from the film example above, however, that we nonetheless remain forever defensive about being called to a moral task and that we like to establish the relationship to such tasks as we see fit, without too much feedback from the immediate other. We could almost argue that there is a blind spot in self-reflection: we mostly don’t see that we don’t behave in the same way we write or think; even the smallest of grievances of our everyday life tend to interrupt our ability for moral reflexivity. Perhaps this is why theoretical thinking rarely manages to capture how difficult, dangerous, unpleasant an ethical task can feel and what strong emotions surround it. The scene discussed above aptly captures the hastiness with which one’s good intentions to protect a (vulnerable) other are transformed into defensiveness. How unwilling we are to use vulnerability as a platform for a construction of a “we” when a conflict becomes personal; how easily the image of the other metamorphoses from “vulnerable” to “aggressor”. We are sometimes prepared to be ethical but only towards a clearly vulnerable other, a non-dangerous powerless other, a child. In other words, we are ready to take vulnerability as a tentative point of identification precisely if we feel safe knowing that this vulnerability is actually the difference between the other and ourselves. It is often easier to help someone on the other side of the world whose potentially unpleasant or threatening otherness you don’t have to encounter, whose unpredictable response will not taint your chosen selfconstruction as an ethical being, who will not challenge your ethics and demand from you to go all the way and engage with her as an equal subject. If ethical responsibility based in the idea of exposure to each other and common vulnerability (Butler 2003: 14) relies on the image of a vulnerable other, the latter is certainly an unstable one, subject to our defensiveness, rage and fear. We are so quick to explain our defensive feelings and behaviour as justified, indeed, even moral, whilst it is much more difficult for us to think about, to look for the feelings of injustice behind the destructive parts of others. We may need to think about how we take part in constructing the image of the other as vulnerable or aggressive5, and how to reduce the layers of our defensiveness. We need to, perhaps, as any other art, simply practice a lot, in less demanding 40 Chapter Three everyday situations; as with many things, it is easy to have great intentions but it’s a whole new level of dedication to make those manifest. Nonetheless, whilst Butler is right that there is a need to continuously think about such destructiveness and the human vulnerability to loss that it exposes, there is also no real escape from the protective veil that Benjamin describes, when it is not about a spitting kid but an adult with a gun. Whether we look for resources to respond to destructiveness in the common experience of loss, or in the good (mothering) experiences; whether, like Benjamin, we are hopeful about the restoration of the dialectic or, like Butler, we accept some losses are irreparable; whether we consider one responsible to survive in order to re-claim subjectivity, or, by being injured, one acquires a “right” not to be so treated even if only to be subsequently asked to renounce it; they are at the end all similarly impossible to do. Ethical responsibility might be about thinking through the intersection of the image of a vulnerable other with an image of a dangerous, threatening, violent other. An other, who might, or may already have, really hurt us or someone vulnerable that we love; an other whose grievances and motivations we don’t know, who may not show remorse, who derides our ethical intentions (consider how in our example Silvana rejected Gonzago’s mother’s good intentions), who may be incomprehensible in terms of the reasons for their violence, whose violence continues. Such other seems beyond identification, transformed within one’s own psychic system into a disgusting and dangerous “thing” whose destruction, in fact, may appear as the only “ethical” thing to do. How can one respond to such other, when it may feel like doing so will endanger not only one’s selfpreservation, but indeed, one’s own (ethical) beliefs? A surrender against the odds of self-preservation, a threatening other that endangers or injures one so horridly that it interrupts one’s thinking and being: isn’t the real destructiveness that Butler draws attention to, except perhaps retrospectively and in theoretical thinking, outside our limits of setting ourselves ethical tasks,? The Way We are Compelled to Love Let’s look back for a moment to the psychoanalytic understanding of the ways we love, to see how we can use it to think about such impossible ethical surrenders. First, psychoanalysis sees the injuriousness of the other as resonating with more intensity within the context of a subject’s own specific primary injury. In other words, it makes each of us sensitive to, and re-enacting, particular injuries: for example, whilst the maternal Dangerous Ethics 41 subject is responsible for protecting the vulnerable child and providing initial conditions for recognition, if she didn’t the child-now-adult cannot avoid feeling that perhaps they didn’t deserve it and this is a point of sensitivity. In the light of such sensitivities, the above-mentioned Adorno’s view that responding to an injury by claiming the right not to be so treated would be “treating the other’s love as an entitlement rather than a gift” (Butler 2005: 102), overlooks that love is always both entitlement and gift, and an adult always revisits his/her childhood impasses. The self, full of emotional contradictions and unconscious affects, wants to, at least sometimes, believe in love as an entitlement and in doing so inevitably fails in its ethical responsibilities. We are not able to know when we are (re-)acting from an unconscious injury, just as we don’t know “why we love as we do” (indeed, the two often overlap): we are compelled to love in certain ways, we continuously judge badly (103). Even when one appears to go on for the sake of the other or the sake of preserving the relationship, or for something altogether external to oneself, how can one be sure? Arguably, we are equally compelled to pursue what we, sometimes unconsciously, feel our entitlements are and those two can often not be distinguished. We want things to be as we think we deserve them to be. And sometimes, this exposes us to great destructiveness from ourselves and/or others. I use the second film vignette both to illustrate the ways we feel compelled, entitled, and recognized, but also to show how we are sometimes compelled to pursue something we feel or believe regardless of danger, something that might help us think about difficult ethical tasks. I want to consider an aspect of the film ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ (Peirce: 1999), on which Benjamin and Butler also comment in their above mentioned 2000 exchange. In this well-known film, the main character Brandon is a girl who wants to be a boy. The reality (of the body, of the authorities/documents) continues to intrude into the picture; nonetheless, as Butler aptly observes, the conditions of fantasy are still able to exist as a “credible” fantasy, as long as they are being confirmed by others (Butler 2000). Butler’s analysis shows how for Brandon, it is mainly his lover Lana’s oscillation between being and not being able to engage in the shared fantasy/reality6 that negotiates this confirmation. But when Brandon’s seeks recognition also from the local boys the story turns tragic as they kill him when they find out he is a “girl”. Butler rightly notes that the tragedy of the story originates in the violent attempt at the reassertion of the cultural “norms” by Brandon’s murderers. We might also add, in their fantasy of what masculinity is as well as fantasy of being entitled to impose their idea of masculinity on others. 42 Chapter Three So why does Benjamin appear to view Brandon’s “problems” to originate to some extent from himself?: “I see the problems of Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry as deriving from the character’s inability to extricate herself from a too literal (concrete) embrace of the gender dimorphism, which makes her seek recognition as a boy not merely from her girlfriend, but, more dangerously, from men” (Benjamin 2000: 303). This reads dangerously like: “If only Brandon hadn’t had sought recognition as a boy from men...” And it is easy to object. His murderers’ destructiveness would not have been resolved if Brandon had not sought recognition as a boy (and rather as something else, less concrete). A twisted and insecure sense of entitlement will always construct a “reason” for destructiveness towards the other7. Nonetheless, whilst doubtlessly not intended to remove any responsibility from the perpetrators of violence, one possible way to read Benjamin’s remark is as an observation of the everyday reality where we are not always able to get the recognition we seek (that we may theoretically, ideally, be entitled to). Whilst there is no position from which one has the right to decide what the other should seek recognition as, perhaps Benjamin, due to her daily experience with her patients’ traumas, conflicts and destructiveness, was trying to acknowledge the way we are sometimes compelled to seek recognition irrespective of the danger it will put us in. Would it be better not to? It is sometimes safer not to seek recognition from certain positions and we often act accordingly even whilst not being proud of ourselves. Little things we learn to do to protect ourselves (for example, when we don’t confront a bully, don’t go to certain places at night, try not to upset someone that is angry, or keep our opinions to ourselves in certain situations), like adjusting the protective veil that we use to get through the everyday encounters with the threatening other. On the one hand, then, perhaps ethical responsibility can only be understood as an aspiration. We can think of ways to challenge the limits of our buffer of thirdness, the way we meet others’ destructiveness, the way we always perceive it personally and with ready-made defensiveness. We can perhaps use some understanding of the therapeutic work in meeting destructiveness in everyday life. We can pay attention to our ability to see the other as vulnerable even when they might also be injuring us. But ultimately, ethical responsibility is perhaps something we cannot self-willingly do outside of the moments we feel safe and generous – in moments of real unthinkable destructiveness. Whilst we might agree with Butler that we cannot survive the threat of the other but we have to face it Dangerous Ethics 43 anyway (even that ethics cannot be about self-preservation) — in theory, we have to admit we don’t very often follow this in our lives. Perhaps we can’t: because it is too scary, too risky, it takes too much effort, energy and pain; because we are not strong enough; because sometimes we don’t see through our good intentions that we don’t. This is important to say so that we don’t think that we do or that we know how – to remain in line with Derridean caution that accounts of lives and their acts, how we did, are always to remain in the future, yet to be determined (Lloyd 2000: 115). And perhaps it is also that we fail to act with ethical responsibility because not many around us seem to behave in such a radically ethical way. The social reaction to such ethics, to people that might risk self-preservation for it, is at best an ambivalent mixture of admiration and reserve. There is perhaps too much passion in such ethics not to upset the everyday fabric of society. Isn’t it perhaps that ethical failure can be seen as just a way “to survive the current organization of ‘human’ society”? Yet on the other hand, for Brandon, being recognized by the others as a boy felt so essential it was worth exposing himself to mortal danger. And similarly, even within dangerous and destructive contexts that stop thinking ethical responses sometimes do emerge, almost like a reaction from the depths of who we are or what means something to us. A psychoanalytic lens might thus be useful here. We might need to understand such ethical responsibility that is effective against destructiveness, as having something of the element of being compelled. An encounter with another that instigates something stronger than self-preservation offers a reminiscence of that passionate love of a child, going on nonetheless because “there is no possibility of not loving, where love is bound up with the requirements for life” (Butler 1997: 8). Without the specific, even compulsive, quality of the foundational passionate attachment, such immense surrender to the danger and unknown would not seem to be in reach of our conscious deliberations. There is, certainly, ambivalence about such passion. But perhaps injury touches this foundational core, creating the possibility that unexpected ethical response, extraordinary sense of responsibility, can emerge. In Conclusion Benjamin’s focus on the survival of destructiveness in intersubjective relationships is perhaps the legacy of her initial theorizing within the asymmetry of the primary mother-child relationship. Nonetheless, Benjamin does not suggest that her idea of survival, whilst defined as a thin line between neither retaliating nor giving in, means not being 44 Chapter Three affected by destructiveness. On the contrary, her suggestions of how to escape an analytical impasse include showing the patient how an analyst has been made to feel by their encounter and, sometimes, by the patient’s destructiveness. The position of the analyst perhaps here to an extent complies with Butler’s description about agreeing to undergo a transformation in the encounter with the other. The difference is that Benjamin does not elaborate on the change of the self through pain, loss, grief and mourning that such an encounter involves. A relationship to a destructive adult, and especially a relationship outside of a therapeutic setting, submits to a real danger of “I’ll go first”, and so it would seem that insistence on survival limits it to a certain destructiveness that can be contained within the buffer of “thirdness.” Since the “survival” of the encounter with the other is limited, involving a real threat with unknown consequences, recognition cannot be understood as a function/consequence of survival as Benjamin proposes; recognition is a right. When we accept/agree to undergo loss, pain, transformation, it is not in order to (re-)claim subjectivity but in order to shift the intersubjective dialectic. Perhaps, indeed, “survival” is not the best term for such a remarkable change of the self. Whilst we can theorize, with Butler and others, the need for such ethical responsibility that goes even beyond self-preservation, it is something that we are not able to consciously commit to in any simple way. It is not only that the veil Benjamin describes is one we cannot avoid using; it is also that we are not always able to know what to do; that we are not even always aware we are called to enact a certain ethical task. This is partly because ethical responsibility, as implied in these accounts, includes not only mindfulness of the vulnerable other but also our link to a destructive other, which we cannot contemplate. Ethical responsibility is dangerous and unpleasant and often does not even feel right in its imminent context. It would make sense, thus, to say that ethics can only call upon the intensity of the psychoanalytic subject’s foundational attachments, and needs to be explored in the contexts of compulsiveness, defensiveness, and even disgust, as well as its meanings for the self. The self that sometimes destructively believes in its entitlements is the same source of subjectivity that sometimes manages to go on in an ethical way despite the injury, even regardless of self-preservation. Whilst Butler’s and Benjamin’s theoretical accounts on destructiveness and recognition greatly illuminate the dynamics of ethical responsibility, the latter remains at the limits of understanding. Butler draws attention to the irreparable, irreversible destructiveness. The theoretical search for an ethical position that is to be Dangerous Ethics 45 somehow effective in responding to such destructiveness, might perhaps next need to think about ethics as a commitment that is as passionate, and thus also as confusing, frightening and even disturbing as this destructiveness itself. References Benjamin, Jessica (1988): The bonds of love psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. New York: Pantheon —. (1994): The omnipotent mother: A psychoanalytic study of fantasy and reality. In Representations of Motherhood (pp. viii, 294). New Haven, CT, US: Yale University Press. —. (1995): Like subjects, love objects: Essays on recognition and sexual difference. New Haven, CT, US: Yale University Press. —. (1998): Shadow of the other: Intersubjectivity and gender in psychoanalysis. Florence, KY, US: Taylor & Frances/Routledge. —. (1999): 'Afterword to 'Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity'. In, S. A. Mitchell & L. Aron (Eds.), Relational psychoanalysis: the emergence of a tradition. Hillsdale, NJ &London: The Analytic Press. —. (2000): 'Response to Commentaries by Mitchell and by Butler'. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 1, 291. —. (2002): Terror and Guilt; Beyond Them and Us. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(3), 473-484. —. (2004): 'Beyond Doer and Done To: An Intersubjective View of Thirdness'. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1), 5-46. Butler, Judith (1997): The psychic life of power. Theories in subjection. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. —. (2000): 'Longing for recognition: Commentary on the work of Jessica Benjamin.' Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 1(3), 271-290. —. (2003): 'Violence, Mourning, Politics.' Studies in gender and sexuality, 4(1), 9-37. —. (2004): Precarious life. The powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso. —. (2005): Giving an Account of Oneself. New York. Fordham University Press. —. (2006): Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge Classics. Frosh, Stephen (2006): 'Melancholy Without the Other.' Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7(4), pp. 363-378. 46 Chapter Three Goldner, V. (2004a): 'When Love Hurts: Treating Abusive Relationships'. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 24(3), 346-372. Winnicott, D. W. (2005): Playing and Reality. New York, NY, US: Routledge. Peirce, K. Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Producer Christine Vachon http://www.foxsearchlight.com/boysdontcry/ Wood, A. Machuca (2004) Notes 1 Freud’s theory of sexuality, Kleinian irremediable unconscious envy of the other’s riches or Winnicottian (manic) denial of dependency, amongst other psychoanalytically informed-theories, have been put forward to understand this repression. In Butler, the passionate attachment is denied because its passionate desire represents a threat and a sense of humiliation to the subject (Butler 1997: 8). 2 Although later in her book Butler distinguishes the Lacanian term ‘foreclosure’ as an act of negation that founds the subject, from Freudian “repression” as an action by an already-formed subject, she uses these two terms interchangeably in the case that I am discussing (from her Introduction). 3 From the film clip approximately 1:17:10 to 1:19:18. Available to watch here: http://youtu.be/YIfpOZrJfzQ. 4 Although, arguably, symbolically endangering her way of life, which of course is not independent. 5 See Butler’s 2004 work for an account of political construction of certain images/faces as dangerous or non-subjects. 6 Perhaps a word here on how a shared fantasy always becomes a shared reality, something that the director of the film, Kimberly Peirce names “emotional truth”. Interviewing the “real” Lana of the story the film was based on, she writes: “I believed Lana was lying to me throughout her interview, but her lies depicted her relationship with Brandon – the emotional truth just poured out. From that emerged what became the core of the story: the love between Brandon and Lana and how I would represent it on film. I wanted their love affair to be embodied within a fantasy, and yet, at heart, deeply truthful.” (Peirce, webpage as quoted in references). 7 There is no space here to discuss this in detail but again, Goldner (2004a) provides an excellent analysis of the dynamics and twisted sense of entitlement in abusive relationships. CHAPTER FOUR EROS AND ITS DISCONTENTS: ON THE TAMING (AND UN-TAMING) OF LOVE’S WILD, DANGEROUSLY UNSCRIPTED FUTURE1 RICHARD GANIS To some philosophers, love is a playfully seditious gesture with unmistakable ethico-political implications. This paper considers several such accounts of love, beginning with that set forth in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Here, from a Freudo-Marxist perspective, Marcuse extracts the attitude of primitive erotic narcissism from the nonrationalisable terrain of the unconscious, wielding it as an orientation poised to shatter the de-differentiating mastery of the late capitalist “performance principle” and its attendant epistemology of identity. Marcuse’s effort to position archaic narcissism as the germ of a new, aestheticised mode of being is compared to the deconstructivist perspective of Jacques Derrida, which likewise valorises the nonrationalisable attributes of the love gesture, but absent is Marcuse’s dalliance with the metaphysics of transcendence. Radically extending the insights of Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida proposes an ethics of loving care that attends to the nonrepeatable alterity of the distant other at the level of both ethics and politics. The arguments of Marcuse and Derrida are in turn contrasted with the contravening tradition of Kant, which keeps the attitude of loving benevolence at express conceptual and structural remove from the public use of reason and its cognate principles of tolerative reciprocity. In so doing, Kantianism entails a standing injunction to “tame” the attitude of love, such that its affective particularism is barred from infecting the impartial universality of the justice perspective. Notwithstanding, neoKantian discourse ethicists such as Jürgen Habermas have made various attempts to nudge the asymmetrical orientation of affective concern for the 48 Chapter Four welfare of the other within the normative orbit of universal justice. Their aim is to guard against the prospects of banalisation and “joyless reformism,” which we invite when we anchor moral action in an appeal to dialogical reasonableness alone. The final section of the paper considers Axel Honneth’s effort to implant the orientation of caring recognition at the conceptual and genetic core of all intelligent problem-solving languages and their associated spheres of life. From this vantage point, the care orientation remains available for retrieval whenever an individual is subjected to the moral injury of “misrecognition.” I argue that in glossing over what is distinctive epistemologically about the detached cognitive standpoint, Honneth invites a curious—albeit entirely unintended—link to the care-ethical perspective of Derrida. Indeed, like Derrida, Honneth blurs the boundary between detached cognition and love, thereby depriving us of the conceptual resources needed to corral the prospect of an all-pervasive phenomenology of recognitional experience. In hopes of resolving this difficulty, this essay concludes with a qualified defence of the epistemological convictions of Habermas’s discourse model, which enjoins us to draw the line between love and morality rather more sharply than thinkers like Marcuse, Derrida, and Honneth have done. Love and Revolution: Marcuse’s Eschatological Notion of Eros The purposive-rational organising directives of late capitalism are seeping ever more deeply into the normative and institutional sinews of modern life—with dire, indeed pathological, consequences. Governing the knowledge and application of science, technology, and industry as well psychosocial relations amongst human beings, Zweckrationalität establishes and oversees a world wherein the domination of external nature and the domination of internal nature are insidiously coimbricated. This, in rather crude caricature, is the diagnosis to which Herbert Marcuse is drawn. Synthesising the respective analyses of Georg Lukács and Max Weber, Marcuse construes late modernity as a “cage” that increasingly subjects its human and nonhuman internees to processes of instrumental manipulation and control—a view that is affirmed and embellished in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002) and other texts of the Frankfurt School tradition. In the wake of such a verdict, the old Marxist convictions must be abandoned: the normative and institutional preconditions for liberating humankind from the “realm of necessity” are to be found not within capitalism itself; rather, if we wish to Eros and Its Discontents 49 keep Marxism’s revolutionary promise alive, we must look outside the emancipatory ideals of the bourgeois Enlightenment and the long since desolated imaginary of the industrial proletariat. It is precisely the desire to identify new reservoirs of radical social agency that motivates Marcuse’s turn to the psychoanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud in Eros and Civilization. In Freud’s work, Marcuse tells us, a veil is lifted off a sphere of human existence with the potential to elude the pernicious fetters of an otherwise totally administered universe. Indeed, at the core of Freud’s architectonic of the human psyche Marcuse discerns a promesse de bonheur that has been effectively eradicated from the reified spheres of existence that circumscribe the productive and intellectual activity of modern, civilised subjects. Extrinsic and indeed inimical to the organising directives of these domains, we find, in the initial stage of psychosexual development that Freud calls primary narcissism, a bundle of instinctual impulses mobilised solely in accord with the pleasure principle. Unperturbed by the reality ego’s demands for renunciation, the value system of the pleasure principle is characterised by limitless receptivity to joy and satisfaction. As such, it constitutes nothing less than “the archetype of freedom,” whereas “civilization is the struggle against this freedom” (Marcuse 1966: 15). Under existing civilisational conditions, maintains Marcuse, categories of thought and action have come to be governed by the contravening performance principle, a historically specific manifestation of the reality principle predicated upon the inhibition of pleasure, the deferral of gratification, and the valorisation of toil, productiveness, and security. In fact, Marcuse holds the performance directive accountable for the production of a sphere of “surplus repression,” wherein labour, sexuality, and other facets of psychosocial life are subject to a level of repression that is pathological, beyond that which is biologically or socially necessary. Here there is a notable break with Freud, who construes repression as an ineliminable feature of human civilisation (Freud 1989). The mature, reasoning ego leaves behind the intense, boundless pleasure that can be experienced only in early psychic life, replacing it with a rational, albeit rather pale, shadow of the originary: the assured, delayed, aim-inhibited pleasure demanded by the reality principle. To be sure, all members of modern civilisation—including those with relatively “intact” psyches— must pay for this transubstantiation of primary libidinal pleasure with a certain amount of guilt, anxiety, and unhappiness. To Freud such instinctual renunciation affords humankind clear benefits—security, peace, intellectual, moral, and cultural progress—which far outweigh the physic costs. Yet Freud’s case for rooting human society in a “reasonable” sort of 50 Chapter Four repression fails to impress Marcuse. To him, all faith in the capacities of the reality ego is lost as soon as we acknowledge that reason itself has been commandeered and co-opted by the instrumental performance objectives of advanced capitalism, which are especially adept at supporting “repression from without . . . by repression from within: the unfree individual introjects his masters and their commands into his own mental apparatus. The struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche of man, as the self-repression of the repressed individual, and his self-repression in turn sustains his maters and their institutions” (Marcuse 1966: 16). At this point, Freud’s lessons on the occluded dimensions of our psychic constitution become propaedeutic for Marcuse. For here we discover unconscious orientations and dispositions that do not conform to the disciplinary directives of the performance imperative. In Freud’s understanding, these primary erotic instincts are “polymorphous-perverse” by nature and thus devoid of any “temporal and spatial limitations on [their] subject and object” (Marcuse 1966: 49). Nonrationalised, unrestrained, and without a stable or fixed form, the erotic perversions are equipped to do something that is beyond both the objectives and capacities of Freud’s reality ego: they can shatter the epistemology of correspondence that undergirds the capitalist directive of performance, thereby helping to unmoor humanity from its present reified relation to itself and the natural world: Against a society which employs sexuality as means for a useful end, the perversions uphold sexuality as an end in itself; they thus place themselves outside the dominion of the performance principle and challenge its very foundation. They establish libidinal relationships which society must ostracize because they threaten to reverse the process of civilization which turned the organism into an instrument of work. They are a symbol of what had to be suppressed so that suppression could prevail and organize the ever more efficient domination of man and nature—a symbol of the destructive identity between freedom and happiness (Marcuse 1966: 48– 49). Breaking precipitously with the rationalist aspirations of Freud, Marx, and (as we shall soon see) Kant, Marcuse thus sets Eros loose against the “ever more extraneous” limitations of normalised, procreative, genitocentric sexuality. Eros’ rebellious, unconstrained libidinal energies, having become aware of their own emancipatory potentialities, explode “the reality ego and its repressive performances” (Marcuse 1966: 48). Eros and Its Discontents 51 Significantly, the liberatory potential of the erotic attitude is evident not simply at the level of social relations amongst human beings, but also with respect to the “things of nature.” Indeed, to Marcuse, Eros becomes the groundwork for a radically new epistemological and technological vantage point from which we can begin the task of emancipating the natural world from the dominative mastery of modern science and industry. “In the Orphic and Narcissistic Eros,” writes Marcuse, “this tendency is released: the things of nature become free to be what they are. But to be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it” (Marcuse 1966: 166). On these terms, Eros constitutes the basis for a new science capable of establishing “essentially different facts” about nature and a new, cognate technology with the capacity to treat nature as an end-in-itself, rather than an object amenable to prediction and instrumental-technical control (Marcuse 1964: 166–67). There is thus clearly more at stake in Marcuse’s valorisation of the erotic attitude than simple criticism of the repressive sexual mores of existing monogamic-patriarchal institutions: in the prehistoric erotic instincts we find, at the level of both nature and society, “proximity to a happiness that has always been the promise of a better future” (Marcuse 1966: 203). Indeed, against the tyranny of the performance norm, which endeavours to divert libido into “useful” cultural activities, Eros forms the basis for a new “aestheticised” reality principle. Such a reality principle would superintend the free development, transformation, and eroticisation of existing social institutions and “previously tabooed zones, time, and relations” (Marcuse 1966: 202). Accordingly, when Marcuse speaks of the reactivation of precivilised, infantile Eros, he anticipates the arrival of an intrinsically nonrepressive form of sublimation that would involve not simply changes in human sexual dispositions and behaviour, but also: the continual refinement of the [human] organism, the intensification of its receptivity, the growth of its sensuousness. The aim generates its own projects of realization: the abolition of toil, the amelioration of the environment, the conquest of disease and decay, the creation of luxury. All these activities flow directly from the pleasure principle, and, at the same time, they constitute work which associates individuals to “greater unities”; no longer confined within the mutilating dominion of the performance principle, they modify the impulse without deflecting it from its aim (Marcuse 1966: 212). The rupture with modernity that Marcuse awaits is in this sense “eschatological”: within the unconscious recesses of the human psyche there resides a domain of untrammelled freedom and happiness with the 52 Chapter Four potential to break down and burst through the normative and institutional foundations of advanced industrial society, issuing forth a new eroticised and fundamentally nonrepressive sociopolitical universe. Anathema to capitalist imperatives of performance, such conditions would allow humankind to enter into a profoundly sensuous—indeed aestheticised— relationship with itself and the things of nature, whose putatively inert, purposeless objects would themselves be radically transformed, socialised, and, in a sense, “reteleologised.” At the Fore or Margins of Morality? Love from the Vantage Points of Derrida and Habermas There are unmistakable resonances between Marcuse’s effort to portray the primitive, nonrelational erotic dispositions as a hidden reservoir for emancipatory praxis and the care-ethical perspective elaborated in the later writings of Jacques Derrida. Speaking rather loosely, both Marcuse and Derrida seek to afford human subjects and the things of nature an avenue through which to elide the de-differentiating mastery of the Concept. Indeed, it is precisely the nonidentical—that which cannot be rendered equivalent to something else—which both writers are keen to resuscitate at the level of philosophical inquiry and social criticism. Under indictment here are not simply the empirical-analytic discourses of the natural sciences and their associated technological applications, but also moralethical discourses that likewise sacrifice the nonidentical to the injunction to proffer and accept meanings on exactingly equivalent terms. Both Marcuse and Derrida are staunch critics of all such regimes of reciprocal equivalence, measurability, and calculability—for example, those set forth in modern legal contracts and in the rules governing the exchange of money and commodities in the capitalist market. However, they differ with regard to the question of how the standpoint of identity is to be conceptualised and challenged. Marcuse, as we have seen, aims to subvert the identity principle at its epistemological roots by positioning Eros as a substratum of nonrationalisable propensities inimical to the objectivating organising directives of advanced industrial society. Derrida likewise finds the standpoint of measurable equality complicit in subjecting the nonidentical to the violence of stabilisation and epistemic erasure. Yet he departs from Marcuse in construing the vantage point of calculable equality (as inscribed, for example, in modern discourses of law) as a “decision” that the deconstructive ethics of difference must necessarily affirm. To Derrida its calculability and programmability are precisely what render the equality perspective “deconstructible”—that is, amenable to Eros and Its Discontents 53 care-ethical gestures aimed at safeguarding the irreducibly different experiences, perspectives, and identities of the self and its other from the inescapable residue of violence that adheres to the injunction to measure. Because such gestures take place in the gaps or aporia of the calculative ideal, they operate, according to Derrida, at the level of the incalculable and the undeconstructible. Indeed, the undeconstructible incalculability of the caring gesture is, for Derrida, justice: a vantage point whose normative horizons can never be fixed, normalised, or predicted in advance, but are rather always already deferred. Justice, in the deconstructive sense, is always justice-to-come (à venir). From this vantage point, Derrida draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas2 to elaborate a number of care-ethical topoi that place the moral standpoint of the incommensurably singular other into an uneasy, yet nevertheless productive, association with the perspective of calculative symmetry (rather than eviscerating the latter orientation tout court, à la Marcuse). Worth highlighting in this context are the Derridean notions of friendship, giftgiving, and hospitality—ethicopolitical orientations mobilised against the impulse to reabsorb the differing vocabularies of self and other into oneness and similitude, the injunction to turn what is fundamentally chaotic and disorderly into a measurable calibration. The latter is precisely the aspiration of the Aristotelian dream of friendship as “a beatifically pacific relation,” which, according to Derrida, inflicts an ineliminable “wound” upon both ego and alter: namely “the necessity of having to count one’s friends, to count the others, in the economy of one’s own, there where every other is altogether other” (Derrida 1997: 22). Against this ontotheological ideal of friendship, Derrida deploys the neologism aimance (or “lovence”). As an idea “perhaps unthinkable today and unthought within the historical determination of friendship in the West,” aimance elides the imperative of calculation, thereby opening up the prospect of a nonviolent, “non-appropriative relation to the other” (Derrida 1996: 83). With the idea of aimance, Derrida begins to disarticulate the boundary between love and morality, as upheld in the philosophical tradition of Kant. As is well known, Kant distinguishes the orientation of loving benevolence categorically from the public use of reason and its associated norms of tolerative reciprocation, such that a cordon sanitaire is established between the affective particularism of the former and the impartial moral universalism of the latter. Derrida’s notion of aimance, in contrast, displaces friendship from the sphere of exclusively private obligations, making it an orientation that is laden with both private and public/political implications—a move that would be illicit on strictly 54 Chapter Four Kantian premises. Homologous to this view of friendship is Derrida’s notion of hospitality without conditions. Against Kant’s ideal of tolerative, legal-juridical hospitality, which subjects both arrivant and host to a resolutely symmetrical chain of mutual obligations (Kant 2005), Derrida extends an im/possible promise of limitless hospitality to a nonidentifiable, unanticipatable other. His aim is to disarticulate the well-formed, synchronically balanced regime of reciprocal equivalence inscribed in Kant’s conditional right of universal hospitality, and thereby dispossess the host of its command over the terms of the arrivant’s sojourn within its borders. Derrida’s hospitable visitation with the wholly other resonates, in turn, with the deconstructive gesture of giftgiving without qualifications. Pace Kant, Derrida envisages a profoundly asynchronous space (for which Plato, in the Timaeus, deploys the sign khôra), wherein ego and alter are unburdened not only from the exchange relation’s requirement of reciprocation, countergift, and debt, but also from the demand of temporal simultaneity, the imperative that the gift be “restituted immediately and right away” (Derrida 1992: 41). “Freed from the command of instantaneous reciprocation, expressions of unqualified giftgiving open onto a radically asymmetrical horizon of time, in which the intervals between the receipt and future bestowment of a gift can be neither calculated nor known in advance” (Ganis 2011: 44–45). Derridean friendship, hospitality, and giftgiving thus undercut the Kantian tradition’s effort to exile gestures of unreserved care for the irreducibly singular other to the realm of private affairs, thereby making the adjudication of moral norms the exclusive purview of the public use of reason. Here the affinities between Derrida’s and Marcuse’s respective engagements with Freud’s work are palpable. Like Marcuse, Derrida gleans from Freud’s map of the human psyche a standpoint of nonidentity that can in turn be wielded against the politics of calculation: that is, the nondeterministic “surface apparatus” of the unconscious, a realm of psychic life shot through with the differential traces of primary narcissism. Further, like Marcuse, Derrida challenges a certain Aufklärung trajectory within Freud’s thinking, which is manifest in the latter’s commitment to the “inevitable progress in understanding according to the principle of reason” (Bass 2006: 179).3 This disposition is reflected in Freud’s portrait of analytic care, wherein the clinician is enjoined to extricate the neurotic patient from a condition of “helplessness” or “empirical finitude.” To deracinate the mechanistic biases of this view of care, Derrida appeals to Heidegger’s idea of “differentiating finitude,” from which standpoint care, time, and interpretation are released from the imperative to measure and conceived instead in relation to angst, uncanniness, and stress. Alan Bass Eros and Its Discontents 55 has noted that although both Freud and Heidegger provide glimpses of this model of care as an “uncanny living machine” (Bass 2006: 68), Derrida ratchets up the implications of their respective interventions. His idea is to propose a new metrics of time, a disruptive, non-messianic spectral messianicity that radicalises the impulse—already at play in Heidegger’s phenomenological account of Dasein—to view care as “an interpersonal orientation motivated by one’s desire not to incorporate others into ‘the universal’ but, rather, to ‘let others be’ in their freedom for their own possibilities and to allow one’s own self-understanding to be informed by theirs” (Vogel 1994: 71). In disarticulating the line between loving benevolence and measurable equality, Derrida’s deconstructive care ethics is positioned at rather stark conceptual remove from Jürgen Habermas’s model of communicative action, which follows Kant in prioritising the standpoint of the universally moral over and against the obligation to care unreservedly for the singularly unrepresentable other. To be sure, in response to critics such as Carol Gilligan (1993) and Seyla Benhabib (1992), Habermas has endeavoured in recent years to nudge the ethics of care within the orbit of the cognitivist procedures of moral argumentation privileged in his own discourse-ethical perspective. The worry here is that discourse ethics’ overvaluation of the “feeling-neutral” standpoint of universal justice—the perspective of “dialogical reasonableness”—appears to entail a concomitant devaluation of the attitude of affective concern for the irreducibly particular needs, woes, and vulnerabilities of “concrete” bodily selves. The asymmetrical orientation of unreserved love for the concrete other is excised from Habermasian morality, so the argument goes, as a consequence of its valorisation of principle (U)—the cognitivist universalisation test of discourse ethics. In appealing to (U), dialogic subjects are enjoined to construe a controversial moral claim as rational and universally binding if and only if they can adjudge generalised compliance to that norm companionable with the interests of each individual (Habermas 1990a: 65). In binding moral action to (U), Habermas’s seems to have privileged the transcendental “figure of a fully autonomous, unambiguously rational, Kantian ‘Man’” (Gaon 1998: 717). Such a figure engages in interminable rounds of banalised, hyperproceduralised discourse aimed at reaching mutual understanding, only to invite a possible “loss of confidence in reason and the end of rational discourse as a normative ideal” (Krause 2005: 379). Apprehensive of such an outcome, Habermas’s later work has extended to dialogic subjects the capacity to integrate “cognitive operations and emotional dispositions and attitudes”; “empathetic sensitivity by each 56 Chapter Four person to everyone else,” Habermas concedes, is critical to the adjudication of moral norms (Habermas 1990a: 182, 202). Here the idea— evident in Habermas’s concept of “constitutional patriotism,” for example—is to co-implicate the cognitive attitude of moral disputation with the individual’s affective allegiance to liberal-democratic institutions and modes of conduct, thereby making moral actors’ own subjective feelings and attitudes about disputed norms expressly relevant to the discursive effort to adjudge the universal validity of these norms (Krause 2005: 374). Because the cognitivist attitude of moral deliberation cannot be dissociated completely from either the affectivity characteristic of human interaction or the orientation of concern for the other’s welfare, Habermas concludes that ethics is an inescapable aspect of all legal and democratic processes aimed at actualising universal rights (Habermas 1994: 126). At first glance, it appears that the resolve to “retain an element of the good at the core of the right” (Habermas 1998: 29) has led the later Habermas to subvert the Kantian distinction between deontological principles of tolerative reciprocity and the attitude of affective concern for the particularistic needs, goods, and definitional identities of the other. It turns out, of course, that Habermas is well aware that the overarching politico-philosophical architectonic of his original programme of discourse ethics—which he still wishes to uphold—imposes intractable limitations upon his attempt to associate rationalist procedures of universal norm justification with the asymmetrical orientation of loving kindness and compassion for the other’s unrepeatable otherness. In short, although he positions the attitude of care as a critical stimulus for the adoption of the moral perspective, the basic Kantian morphology of the discourse ethic leaves Habermas with little choice but to relegate care to the terrain of the ethical, which must in turn be distinguished categorically from a prioritised sphere of morality. Indeed, inasmuch as he remains beholden to Kant, Habermas can push the entanglement of the two spheres only so far. If Habermasian morality is to vouchsafe its own normative commitment to principles of impartial discursive will-formation, it must at some point unburden itself of the nonuniversalisability of the care orientation. In failing to uphold this critical demarcation between the ethical and the moral, between the good and the just, between the “poetic” and the illocutionary, Habermas views Derrida’s perspective (among others) as shorn of the conceptual resources necessary for averting the slide towards relativist prevarication, decisionism, and “bad” historicism and aestheticism.4 The conceptual tension between Habermas’s metatheoretical allegiances to Kantianism and his contravening attraction to an idea of civic Eros and Its Discontents 57 republicanism fortified with the orientation of affective, ethico-solidaristic concern for the existential other is, in the view of some observers, problematic, inasmuch as it neglects to adequately address the question of how the attitude of loving benevolence can be construed as “prior” to the standpoint of detached moral cognition. In what follows, I foreground the recognition theory of Axel Honneth, which sets forth a rigorous elaboration of, and solution to, this problem. Love and Recognition: Honneth’s Moral Monism As developed over the last several decades, Honneth’s theory of recognition remains significantly indebted to the communicationstheoretic programme of his mentor and associate Habermas. Honneth himself views their respective approaches as being anchored in a common philosophical lineage, which he characterises as the tradition of “leftHegelian intersubjectivism.” From this vantage point, both writers seek to identify the normative principles and attendant “emancipatory interests” (already partially thematised and institutionalised within modern societies) on the basis of which the task of establishing domination-free social relations can be carried forth. So equipped, their critical social theories are positioned to elucidate those elements of social practice and experience that circulate as “socially embodied reason insofar as [they] possess a surplus of rational norms or organizational principles that press for their own realization” (Honneth 2003: 240). These kindred metatheoretical objectives aside, Honneth’s recognition model inaugurates a significant break with the discourse theory of Habermas. A key point of divergence— especially germane in the present context—concerns the question of how the attitude of caring recognition is to be conceptualised and brought to bear at the level of social critique. In Honneth’s view, Habermas is mistaken to claim that the standpoint of detached moral argumentation can be cleansed, at the level of epistemology, of the recognitional orientation of care. Contra Habermas, Honneth views the latter attitude as conceptually and genetically anterior to the vantage point of detached cognition, meaning that the latter stance cannot be taken up successfully without prior experience of the former. Honneth argues that in portraying moral discourse as little more than a negotiation over the redemption of language-based validity claims, Habermas is insufficiently attentive to this insight. Honneth’s model of moral action, in contrast, maintains that recognitional care is “neutralised” when the impartial standpoint is adopted, rather than being expunged from it, as Habermas proposes. 58 Chapter Four On this conviction, Honneth sets out to delineate the sorts of pathological syndromes that arise in cases where the anterior orientation of caring recognition has been abjured. For Honneth, such misrecognition, or disrespect, can be observed at the level of three distinct action domains, which he corrals under the respective rubrics of love, law, and solidarity. Within each sphere, misrecognition takes the form of a specific sort of moral injury that undercuts the prospects of an individual relating positively to his or her own concrete abilities and attributes. Such an “undistorted relation-to-self” is threatened by bodily abuse within the affective sphere of love; by the denial of universal rights within the legal domain; and by affronts to the individual’s sense of self-esteem within the socio-ethical space of solidarity (Honneth 1992: 129). These divergent modes of expression notwithstanding, all three types of misrecognition entail a situation in which our reflexive actions lose “consciousness of their origin in an act of antecedent recognition”; crossing “the threshold to pathology, scepticism, or—as Adorno would have called it—identity thought,” ego misperceives alter as a mere insensate object (Honneth 2008: 57; see also Ganis 2011: 127). Insofar as he underscores the necessary cohabitation of the attitudes of reciprocal respect and boundless concern for the radically singular other, Honneth argues that Derrida’s perspective is superior to Habermas’s. Indeed Derrida, in an advance over Habermas, has rightly construed the relationship between the divergent orientations of care/goodness and law/equal treatment as irresolvable yet productive, inasmuch as both vantage points must be reckoned with and in fact mutually condition each other at the level of moral action. Where Derrida errs, in Honneth’s estimation, is in effectively incorporating the two standpoints into an overarching moral principle, thereby undermining a key normative commitment of both his and Habermas’s respective critical-theoretic interventions: namely the Kantian resolve to bar the attitude of loving benevolence from encroaching upon the sphere of public moral disputation. Indeed, as Honneth sees it, Derrida has pushed the care perspective so far to the fore of morality that he has endangered the architectonic preeminence that the Kantian tradition accords to universalistic principles of respect and the attendant imperative of impartiality (Honneth 2007: 172). Here Honneth agrees with Michel Rosenfeld, who reads Derrida as prioritising the “obligation to account for the full panoply of differences of the irreducible other” over and against the calculative ideal of reciprocative equality (Rosenfeld 2005: 821). In so doing, Honneth maintains that Derrida invites the prospect of a totalising heterogeneity, a situation wherein the moral injunction to care everlastingly for the absolutely other Eros and Its Discontents 59 is transfigured into an all-pervasive phenomenology of recognitional experience. While he is keen to reproach Derrida on this score, Honneth’s own approach is beset with a similar vulnerability, which in my view arises as a consequence of his having seeded caring recognition into the genetic and conceptual core of the detached cognitive stance. This metatheoretical vantage point — which he portrays as a variant of “moral monism” — deprives him of the conceptual resources needed to uphold his criticism of Derridean care ethics. This difficulty can be avoided, I would suggest, from Habermas’s contravening dualistic perspective, in which the attitudes of loving benevolence and reciprocal respect are distinguished from one another at the level of epistemology. In brief, Habermas claims that the stance of caring recognition — which I have elsewhere characterised as a vantage point of immeasurability (Ganis 2011) — is adopted in discourses with “world-disclosive” or “aesthetic-expressive” properties. In contrast, the perspective of moral universalism is taken up in the historicalhermeneutic discourses of the Geisteswissenschaften, which can in turn be demarcated categorically from the empirical-analytic perspective of the Naturwissenschaften. The distinction between the latter two frameworks of measurability is the epistemological backdrop for an associated split between the domains of symbolic interaction and system integration, each of which is understood to be endowed with a distinct conceptual and structural “life of its own.” This analysis led the young Habermas to view reification a “border violation,” in which the technical-strategic organising directives of the modern economic and political subsystems overstep their remit of benign action coordination and become conflated with the moralpractical (Habermas 1970: 113). On Honnethian premises reification takes on a rather different cast: it is viewed as a pathological “forgetting” of the perspective of recognitional care that precedes and makes possible the assumption of the objectivating stance. In affiliating recognition with the reifying attitude in this way, Honneth, no less than Derrida, has in my view diminished our capacity to discern the point at which the latter orientation ceases to be deployed in the service of nonpathological system integration, but is rather undermining the normative conditions of discourse-ethical consociation. This deficit is especially palpable in situations where the discriminatory features of misrecognition are not prima facie evident to the disrespected parties, owing to the fact that recognitional discourses have been themselves mobilised to legitimate ideologically the asymmetrical abnegation of recognition (see Ganis 2013 for an elaboration of this problem). By way of illustration, Honneth calls attention to the now- 60 Chapter Four fashionable neoliberal view of workers “as entrepreneurs of their own labour power [Arbeitskraftunternehmer]” (Honneth 2009: 344). The suspicion here is that far from recognising workers for their own unique achievements, such a recognitional discourse seeks to promote a new conception of labouring activity that does little more than service the deregulated market’s demands for increased productivity and “workload flexibility.” However in such cases, one may be hard pressed to point to empirical evidence corroborating the suspected misrecognition. Indeed, in situations where recognitional practices are not characterised unambiguously as forms of disrespect by the targeted parties themselves, it may be difficult to determine whether these practices are justified or ideological. Under what conditions, then, can recognition be said to take on an ideological cast? Honneth maintains that recognition operates as “conformist ideology” and in fact suffers from a second-level “irrationality deficit” when it fails to manifest itself at the level of existing institutional practices and modes of conduct, and remains instead within the “merely symbolic plane” (Honneth 2009: 326, 346). Absent such “material fulfilment,” the evaluative promises of recognition are free to circulate as ideological legitimations for unrevealed relations of power and subjugation. Love as Pathology or a Promesse de Bonheur? The foregoing discussion seems to warrant further reflection on the point at which the act of loving my neighbour as myself begins to cross the threshold from a legitimate ethical stance to pathology. An interesting moral-psychological question — under-researched in the approaches discussed so far –– is worth highlighting in this context: that is, the possibility of the ethico-solidaristic attitude manifesting itself, under certain conditions, as a kind of “pathological narcissism”. The psychoanalytic perspective of Otto Kernberg is a useful starting point from which to address this problem. According to Kernberg, pathological narcissism is marked “by the building up of an inflated self-concept within which the actual self and the ideal self and ideal object are confused” (Kernberg 1970: 56). In turn, unacceptable features of the self-concept are repressed and projected onto others, who are devalued for failing to satisfy the ego’s demands for narcissistic cathexes. In adopting this defence mechanism, the pathological narcissist apprehends alter as little more than an extension of him - or herself, thereby rendering it an object to be manipulated and controlled - either as an idealised, praiseworthy purveyor of recognition or as something to be criticised and denigrated, as a consequence of its failure to provide such recognition.5 Because such Eros and Its Discontents 61 ideation reduces alter to little more than fungible material for the gratification of endopsychic needs and desires, the sincerity of the pathological narcissist’s avowals of love and concern for the “self-object” always remains suspect. Kernberg’s account of pathological narcissism invites an obvious comparison to Honneth, who likewise alerts us to the prospect of recognitional practices serving as ideological legitimation for material relationships of domination and control. But there is also an interesting link with Marcuse, who, as noted earlier, valorizes narcissism as an untapped reservoir of radical social agency. Marcuse would perhaps not demur from Kernberg’s depiction of the pathological manifestations of narcissism; however he would insist on locating the aetiology of these symptoms in the prevailing instrumental forms of social interaction that circumscribe the pathologically narcissistic ego. For Marcuse, it is precisely the diagnosis of totally administered conditions that counsels an appeal to primary erotic narcissism; inherently chaotic, nonrelational, and autistic, primitive narcissism contains “the germ of a different reality principle”, one with the capacity to transform “this world into a new mode of being” (Marcuse 1966: 169). In this sense, Marcuse chooses regression “over unconscious conformity”, the aesthetic narcissism of myth and art over “rational forms imposed on unordered bits of sensation” (Gendlin 1987: 18, 13). Thus, as we have seen, Marcuse consigns us to a speculative space that appears to have loose affinities with Derrida’s careethical disarticulation of identity thought and the politics of calculation. At the same time, at the level of his normative desiderata, Marcuse breaks not only with Derrida, but also - rather more precipitously - with Freud, Habermas, and Honneth, each of whom upholds qualifiedly the capacities of the reasoning ego within a modern civilisational context. Whatever their discrepancies, Habermas and Honneth provide especially acute vantage points from which to address the question of whether and under what conditions ethico-solidarity can present itself as a pathological manifestation of the love orientation, exerting crippling effects on human action and agency. Each thinker offers insights into how such pathological expressions of love can be understood as both a product of, and ideological legitimation for, existing relationships of power and domination. While Honneth’s vantage point seems promising in this regard, I have suggested that it is not sufficiently equipped to distinguish legitimate expressions of caring recognition and solidarity from pathological ones, owing to its resolve to place the love orientation at the genetic and conceptual foundation of all standpoints of measurability and their associated action domains. In this context, Habermas’s distinction 62 Chapter Four between purposive and communicative reason is in my view an important corrective to Honneth. In distinguishing these two forms of rationality as discrete epistemological standpoints, Habermas’s dualistic model better situates us to identify and criticise situations in which the orientation of loving benevolence becomes coimbricated with the instrumentalisation of the self’s capacity to proffer and accept meanings with others on free and equal terms. From such a perspective, we are in turn better equipped to plea for the institution of sociopolitical arrangements wherein dereifying dialogic norms can be vested materially—a desideratum that both Habermas and Honneth uphold. Be this as it may, conceptual recourses beyond those considered in this chapter will be necessary to more fully delineate and demarcate the line between love as pathology and love as a promesse de bonheur. And here remains a project for future research. References Bass, Alan (2006): Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Benhabib, Seyla (1992): “The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan Controversy and Feminist Theory.” Pp. 148–77 in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques (1992): Given Time: Counterfeit Money. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —. (1996): “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.” Pp. 77–88 in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe. New York: Routledge, 1996. —. (1997): Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso. Freud, Sigmund (1989): Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton. Ganis, Richard (2009): “Interpretative Care and the Postmetaphysical Tradition: The Legacy of Two Freuds.” Review of Alan Bass, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care.” H-Ideas, HNet Reviews. February. www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=229 80 (16 January 2013). —. (2011): The Politics of Care in Habermas and Derrida: Between Measurability and Immeasurability. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. —. (2013): “Sittlichkeit and Dependency: The Slide from Solidarity to Servitude in Habermas, Honneth, and Hegel,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 4.2 (forthcoming). Eros and Its Discontents 63 Gaon, Stella (1998): “Pluralizing Universal Man: The Legacy of Transcendentalism and Teleology in Habermas’s Discourse Ethics,” The Review of Politics 60(4): 685–718. Gendlin, Eugene T. (1987): “A Philosophical Critique of the Concept of Narcissism: The Significance of the Awareness Movement.” Pp. 251– 304 in Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression, edited by D.M. Levin. New York: New York University Press. Accessed at www.focusing.org/pdf/narcissism.pdf (16 January 2013). Gilligan, Carol (1993): In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1970): Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press. —. (1990a): Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. —. (1990b): The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. —. (1994): “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State.” Pp. 107–48 in Multiculturalism, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —. (1998): The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, edited by Ciaran P. Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Honig, Bonnie (2006): “Dead Rights, Live Futures: On Habermas’s Attempt to Reconcile Constitutionalism and Democracy.” Pp. 161–75 in The Derrida-Habermas Reader, edited by Lasse Thomassen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Honneth, Axel (1992): The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. —. (2003): “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder.” Pp. 237–68 in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso. —. (2007): “Love and Morality.” Pp. 163–80 in Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. —. (2008): Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. (2009): “Recognition as Ideology.” Pp. 323–47 in Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social Theory, edited by Bert van den Brink and David Owen. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 64 Chapter Four Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno (2002): Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kant, Immanuel (2005): Perpetual Peace, trans. Mary Campbell Smith. New York: Cosimo. Kernberg, Otto F. (1970): “Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personalities.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 18: 51–85. Krause, Sharon (2005): “Desiring Justice: Motivation and Justification in Rawls and Habermas,” Contemporary Political Theory 4: 363–85. Marcuse, Herbert (1964): One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press. —. (1966): Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. New York: Vintage Books. Rosenfeld, Michel (2005): “Derrida’s Ethical Turn and America: Looking Back from the Crossroads of Global Terrorism and the Enlightenment,” Cardozo Law Review 27(2): 815–45. Russell, Gillian A. (1985): “Narcissism and the Narcissistic Personality Disorder: A Comparison of the Theories of Kernberg and Kohut,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 58: 137–48. Vogel, Lawrence (1994): The Fragile “We”: Ethical Implications of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Notes 1 I have borrowed the phrase “dangerously unscripted future” from Bonnie Honig (2006: 169), who employs it in the context of her sympathetic reading of the undeconstructible incalculability of Derridean justice. 2 See my The Politics of Care in Habermas and Derrida (Ganis 2011: 50–52) for more on Derrida’s critical appropriation of Levinasian care ethics. Some of the arguments set forth in this book are revisited passim below. 3 See Bass’s Interpretation and Difference (2006) for an account of the respective care-ethical frameworks of Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. See Ganis (2009) for a review of this book. 4 According to Habermas (1990b), Derrida lacks the conceptual means to criticise the pathological undercurrents of late modernity (racism, antisemitism, sexism, xenophobia, and so forth), inasmuch as his deconstructive manoeuvre disallows the adoption of a stable intersubjective vantage point for moral judgment. Absent this, deconstruction remains politically and ethically impotent, trapped in a cul-de-sac of “performative contradictions”, in the nihilism of an irreducibly nonreciprocative an-archē. Habermas’s polemic — carried forth without so much as a single direct Eros and Its Discontents 65 reference to Derrida’s work - has been widely and deservedly criticised. Derrida’s aim, it has been noted, is not to undermine the perspective of calculable equality simpliciter, as Habermas maintains. Rather, as I have suggested above, his idea is to place the ineliminable residue of violence that adheres to the imperative to measure universally into a tense yet generative alliance with the obligation to care without limitations for the unsubsumable example. Marked by its undeconstructible immeasurability, the latter orientation, rather than obliterating the contravening stance of moral universalism, is precisely the vantage point from which the deconstructive idea of justice as an always already deferred possibility takes its moral bearings. 5 Interestingly, excessive praise and excessive criticism on the part of the child’s primary caregivers have been themselves implicated in the development of what is known clinically as “narcissistic personality disorder,” suggesting a viscous genetic cycle through which the pathology is poised to reproduce itself (see Russell 1985). CHAPTER FIVE LOVE, PARANOIA AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE HEGELIAN SUBJECT: FROM THE EROTIC TO MASTER AND SLAVE, SOLDIER AND PHILOSOPHER JANE CONNELL I dwell in Possibility A fairer House than Prose —Emily Dickinson Hegel, the proponent of terror as the grounding emotive force a propos the pathway to self-consciousness, had first thought that love, specifically erotically charged love between a man and a woman, was the experience of affect that would initiate the process. These thoughts of love indelibly marked the powerfully affect-driven relationship he later ascribed to the master and slave. Given the renown of this master–slave figure, intensified in the wake of Kojève’s reading of Hegel, curiosity about the way the trope is constituted and functions within the Phenomenology of Spirit and beyond is well warranted. It is frequently deployed as a tool for critique, being commonly cited as an accepted, universally applicable referent for the understanding of our subjectivities and social being but is, in itself, not much subject to analysis. If, however, a propos this master–slave narrative, we eschew enlightenment notions of scientific thinking and take it, with Derrida, as myth or legend (Derrida 1986: 1), then Hegel’s choice of these particular characters is significant, as are the resonances of the imaginary out of which they arise. Here, I will take the imaginary as defined by Sartre rather than in the more restricted Lacanian sense: for Sartre, then, the imaginary is an act, an intentionality that mediates perception; it is not anchored by any particular trope or signifier (Sartre 2004: 184). Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 67 Taken as myth, the master–slave trope functions as rhetoric, not as substantiated argument, and in reaching for rhetorical effect, a philosopher will draw on a more inclusive referential field than in straightforward presentation of the argument. Such stratagems explain and illustrate the arguments of a text, but they also bring to it other resonances, histories, associations and prejudices. The story of our theory is carried, in part, by such tropes; they are focal points in the interactions between the cultural imaginary and the imaginary of theoretical thinking and to bypass or ignore their effects is to risk complicity with the promulgation of an unexamined ideation. A trope of this kind that acquires great renown and accrues influence beyond its grounding text warrants particularly careful scrutiny.1 Hegel’s master–slave figure is paradigmatic of such a trope. Further, the master– slave story as myth is not a cultural artefact shaped by oral transmission for generations, but rather a tale from the pen of one man, written at a particular time. As we shall see, Pinkard, in his biography of Hegel, has drawn attention to the circumstances of Hegel’s life that may have powerfully influenced the construction of the various Hegelian narratives as the trope moved towards the final form of the Phenomenology of Spirit. If this final narrative is taken as a description of a given phenomenon, rather than understood in all its specificities, the assumptions it carries are unknowingly reproduced and reinforced.2 When it is considered a valid, universal referent in the construction of our subjectivities, these assumptions may operate within our imaginaries to serve a spill of unexamined identifications with these particularly limited characters, and any questioning of the necessity of crossing a place of absolute dread and terror, as a privileged moment a propos self-consciousness, may not arise. Strauss, in Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel and the Modern Self, describes the profound and pervasive influence of the motifs of terror and death, from their elucidation by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit to their central role in the Lacanian schema of the psyche. He emphasises the fear of death per se, but with the exception of a brief note on its inadequacy vis-à-vis the explanation of the pathway to recognition it is intended to furnish, he does not discuss the role that the master–slave trope takes in framing and developing these motifs (1998: 69).3 This is philosophically sound but elides the extent to which Hegel’s anthropomorphised account of fear has contributed to the pervasive influence of exactly these tropes of terror and death. Strauss does describe the importance of Kojève’s 1930–1933 lectures a propos the burgeoning interest in Hegel at that time. Kojève centred his discussion on the master– slave figure. Butler’s reading is that “[i]n effect Kojève halts the 68 Chapter Five Phenomenology at the end of ‘Lordship and Bondage,’ and retells Hegel’s narrative from the point of view of that struggling individual…” (1987: 58). And this emphasis continued to operate within subsequent French thought; Irigaray observed that Lacan was “enough of a Hegelian to have been credited in certain psychoanalytic seminars at Vincennes with the discovery of the master–slave dialectic!” (Whitford 1991: 85). We live in a time in which the role of terror in the cultural imaginary is self-evidently topical. The mid-twentieth century, post-war preoccupation with nuclear apocalypse as the imminent global catastrophe was accompanied in the sixties and seventies by a widespread conviction that love, commonly sexualised as “free love,” was a harbinger of peace—a global panacea. If every generation has an overworked trope to denote the end of civilisation, then in the West, we inhabit, since the end of the Cold War and our diminished preoccupation with the mushroom cloud, a split between fear of two catastrophes: climate change and terror. Possibilities of responsibility and agency jostle with predictions of inevitable doom visà-vis the former; while in the second, fear of the deadly violence of the terrorist locates the threat in the alien, objectified other, in a calamity in the socio-political arena driven by affect-laden ideology. The intense investment during the sixties in love, as a prophylactic for global disaster, has dissolved into the preoccupation with fanatical hatred of the new millennium — understood as an affect that fuels, rather than prevents, the apocalypse. Thus, projection and identification a propos the terrorist are embroidered throughout the productions of contemporary Western civil society. We have entered, or re-entered, a realm of the cultural imaginary dominated by fear of the malevolence of an alien other who carries the threat of extermination or imminent dystopia and who must be annihilated. Given these recent fluxes in the cultural imaginary, it is timely to examine our own philosophical tradition in relation to them. Complaint about the culture we have spawned is a commonplace philosophical assertion at present, but careful identification of homeostatic forces that have been perpetuated during our watch is to better effect than attempts at abnegation of our own contributions. So to return to the Hegelian subject, indelibly marked as it is by precisely violence and terror — and with an eye to the fact that the trope’s attendant popularity frequently carries the presumption that it is self-evidently verifiable. Despite the need for care vis-à-vis the insertion of such a potent trope into theoretical discourses, caution is rarely apparent. Hegel himself was scathing of argument by analogy or metaphor, as for him it “replace[s] the abstract Notion with something that can be intuitively apprehended, and so made more pleasing” (1977: 30), and he Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 69 was completely dismissive of myth as a valid subject of scholarship (1977: 44). Szondi goes so far as to say that “Hegel’s considerations on metaphor and on figuration must seem truly shallow … he does not reach an adequate understanding of metaphor and simile” (1974: 395).4 If this is the case, then when Hegel does deploy such stylistic devices — and there can be no doubt that at times he does so in profusion; the “Preface” to Phenomenology of Spirit is a bundle of such tropes — he may not be alert to their in situ resonances. This may go some way to explaining the chauvinistic ease with which the master–slave couple is presented to the reader — an attitude that then haunts its multiple deployments. What do these men want? Hegel proffers reiterated, unequivocal detail about the mind-set of these fictive characters, and in so doing he effects a pre-emptive refusal of other possibilities for the brief narrative that follows. Before moving to an exposition of this detail, it is important to note that the depiction of the master and slave, in what has become Hegel’s landmark text, is often assumed to be a description of our pre-historical experience that is, in turn, fundamental to an understanding of human social experience and behaviour.5 However, it is not, and never could be. The entrenched habit of ascribing the less savoury of our personality traits, in an exaggerated form, to a presumed pre-historical subject does not render it automatically valid. The short passage in which the master and slave figure suggests itself as a sparse, carefully delineated account of the generic subjects’ interaction with the world and the other. However, the men are of a particular character that shapes their particular desires; Hegel selected them from a field of possible subjects. His argument relies on our complicity with the presumption that these characters have universal standing, yet in point of fact leans on their particularity, which is asserted but never justified. When the master–slave figure is taken as a benchmark for the selfreflexive subject, the couple’s particular aspirations and motivations, a necessary bedrock of their story, become an apposite and unquestioned model a propos our inner worlds and social being. Later, Freud will famously ask: “What does a woman want?” (Jones 1964: 474). Yet has anyone ever asked: What do these men want? Indeed, the homogenised peculiarity of their desires, and the view the subject will take of itself through the prism of this particularity, can explain why Freud put his question with such an air of self-righteous bewilderment. Where does the inexplicable desire, the desire that cannot be assimilated to an empathic 70 Chapter Five recognition, lurk — in the “other,” for Freud, the woman, or exactly in figures such as the unexamined “universal” Hegelian subject? In the first half of Chapter IV of Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s subject, not yet representative of a particular historical epoch is split and, once doubled, engages in an intense interpersonal interaction. The work has begun with a philosophical examination of a person observing an object through time. In many ways, the die is cast as Hegel describes this interaction — prior to the subject’s path through pre-historical and Western historical time. We find: For us, or in itself, the universal as principle is the essence of perception, and, in contrast to this abstraction, both the moments distinguished—that which perceives and that which is perceived—are the unessential. But, in fact, because both are themselves the universal or the essence, both are essential. Yet since they are related to each other as opposites only one can be the essential moment in the relation, and the distinction of essential and inessential moment must be shared between them. (67) What we now have is unconditioned absolute universality, and consciousness here for the first time truly enters the realm of the Understanding. (77) As a matter of fact, philosophy does have to do with them [mental entities] too, recognizing them as the pure essences, the absolute elements and powers; but in so doing, recognizes them in their specific determinateness as well, and is therefore master over them [latter emphasis added]. (78) But it is, in fact, these essentialities within which perceptual understanding runs to and fro through every kind of material and content; they are the cohesive power and mastery over that content and they alone are what determines the relation of the sensuous as essence for consciousness, they are what determines the relation of the sensuous to it, and it is in them that the process of perception and of its truth runs its course [former emphasis added]. (78) There is something of a tautology here. Assertion of the importance of the “universal” and of a competitive sense of “essence” leads inevitably to the conclusion that is reached — a competitive dynamic between that which perceives and that which is perceived. Desire for “mastery” is unquestioned in the realms of perception and of philosophy. The philosophical import of these propositions, then, should be framed by the question of whether or not such assertions predetermine the responses of the subject and the story that ensues, rather than that anything is in fact developed. Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 71 Depiction of an equivalent object and subject shifts to contemplation of the single subject — as it observes and interacts with an external object. As Hegel concludes his description of the pre- or extra-social experience of consciousness — the progression from “the motionless tautology of ‘I am I…’” (105) — there is a peppering of the text with the word “supersession,” which builds on the designation of the external as a threat. Domination is clearly on the agenda: The simple “I” is this genus or the simple universal, for which the differences are not differences only by its being the negative essence of the shaped independent moments; and self-consciousness is thus certain of itself only by superseding this other that presents itself to selfconsciousness as an independent life; self-consciousness is desire. Certain of the nothingness of this other; it destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as true certainty, a certainty which has become explicit for self-consciousness itself in an objective manner. (109) Again, the content ends as it began, although the assertion broadens and intensifies; content set up as philosophical fact is now justified in terms of human desire: The notion of self-consciousness is only completed in these three moments: (a) the pure undifferentiated “I” is its first immediate object. (b) But this immediacy is itself an absolute mediation, it is only as a supersession of the independent object, in other words, it is Desire. (110) “Self-consciousness” as desire assumes a single form — a hostile relationship to the other. As the subject proceeds towards its split state, it is equipped with a response to the external object that admits no variation; be it thing or person, it is a threat, an unwelcome and alien burden, and must be annihilated. Any entity outside the limits of self, and thus beyond control, offers only jeopardy to this subject. It is an alien and antagonistic independence; a mutually beneficial interaction is unimaginable. Here, Hegel foreshadows his coming argument: “Consciousness has for its object one which, of its own self, posits otherness or difference as a nothingness, and in so doing is independent” (110) [emphasis added]. This, of course, is precisely not independence; the need to position the other thus is, exactly, dependence. Insofar as “independence” must be understood in relationship to the other, a drive to mastery or annihilation need in no way be a privileged mode. The next move relies on the interaction of bodies; there must be a fight to the death, or near death; there is no other way forward. For each subject, 72 Chapter Five there is neither doubt nor revulsion and this uninhibited dash into violence is checked only at the last moment when, for one, love of life becomes manifest within a sadomasochistic certainty. This scenario rests on unverifiable assumptions. There is no ground, other than that of imaginary choice, to substantiate violence as the inevitable and eventually productive response.6 To become acquainted with one of these men would be hazardous, to converse with him constraining and frustrating, to cross him outright dangerous. The world for him is a purely hostile space; any external change represents danger and attack. His mode of thought reflects this paranoia and hostility. The understanding he craves is certainty; there is no room for question, for reflection, for partial knowing. The world of ideas is, as the world of perception, purely fodder for the exercise of a sense of mastery.7 To disagree with him, to intrude on, or in any way challenge, this fragile, distorted and brittle view of his, is to provoke one certainty — that of physical attack. Prerequisite terror Recovery from this all but mortal combat introduces the basest form of relationship — slavery: for Hegel, a pure objectification. The fight has “done away with the truth that was supposed to issue from it … with the certainty of self generally … The two do not reciprocally give and receive one another back from each other consciously, but leave each other free only indifferently, like things” (114). The violent struggle fails to produce the “truth,” but neither Hegel nor his players question the need for it. Instead, the consequent interplay of toxic dependencies becomes the next prerequisite. Through his enforced labour, the slave experiences delayed gratification: “Work … is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words work forms and shapes the thing … It is in this way, therefore that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence” (118) and thus “the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own” (119). Many situations provoke a check to immediate, impulsive actions, in which frustration is tolerated to achieve a more distant objective and thus may open a different perspective of self. However, Hegel, rather than relinquish the master–slave dynamic, argues that this alienation only leads to self-consciousness if coupled with an experience of “absolute fear.” The subject meets his inevitable fate as fashioned by his own desire in one of Hegel’s most emotive passages: Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 73 For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. (114) Hegel then affirms this terror as necessary for the development of selfconsciousness: If consciousness fashions the thing without that initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self-centred attitude; for its form or negativity is not negativity per se, and therefore its formative activity cannot give it a consciousness of itself as essential being. (119) An intense response to the other becomes a prerequisite for “consciousness of self.” Since Hegel has limited the subject’s affect to fear and annihilatory hatred, fear is the only extremity of feeling available to trigger this emotionally charged negation of self. A myriad contexts furnish alienation from immediate gratification and intense feeling for another. However, for Hegel, as he wrote Phenomenology of Spirit, selfconsciousness is born of, and only of, fear and imposed service. Actually, this interpolation of an intense emotional experience of the other as a prerequisite for “recognition” had its Hegelian genesis in a starkly different form; we shall return to an exposition of this material. As much as the master–slave myth is an interesting formulation, it is manifestly impoverished. Events crucial to the development of selfawareness are chosen to facilitate a story consonant with a sadomasochistic imaginary. Only enforced productive work in an atmosphere of fear, generated by the threat of violence, leads to self-consciousness. In fact, we know that it is exactly within dyads of this kind that a confused perception of self and other tends to arise; that the subject’s “consciousness of itself as essential being” is often lost.8 If a gut-wrenching response is a necessary part of the process of “selfnegation,” why should it not stem from the abnegation of self that may arise in the care of a child, the pursuit of a lover, or the politics of acquisition or of revenge, rather than the experience of slavery? Here, the ongoing choice to persist at least stacks the odds in favour of an experience of responsibility rather than resentment. If within these and other relationships of power — inclusive of others beyond the male “double” — we constantly struggle with objectification, sometimes winning and sometimes losing, are we not, if we accept Hegel’s story, just comforting ourselves with some notion of irreversible developmental or historical progress in order not to confront the entrenched and systemic 74 Chapter Five modes of objectification of our own time? Hegel has warned against thought that “rests solely on the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff” (Hegel 1977: 25), yet his subject seems subject to the same malady — a “poverty of purpose:” it wants only control and mastery and thus what it achieves is the promulgation of an unexamined paranoia.9 Sex, love and the antecedent journey Despite its brief appearance in Phenomenology of Spirit, the master– slave trope has had widespread and enduring influence. However, its own immediate circumstance lacks exegesis. The couple’s peculiarly constricted desires arose in the context of the trope’s antecedent textual forays. Pinkard’s biography of Hegel traces this earlier excursion as, in Hegel’s line of reasoning, “the Kantian idea of ‘mutual adjustment of judgments’ in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ became transmuted into an original struggle for recognition that possessed its own logic” (Pinkard 2000: 173). Just after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hegel contributed to the emerging academic debate about “recognition”, the important ideas of “intersubjectivity” and “mutually recognizing agents” (170–2). Work played a significant part: “labour and its concomitant use of tools in turn raises us to being social creatures, mutually shaping each other through an even more complex process of ‘formative culture’” (172). By 1804, he had proposed a rudimentary form of the master–slave interaction. This scenario translates the usual wrangles of the academy into a deadly survival game. Pinkard, citing Hegel, describes it: “[E]ach appears in the consciousness of the other as that which excludes him from the whole extension of his individuality,” and this leads to a struggle to determine whose point of view is to be normatively dominant. Since there is no given objective point of view to which the agents can turn to resolve such epistemic disputes between themselves, they must struggle to the death … in order to be recognized simply “as rational, as totality in truth” (174).10 This struggle produced enslavement and then mutual recognition — the latter simply because each desires to move beyond this unsatisfactory and unproductive form. There was no prerequisite emotionally charged engagement. However, Hegel became dissatisfied with this explanation, concluding — correctly, a propos a contemporary psychological perspective — that the domination, in fact, would constrain any possibility of mutual recognition. He dropped the project and the manuscript remained incomplete and unpublished. Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 75 In 1805, he revisited it, turning to an interaction that he thought would provoke reciprocal recognition: and here there is, briefly, a radical discontinuity in the model. To explain the awareness of the other as an equally “self-conscious” being, Hegel now proposed an alternative prototypic dynamic — love between a man and a woman. It was grounded in difference: “The male has desire, drive; the feminine drive is far more aimed at being the object of the drive, to arouse drive and to allow it to satisfy itself in it” (Hegel 1983: 105).11 At first they “are only opposed characters, not knowing themselves — but either knowing themselves in one another, or else knowing themselves only in themselves” (106), but a relationship ensues, driven by desire for the other: The movement of knowing is thus in the inner realm itself, not in the objective realm. In their first interrelation, the two poles of tension already fall asunder. To be sure they approach one another with uncertainty and timidity, yet with trust for each knows itself immediately in the other and the movement is merely the inversion by which each realises that the other knows itself likewise in its other. This reversal also rests in the fact that each gives up its independence. The stimulus is in itself an excitation, i.e. it is the condition of not being satisfied in oneself, but rather having one’s essence in another—because one knows oneself in the other, negating oneself as being for oneself, as different. This self-negation is one’s being for another, into which one’s immediate being is transformed. Each one’s self-negation becomes, for each, the other’s being for another, i.e. the other is outside itself. (106) Mutual recognition is achieved: This cognition is love. It is the movement of the “conclusion,” so that each pole, fulfilled by the I, is thus immediately in the other, and only this being in the other separates itself from the I and becomes its object. It is the element of [custom or morality], the totality of ethical life … though not yet in itself but only the suggestion of it. Each one [here exists] only as determinate will, character, as the natural individual whose uncultivated natural Self is recognised. (107) This interaction is harmonious; the apprehension of difference furnishes the “excitation” that both provokes and facilitates awareness of the other and, through it, an altered perspective of self. Competitive tensions only come into play as the subject, by implication now the male subject, moves outside the domestic base and defends his family’s property.12 It is in each “demanding of the other to be recognised by the other as having rightful claims on the other’s possessions” that the life and death Chapter Five 76 struggle occurs and here the “confrontation with possible death simply lead[s] each immediately to offer recognition to the other.” (Pinkard 2000: 192–3) This clichéd model of conflict-free mutual recognition grounded in love and congruous difference differs conspicuously from that of the macho male pair but, nonetheless, reflects many of its difficulties. Each model is interpersonally superficial and emotionally uni-dimensional. One pair experiences only positively inflected emotion, the other only negative — either a bland notion of love or an uncomplicated hatred; mixed feelings never arise. In the second phase of the earlier model, the confrontation with death is a shared, rational response to pointlessness of attempted resolution by means of violence — it does not furnish the affective component of recognition. In each model, recognition is critically dependant on the interactions of bodies. Either fear, generated by deadly assault, or bodily pleasure derived from shared sexual experience, breaks through the presumed need for quiescence of the incipient social subject. These contrived scenarios rest on an imaginary highly cathected in sex or violence as the decisive driving force. Surely this is a dangerous and reductive formulation on which to ground an understanding of the complexities of our social being? Further, these shifts between a heterosexual dyad and a macho male one, and the, albeit brief, inclusion of the woman in a trope that goes on to have such a grip on the theoretical imaginary, are a matter for some curiosity. Why this radical shift a propos the prototypic scenario as it wobbles in its course before setting firmly into the mould of the paranoid that goes on to dictate the horizon for generations?13 The initial foray into domination as the primal relationship, relinquished as a dead-end, is reinstituted, with the interpolation of the experience of “absolute fear” that takes the place of sexual excitation in the interim model.14 Nowhere in Hegel’s texts is there any explanation for the shift back to the macho model, from sexual desire to paranoia as the grounding experience for the dialectic of recognition. However, as he maps these variations, Pinkard observes that as: Hegel returned to his notions of “recognition” to articulate this generation of self-consciousness … [he] quite strikingly, in the 1805–6 manuscript … employed a theorised sexual encounter between a man and a woman to make that point … [s]exual union makes explicit the very perspectival nature of the consciousness of such embodied agents. (191) And he continues: Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 77 One can hardly help speculating about whether it is only coincidental that around the time that Hegel was composing these notes, he was engaging in a sexual liaison with Christina Charlotte Johanna Burkhardt, his landlady and housekeeper, which resulted in the birth on February 5, 1807, of his illegitimate son, Ludwig Fischer. (192) In 1805–6, Hegel was very attached to Burkhardt, perhaps his first experience of a powerful sexual connection.15 While in its grip, he used it to explain the inception of recognition. What Pinkard does not note is that, if the model of 1805–6 was influenced by the relationship with Burkhardt, so, perhaps, was Hegel’s decision to jettison it. As Hegel wrote the final, profoundly influential version of the recognition scenario, his relationship had soured. His affair had become known; pregnancy led to his lover being abandoned by her husband, his landlord; and he faced eviction from his lodgings (Inwood 1992: 21). He wanted neither the woman nor the child in his life, and to a large extent he arranged to rid himself of both.16 He did not officially recognise the child, he ended the relationship with Burkhardt and he is thought to have moved from Jena to Bamberg partly to distance himself from this unpleasantness (Pinkard 2000: 237).17 The dissolution of the heterosexual model coincided with Hegel’s disillusionment — Hegel’s situation had become “completely and totally desperate” (230). The experience of a passionate interpersonal engagement, of the erotic, of love, or merely of infatuation, that had driven his conception of “mutual recognition” had proven both superficial and unpleasantly confronting. He threw himself into his work. [W]hat had been planned as a short introduction to [his own systematic philosophy] took on a life of its own and grew into one of Hegel’s most provocative and influential books. Working at a furious pace, he finished what would eventually be called Phenomenology of Spirit in a period of great personal and political turmoil. (Pippin 1999: 365–6) He also returned to the dynamics of domination, to the model he had previously found inadequate as the founding intra-psychic experience of our social being. Saddled with the burdensome consequences of his liaison, he rewrote the prototypical scenario, adding an emotional element — this time “dread” rather than “excitation.” The initial model that Hegel had quite rightly deemed to be constrictive a propos recognition of self and other was now invigorated with a highly charged sadomasochistic encounter that, he suggested, would produce the perspectival shift that he had first glimpsed in the context of sexual excitement. Gone was any possibility of willingly “know[ing] oneself in the other,” and the competitive, violent, male couple was reinstituted as the apparently self- 78 Chapter Five evident universal.18 With the exclusion of the female subject, the different other — once she is the site of matters that pertain neither to pleasure nor convenience — goes the incipient exploration of a positive reading of “difference.”19 The effects of this gripping spectre of two men whose relationship is grounded in deadly physical violence and fear cannot be underestimated. Think of what does not count in this impoverished model: If we are in any way the inheritors of its exclusions should we not attend to them?20 Merging as a purely masculine affair The identification of the incursion of gendered praxis into the central arguments of such a text — this passage represents philosophical argument for Hegel and much of the receptive field — gives grounds for looking elsewhere in this much-read text and beyond. Tracing this footprint, still manifest whenever the master–slave trope is mobilised, makes a fascinating study, as do attempts to gloss the myth with the inclusion of the woman, the exclusion of violence, or an expanded affective repertoire while not relinquishing its narrative sequence. The way in which this trope resists exhaustive revision, or even justified renunciation, is striking. However, description of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this essay. What is not is a reading of another wellknown trope in Phenomenology of Spirit with an eye to this understanding of its founding myth. As, within Hegel’s corpus, the macho male couple becomes enshrined as a theoretical and imaginary referent, Hegel permits pleasure and cooperation only within the heterosexual couple; the man is otherwise exiled from these and is trapped within the play of hostility. However, in the work as a whole, this exile is not complete; the male dyad reappears in another form. Hegel — an ardent admirer of Napoleon and of the civil code he was intent on establishing, at the cost of war after war, throughout Europe — drew the events of the French revolution and its aftermath, of terror and reform, into his argument, integrating these political and civic reforms into his own work. This appropriation of the political is achieved, in part, by positing a Napoleon–Hegel dyad as the figure that marks the portentous moment when the age of science is achieved; Hegel, the philosopher with understanding, unites with Napoleon, the soldier who has established the secular state. Napoleon is not named in the paragraph of elaborate prose that ends the “Spirit” section of Phenomenology of Spirit, but the context identifies this conjoined pair of men. For Kojève, “[t]his dyad formed by Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 79 Napoleon and Hegel, is the perfect man, fully and definitively ‘satisfied’ by what he is and by what he knows himself to be” (1980: 70). However, Althusser is unimpressed by this trope: [T]he reconciliation of the professor and the Emperor, or in other words the reconciliation of Hegel with the demiurge he would never become, comes about through mutual recognition … Thus Hegel’s work represents not only the fulfilment of its author’s existence, but is also presented as the fulfilment of a destiny more extraordinary than any a Prussian civil servant could have dreamt of in 1806, amidst the defeats and in the schools. (1997: 43) Althusser concludes that this passage is “[a]n extravagant attempt at self-justification, which, in its extremity, may well bear witness to the temptation to madness that haunts any solitary individual, even a thinker” (1997: 43). Hegel’s troubles during 1806 actually included Burkhardt’s pregnancy and the breakdown of their relationship. The receptive field has favoured Kojève’s reading; another legend has been promulgated. Napoleon is said to have captured Jena on the day that Hegel completed Phenomenology of Spirit and to have passed under Hegel’s windowsill at this portentous time.21 The book was completed roughly then, but the story about Napoleon is not true — it was circulated by Hegel himself (Pinkard 2000: 228–30). The incursion of political praxis into the text is achieved by recourse to extreme rhetorical device and promoted by the embroidering of facts, whereas the highly significant incursion of events inside the windowsill, of domestic and sexual praxis, slips past virtually unnoticed. This second idealised dyad, a purely masculine affair, created by the manipulation of tropes and reinforced by the manipulation of facts, rhetorically inflects the reception of Hegel’s notion of the end of history. It carries the imprimatur of the abandoned heterosexual dyad in its atmosphere of agoraphobic satisfaction and optimism; but here the two become one—there is no possibility of discursive or affective exchange from positions of difference. This could be understood as a regression, but if so, it is recruited by Hegel to mark the culmination of progress. Viewed from this reading of the imaginary of the text, it suggests itself as an endorsement of what has always been a stasis — the privileging of homosociality as a retreat from philosophical investigation.22 80 Chapter Five On not being Napoleon This second dyadic figure is also the very stuff of myth, yet is conceived by a man who, in the same text, repudiates the mythical form. This conundrum surely incites investigation. Hegel is explicitly dismissive of “Plato’s scientifically valueless myths” (1977: 44), but as his subject moves on and, at the end of its travels, finds fulfilment in this second dyad, there is a remarkable concurrence precisely with Platonic myth. Plato’s proposition, given to Aristophanes in the “Symposium” (1977: 542–6), that we were created as dyadic creatures, split into our single state by Zeus as punishment for the arrogance to the gods, and subsequently “asked for nothing better than to be rolled into one” (191a) with the lost other half resonates powerfully with Hegel’s concluding trope.23 For Plato, there are three types of dyadic creature that spawn heterosexual, male homosexual and lesbian love in the consequent halfbeings. In the shift between the Platonic mythic schema and the Hegelian one, we move from an imaginary that accommodates men and women and embraces a considerable, if not comprehensive, diversity of desire, to an imaginary initially confined to the hostile male subject that in turn spawns the grandiosely inflected (re)union of Hegel with his hero of civic life, and the repertoire of subject and desire is constricted — for the second time. There is a centrifugal force at work, a tendency for forms inclusive of gendered difference to be reduced to a limited, emotionally univalent, male dyad. The germinal model of “recognition” based on difference and Plato’s more highly nuanced trope are replaced with these more limited forms. Napoleon was perhaps as exploited as was Burkhardt. He was not just a soldier and politician; he was educated, cultured and a serious scholar. Conversely, Hegel was nothing of a soldier. In conjoining himself with Napoleon, he appropriated a powerful reference to warmongering and social and political change without incurring any physical risk himself. The darker side of the Napoleonic trajectory, like the unpleasant sequel of Hegel’s love-affair, was to be disavowed.24 Both the return to domination as a central referent a propos recognition and Hegel’s deployment of this grandiose trope allow him to turn away from schismatic openings into unthinkable revisions of praxis. This radical demand would appear if the different other, as equivalent self-reflexive subject, were to resist manipulation, exclusion or annihilation. Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 81 Conclusion: a women philosopher … This gap between praxis and the philosophical text holds the resistances to the elimination of oppression of subjugated groups such as women. Read against the shifts in its form that correspond to shifts in Hegel’s concurrent relationship with a women, the master–slave figure, so often treated as an inviolable entity, comes into perspective as a trope that carries the imprint of repressed awareness of the irrational and unethical nature of some heteronormative praxis — in this case, the resolution of conflict when the consequence of “love,” of erotic pleasure, is the inconveniently pregnant woman. Thus we find in the trope’s journey through this chapter of Hegel’s life — the turning away from the, albeit rudimentary, grounding of self-consciousness in awareness of, or curiosity or pleasure in, a different other; the introduction of homosociality as the prototypic scenario; an ablation of empathic exploration as a basis for selfconsciousness and its replacement with stark and unrelenting objectification and paranoia; and the privileging — or even glamorising — of violence, fuelled by this objectification, as a site of resolution or progress. This latter is dangerous and extremely relevant to current fragilities in the social contract, such as in ideologically based violence — usually between men, but also extremely dangerous for women — and in the erosion of rights justified by an insistent reciprocation of this objectification and violence when it takes the form of “terrorism”. This in turn occludes precisely the possibility of resolution in language, in dialogue — dialogue informed by intense and mixed affects on both sides, but aimed at exploiting any possibilities of mutual recognition that arise as a basis for progress towards resolution. Many other such readings can be made. For example, Marx, in a letter dated 1865, wrote scathingly of the fact that his detractors lacked the “wit” to critique his notions of the “productive and social relations” a propos his relationship with his wife, in which he characterised himself as playing “the romantic lead in a second-rate theatre” (Marx and Engels 1983:173). This invitation to critique a published text in the light of a domestic relationship with a woman comes from the author himself, and if taken up, it furnishes a perspective of the Marxian corpus that demonstrates, as Marx well knew it would, the way in which immersion in the oppressive praxis of heteronormativity has an immense influence on the significant arguments and silences of a philosopher’s oeuvre, which overtly have nothing to do with the “woman”.25 These readings refresh the perspective of the philosophical tradition and produce informative and meaningful 82 Chapter Five interpretations of the texts. They may also render the space of philosophy as less unwelcoming to the “woman philosopher”. This brings us to Malabou’s considerations about women and philosophy, about the impossibility of the position of the “woman philosopher.” Her contention is that “it is necessary to imagine the possibility of woman starting from the structural impossibility she experiences of not being violated, in herself and outside, everywhere. An impossibility that echoes the impossibility of her welcome in philosophy” (2011: 108). And that if indeed she, Malabou, is a philosopher, for her “it is at the price of a tremendous violence, the violence that philosophy constantly does to me and the violence I inflict on it in return. My relation to philosophy looks a lot like a fierce quarrel between a man and a woman” (109).26 A quarrel between a man and a woman holds more promise than a fight to the death; it occurs in language, is inclusive of gendered difference and, in this instance, it occupies the formal discursive space of philosophy but also gestures towards the domestic. In this same essay, Malabou makes an interesting move a propos Derrida, who supervised her doctorate, wrote the preface for her first book and collaborated with her in philosophical work in the years before his death. Having written of the difficulty for her of “bear[ing] for [Derrida], even speaking in the name of women, ‘as’ a woman, to speak better than they could, for them, stronger and louder than them, their conceptual and political rights” (2011: 108), she makes the following comment: “[i]n any case, the women and men who knew Derrida know all about his ambivalence in regard to women. Respect and fraternity, or sorority, went hand in hand with machismo, seduction and sexual parade”. The critical word here is “ambivalence”. This description psychologises the disparity and thus limits interrogation of the gap between the life and the work with which we are all so familiar. If we consider Derrida as a man, living in the mid- to late-twentieth century, and marked to an extraordinary degree by the beneficial effects of his own intellectual capacity and a professional life conducted within the privileged space of academic philosophy, then Malabou’s observations of him, rather than denoting a particular ambivalence of a particular man, merely describe the predictable and understandable gap, the displacements, between the possibilities for analysis in philosophy and the inevitable and ordinary entrapment in the mire of heteronormative praxis that we all, even Derrida, endure, despite our attempts to shift it. If the prism provided by bringing these together, applied to a philosophical text, can destabilise the blindness or repressions that inform this gap, should we desist? Moreover, if this Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 83 critique is withheld, will the “gap” between praxis and philosophy ever be bridged? Better that “she” who has had her thoughts turn to this quandary over and over again in an attempt to understand the unrelenting nature of her oppression critiques the work of “he” who is barred from the depths of such reflection by multiple turnings away from the threatened loss of convenience and of a comfortable sense of authority. Such critique, while informed indeed by the need to express outrage and seek recompense, would also be just comment from one philosopher to another; from one with a wider perspective who can alert the other to the limitations and claustrophobic solipsism’s of aspects of “his” work. This critique is difficult philosophical work in an inhospitable environment, but it might provoke, from time to time, a glimmer of mutual recognition from positions of difference. Perhaps this cognition is love. References Althusser, Louis (1997): Early Writings: The Spectre of Hegel, trans. G.M. Goshgarian. London: Verso. Bataille, George (1988): Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: State University of New York Press. de Beauvoir, Simone (1972): The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Braidotti, Rosi (1991): Patterns of Dissonance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, Judith (1987): Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press Cixous, Hélène (1994): ‘First Names of No One,’ in The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers. London: Routledge. Clément, Catherine (1989): Opera or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing. London: Virago. Connell, Jane ‘Beyond Oedipus—The Baroness and the Sphinx: A Reading of the Imaginary of Western Critical Theory’. PhD diss., University of Melbourne, unpublished. Derrida, Jacques (1978): ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelian Without Reserve,’ in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London: RKP. —. (1986): Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr and Richard Rand. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Fuchs, Jo-Ann Pilardi (1983): ‘On the War Path and Beyond: Hegel, Freud and Feminist Theory,’ Women’s Studies International Forum 6, pp. 565–72. 84 Chapter Five Gauthier, Jeffrey A. (1997): Hegel and Feminist Social Criticism: Justice, Recognition, and the Feminine. New York: State University of New York Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977): Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. (1983) Hegel and the Human Spirit: A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6) with Commentary, trans. Leo Rauch .Detroit: Wayne State University Press. —. (1986): Jenaer Systementwürfe I: Das System der spekulativen Philosophy. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. —. (1993): Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet. London: Penguin Books. Inwood, Michael (1992): A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. Jardine, Alice A. (1985): Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jones, Ernest (1964): The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Kojève, Alexandre (1980): Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James Nichols Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lonzi, Carla (1996): ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel,’ in Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, ed. Patricia Jagentowicz Mills. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press. Malabou, Catherine (2011): Changing Difference, trans. Carolyn Shread. Cambridge: Polity Press. de Man, Paul (1982): ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,’ in Critical Inquiry 8, pp. 763–9. Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1983): Collected Works. Volume 42, trans. Peter and Betty Ross. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Pinkard, Terry (2000): Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert B (1999): ‘Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831),’ in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato (1961) ‘Symposium,’ trans. Michael Joyce, in Plato Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Roudinesco, Elisabeth (1990): Jacques Lacan and co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 85 Sartre, Jean-Paul (2004): The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber. London: Routledge. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1990): The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press. Starobinski, Jean (2003): Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple, trans. Sophie Hawkes with Jeff Fort. New York: Zone. Strauss, Jonathan (1998): Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel and the Modern Self. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Szondi, Peter (1974): Poetik und Geschichtsphilosopie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Walker, Lenore E.A. (2000): The Battered Woman Syndrome: Second edition. New York: Springer. Whitford, Margaret (1991): Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine. London: Routledge. Williams, Robert R. (2003): ‘The Concept of Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,’ in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: New Critical Essays, ed. Alfred Denker and Michael Vater. New York: Humanity Books. Notes My thanks to Leo Kretzenbacher for his help with the original text of Phenomenology of Spirit. 1 Jean Starobinski demonstrates this point in his lexical study of the trope “action– reaction:” “The more a science succeeds through innovative formulas, the more the predators of its vocabulary multiply” (2003, 50). 2 Such analysis does little to dint the trajectory of the trope’s influence. Bataille, and Derrida after him, makes an incisive critique of the master–slave narrative that partly destabilises the argument that it supports. See Bataille (1988, 71, 132) and Derrida (1978, 254–62). However, the trope’s sequential presentations down the theoretical line do not reflect this modification. Neither Derrida nor Bataille call into question the significance of Hegel’s selection of this particular scenario. 3 This matter is ambiguous even in Hegel’s account. Fear of death per se is discussed but from the context of the established master–slave relationship; Hegel also describes death as “the absolute Lord” (1977, 114). 4 De Man develops this point, which he cites and translates; he argues that Hegel is “a theoretician of the symbol who fails to respond to symbolic language” (1982, 765). 5 See, for example, Williams (2003, 60). 6 Since the master must live for the story to continue, Bataille situates the interaction as play, and as comedy; Derrida develops this idea, which destabilises the pivotal role played by physical violence. However, the mode of “operation” of 86 Chapter Five domination and the prima facie desire for it as the driving force are not drawn into question. See Bataille (1988, 71, 132) and Derrida (1978, 254–62). 7 Cixous very briefly challenges the workings of desire for mastery. See Cixous (1994, 31–2). 8 As Walker notes: “[we] now know [that] battered women, like other trauma victims, lose the ability to perceive objectivity or neutrality in relationships” (2000, 35). Traumatic experiences of this kind are marked by the aggressor’s occasional “kindness” to the victim; a scenario in which the “negativity” of the dominant figure is without breach and yet provokes the affect necessary to the Hegelian model is improbable. 9 Jardine places male paranoia as a central issue. However, her emphasis is its operation against the woman (1985, 97–102, 263). 10 Pinkard quotes and translates from the 1803–1804 manuscripts of the Jenaer Systementwürfe (1986, 218–9). 11 Hegel does introduce a difference between the master and slave; this appears abruptly in the course of the “fight to the death”. The predisposition for this difference is not accounted for and it is only manifest after recourse to near fatal violence. 12 This two-tiered recognition process is a device geared to subordinate the initial recognition scenario, inclusive of the woman and productive of the subject’s apprehension of a “natural Self,” to the evolution of a civil society of exclusively male subjects. 13 Derrida notes this shift in the model in Glas: “Once the family is constituted, as a power of consciousness, the struggle can break out only between consciousnesses and not between empiric individuals. From this viewpoint the gap [écart] narrows between the Jena text and that of the Phenomenology” (1986, 135). While the page-by-page parallel with the Genet text marks the homoerotic resonances of the Hegelian texts, Derrida makes no analysis of the “gap” constituted by the move from a heterosexual to an exclusively masculine scenario. 14 The English translation of Phenomenology of Spirit amplifies this association: “In that experience it has been quite unmanned”. 15 Pinkard reports no earlier liaisons. Inwood notes that Hegel’s contemporaries “called [him] the ‘old man’, owing to his ponderous and studious manner” (1992, 20). 16 Hegel felt some responsibility to provide for the child and guilt about Burkhardt’s situation. The child took its mother’s maiden name but the godfathers were Hegel’s brother and close friend (Pinkard 2000, 233–7). 17 Ten years later, Hegel acknowledged and adopted his son (Pinkard 2000, 354). Derrida writes in Glas: “At the end of his life, Hegel responds to a natural son come to be acknowledged: I know I had something to do with your birth, but previously I was the accidental one, now I am the essential one” (1986, 7). 18 Most feminist critique, in the wake of de Beauvoir (1972, 96), is limited to application of the Hegelian model to the heterosexual dynamic. That the Hegelian subject might have been “made” by the philosopher rather than “born” fully equipped with hatred, paranoia and a propensity for violence is never considered. Love, Paranoia and the Constitution of the Hegelian Subject 87 See, for example, Gauthier (1997, xiii, 135–6). There are a few exceptions: Lonzi considers that “[f]orcing the woman question into a master–slave concept … is a mistake” (1996, 278); Braidotti takes up Lonzi’s point: “one must tackle the very structures of the framework, not its propositional contents, in order to overcome the power relations that sustain it” (1991, 214); Pilardi Fuchs sees the master–slave interaction as representative of male psychosexual development and posits the “replacing of patriarchal erotics with an erotics of affiliation” (1983). 19 To refuse the sadomasochistic conflict of the master–slave dyad as an apposite model for the inception of self-consciousness is not to refuse the role of conflict per se — many other conflictual models are possible. As much of the injustice and physical violence in civil society is both perpetrated and perpetuated by masculine, hostile, violent and objectifying dyadic formations that resist translation into other conflictual modes, including those more germane to creative forms of resolution, this is a critical point. It is not conflict from which we need to free ourselves but rather the grip of such objectification insofar as it is at play in situations of injustice. 20 There are of course important areas of post-Hegelian scholarship that emphasise mutual recognition per se and eschew reference to the master–slave trope; this then represents a return to Hegel’s initial concept of “mutual recognition”. 21 See, for example, the front matter to Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics and Roudinesco (1990, 137). 22 See, for example, Sedgwick (1990). 23 Despite his remarks about Plato, Hegel had a long-standing passion for “ancient Greek society, culture and philosophy” (Inwood 1992, 21). The depth of this engagement with the corpus is apparent in Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. 24 After Napoleon’s defeats and fall from grace, Hegel simply changed horses and claimed to have predicted the same (Pinkard 2000, 311). 25 This reading is elaborated upon and substantiated in Connell, “Beyond Oedipus —The Baroness and the Sphinx: A Reading of the Imaginary of Western Critical Theory” (unpublished). 26 I have confined use of the term “violence” to physical violence. Malabou applies the term more inclusively. CHAPTER SIX FROM THE WORKS TO THE PROBLEM OF LOVE: THE APORIA OF THE NEIGHBOUR IN KIERKEGAARD1 GEORGE TSAGDIS “Hang up philosophy!” —Romeo The lover forbids the love of wisdom to change into a wisdom of love — even less into a wisdom on love. The pastoral words of Friar Laurence are lost on Romeo for they cannot bring Juliet back. Romeo cannot understand the counsel of the Friar — understanding is unwanted, suspended if not banished, hung up if not hung, indeed, executed. Romeo and Juliet do not understand love for they execute it. Their tragedy is founded upon the execution of incomprehensibility, they see through the absurdity of love to the end. Thus they are due the words Johannes de Silentio reserves for his knight of faith: “I cannot understand Abraham—I can only admire him” (Kierkegaard 1983: 112). In executing understanding one is not in want of words. Lovers prove it; yet in faith Abraham is equally eloquent. “He can describe his love for Isaac in the most beautiful words to be found in any language. But this is not what is on his mind; it is something deeper”, (113) an execution. Abraham’s act comes from the eloquence of silence. A tension between silence and the most beautiful of languages grows. And quicker than the winged Eros this discourse has placed itself in its midst; perhaps too quickly. At an equal pace grows the tension between faith and love. It seems to emerge against the fragile aporia of love, as though to perplex and veil the demands it places on thought. As if love was already decided, or if the writing of or on love had found its meaning. As if we knew how to make the “on” of the surface of love quiver, maybe even its depth tremble (Derrida 1995: 139) and the figures of its language From the Works to the Problem of Love 89 had learned to talk of it, without engendering the monstrosity of a “philosophy of love” (Barthes 2002: 8). Could it be that as perhaps with friends, as soon as love is spoken of rather than to, it should cease, (Derrida 2005: 172-173) so that one should declare: O love there is no love? Can love be addressed? Or is this privilege and necessity reserved exclusively for the beloved? And finally which love? Is there some love that as the 16th century French song has it “makes me think too much” and what do I think then, so pensive, if I think neither on love, nor even of love? It appears simple at first. A clear triangulation between love (agapē, Kjelighed), eros (Elskov) and friendship (Barthes 2002: 160) (philia) presents each term as distinct, then allows its alliance with the second against the third, re-arranges the figure of figures and even admits for its tense unity. Tracing the contours of this figure is already more than can be hoped for here; and already the figure cannot contain itself. A fourth term appears as original as indispensable: brotherhood (adelphotēs). Then a fifth: sexuality—kindred yet distinct from eros, altogether ill-fitting the ancient demarcations: pothos, himeros, thymos. Kierkegaard encloses his thought in the triangulation. He recognizes erotic love (subsuming in it tacitly the sexual manifold) and friendship (a restricted, even diluted philia) in contrast to the singular love of the neighbour. He has no use for brotherhood. The brother, this unnatural figure — insofar as “a political fraternization between ‘natural’ brothers” (Derrida 2005: 202) could never be, insofar as the animal knows not of the brother — this other that ecclesiastic labour took so long to institute, before revolutionary ethos placed him at the root of all freedom and equality to ensure an irresolvable bond of mutuality beyond merely beneficial contractuality, this brother remains unspoken of in Kierkegaard’s work. He is displaced by the neighbour, the one who is near. The brother, the friend, the lover are certainly near, in the proximity of oikiotēs. But Christianity cannot rest satisfied with the received spatiality of otherness, or with what seems to interfere with it. The Old Testament situates the neighbour too close to the brother. Leviticus, which for the first time commands the love of the neighbour as oneself (19:18), also abolishes brotherly hate from the heart (19:17). The neighbour is here one of kin, a chosen one like oneself. Because one is like oneself one ought to be loved like one. The Mosaic commandment of love towards the neighbour includes thus all; all but non-neighbours2. The New Testament strives to engulf the non-neighbour. As the revolutionary declares the brotherhood of all mankind, Kierkegaard evangelizes the neighbour in “unconditionally every human being” (Kierkegaard 1998: 66) and repeats with Matthew (22:39) the commandment 90 Chapter Six of love: love thy neighbour as thyself. One is thus called to loving every and all: the neighbour is not only every human, but all humans, (55) all humanity; (141)3 moreover not simply now, for some time, but always, (49) indeed unlike all temporal love — a moment, a year or a century matters little — unto all eternity (8). In the figure of the neighbour, in the all and every that allows for no distinction, the Christian comes to distinguish himself from the natural man (Kierkegaard 1980a: 8) and constitute the new brotherhood infused and marked with the blood of Christ. The brother is potentially every other, yet only the neighbour is actually4 every other. In the love of the neighbour the Christian finds himself. Christianity teaches proper selflove (Kierkegaard 1998: 18) as it rests it from the person to bestow it upon the neighbour (17). In learning to love the neighbour as oneself, one learns to love oneself (23 and Evans 2004: 182) as a neighbour and as the one who loves the neighbour, as a brother. As a brother the Christian learns to love the one who does not love him as brother: the neighbour. This is the meaning of the commandment par excellence: love the one who doesn’t love you as thyself; even: love the one who hates you as thyself. Learn thus to love thyself as the one who hates you. We interrupt and defer the logic to prepare its unfolding. We assume it first from the end of its spatiality. Love thy neighbour, the one who is near, as thyself. Love thyself as the one who is near. One has to bring the other as near as one is to oneself and oneself as near as the other is. The commandment of love summarizes accordingly in the neighbour the spatiality of ethic as the “should” of proximity. Yet this space is not continuous. God incessantly interrupts it, always between neighbours, brothers, as well as between the neighbour and the brother. The logic of the interruption of the space of love however needs also to be interrupted, for we have yet sufficiently thought neither love nor its commandment. Kierkegaard distinguishes the love of proximity, the love of the neighbour, from the love of the natural man — natural, preferential (Kierkegaard 1998: 56) or spontaneous love (40). Is the love of the neighbour not spontaneous? Does it presuppose a thought on love? A logic, a plan, a calculus? Is it possibly a practical duty of a categorical imperative, beyond emotion? Kierkegaard desires a love without calculation, yet not an-economic like a Derridean gift, which rather than remaining foreign to the cycle of exchange, places itself in a relationship of foreignness to it (Derrida 1992: 7) — the gift of love proposes a new, counter-calculative economy. Love is a passion, in a second, most essential triangulation of Christian passions, next to hope and faith, where From the Works to the Problem of Love 91 Kierkegaard’s heretic Hegelianism discovers an “immediacy after reflection”, in lieu of the “first immediacy” (Evans 2004: 195). The first immediacy of the beautiful commands immediate love-inclination and passion (certainly a different kind of passion) are on its side. The Christian passion takes up the arduous task of the love of the ugly (Kierkegaard 1998: 373). It makes no exceptions, feels no preference or aversion (20). The difficulty of such a demand makes God appear necessary in the love of the neighbour, while eros and philia seem best left to themselves, the presence of God making itself felt here as rather disturbing (112). Kierkegaard desires the disturbance, amplifies the tension. On the one hand he appears reassuring: the neighbour does not require giving up on “existing” love (61). Later on however he must declare: “Christianly, the entire distinction between the different kinds of love is essentially abolished” (143). Indeed, in the whole New Testament not a single word of erotic love or friendship is to be found (45)5. For Christian love “in earnestness and truth is more tender in inwardness than erotic love in the union and more faithful in sincerity than the most celebrated friendship in the alliance” (44) and thus philia and eros, these pagan tropes of love, are essentially less in what is essential to them than neighbourly love. Accordingly, the neighbour cannot be the foundation of any other trope of love as conciliatory thought would wish (Evans 2004: 208), for other tropes of love are already part of it and as such redundant in what is most essential to them in face of the neighbour. The brother could love a lover or friend, but if he loved them as such he could only love them less than his neighbour. Conjugal love can only reach its height if the spouse becomes a neighbour — further it cannot advance, closer it cannot arrive. The New Testament voids thus without erasing the Mosaic commandments of parental love and spousal faith—the figure of the neighbour designates this proximal void (and yet something more is subterraneanly at work, something to which we shall return). The tension Christianity effectuates in retaining eros and philia, while attempting to assimilate and neutralize them at the specific proximity of the neighbour, is far from resolved. It appears first as a matter of effort: “To choose a beloved, to find a friend, yes this is a complicated business, but one’s neighbour is easy to recognize, easy to find if only one will personally — acknowledge one’s duty” (Kierkegaard 1998: 22). One does not seek, one has always already found. Even death forms no obstacle, as it “cannot deprive you of your neighbour, for if it takes one, life immediately gives you another” (65). The neighbour is the task-at-hand one has not had to seek; Christianity has found and gifted it in the guise of a duty. The duty is hard but one needs not try for the gift — friends had to Chapter Six 92 try, brothers do not. Even the thought of this love is no longer difficult. What the poet had to leave unresolved in the riddles of eros and friendship, Christianity has explained “eternally” (50), in the simplicity of a duty, indeed a command (Evans 2004: 30) one has only to execute. Its simplicity is summarized in three moments: True love, which has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty, is never changed; it is simple, it loves and never hates, never hates—the beloved. (Kierkegaard 1998: 34) An immutable love consisting in an immutable command, for: Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair. (29) This immutable duty of love: is therefore the eternal equality in loving, but the eternal equality is the opposite of preference. This needs no elaborate development. Equality is simply not to make distinctions, and eternal equality is unconditionally not to make the slightest distinction, unqualifiedly not to make the slightest distinction. (58) No effort, “no elaborate development”, just an execution. What if however this love and the equality it proposes, are thought? We soon for example notice: “equality for all, the slogan of bourgeois revolution, becomes the objective or quantifiable equality of roles, not of persons” (Derrida 2008a: 37). Here it is the very distinction (of roles) that is equated. But Christianity commands an equality of persons; perhaps here the eternal condition of eternal love holds. It has to; since from eternity’s point of view (sub specie aeternitatis), the individual growing together with his dissimilarity, that is, his distinction, is deformed, so that eternity has to reclaim one by means of death (Kierkegaard: 1998: 88). Death, this “minor event” (Kierkegaard 1980a: 7) for the Christian, brings one back to similarity, to loving indistinction, for from eternity’s perspective, dissimilarity, rather than despair, appears as the true sickness unto death. As love saves from both, the question of their relation presses. Is maybe despair a form of dissimilarity? Indeed, this question refers both to the self, the self one is commanded to love in neighbourly proximity. Kierkegaard identifies at the crossroad of Christ and Hegel the human with spirit; spirit accordingly is the self. The self as spirit is however nothing given but a relation’s relation with itself. The first relation is one From the Works to the Problem of Love 93 of finitude and infinity, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity (13). Yet this is not the self, but merely the human being caught between animality and divinity, in the constancy of an unresolved tension. Tempting as it is to see the second relation, the relation’s relation that is the self, as the negotiation that keeps open the “contradiction” and maintains the elements as integral (Dreyfus 2003: 92), the self, this second relation is precisely and only spirit. Thus Kierkegaard, further identifying the self and spirit with the soul, makes it with Matthew (16:26) and Luke (9:25) indifferent to the world (Kierkegaard 1987: 220-221), a foreigner in truth to finitude. And thus the spirit, the relation’s relation, is always the “third” (Kierkegaard 1980b: 85), in truth, of an infinite order. The infinite spirit, this self, must not grow dissimilar to itself, it must not grow distinct. To save the self from such fate, from its own most death, worldly death intervenes, removing the dissimilarity of finitude. Distinction, this misrelation of the human relation, originates in the detachment from the origin of the self. For the self is a relation that cannot establish itself, but which originates in another, so that when the self relates to itself it also relates to another (Kierkegaard 1980a: 14). The question of this other is crucial; for Kierkegaard it concentrates in the figure of God. When the self no longer relates to the Other as it relates to itself, then it is in despair; and then it grows distinct. To overcome such despair is for the self to rest “transparently in the power that established it” (14). The only power in which such transparency is possible is God; only in God can the simple similarity that is the self be itself. Can this other then not be the neighbour? Cannot a self establish another self? Cannot a self rest transparently in another self? If the commandment of love requires one to help another become a master of oneself and yet without the other knowing, so that such knowledge will not rob him of this self-mastery (Kierkegaard 1998: 279)6, is it not possible that a neighbour, indeed a brother — even if not my brother, is the foundation of the relation that is myself? A brother can even say: “Is it my blood that runs in my veins? No it is the friend’s. But then in turn it is my blood that flows in my friend’s veins. That is the I is no longer primary, but the you —”, still, he must add: “yet the situation, reversed, is really the same” (267). The I-you reversal amounts to nothing, for in neighbourly proximity there is no distinction, no you or me, only God. One is equal to and indistinct from one’s neighbour before God (60). This indistinction is so pervasive that one must come to recognize oneself as nothing before God (102). How could a mere nothing establish another nothing that is an open relation just like itself? Indeed, Kierkegaard admits, the invisible, upbuilding work of love (217) requires a ground which cannot be placed 94 Chapter Six in a human’s heart by another human; for this necessary condition man is insufficient (224). Yet even if man sufficed what would be thus established, but a mere indistinction, an empty repetition of the same? How would man then differ from the animal? Kierkegaard seems bound by the tension he set into motion. What seemed like a matter of effort is now no less than the crux of the neighbourly figure. For how is the self other than the animal, other than mere finitude? Kierkegaard makes a distinction; indeed, he asserts man’s superiority over the animal not on grounds of the human universality (Badiou 2011: 68-69)7, that is, of that in which all humans share, but rather because “within the species each individual is essentially different or distinctive” (Kierkegaard 1998: 230). In this difference a distinctive relationship to God and a distinctive love (Hare 2002: 66-67, 168-172)8 become for the first time possible. In this difference is also given the possibility of despair that distinguishes the man from the animal and its awareness that distinguishes the Christian from the natural man (Kierkegaard 1980a: 15), the brother from the neighbour. Further, it is because one is distinct that one should not change. For change between things of no difference proves either indifferent, or meaningless. Thus Johannes de Silentio extends his hierarchization into both the human and the animal realms, at the limits of incongruity: Only lower natures forget themselves and become something new. The butterfly for example completely forgets that it was a caterpillar, and may in turn so completely forget that it was a butterfly that it may become a fish (Kierkegaard 1983: 43). The knight of faith in contrast becomes nothing new but in pain recollects everything; his memory guards the uniqueness of the event of his faith. Persevering in pain he proves his superiority over the lover who in recollection “sometimes dies of excess, of exhaustion, and tension of memory (like Werther)” (Barthes 2002: 14). Ultimately, in the brotherly hierarchy the knight of faith: has grasped the deep secret that in loving another person one ought to be sufficient to oneself. […] it is only the lower natures who have the law for their actions in someone else, the premises for their actions outside themselves (Kierkegaard 1983: 44-45). The knight of faith is sufficient to himself in the distinctiveness of his faith and this he is not allowed to forget, lest he becomes a fish. Even though he as a self is a relation established by another, the law of his From the Works to the Problem of Love 95 actions does not lie in someone else, for the human law is only valid for lower natures. The only other in faith is God. Accordingly love in faith allows another to remain another (Evans 2004: 188), since in the words of Paul “love does not seek its own (zētei ta eautēs)” (I Corinthians, 13:5). Love does not seek its own, yet in truth neither does it seek the other. The law is already given, nothing is to be sought. It is not so much that the example of Christ forces a love of his example, demands its own love of love, for this example is in turn one of (love as) giving (Kierkegaard 1998: 264), invoking the other. But the other is merely to be loved at the specific proximity of neighbourliness. Thus it is eventually said: The truly loving one does not love his own distinctiveness but, in contrast, loves every human being according to his distinctiveness; but his ‘distinctiveness’ is what for him is his own; that is, the loving one does not seek his own; quite the opposite, he loves what is the other’s own (269). The love that makes no distinction loves the other for his distinctiveness. The act of thought that executed the distinction of I and you into ex-tinction has now to salvage both; it does so by discovering a love for the other’s distinction yet leaving the law of the self unaffected by it. The other’s distinction is never a lesson. For on pain of bestiality, the self has to retain a singular autonomy. Kierkegaard is explicit: “Marriage is not really love, and therefore it is said that the two become one flesh — but not one spirit, since two spirits cannot possibly become one spirit” (466, from the Journals). An absolute singularity forever recollected in pain becomes the relation that is the self, a singularity foreign to the law of the other. This is not the extremity of tension. Kierkegaard accuses philia and eros of willing to give up everything the other’s distinctiveness, everything but themselves, that is, their own distinctiveness (273). He thus violently ignores the Aristotelian definition of friendship as “one soul in bodies twain,”9 a definition so familiar to Augustine and antiquity that he may adopt without quoting it. Augustine is surprised to have survived the death of his friend, to have survived with only half a soul; and he redeems his guilt for having continued to live in his will to salvage something of his friend, not to completely let him die (Augustine, 1961: 77-80), a declaration he will however subsequently (in his Retractations) denounce as inept (Derrida 2005: 187). Eros is as aware of the community of souls and the impossibility of life beyond the death of the other, as the Church Father. The death of Juliet teaches thus Romeo the truth of loss, from the truth of love of a singularity that was also himself. Without the singularity of Juliet, the world of finitude becomes toxic, as Romeo says to the 96 Chapter Six Apothecary who gives him the means of his death in exchange of money: “I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none” (Shakespeare 2012: 318). Indeed pharmakeus, the one who distributes the potion of life and the poison of death is the name Diotima gives to Eros—the force that resurrects and executes the singularity of the community of souls. The possibility is not unknown to the Kierkegaardian tension. As it wavers between the necessity and corruption of distinction it comes to discover a love of the spirit that “has the courage to will and have nothing at all, the courage to cancel entirely the distinction ‘yours and mine’; [thereby gaining] God — by losing its soul” (Kierkegaard 1998: 268-269). Here one can dream the prelapsarian dream of a child that lacks the knowledge of evil (286), the evil distinction constitutes, and as a child desire to keep nothing and exclaim: “All things are mine — I, who have no mine at all” (268). Yet not because, like Rimbaud, I experience the horror of my I being another10, neither because, like Barthes, I experience the horror of not being someone else (Barthes 2002: 121), caught in the dazzling leap from my singularity to the singularity of the pair, but because in the executed leap the self is altogether shed. Again, only God is left. We follow Kierkegaard in this dis-pairing of the pair, in this dis-relation of a self, admitting only God’s presence. Dis-pair appears initially as the difficulty, the horror, of being left alone before God (Kierkegaard 1998: 124). Unlike Eros, God does not return the stare, seeing into souls without being accessible to view (Derrida 2008b: 26). In this asymmetry and infinite distinction, in the absent gaze of the master the I is ordered: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Paul, Philippians 2:12). The infinite love that is God asks one to find the entry of heaven in fear and trembling; yet more importantly, in solitude. The other, who cannot establish me, can neither save me; and I am as powerless to save the other. In fear and trembling I must try to save myself. To do so I have to love the neighbour. Yet there is a command that stands even higher: more than the neighbour, more than oneself (these two distinct/indistinct moments of the soul) Christ himself commands the love of God (Matthew 22:37). Kierkegaard acknowledges the command (Kierkegaard 1998: 20) and interprets its tropos, the way of its execution, in accordance to the principle of likeness that supports the second command, that of the love of proximity. One ought to love God — infinite distance and distinction — and “like unto it” (Matthew 22:39) love the neighbour — utter proximity and indistinction tormented by the desire of distinction. From the Works to the Problem of Love 97 Kierkegaard will constantly repeat: “like for like”. Thus the Jewish “like for like” (a tooth for a tooth) comes to be replaced by the Christian command of forgiveness; like God forgives, so one must the other forgive, so that one — like for like in turn — may be forgiven. In this logic one does not receive the forgiveness one gives, but rather gives precisely what one receives, what one receives precisely from oneself (382); such is the labour of salvation. This labour can only be undertaken insofar the principle of likeness is internalized, insofar the relation of the self identifies itself with the principle that constantly relates the finitude of the neighbour11 to the infinitude of God. This identification is thorough; one not only executes but also knows (16) according to the principle of likeness. This principle is God in man; its name is love, or at least, a principle in the name of love. At very least the meaning of indistinction starts to clarify. To love God and to be like God (homoiōsis) one must forget friendship, abolish it while evoking it: “Friends there are no friends!” the Christian has to declare like a most devout Aristotelian. For it is clear: “Insofar as you love your friend, you are not like God, because for God there is no distinction” (63). And thus no friendship. One cannot be God’s friend, nor can one ask for God as a friend (Derrida 2005: 223). One can only love God and in the likeness of this love love another. God is always the middle term between a person and another—to love oneself is to love God; to love another is to help another love God (Kierkegaard 1998: 107), so that to love another means exclusively to love the Other. Idolatry is thus not only the poetic blasphemy (19) of loving another more than God (Evans 2004: 209), but already loving another without or before one loves God. One can then expect the love that is God12 to intervene and demand “out of love and in love to hate the beloved” (108). For first and foremostly, “all true love is grounded in this, that one loves another in a third —” (395 from the Journals) namely, God, who ultimately “not only becomes the third party in every relationship of love, but really becomes the sole object of love, so it is not the husband who is the wife’s beloved, but it is God […]”, since “the love-relationship requires threeness: the lover, the beloved, the love — but the love is God” (121). One thus loves love instead of a person. Yet — isn’t this rather “a specifically amorous perversion”, a great cause the loss of which one laments only for itself, not for the other? (Barthes 2002: 31). A cause however a brother cannot lose, since the third that is love, is God and one cannot break with God (Kierkegaard 1998: 304-305)13; and which he need all the less lament since God shall always offer another neighbour in place of the one lost to life or to death. God then, not only does not withdraw in 98 Chapter Six favour of the person loved, but usurps the figure of the other in his infinite alterity. Love, bereft of all singularity transforms into a principle, an unlawful principle. A principle beyond the Law. Badiou is here closer than anywhere else to Kierkegaard’s thought of love as he says: “Love cannot be reduced to any law. There is no law of love” (Badiou 1012: 79). Indeed for Kierkegaard, as for Paul, love is the fulfilling of the Law (Romans 13:10), the relation of the former to the latter being “like the relation of faith to understanding” (Kierkegaard 1998: 105) — Law, this “prolix matter” (96) requiring and taking, while love gives (107). This love is the exuberance of the Law that requires no settlement, for the execution of its infinite bounty leaves no one without copious compensation. Love’s infinitude vouchsafes this. This infinitude also deprives calculation of its meaning, insofar the calculation of infinity remains impossible (178). As soon as one attempts this, as soon as one attempts a calculation, a comparison and thus the transformation of the infinite debt love stipulates (177) into finitude, eternity is broken. Loving the other’s distinctiveness without distinction and giving what is received without calculation, this is “the sum of the commandment” (137) that heaven prescribes in the name of love. This name is not to be spoken. For the name of love is the name of God. Unlike eros and philia, the love of the neighbour is not to be declared. Insofar one stands alone before God, there is no one to declare this love to; insofar one executes the love that is God, in the name of love, like for like, so that one may become love, nothing is left to be said. In God, even the most celebrated lover knows that “the purest faith keeps the deepest silence” (Casanova 1997: 29)14. In this silence nothing is left, but to execute. In this silence takes place the act of Abraham; as a work of love. The Christian does not think of love, but of the works of love (Kierkegaard 1998: 3), since the maturity of love shows in its fruits that exceed words15. In the precarious distinction of interiority (infinity) and exteriority (finitude) sustaining Kierkegaard’s thought, love appears as a work on the interior. We read: “Christianity does not want to make changes in externals; neither does it want to abolish drives or inclination—it wants only to make infinity’s change in the inner being” (139). Accordingly, it is fatuousness rather than a work of love, to desire an equality of rights for the woman“— Christianity has never required or desired this” (139). In the stare of God that one is not to return, one eliminates difference by shutting one’s eyes and becoming all ears to the commandment (68); recasting the blindness of love. In this blindness dissimilarity exists but does not occupy the Christian “at all, not in the least” (71). The Christian knows that even From the Works to the Problem of Love 99 centuries of resolute labour will not undo all worldly dissimilarity and doesn’t try to undo them. He allows “them to stand but teaches the equality of eternity” (72). Thus Christianity finds itself at the end without having even begun, without caring to begin, for determining is not the outcome but “expectancy in itself” (263). The work of love is working without the need of works (indeed the Kierkegaardian title does not hold beyond rhetoric; there are no Works of Love, only the work of love as barren activity, an empty actuality). Thus one should practice mercifulness, “a work of love even if it can give nothing and is able to do nothing” (316). Mercifulness unpractised however, a failure more grave than death (326), does not equal a lack of acts, since mercifulness consists in the how of giving (327), even if it is not giving at all. At the same time, as interiority, love is not a feeling. “To say that love is a feeling and the like is really an un-Christian concept […] Christ’s love was not intense feeling, a full heart etc.; it was rather the work of love, which is his life” (483)16. Love can certainly not be a feeling, for it is Christ and God and a command. The dialectic of divine love thus becomes: “What love does, that it is; what it is, that it does — at one and the same moment” (280). Love however does nothing, it is not a deed, but the interiority that transforms a deed, insofar as the same deed without love is infinitely different (181). At the same time it is nothing17. Neither a thing of the world, nor of the soul. It is precisely the soul itself as the passion that strives to become like God. A long tradition is at work. To be like, constitutes a passion at least as old as Plato. In the Symposium (205e) love longs for neither the half, nor the whole of anything, and would even dismember itself only to assimilate itself (in a specific erotic proximity) to the good (agathon oikeion). Here the lover is the only path to the good. Cicero, the foremost introducer of Hellenic thought to Latium could not but recognize friendship between good men18, that is, within the principle of the good to which both parties aspire. Yet, here too, this principle is unattainable without the aid of the friend, the specific other. For the work of love the neighbour is no path at all, but precisely an aporia. The neighbour leads nowhere; solely God does. So that even if the numeric casuistic of Dante holds, and Beatrice is indeed a miracle and the number nine whose root is the miracle of trinity, the triune origin of everything miraculous (Dante 1969: 80), she can still lead Dante nowhere. Certainly not Above as Goethe would have come to learn from the old master19. Another master, Eckhart, repeating Dionysius the Areopagite would subscribe to this (Neo-) Platonic tradition: “love is of such nature, that changes man into the things he loves”20. 100 Chapter Six What the Christian loves in the absolute commandment of love is God. A God who, in the words of the biblical narration that possesses Kierkegaard, tempts (Genesis, 22:1) and tests Abraham (Kierkegaard 1983: 20). Kierkegaard puts in the mouth of Abraham the confession: “I love Isaac more than anything in the world” (70) and will not accept that the divine command can or wills to lessen it. Abraham does not merely love God more; his love towards Isaac remains unsurpassable. Yet not unconditional; its absolute condition is God. This condition which we have seen voiding the Law by levelling all ties (of blood, love and friendship) to the proximity of the neighbour and by becoming its fulfilment beyond any determination, this condition that simultaneously empties and fulfils the Law ultimately annihilates it. It runs counter its command, unto its absolute condition. Thus Kierkegaard repeats and intensifies the words of Luke (14:26): “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (72). In the pure militancy of love everything and anything has to be hated. To be like God, to be like love that never hates, one should prepare to hate, if love so commands. Is the distinction between love and hate “egoistic and without interest” (Derrida 2008a: 65)? Are we trying “to suck worldly wisdom out of the paradox” (Kierkegaard 1983: 37)? Out of all the paradoxes that have been amassing behind the figure of the neighbour? (One should not forget — Isaac is to Abraham first a neighbour and only then his promised, dear son). Are we in danger of falling from faith into calculation (35)? Should we not rather have faith “where thought stops” (53)21, adhere to the Christian kērygma letting God appear in our love of God, become fools in the moronity of love (Paul, I Corinthians 1:20 & 4:10) rather than attempt any proofs of his in/existence? Or is this rather perhaps a “precarious solution” (Derrida 2008b: 139-140), an execution in complete disregard of the aporia? Can Kierkegaard who desires to tarry infinitely on the paradox, make of the paradox a true aporia, in a sense requiring more thought than presently possible, an aporia that does not deprive but gives a way? Can what Kierkegaard regards as a paradox be a gift? Is silence and expenditure (Barthes 2002: 77) sufficient or even necessary to turn divine love into a gift? One should initially (and in passing) note: first, keeping the secret, which for Kierkegaard (and Derrida) is an essential condition to Abraham’s act, is not the will of God. If the Bible is more than secular gossip, if it is indeed revelation, then God reveals the secret that Abraham (perhaps also Isaac) takes so much care to safeguard. God may demand from Abraham silence, but in this silence Abraham acts unlike God, who From the Works to the Problem of Love 101 ultimately desires the circulation of the secret (a secret is precisely what circulates). Secondly, as Abraham is called to an execution he is forced to act. Kierkegaard insists throughout Fear and Trembling on the significance of the preparation and the long journey that lead up to the unexecuted execution. However an act is ultimately never (neither for Abraham, nor for us) required. As we have seen, the work of love, and such is the murder of Abraham’s son, does not require that anything be done, the act in love is empty. Thus the indispensible, for Kierkegaard, dramaturgy that leads father and son to Mount Moriah we must think in Kierkegaardian terms as merely external (a work of love does not occupy itself with worldly change and mercifulness is already fulfilled in expectancy). Expenditure is thus uncalled-for. For all that one does depends solely on the orientation of the soul; similarly all that is done to one is dependent upon one’s soul. “In the Christian sense, you have nothing at all to do with what others do unto you — it does not concern you” (Kierkegaard 1998: 383); the neighbour and his acts are insignificant, the sole origin of meaning is divine love and in this love exists accordingly no murder, only suicide (33)22. The only death is the one originating in the self. Thirdly thus, Abraham cannot kill Isaac in the true sense, even if he is allowed. In these thoughts we face no paradox; no true aporia is there to guide us. Yet neither is there reached a positive economy of love; such an economy, if at all possible, is unwelcome. The moment of aporetic tension emerges when the revealed secret of the void and impossible act of Abraham is replaced by the true command: for my love, you have to attempt a void and impossible act and keep a secret I shall reveal, but before this and as a condition of it, for my love, you have to hate. Only then, in the fear of God that is love and it is also hate, is Isaac spared (Genesis, 22:12). It is not merely that the universal (ethic) is against Abraham, while he remains individually faithful to love. Abraham does not merely hate the hateful, nor does he leave his soul aside (hate, as love, is not a feeling, but soul itself). Abraham has to hate precisely what he loves (Derrida 2008a: 65). His work of love is this hate. And yet, if one cannot love the neighbour, except upon condition of the love of God, how can one hate, without first hating God? In verso, unless God himself hates, where does hate originate? For if omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homini, why does God command what is absolutely foreign to him? Why is man commanded to do what God never does, commanded to be like God never is, and also commanded to be like God, absolute love? It seems that insofar God is in man, God can be hate. We hear of likeness once more: 102 Chapter Six If you cannot bear people’s faults against you, how then should God be able to bear your sins against him? No, like for like. God is actually himself this pure like for like, the pure rendition of how you yourself are. If there is anger in you, then God is anger in you. (Kierkegaard 1998: 384). In man God becomes all that is foreign to him. He who is absolute love “repeats the words of grace or of judgement that you say about another; he says the same thing word for word about you” (384-385). Through the mediation of God the judgement of another becomes one’s own judgement (233). Aporetic as such divine function appears, an anthropomorphism of the singular God, it should suffice to contain evil in man and make of man the nothing Kierkegaard believes him to be, in the eyes of the unseen God. But before God, man must be everything. The significance of the individual is so great for God that a whole herd is to be wagered for a sole sheep. And since even the briefest glimpse of interest of an infinite God is infinite, a finite creature would never deserve it23. This is why God, like the knight of faith in his image24, never forgets. And in this infinite recollection of God one was and will be forever; in the recollection of God one is infinite and eternal. The infinite significance of man for God shows precisely as God does not judge man in and through man, but in and of himself. While man is called to repay evil with good (337), God besides the endless inflictions of the Old Testament reserves ultimately for man eternal punishment without the prospect of penitentiary reformation. Man comes to know that with tears and gnashing teeth will be “thrust out” (Luke 14:28) those who dare to judge, make distinctions and exclude (Quinn 1998: 277), while the God they where commanded to become like, judges, distinguishes and excludes them for all eternity, never judging himself25, an auto-theodicy denied. Kierkegaard calls us to neighbourly love; a love of distinctiveness without distinction. He calls to the execution of works of love that do nothing. For the sake of such love he calls in turn to impossible murders and hate. All to obey the command: You, who are infinitely unlike me, must become like me by refraining from all I do (i.e. judging, excluding, etc.) and by doing all I exclude from myself (i.e. murdering, hating, etc.). And if you fail this command you shall in turn be judged and excluded, indeed placed in hatred, for all eternity. Attempting to heed such command is despair and dis-pair. The friend is lost to a principle; it is a principle of destruction. This principle and love of indistinction is foreign to the love of distinction it tries to appropriate. Only philia and eros can re-pair oneself to the neighbour; only here is equality, for only here is true distinction; and only here becomes possible Kierkegaard’s (surprising, as indeed for him provisional) counsel to love From the Works to the Problem of Love 103 the neighbour as the beloved, since only here for the first time becomes the other not an ‘other I’, but a ‘first you’ (Kierkegaard 1998: 57). For such friendship rarity is a virtue (Derrida 2005: 212), for such love its hyperbolic scarcity (212) a wonder. In such friendship death becomes again possible and necessary, constituting one’s irreplaceable singularity and calling one to respond, become responsible (Derrida 2008a: 42) for the declaration of love (Derrida 2005: 302), a declaration of polemos beyond war, a dissolution of neutrality (228) and indistinction. If such rarity is a need, it cannot be reduced to the satisfaction of mere appetite, a shard of finitude, but like the poet’s need to write (Kierkegaard 1998: 10) amounts to uttering the words, the declaration which initiates an infinitude of effects (Badiou 2012: 42), opens a world of difference (56) and marks the transformation of chance into destiny (43-44) and a promise of eternity (47). In this declaration every other is wholly other (tout autre est tout autre (Derrida 2008a: 78)) for the first time. For the first time this declaration transforms the other into infinity and transforms ethics, indeed, into religion, a religion precisely of love. This declaration of polemos returns not only the friend, but also the crucial possibility of the enemy—the question of one’s own self as figure, as Schmitt used to repeat from a line of Däubler’s Sang an Palermo. Perhaps we can thus for the first time tend to the words of Kierkegaard’s arch-enemy. Nietzsche invites us to share the need, the “higher thirst” (Derrida 2008a: 71) of a common infinity: “My brothers, I do not exhort you to the love of your neighbour: I exhort you to the love of the most distant” (Nietzsche 1999: 79). This is the distance in which the neighbour withers, which only friendship and love can endure, the distance of an infinite future that takes one out of all impassable aporias, while persisting on the aporetic way. And in the distance we hear on: “That we have to become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should become more venerable for each other […]. Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies” (Nietzsche 1974: 225). As long as we write of and on love, love will remain an aporia, a problema. In Greek however problema has a second meaning: the shield. If love is a shield26, this is the aporetic limit that protects beyond all limitation — even against God. Abraham, Kierkegaard’s cherished knight of faith, does not have the strength to carry this shield. Kierkegaard calls the divisions of Fear and Trembling in Greek: problemata. He seeks the aporia of love and its protection in God. But Abraham’s unexecuted execution cannot lead out of the non sequitur of the neighbour. 104 Chapter Six References Augustine (1961): The Confessions, trans. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Badiou, Alain (2012): Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, trans. Bruno Bosteels. London: Verso. —. (2012): In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush. London: Serpent’s Tale. Barthes, Roland (2002): A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage. Casanova, Giacomo. (1997): History of my Life, trans. Willard Trask. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dante, A. (1969): La Vita Nuova, XX, trans. Barbera Reynolds. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Derrida, Jacques (1992): Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —. (1995): On the Name, trans. David Wood. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press —. (2005): The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London: Verso. —. (2008a): The Gift of death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills. Chicago: the University of Chicago Press. —. (2008b): The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press. Dreyfus, Hubert (2003): ‘Christianity Without Onto-Theology. In, Mark Wrathall (ed.) Religion After Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, C.S. (2004): Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Love, Divine Commands and Moral Obligations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hare, John (2002): Why Bother Being Good? Downers Grove, Ill. Intervarsity Press. Heidegger, Martin (2000): Vortage und Aufsatze. Frankfurt: Vittoria Klosterman. Kierkegaard, Soren (1980a): Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard & Edna Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. —. (1980b): The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. —. (1987): Either/Or, II, trans. New Jersey: Howard & Edna Hong. Princeton University Press. —. (1983): Fear and Trembling and Repetition, trans. Howard & Edna Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. From the Works to the Problem of Love 105 —. (1998): Works of Love, trans. Howard & Edna Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974): The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffman. New York: Vintage. —. (1999): Also Sprache Zarathustra, KSA4, 1, Von Nachstenliebe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Quinn, Phillip (1998): ‘The Pimacy of God’s Will in Christian Ethics’. In, M. Beaty, C. Fisher, M. Nelson (eds.) Christian Theism and Moral Philosophy. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press. Shakespeare, William (2001): Romeo and Juliet. London: Arden Press. Notes 1 To the star of an other Beatrice. The question of the person of the non-neighbour and his function as either inimicus or hostis, has to remain here open. One is however tempted to ask whether ultimately the human brotherhood is but the non-neighbour of the animal. 3 We even read: “the category ‘neighbour’ is like the category ‘human being’”. 4 Potentiality and actuality are used here tentatively, merely in accordance with the tradition of Idealism that structures Kierkegaardian Logic. 5 Upon execution, Christ, the archetypon of the Christian, had neither a lover, nor a friend. 6 Of course in the master as in the self, there are already two. 7 A displacement of universality that qualifies Kierkegaard’s thought as antiphilosophy for Badiou. 8 The distinction of love, which constitutes the possibility of individuality for Hare, lies at the heart of the problematic. 9 Of the most prominent moments in the Aristotelian doxographic tradition, yet not an extant fragment. Delivered by Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 5.20. 10 “Je est un autre”. Rimbaud’s correspondence with Paul Demeny, from the 15th of May 1871. 11 The neighbour as indistinct is finite. A brother loves the other not as distinct but in the other’s distinction, that is, in the other’s faith that presents the promise of salvation, or as indistinct, that is, as finite, a fallen spirit that requires one’s love to find the distinction of faith. The brother is commanded nonetheless not to distinguish the two. 12 At the beginning of the Works of love we read: “you who are love, so that the one who loves is what he is only by being in you!”, p.3. 13 Thus Kierkegaard interprets the meaning of the Pauline “love abides” (I Corinthians, 13:13). 14 Casanova, the seducer par excellence in the Kierkegaardian sense, begins his History with a declaration of faith, the implications of which exceed the current undertaking. 2 106 15 Chapter Six Ibid., p.12. We read also: “Christ’s life is really the only unhappy love.” Ibid., p.109. And: “it was indeed madness, humanly speaking: he sacrifices himself—in order to make the loved ones just as unhappy as himself!” Ibid., p.111. Kierkegaard could make nothing of Dante’s: “Love and the noble heart are but one thing.” Dante A., La Vita Nuova, XX (Penguin, London, 1969), p.59. 17 Perhaps we could only proceed if instead of the “is” our thought engaged with this Nothing. This cannot be done here, certainly not on Kierkegaard’s terms. 18 Cicero, Laelius de Amicitia, V, 18. All of this essay’s questions are accompanied ultimately by the question of the possibility of friendship founded on a principle (Derrida says on “virtue”) without aporias and contradictions. Derrida, J., The Politics of Friendship, p.198. 19 The last words of Faust (12111): “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan”. See also Badiou’s dismissal of this Above, against the rigidity of directinality: “to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity.” Badiou A., In Praise of Love, p.25. 20 “Diu mine ist der natur, daz si den menschen wandelt in die dinc, die er minnet”, Heidegger M., Vortäge und Aufsätze, GA7 (Vittorio Klosterman, Frankfurt am Main, 2000), p.178. 21 At the same time, faith is said to know more than experience and mistrust know (Kierkegaard S., Works of Love, p.228) and to see the unseen in what is seen (Ibid., p.295). 22 The dilemma is not as Badiou believes: “why choose Christianity rather than suicide?”, but rather why to choose their inseparable destiny over phila and eros. Badiou A., Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, p.89. 23 Hence, anew, the question of the animal. 24 Yet in his, by now familiar wavering, Kierkegaard demands from the knight of faith unlike God to forget: “But anyone who loves God needs no tears, no admiration; he forgets the suffering in the love. Indeed, so completely has he forgotten it that there would not be the slightest trace of his suffering left if God himself did not remember it, for he sees in secret and recognizes distress and counts the tears and forgets nothing.” Kierkegaard S., Fear and Trembling, p.120 25 This possibility deserves still long thought. 26 It is, this time, the words of a 20th century song. 16 CHAPTER SEVEN I WANT YOU TO BE: LOVE AS A PRECONDITION OF FREEDOM IN THE THOUGHT OF HANNAH ARENDT RACHEL PAINE This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given to us at birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be)”, without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation. (Arendt 2009: 301). Love is often depicted in Hannah Arendt’s work as an unworldly and insulating passion that creates a barrier between us and the public world of political action. However, there is a kind of love that, I suggest here, is a necessary condition for the freedom Arendt places at the centre of being human. Cupiditas, our passion for the possession of another lies in stark contrast to Caritas, the love graced by its transcendent character. Caritas is the love that is the basis for recognizing ourselves and others as unique individuals, and so makes possible the development and expression of human freedom. Hannah Arendt is best known for her contributions to political philosophy. She became the focus of controversy for her coverage of the trial of Adolph Eichmann for the New Yorker in 19631 in which she presented her thesis that “evil” is “banal”. Eichmann, she found, was an ordinary man, with none of the traits of evil thought to be the mark of a person capable of such crimes against humanity. The idea that evil is banal appeared to many to excuse Eichmann, while the real nature of her insight was missed. In fact, much of Arendt’s work from that time onward was a response to the criticism of her portrayal of Eichmann. She argued that if we do not actively think through what we do, we are all susceptible to the 108 Chapter Seven norms of the society we live in. I think today we are more able to recognize that people are capable of crimes of all kinds if the conditions are apt. The results of the Milgram experiments in the 1960s showed the world that “ordinary” people can be induced to torture others if asked to by an accepted authority2. The behaviour of American soldiers in Abu Ghraib has given us a real-world illustration of this susceptibility. Acts of genocide and mass murder throughout history have been the actions of otherwise civilized people. Given the enormity of the issues here and the bleakness of our history in this respect, a claim about necessary conditions for the possibility of resisting authority when it presses upon us in ways that horrify us, makes no attempt to describe sufficient conditions. However, it is not Arendt’s intention in her work to tell us what we ought to do, but, rather, to explore what it is within our capacity to develop, that which may suggest a way out of the future, described by Orwell, of “a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”3 That future is the antithesis of one in which “the grace of love” has had a role to play. I first set out the conception of the political, and its dependence upon our freedom, that is central to Arendt’s political philosophy. I then discuss her account of the individual and the role this plays in underpinning the possibility of our being free. In the third part I look at the accounts of love Arendt herself first explored in her PhD thesis, Love and Saint Augustine and referenced in her later work. While both Cupiditas and Caritas are explored as kinds of love, I suggest that we can reject the concept of Cupiditas as intrinsically connected to the love that possesses the grace of transcending the particular moment, Caritas. Caritas is the form of love that underpins our freedom. In part four I explore Arendt’s account of totalitarianism and the dangers of missing the centrality of Caritas to human freedom. Part I: The Polis Arendt’s account of the political realm is of a domain which expresses human freedom without the pressures of contingent needs, or particular desires. It is the realm of free beings being heard and seen by others, which constitutes the sphere of human freedom and the construction of a world that lasts beyond the life spans of the individuals who constitute it. Arendt introduces her conception of the polis as that which originated in Aristotle’s bios politikos. No aspect of human endeavour that is necessary, either for the maintenance of life itself or for the furthering of the social/economic organization under which we live, is a part of this. I Want You to Be 109 “Neither labor nor work was considered to possess sufficient dignity to constitute a bios at all, an autonomous and authentically human way of life…” (Arendt 1958: 13). Those whose work involves producing what is necessary and useful are not free, since their lives are bound up with human needs and wants. Instead, the polis is that sphere in which the participants are free, and have freely chosen to congregate. Any political organization that is not freely chosen and constituted by the freedom of the participants is not, properly speaking, political in Arendt’s terms. To emphasize this point Arendt tells us that “…the despot’s way of life, because it was ‘merely’ a necessity, could not be considered free and had no relationship with the bios politikos” (13). The political is the sphere of human freedom. The freedom found in the polis is recognized as a freedom of the human world itself, continuing beyond the lives of the individuals who constitute it. It is this transcendence of the natural life span that characterizes the polis as meaningful: The polis was for the Greeks, as the res publica was for the Romans, first of all their guarantee against the futility of individual life, the space protected against this futility and reserved for the relative permanence, if not immortality, of mortals. (56) The political sphere is premised on the assumption that the world will last. What occurs there leaves its trace on humanity itself. It does not die with the death of the individuals who contribute to it. It is the polis that preserves our freedom, in providing the sphere in which we may converse and be known by other free human beings. A world in which there is no public sphere is one in which there is no transcendence of the particular life, in which we “live and die without leaving a trace” (2009: 300). What we call politics now is the social and economic sphere that Arendt views as destructive of the genuinely political. Given the instrumental nature of socioeconomic activity, “the political” now refers to government processes at best, and self-serving or power-oriented machinations at worst. In the case of government legislation, politics is viewed as the art of compromise between competing interests with the aim of meeting the needs and promoting the desires of the citizens. In contrast to this instrumentalist perspective, Arendt‘s conception of the polis as functioning outside of necessity or desire seems an alien concept: she conceives of the political as the highest expression of the best that being human offers us. The political sphere is characterized by action: action is human by definition. All other movements are mere behaviour, responses to stimuli, 110 Chapter Seven not self-determined. While we share our social nature with other animals, the political nature is entirely human. The political nature is a “second nature”, so that to be part of the political sphere one must leave the social or familial sphere, the sphere of relations that are determined by roles and hierarchies, in which we satisfy our wants and needs, rather than express our own free will. The political sphere is characterized by “action (praxis) and speech (lexis), out of which rises the realm of human affairs from which everything merely necessary or useful is strictly excluded.” (1958: 25). The distinction between the two is clear: Natural community in the household ….was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities performed in it… The realm of the polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of freedom, and if there was a relationship between these two spheres, it was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life in the household was the condition for freedom of the polis… freedom is exclusively located in the political realm. (30-31) The polis is the essential condition for eudaimonia, what we often translate as human flourishing. Flourishing, in Aristotelian terms, requires a good deal of luck regarding health and wealth, so that we might be free from the necessities of life to develop our human characteristics. To be free means to be free from ruling or being ruled, it means being equal among equals. There are certainly resonances here with Kant’s ideal of our living as ends-in-ourselves in a Kingdom of Ends. The polis described here remains for Arendt a way of capturing what is essential to human freedom. This is not just an exercise in ontology, but contains a moral claim as well: without our being able to recognize and exercise such freedom we are more susceptible to the threat from totalitarianism, which Arendt saw directly in the form of Stalinism and Nazism, and which remains an issue for us today given the social pressures on freedom we see in modern society. The freedom of individuals found in such a political realm depends on more than the presence of a polis, however. In order for there to be a polis, for the expression of human freedom, there must be individuals, “single, unique”, and others with who these individuals are in relationships as equals. Equality is a feature of the public sphere, while difference and diversity are features of the private. Without the latter, however, the former is not possible. I Want You to Be 111 Part II: The Individual The individual is a central focus of concern for Arendt. Without individuals, there is no one to take responsibility. She argues, in fact, that there is no such thing as “group responsibility”. Only individuals are responsible. There are two strands in Arendt’s thinking on the concept of the individual I will explore here: One is that this individuality is given to us in virtue of our being born. Her account of natality as defining our experience contrasts with Heidegger’s account of our being-toward-death. We do not experience our death, she argues, but our birth is given to us in actual experience. We know that we began, and are, therefore, a beginning. This idea of our being a beginning, a new life arising in the midst of a world otherwise shaped by on-going causal connections, is central to Arendt’s conception of our capacity to initiate actions, to shape a world. The idea of our being beginnings is present in her early work on Augustine. Augustine’s claim “that a beginning be made, man was created” (2009: 479) is echoed throughout her writings on thinking of ourselves as originators, having spontaneity, the capacity to be the first step in a new series of actions. Clearly this is important if we are not to be viewed merely as aspects of an already established causal structure, and if we are to make a difference in the world. Another strand in her thinking on the concept of the individual person is found in her account of the origin of that term: Persona…originally referred to the actor’s mask that covered his individual “personal” face and indicated to the spectator the role and the part of the actor in the play. But in this mask, which was designed and determined by the play, there existed a broad opening at the place of the mouth through which the individual, undisguised voice of the actor could sound. It is from this sounding through that the word persona was derived: per-sonare, “to sound through,” is the verb of which persona, the mask, is the noun. (Arendt 2003: 12). We are persons to the extent that we engage in the activity of speaking with our own voice. When this voice is lost, when the mask covers the voice of the person and speaks for it, as in the case of Eichmann, the individual views himself as a “cog in the machine.”4 When the court of law asks the accused to speak it is on the basis that the trial is that of a self-responsible individual, or person. Self-responsibility assumes that one’s speech is one’s own. A self-responsible being is not a mouthpiece for another, not a cog in a machine run by others. A self-responsible person’s speech and actions originate with herself. 112 Chapter Seven In order for us to be self-responsible, speaking and acting from a place that originates in each of us, our persona, we must be free to do so. What gives us the freedom to do so is a central concern for Arendt. Freedom lies in our capacity to think. The freest activities of the vita activa5 turn out to be those that are wholly constituted by the activity of “thought.” Here we can see how Arendt arrives at this notion phenomenologically: …if no other test but the experience of being active, no other measure but the extent of sheer activity were to be applied to the various activities within the vita activa, it might well be that thinking as such would surpass them all. Whoever has any experience in this matter will know how right Cato was when he said: Numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset – “Never is he more active than when he does nothing, never is he less alone than when he is by himself.” (1958: 325) In thought we are two-in-one, not alone, but with ourselves, originating thought and self-reflection, making active our original, originating character. The account Arendt gives of the person as originator is developed in her metaphor of the “gap” between past and future in which we experience ourselves. She critiques Kafka’s account of the person, K6, who is squeezed into a gap by the pressures of the past and the future on the point at which he attempts to live, arguing that Kafka does not explore how that “gap” itself is the origin of freedom. On her own understanding of the “gap”, it is ontological of human kind that we originate in a “non-time” space produced by the past and the future, directing ourselves infinitely outward. Arendt illustrates her idea with a geometric metaphor in which our trajectory is produced by the confluence of past and future, which is then refracted, or redirected by our presence, angling us in a new direction that is constituted by our presence as much as by the past or future. How do we, by being present, make this happen? Arendt argues that it is our capacity to think that is both necessary and sufficient for our determining ourselves in this space of freedom: Only insofar as he thinks, and that is insofar as he is ageless - a “he” as Kafka so rightly calls him, and not a “somebody” – does man in the full actuality of his concrete being live in this gap of time between past and future. The gap, I suspect, is not a modern phenomenon, it is perhaps not even a historical datum but is coeval with the existence of man on earth. It may well be the region of the spirit, or, rather, that path paved by thinking, this small track of non-time which the activity of thought beats within the time-space of mortal man into which the trains of thought, of remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and I Want You to Be 113 biographical time. This small non-time-space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew (Arendt 1961: 13). The “plodding paving” of the lived life is not achieved by the assertion of tradition, or by serving the functions established by our place in our culture. To refer to the activity of thought, the free expression of our individual, self-responsible self as “plodding” calls our attention to the fact that thinking is not easy: we don’t just do as we wish, say as we wish, entertain any fantasy that occurs to us. Arendt’s commitment to “thinking without a banister”, is crucial to our plodding paving of the life anew: Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality (Arendt 1994: 307). We must hold ourselves up, self-balanced and self-determining, able to think and rethink, reflect and question, maintaining the ideal of the Socratic internal dialogue, rejecting any easy, pre-established routes along which support guide us on our way. And in this way, we might resist the categories imposed by regimes that aim to remove our humanity. Thinking is the capacity we have for self-originating action, both as speech and deed. Its paradigmatic expression is in the public sphere, where we think, that is speak and act, amongst equal and free people. What role, then is played by ‘thinking with oneself’, the solitude that is never lonely? The being-with-myself, as Cato describes it, seems too isolated, too internal, too easily subsumed within the sphere of the private, to play the role of the expression of freedom which requires a public world of political activity. While political freedom is prioritized in Arendt’s work as the primary way of grasping human freedom, this political freedom presupposes the capacity for the inner self to recognize itself and to embrace itself. This inner recognition is not freedom, but the precondition for freedom. The question then is what in our nature makes this precondition for freedom possible? “The grace of love” may, I suggest, be the condition that must be in place for individuality and political freedom to arise. 114 Chapter Seven Part III: Love It is easy enough to think of love as involving passion. If one doesn’t feel something happening to oneself in the presence of a loved one, where’s the love? The indifference William James refers to as a cold intellectual appreciation in relation to fear, when it appears in love threatens to make protestations of one’s devotion vacuous: we need to experience the heartfelt warmth shared by those we love. This passion, as passions do, comes upon us. We don’t choose to love, but discover our love. We are, it might then seem, passive recipients of love, falling into it, being overwhelmed by it, behaving obsessively in the face of it. But, unlike fear, we don’t attribute loving to a cause: no one causes us to love. Despite the language of passivity, we identify ourselves as active when we love: in fact, love gives rise to activity and a sense of purpose, a joy of acting in consort with the loved one for the sheer pleasure of it. We may not choose whom we love, but we seek love out, and claim it as our own, as expressive of ourselves, our individual life. The way in which love seems to create a world of the lovers, removing us from the greater world, suggests love is a private experience. Hannah Arendt warns that the passion of love isolates us from the public world: “Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.” (1958: 242). The “spell” of love can only be intercepted by the child born out of it, and who becomes the way in which the lovers can contribute to the world outside their own. Although the child breaks the spell by contributing to the world, our passion keeps us in a limited, private world. We can neither be related to others, nor, in fact, separated from others through love. The “in-between,” the wider world which we engage in when part of the public life is not available to us, to relate and separate us. This can best be understood by recognizing that separation is not isolation, but distinction. If we cannot be distinguished from others our individuality is lost. This understanding of love is that of Cupiditas, the love that is a passion for a particular object, one which always includes the fear of losing it that arises once the object is possessed. Cupiditas is always frustrated love. It turns in on itself and its objects, since it always needs to protect against threats to the possession of the object of desire. It longs for something to be permanently possessed, which can never be permanently possessed, so it longs for an illusion. Cupiditas is built on the illusion of possession, while suffering the very real fear that this object will be taken against our will. Arendt argues that respect is better suited to the worldly appreciation of others than is the passion of love: “…what love is in its own, narrowly I Want You to Be 115 circumscribed sphere, respect is in the larger domain of human affairs.” “Respect,” she says, “is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities which we may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem” (243). Although we do not respect another in virtue of their qualities, our respect is personal. To understand how this might be, it is worth thinking of this respect as Kantian. For Kant, we are all due respect in virtue of our being persons, not because of a contingent fact about our personhood. Reflecting on the passion of love as the desiring of an object and the ensuing fear of its loss, Arendt concludes: “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only a-political but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces” (242). There is no role to be played by Cupiditas, the passion of love, in the foundational conditions for human freedom. A mere passion, a heat, a bond, a world-isolating cocoon of lovers, might even be a threat to our freedom, as, indeed, it often seems in experience to be. Respect, not love, recognizes human beings as uniquely individual and related to each other as ends in themselves, aware of each other as uniquely individual. But love is also an action, the expression of our persona, our individual voice, an experience that can lead to us appearing more clearly to ourselves, and others appearing more clearly to us. The love that feels like an action does not bind us into a single unit, or cause vacillations between desire and fear. It is the love that, grounded in the recognition of the possibility of the eternal, is shown to be foundational to our experience of freedom. This foundational experience connects us through recognition of the individuality of others and a wish that other individuals will flourish. Such a love does not possess its object, since its object is that another remains individual and exists. Since its desire is not for possession it doesn’t fear the loss of its object, although there is grief if the one loved is harmed. The love itself is not shaped by possession and fear of loss; it is shaped by the dynamic character of discovering the other as single, unique and related to oneself in mutual recognition. Arendt first wrote about love in her PhD thesis, Love and St Augustine. She begins her dissertation with Augustine’s account of love as “craving”: “Augustine writes that ‘to love is indeed nothing else than to crave something for its own sake,’ and further on she comments that ‘love is a kind of craving’” (Arendt 1996: 9). We are directed toward the object of love, “love is ‘a kind of motion’”, as a good we seek for its own sake (9). It represents nothing but its own goodness, and we need it because we do not possess it. Arendt sums up the idea of craving as “the will to have and 116 Chapter Seven to hold” which will give rise to fear as soon as we possess the object craved (10). This craving is central to being human and makes us each who we are: “Such is each as is his love. Strictly speaking, he who does not love and desire at all is a nobody” (18). Love is a defining constituent of being in a world. Understanding ourselves as needing others, as lacking self-sufficiency, motivates us to form bonds with others, “to break out of [our] isolation by means of love” (19). A dilemma arises within the very experience of loving, however. Without it we are nobody, the persona that marks our uniqueness and presence in the world does not exist, but with it we are enslaved by desire and frustration… and so do not experience the freedom we are born for. Arendt summarizes the view of Plotinus on this point: “…to the extent that we are alive and active (and desire is a form of action), we necessarily are involved in things outside ourselves and cannot be free” (21). The description of our flight into the temporal, worldly world and away from ourselves, echoes Heidegger’s account of Das Man as fleeing from ourselves into the world. There seems to be no solution to the problem of our need: either we love the world and lose ourselves by absorbing ourselves in it, or we retreat from the world and find ourselves lost in the question of who we are. Augustine found love of God was the answer. While Cupiditas mediates between man and world, with man forgetting himself in the transit to love of worldly things, Caritas mediates between man and God, with man forgetting himself in the transit to love of Him. Arendt’s approach is to locate the realm of the eternal, not in the religious outlook, but in the public sphere, where eternity, or something close to it, resides in its transcendence of the individuals who constitute it. Cupiditas and Caritas: A Contemporary View of Love Cupiditas is experienced as passion. It comes upon us, it motivates our absorption in each other, often in spite of ourselves, often giving rise to desires we do not desire. When we fail in love, when we are rejected or usurped by another, the loss reminds us how little control we had over the direction of the love. We can feel as if we were overwhelmed by love so that we could not judge well, and the devastation of loss reflects the degree of powerlessness the entire predicament reveals about us. Despite this powerlessness, the passivity, the chanciness of love being good for us, of being returned, and stable, there is also a feeling of activity. But the activity of Cupiditas is the activity of the addict… it is forced upon us by our need. The activity felt when Cupiditas appears to dominate, but which I Want You to Be 117 is, nonetheless, energizing, and expansive arises, I suggest, from a different kind of love, that of Caritas. When Cupiditas feels personal and active, it has elements of Caritas and it is these elements alone that are necessary and sufficient for the experience of love as powerful, active, meaningful. Caritas gives us the experience that our love transcends the particular and does not aim for possession. Cupiditas without the intermingling of Caritas is not recognizably love: it is obsessive and power-based, it is an appetite, not an emotion. It is a craving, as in addiction, it is self-involving while destroying the self, and never other-involving. Cupiditas does not recognize the singularity or autonomy of the person desired in this way. Lust, for instance, is constituted by an appetite for sexual satisfaction. The common conceptual error is to call this a desire for another person. It is peculiar to think that there is a way in which we can possess another. Short of trapping someone in a room, we cannot possess another. Trapping a person in a room involves a form of possession that refers only to the body. The use of drugs, or psychological manipulation can mask or possibly bring about a mental state in the object desired that does not announce its independence from the possessor, but the mental life of another can never be possessed. Describing what must take place in order to “possess” another makes it clear that lustful desire is not a desire for possession of the other, but a need, or urge, or appetite for a set of sensations which result in the cessation of the appetite. Lust drives people to pursue not a person, but an act. Any pursuit of the person is the means for pursuing the act. Nor does one, in lust, possess the sexual act, one performs it in order to satisfy or lose the appetite for it. What of more complex desires for sexual involvement with another? Perhaps romantic obsession is a good illustration of a complex form of Cupiditas which is not so easily shown to be an appetite rather than a form of love. While obsession feels very far from love, associated with stalking and even harming the object “desired” in some way, romantic obsession contains ideas of caring for the desired object while fearing that one may be rejected. I think if we explore this concept, there will be nothing inherently loving about it. The desired object remains a means to the end of fulfilling needs that belong entirely to the person obsessing. A person who has obsessed about another at one time, has no doubt obsessed about others before and will obsess about others in the future. There is a good chance that they will be obsessive in their approach to desiring others. The other is not a particular, a singular person. Obsession clouds the understanding, it does not clarify. And the energy it produces is destructive 118 Chapter Seven not productive. The ways found out of it often involve violence as a means of asserting oneself against the pain produced by the obsessing mind. One could say that the violence done to another about whom one obsesses is mis-directed violence aimed at ending one’s own obsessive experiences. If we add the concept of the romantic to the obsession, obsession does not fare better. This is not to say that it is impossible that a person can overcome the obsession and still remain romantically engaged with the other, or with the thought of the other. But the obsession does none of the work of making this an experience of love. If the romantic feelings are not themselves merely disguised obsessions, then they may actually be feelings describable as Caritas, not Cupiditas. What is the “grace of love,” or Caritas, that makes our experience of love something other than the satisfaction of a desire or appetite? Grace in this context is not the grace found in the love of God, but in something nonetheless sharing in a transcendent nature. Without reference to God, an afterlife, or a higher purpose, the sense of the transcendent qualities can still be found in the making of a human world. Key features of this world are that we are actors, agents, not just an aspect of a greater causal chain; we are single, unique, we are born, and so are beginnings; and we are related to others who are themselves beginnings. We make a difference to the world we co-construct, a difference that lasts beyond our own lifespan. The activity of love is experienced as the energy of relating to another. The heightened pleasure of the other’s voice, of insights, of projects shared, are part of this relational energy. Both people stand out in fuller relief, in Technicolor, in four dimensional space. We become interested in the full person, including their past, photos of them as children; details of their lives as they have grown into the present we share with them, knowledge of the people they have cared about, all become part of the person we are coming to know through loving them. We become more aware of ourselves through coming to know another. We, too, stand out in four-dimensional space, our own past acquires new meanings when another is interested in it. The eyes and ears of the other, their seeing and hearing us, brings us into full relief to ourselves as well as to them, as do our eyes and ears, our seeing and hearing the other, bring the other to him or herself in a fuller form. If we view others as means to our own ends, or objects interchangeable with others, the one we purport to love is diminished, not made fuller by our involvement with them. If each of us is diminished by not actually being loved by the person purporting to love, there is no-one fully there. “We drifted” sums up the account of a relationship in which neither I Want You to Be 119 actually loves the other. We stopped mattering in a particular way, we stopped enriching the presence of the other, and we stopped being enriched. If this is the pattern of our lives, we need to take note. The lack of love, Arendt says, “strictly speaking” makes us a “nobody”. Objects, not people, drift. The lack of love eliminates the individuality, the presence of a persona, the necessary precondition for freedom. Loving Your Neighbour as Yourself. Caritas is not the passion of desire, Cupiditas, but the recognition of another that enlivens both oneself and the other. Love motivates us to deepen our understanding of the other, to live our own lives more fully, to better understand ourselves. Caritas adds something to the world. Love as Caritas has no connection to possession. Love of our neighbour, that is, of our friends, colleagues, and those who make up our world is central to human flourishing. Our capacity to love others adds light and meaning to the world. The light comes from the many perspectives that shape each of us, when we are seen and heard by others who love us. The meaning comes from this being a good in itself. We can experience this light and meaning even when it is not a mutually shared love. Love of those in the public world, the artists, the great public figures, those who touch us from outside our immediate sphere of reference, is love in the ways I have suggested above: the greater dimensionality, the enlivening thoughtfulness, the meaningfulness of their presence. We can also love artworks, or nature, or our community, in this way. We can love any number of beings or presences in the world in this way. A feature of all such experiences is that even when we are on our own, we are not lonely. Solitude, Arendt tells us, is not loneliness, but beingwith-oneself, active in the presence of one’s full life. A love of one’s work, of humanity in general, all this is love of our neighbour, and all give rise to this experience. Solitude is there where loneliness, as found in the “loneliness of the mass man” (1958: 247), might have been. In loneliness, we are not special. We are replaceable by others. The only meaning we have is given to us by our role within a system. We, ourselves, have no importance, no resonance. No trace is left after our death. Dying is as useful as living. In such a state we are vulnerable to the control over life that is the hallmark of totalitarianism. Part IV: Totalitarianism: A Threat for Mass Man Totalitarianism is not mere tyranny, in which a powerful ruler or ruling group forces the people into submission for the glorification of its own 120 Chapter Seven power or an ideal. Totalitarianism has two central features that distinguish it from tyranny: one is that the populace is not bullied or threatened into submitting, but is in fact so thoroughly absorbed into it that it appears even to itself to be willingly contributing to the aims of regime. The possibility of an inner life resisting the regime’s aims is removed: …all public manifestations, cultural, artistic, learned, and all organizations, welfare and social services, even sports and entertainment, are “coordinated.” There is no office and indeed no job of any public significance, from advertising agencies to the judiciary, from play-acting to sports journalism, from primary and secondary schooling to the universities and learned societies, in which an unequivocal acceptance of the ruling principles is not demanded (2003: 33). The other central feature is that it is life-denying. There are no ideals, only the aim of removing human dignity altogether. Anyone at any time can be targeted as a criminal. People might even decide to target themselves. Arendt describes what happens to humans in such an environment: To give but one among many examples: the extermination of Jews was preceded by a very gradual sequence of anti-Jewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse – until a stage was reached where nothing worse could possibly have happened….. We see here how unwilling the human mind is to face realities which in one way or another contradict totally its framework of reference. Unfortunately, it seems to be much easier to condition human behaviour and to make people conduct themselves in the most unexpected and outrageous manner, than it is to persuade anybody to learn from experience, as the saying goes; that is, to start thinking and judging instead of applying categories and formulas which are deeply ingrained in our mind, but whose basis of experience has long been forgotten (37). The nobody, the human being who loses his recognition of himself as unique, and his recognition of others as unique, identifies himself as a cog in a machine run by others. He is lost in the world he purports to dwell in, and his loneliness is all consuming. Thinking and judging, and the recognition of our nature as beginnings rather than parts of a system remain throughout Arendt’s philosophy necessary conditions for human freedom. This self-awareness is what makes possible resistance to the usurpation of our freedom by regimes that aim to invade the individual at the level of his private life and remove the sources of freedom found there. I Want You to Be 121 A precondition for thinking and judging is the recognition of oneself as an originator of thought, not as a cog in a machine that functions best when functioning to fulfil the aims of the machine. It is the recognition of oneself as unique, and of others as unique. It takes work to resist turning others and ourselves into objects. The warning that we are doing so is that we lose interest, both in others and in ourselves. This suggests that the interest, the primal driving interest that is experienced as love, a desire for someone to be, lies at the heart of wanting ourselves to be, and in so being, be alive, thinking, acting, reflecting, making a difference. Conclusion What kind of beings can create a common world with the freedom of the polis? It seems a precondition for the creation of this world is that we are, to begin with, individual and unique. We are defined by our natality, not our mortality, we are a rupture in the flow of time, beginning something new and making a difference by being born. If our being born is followed by our being overtaken by the instrumental values of the culture into which we then find ourselves absorbed, the difference we make is lost. But if we crave making a difference to the world, to be seen and heard by the infinite perspectives provided by others who see and hear us, then we have found the human equivalent of immortality, which is the freedom to contribute to a world that is greater than the sum total of those alive at any point in time. “I want you” is finite, limited and consumable. “I want you to be” steps back from possession and recognizes us as individual: …the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised. For though the common world is the common meeting ground of all, those who are present have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects. Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life… Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear (1958: 57). The innumerable perspectives we have on each other as individuals constitute a shared public world that is greater than the particular moments during which each of us lives. Love as Caritas is the craving for this 122 Chapter Seven sphere that extends beyond the lives of each of us, a precondition for freedom. References Arendt, Hannah (1958): The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —. (1961): Between Past and Future. London: Faber and Faber Limited. —. (1994): Essays in Understanding 1930 – 1954, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. —. (1996): Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —. (2003): Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. —. (2009): The Origins of Totalitarianism. Benediction Classics. Shin, Chiba (1995): ‘Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political: Love, Friendship, and Citizenship.’ Review of Politics, 57:3 (Summer), pp. 505-535. Fine, Robert (2000): ‘Hannah Arendt: Politics and Understanding after the Holocaust.’ In, Social Theory after the Holocaust, ed. Robert Fine and Charles Turner. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 19-45. Kohn, Jerome (2000): ‘Freedom: the priority of the political.’ In, The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 113-129. McKenna, George (1997): ‘Books in Review: Love and Saint Augustine.’ In, First Things 72 (April), pp. 43-47. Miles, Margaret (2002): ‘Volo ut sis: Arendt and Augustine.’ In, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 41, no. 3. (Fall), pp. 221-224. Stortz, Martha (2002): ‘Geographies of Friendship: Arendt and Aristotle. In, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 41, no. 3. (Fall), pp. 225 – 230. Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, A Reporter at Large, “Eichmann in Jerusalem—I”, The New Yorker, February 16, 1963, p. 40. This is the first of a series of articles published in The New Yorker. 2 Stanley Milgram set up a series of experiments in which subjects were asked to administer shocks to people who did not answer questions correctly. The victims were actors pretending that the system administered painful shocks to them, while the subjects remained unaware that the ‘shocks’ were not real. These were set up in response to the controversy surrounding the “ordinariness” of Adolph Eichmann I Want You to Be 123 and established the point that we may all be capable of extreme cruelty when submitting to authority. 3 Orwell, George. 1949. 1984. London: Penguin. 4 Arendt wrote: “Recently, during the discussion of the Eichmann trial, these comparatively simple matters have been complicated through what I’ll call the cog-theory. When we describe a political system – how it works, the relations between the various branches of government, how the huge bureaucratic machineries function of which the channels of command are part, and how the civilian and the military and the police forces are interconnected, to mention only outstanding characteristics – it is inevitable that we speak of all persons used by the system in terms of cogs and wheels that keep the administration running. Each cog, that is, each person, must be expendable without changing the system, an assumption underlying all bureaucracies, all civil services, and all functions properly speaking. This viewpoint is the viewpoint of political science, and if we accuse or rather evaluate in its frame of reference, we speak of good and bad systems and our criteria are the freedom or the happiness or the degree of participation of the citizens, but the question of the personal responsibility of those who run the whole affair is a marginal issue. Here it is indeed true what all the defendants in the postwar trials said to excuse themselves: if I had not done it, somebody else could and would have” (Arendt 2003, 29). 5 The vita activa in this context refers to Arendt’s own account of this in The Human Condition. This refers to the three levels of human existence, labor, work, and action. 6 Arendt is referring here to a work by Kafka, “HE”, a story in a series entitled “Notes from the year 1920”. Translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir. CHAPTER EIGHT THE ART AND TRUTH OF LOVE: FOUCAULT (AND LACAN) ON PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM SANNA TIRKKONEN Introduction Plato’s Symposium is famous for the speeches dedicated to Eros, love1. A party of visible figures of Athens have gathered together after a heavy night of drinking to celebrate the poet Agathon’s victory in a tragedy contest. Instead of getting stone drunk, they decide to praise the god of love each in their own turn as well as they ever can (Plato 1925:177d). The scene gets electrified, when Alcibiades steps in drunk and pours out his heart: he has loved Socrates for years. It seems he still does. From Socrates’ perspective, Alcibiades is no longer a young boy about to bloom and even worse, he hasn’t taken care of himself (epimeleia heautou) accordingly, which is the focal point of Socratic ethics and the condition of happiness of the polis. The very first French translation of the Symposium by Louis Le Roy (1558) left Alcibiades' entrance completely out and ended the dialogue with Diotima's speech. The eruption of drunken Alcibiades in the end of the Symposium was not seen integral or appropriate to the rest of the dialogue neither philosophically nor stylistically. Rather, it was read as a joking coda (Lacan 1961: 19). Contemporary readings have nonetheless emphasized the scene's unifying role and psychologically excruciating quality. Perhaps most famously Martha Nussbaum has argued in the Fragility of Goodness that comprehension of Alcibiades’ speech and his political figure is the only way of grasping the significance of many apparently inconsiderable remarks and understanding the dialogue as a whole (Nussbaum 2001: 166). However, I will reflect on two French thinkers, namely Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, in order to provide a reading of the Symposium, in which love is political and personal, The Art and Truth of Love 125 educational and regressive, active and passive, passionate, cold, disembodied and carnal, violent, appealing and painful, universal and particular, tragic and comic — complex. A description of Michel Foucault’s reading of Plato’s Symposium requires singling out references to the dialogue in the second volume of the History of Sexuality. Foucault wishes to point out the difference between 1) the Socratic-Platonic way of dealing with the question of love and 2) the conventional conception, which is based on the division between activity and passivity. The Socratic-Platonic model introduces a new character in the love relation — the master — and his truth. However, I think Alcibiades’ entrance in the dialogue challenges Foucault’s distinction and supports reading the dialogue as a whole, as Nussbaum suggests. Taking Alcibiades’ role seriously questions any interpretation in which the speeches are seen as Plato’s argumentation with the climax of Socrates’ praise of intellectual love. Reading the Symposium as a unity leads one to ask, what actually happens between the men in the end of the dialogue and how it affects interpreting the rest. Jacques Lacan addresses the issue of the dynamics in his reading of the Symposium, but Foucault rejects his psychoanalytical perspective. Both Foucault and Lacan deal with the hierarchical structures between the men, but respond to them differently. By reading Foucault I will stress the socio-political standpoint of education and the master’s role, and on the other hand the view that the younger men of the dialogue are seen as equal lovers in the end. Through Lacan’s seminar on the Symposium, also the aspects of desire and the private, emotional field are possible to introduce in reflecting political subjectivity and its ethico-political formation. Foucault and Lacan on the Symposium Michel Foucault deals with the Symposium in the Use of Pleasure, the second volume of the History of Sexuality. He studies the transition concerning the art of love (aphrodisia) in antiquity: how does the focus shift from concentrating on the behaviour of the lover to the question of the truth of love itself, or defining true love? Foucault sees that the former subject-object relation between Socrates and Alcibiades is turned up-sidedown in the Symposium. Alcibiades surely has become a powerful figure, but the target of younger men’s love is now Socrates: love is associated with the master’s truth. Lacan reads the Symposium in detail from a psychoanalytical perspective in his 1960–61 seminar on transference. Foucault's reading differs from Lacan's crucially: Foucault re-contextualizes the Symposium in the 126 Chapter Eight pederasty discourse, and by doing so, makes any easy identification with the figure of Socrates quite difficult (Miller 1998: 221). Foucault does write that Lacan did not try to normalize his patients, but formulated a theory of desiring subject (Foucault 1981/2001: 1023), yet Socrates is absolutely not comparable to the analyst in Foucault’s work. He rejects formulating any positive theory of midwifery or establishing a position of maître de la vérité (Miller, 1998: 221). It is possible that Socrates’ suspect liaison with Alcibiades reinforced the judges’ decision to sentence Socrates to death. However, Lacan rejects politicised interpretations of Alcibiades’ words and wishes to talk only about what happens between private individuals, about love (Lacan 1961: 20). Foucault on the other hand provides a historicized reading, which locates the classics in a wider socio-political context within his own project of history of sexuality, in which the Symposium is just one of the many dialogues referred to. Foucault writes that practices concerning sexual pleasure were conceptualized using similar types of categorizations as when speaking of hierarchies and rivalries in the social field. The question of love is asked in this context. Alcibiades wears ribbons, lots and lots of ribbons, indicating victory in his wreath made of ivies and violets (Plato 1925: 212e). Ivies carry the weight of symbolizing Dionysus, god of wine and irrational inspiration, and violets were associated with both Aphrodite and Athens (Nussbaum 2001: 193-4). In the verbal rivalry he remarks that Socrates has to win him in every situation: “He has set his heart on having the better of me every way” (Plato 1925: 222e). Foucault sees analogies in the agonistic structures of the relationships and values attributed to the roles of the partners. Whereas the sex of the partners did not qualify the act or the relations most significantly, activeness however was the factor, which marked superiority (Foucault 1985: 215). The way of using the type of power is that of moderation, and showing moderation to oneself and to others (1985: 199). In the midst of noble speeches, Alcibiades’ appearance in The Symposium embodies a destructive game (agōn) and heart-ache, unsuccessful dynamics of a subject-object relation and mutual disappointment caused on the other hand by Alcibiades’ lack of self-discipline — and Socrates’ philosophical life on the other. And it’s not just a game, as it is well known soon after Alcibiades commits real acts of violence (Nussbaum 2001: 171). Foucault, however, pays surprisingly little attention to Alcibiades' entrance in the second volume of the History of Sexuality. “Surprisingly little”, because he reads very closely Plato’s Alcibiades I in the Collége de France lecture course 1981–1982, the Hermeneutics of the Subject. In Alcibiades I Socrates guides the gorgeous young boy of noble The Art and Truth of Love 127 birth, who appears to be willing to follow his every word. Socrates tells Alcibiades to “take care of himself” and to get to “know himself” before he is ready to reign the polis. In the Symposium we meet Alcibiades again, older and way past his blooming, rosy fresh adolescent years, and it instantly becomes clear, that as the years have gone by, he hasn’t followed Socrates’ guidance, the procedures in finding the philosophical path and self-mastery. In Lacan’s reading it is kept possible to see Socrates having a positive role. Even if Foucault doesn’t analyse the end of the Symposium in detail and he ends with Diotima’s speech, using Foucauldian lenses the tension is not solved: Socrates and Alcibiades are visibly torturing each other in the end of the Symposium, and even if the subject-object relation would be turned over and other objects of desire created, something highly disturbing remains. However, Lacan’s seminar deals in depth with the dynamics of the relationship, especially considering the ambiguous role of the third, which Foucault never discusses. I find that these two readings, by Foucault and Lacan, can be used mutually supportively and complementary, fully taking both socio-political factors and the most intimate feelings into consideration without making a sharp private/public distinction. Activity and Passivity: Lover and the Beloved In the last two parts of the History of Sexuality and in the Hermeneutics of the Subject Foucault portraits non-universalistic ethics and multiple arts or skills (tekhnê) applied in everyday situations. In antiquity, these arts are codified, but they are not sets of rules to be followed. Rather, through education, paideia, they constitute êthos, the relation one has to oneself as a moral subject. Êthos indicates a paradoxical understanding of freedom, which is shown by self-government. The Greek, free men problematized their own individual freedom and “practiced their freedom” by elaborating their lives as respectable2 and as unforgettable as possible (Foucault 1984b/2001: 1533 and Foucault 2011: 405, 429). If ethics means “practicing one’s freedom”, the idea of “freedom” includes the presupposition of restriction and deliberation, which include being in front of, for the eyes of, other people. A person with a beautiful ethos — êthos, which appears in his way of walking, behaving, facing the situations ahead — also practices oneself in a certain way. Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics: “[M]oral or ethical virtue (ethikē aretē) is the product of habit (ethos), and has indeed derived its name, with a slight variation of form, from that 128 Chapter Eight word. […] The virtues on the other hand we acquire by first having actually practised them, just as we do the arts. We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learnt it” (Aristotle 1934: 1103a). By looking at actions themselves, we cannot tell anything about their virtue: the question is how they are done. In Pausanias’ speech in the Symposium Eros is worth praising only if he makes people love, not in any possible manner, but well and beautifully: [I]n our conduct at this moment, whether we drink or sing or converse, none of these things is noble in itself; each only turns out to be such in the doing, as the manner of doing it may be. For when the doing of it is noble and right, the thing itself becomes noble; when wrong, it becomes base. So also it is with loving, and Love is not in every case noble or worthy of celebration, but only when he impels us to love in a noble manner (1934: 181a). The opposition between activity and passivity was essential in the Greek domain of moral attitudes and sexual behaviours. Suspicion of men’s negative and passive effeminacy was not defined according to the relations to male partners but in regard to the activeness in the sexual relation — and in the moral mastering of oneself (Foucault 1985: 85). The active/passive opposition formed the asymmetrical relationship between two partners, erastēs, the lover, and erōmenos, the beloved. They were not two lovers. Eros was understood to be coming from the lover and the beloved couldn’t be the active subject (1985: 239; Halperin 1990: 266; Lacan 1961: 28, 33; Nussbaum 2001: 188). However, the role of erōmenos was more complicated and problematic than mere passivity: the beloved could not yield too easily without continuously testing the worth of the other, or accept too many gifts or tokens of love. Similar apprehension is later recognizable in the tasks of young women. The practices of constant back-and-forth, obstacles and delays, defined the sets of appropriate behaviours between younger boys and older men (Foucault 1985: 196, 224). They included such gestures of the body, which indicated gracefulness, gaze that would signal dignity, acquaintanceships showing quality, and the way of talking, which would display both engagement with serious matters and the ability to have a pleasant, casual conversation (207). It was a morally and culturally overloaded social game, which had to meet the conventional rules of conduct in order to be accepted. Foucault writes that something essential would be missed if the complex practices and precautions were interpreted as the signals and proofs of free attachment (197). Boys’ status as free citizens was however presupposed — the possibility to say no — which made the dynamics indeed a game or The Art and Truth of Love 129 a test (agōn) with delicate strategies,3 which were less clear compared to the marital relation, which took place in the sphere of household (oikos) instead of public places (199, 203). Moreover, not all of the affairs between men were as asymmetrical as those between young boys and mature men: the most debated relationship with disparity and age difference, the object of special philosophical concern, was also the privileged one. The inequality made the relationship valuable and conceivable (195). It was part of the cultivation of those who would one day become the leaders, the elite of the polis: “Sure evidence of this is the fact that on reaching maturity these alone prove in a public career to be men” (Plato 1925: 192a). It was noble to desire what is beautiful and honourable. However, the use of these types of pleasures demanded a particular type of behaviour, a special stylistics (Foucault 1985: 192). In Pausanias’ speech it is a good thing that the boy yields and gratifies his lover. Self-enslavement is justified by seeking virtue, which leads to “intellectual and all other excellence” (Plato 1925: 184d-e): For this youth is also held to have discovered his nature, by showing that he would make anyone the object of his utmost ardor for the sake of virtuous improvement; and this by contrast is supremely honorable. Thus by all means it is right to bestow this favor for the sake of virtue (185b). The problem was, however, how to transform the status of an object into the status of an active subject by establishing a self-mastering relation to one’s decisions, judgements and behaviour. If the culture worships strength and glory, the position of an object has to be overcome, if the boy is to become a respectable figure of the polis. Foucault argues that the problematic relation of a subject and an object is negotiated through lifestyle and askesis, so that the position of an object could be improved and turned into a status of a respectable man. The subject-object relation is formulated anew through ways of existence, behaviour, practices and sets of recommendations of everyday life such as diet, just as well as physical and mental exercises (Foucault 1991: 94-95). The cultivated life (bios) of a boy was to become a matter of common work and concern, an artwork to be modified with anxiousness, because of its evanescent beauty, until reaching the factors constituting an honourable foundation. In ideal cases the contradictory aspects could be turned into a stable tie and socially valuable friendship (filia) — both to oneself and to another (Foucault 1985: 225). Its timing was crucial, a matter of special concern. In the Symposium Alcibiades tells he has tried to withhold his ears as if Socrates was a Siren and flee as fast as he can so that he wouldn’t sit beside him until he was too old4 (Plato 1925: 216a). 130 Chapter Eight It’s the righteousness of the polis, justice, which is the goal, and justifies, the practice and self-observation. In Plato’s dialogue Alcibiades I the title character is a young, extremely handsome aristocrat. In the Symposium he then pours out he has always loved Socrates. In Alcibiades I he is still the promising future leader of Athens. Alcibiades is very eager to take up his position, but Socrates holds him back: he is given a task to find out, which things belong to him and which are part of him. The conclusion is that it’s the soul he must look after, because the body is not what he truly is, it’s a belonging5 (Plato 1955: 130e-131e, 133e). Taking care of oneself is related to justice of the polis, because when a leader knows himself and the structure of his soul, he will also know the structure of the society. When Socrates has proved himself right and Alcibiades agrees that he must “take care of himself” to “know himself”, Alcibiades explicitly states that by so doing, he will develop right-mindedness (135e). He does not question Socrates, but expresses the will do anything to fulfil Socrates’ hopes in his education. It is made clear that “taking care of oneself” is a task and a skill of the elite, the leaders and the superior. Foucault pays attention to “ethical differentiation” (la différenciation éthique) between those who know the codes of care-taking and those who don’t. Constructing êthos is always related to having access to knowledge, its quality, and possibilities of locating oneself in it (Foucault 2009: 63). The visible signs of status and power are understood to be shown not just by the power one uses to others, but as power that one exercises to oneself (Foucault 1984: 105107). Heartbroken Alcibiades and the Unity of the Dialogue Foucault denies he would be searching for a description grasping any “spirit of the time”; instead, he positions his study under the title of the History of Systems of Thought. Lacan wishes to avoid political reading. However, it is tempting to ask, is it a surprise that by his 30’s, Alcibiades has become somebody, who uses seduction inseparably with political power?6 He was dubiously well known not just of doing his best in making the peace negotiations fail between Sparta and Athens, but also making the Queen of Sparta pregnant to ensure the throne would be passed on to his descendant (Lacan 1961: 17; Plutarch 1952: 165). Alcibiades’ seductive power goes together with his arrogance and contempt for order, making him a highly controversial figure in the Athenian socio-political scene, attractive and repulsive, deceitful and appealing all at the same time (Cake 2009: 225). The Art and Truth of Love 131 In Lacan’s seminar Alcibiades is the rupture (Lacan 1961: 15, 21), life that unexpectedly enters, changes the dynamics of the situation and challenges interpretation considering what happened before: things that have been said appear in a new light. Alcibiades is here and now in flesh. When Alcibiades enters the room, he takes his power as given and appoints himself president of the party. He changes all the rules that were agreed upon in the beginning of the dialogue: how the speeches should be held and how much should one drink. Instead of modesty, which has characterized the party so far, proportions come from now on in wine coolers (Plato 1925: 213e-214a). Supporting the thesis considering Alcibiades’ role in the unity of the dialogue, we can observe that the issue of divine and carnal love has been addressed before as well, namely in Pausanias speech. Pausanias makes a distinction between heavenly and popular loves, each having their own gods, named alike: True, if that goddess were one, then Love would be one: but since there are two of her, there must needs be two Loves also. Does anyone doubt that she is double? Surely there is the elder, of no mother born, but daughter of Heaven, whence we name her Heavenly; while the younger was the child of Zeus and Dione, and her we call Popular (180d). Alcibiades is accused of drawing wives away from their husbands and husbands away from their wives considerably (Plutarch 1952: 156-157). With the reputation of having affairs both with men and women, he can be recognized of the popular love: Pausanias explains it is the love that “is seen in the meaner sort of men who, in the first place, love women as well as boys; secondly, where they love, they are set on the body more than the soul” (181b). The other love of Heavenly goddess partakes only of men: But the other Love springs from the Heavenly goddess who, firstly, partakes not of the female but only of the male; and secondly, is the elder, untinged with wantonness: wherefore those who are inspired by this Love betake them to the male, in fondness for what has the robuster nature and a larger share of mind (181c). Socrates and Alcibiades are two distinctive characters in Athens, with a crucial difference when it comes to love affairs, which creates the strained, torturous tension between the two men: if Alcibiades’ love seeks to conquer and then possess, Socrates seeks to establish a love relationship in accordance with his philosophical life and its aims. When Alcibiades speaks of love, he speaks of one person, uniqueness and the particular; 132 Chapter Eight Socrates speaks of deductive, scientific and universal episteme (Nussbaum 2001: 186-187). However, Socrates’ evasion and rejection is seductive itself as Alcibiades wishes at the same time to be close to Socrates and to overcome Socrates’ virtue bringing him down from the world of ideas on the level of Alcibiades’ other conquests (Cake 2009: 226, 228). Alcibiades enters the room visibly drunk and obviously not so lovely and beautiful — he has not taken care of himself accordingly. Plato writes in Laws about the three natural desires, which need to be controlled in order to do so, and drinking is one of them, among eating and sexual drives (Plato 1967/68: 782e-783a; Halperin 1990: 276). It is emphasized that Socrates never appears to be under the influence of alcohol, which Alcibiades also points out, together with a list of Socrates’ deeds and ordeals in difficult circumstances, which indicate admirable self-mastery: Socrates walking barefoot on ice, Socrates standing still for a day in his thoughts, Socrates as a war hero — and Socrates continuously rejecting Alcibiades’ persistent attempts to seduce him. Despite, or perhaps because of his self-discipline, Socrates is nevertheless able to enjoy everything (Plato 1925: 220a). Alcibiades, instead, is a slave or a prisoner in Socrates’ presence. Socrates’ words penetrate listeners’ ears like the satyr Marsyas’ music, and Alcibiades says: “I find my heart leaping and my tears gushing forth at the sound of his speech, and I see great numbers of other people having the same experience” (215e). Socrates makes Alcibiades feel his life is not worth living as it is, he is ashamed of himself, deficient, and very much aware of the lack of self-care (216a-b). Reflecting the role of Alcibiades’ speech forming the unity of the dialogue it is noteworthy that the theme of shame is taken up already in the very first speech, held by Phaedrus. It also entails the relationship structured according to the pattern of erastēs and erōmenos, which clearly has portrayed the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, so far. Phaedrus invites the others to imagine a city or an army, which would be composed of lovers — they would be the best possible citizens in mutual rivalry and honour, avoiding being ashamed in each other’s eyes: I for my part am at a loss to say what greater blessing a man can have in earliest youth than an honorable lover, or a lover than an honorable favorite. […] What shall I call this power? The shame that we feel for shameful things, and ambition for what is noble; without which it is impossible for city or person to perform any high and noble deeds (178c-d, emphasis added). Alcibiades is indeed ashamed and speaks in heart-ache. In his pain he admits he sometimes wishes Socrates was dead, even if he knows he The Art and Truth of Love 133 would then be even more miserable. He tries to stuff his ears and avoid Socrates, and still Alcibiades finds Socrates everywhere: the whole painful outburst, at times dressed in levity, begins when Alcibiades suddenly sees Socrates, who was sitting next to Agathon, and flies into a rage. They throw abuses in the air, and Socrates turns to Agathon: Agathon, do your best to protect me, for I have found my love for this fellow no trifling affair. From the time when I fell in love with him I have not had a moment’s liberty either to look upon or converse with a single handsome person, but the fellow flies into a spiteful jealosy which makes him treat me in a monstrous fashion (213c-d). In the quote above, Socrates is the lover, Alcibiades just happens to be jealous and violent. However, Alcibiades’ experience of the affair is quite different. He doesn’t see reconciliation between them possible (213d), and he accuses Socrates of loving all beautiful young boys hovering spellbound around them. Nonetheless he just pretends not to know anything, dissembles unawareness of what is happening (216d). Socrates’ philosophic discourses strike in the souls of the young and innocent worse than if they were bitten by snakes, and they are forced to do and say whatever they will. Alcibiades cries: “I have been bitten by a more painful creature, in the most painful way that one can be bitten: in my heart, or my soul, or whatever one is to call it, I am stricken and stung by his philosophic discourses” (218a). Body or soul — Alcibiades doesn’t care about the distinction. He claims several boys have had the same destiny as himself with Socrates: they have all been deceived by his words so that they also have ended up running after him (222b), just like everybody else in the room. They have been bitten by the passionate madness that philosophy causes. Foucault points out, the roles get reversed, or rather, the young boys become active lovers, and the beloved ones disappear. True love Foucault sees Socratic-Platonic perspective to love affairs radically different from the relations conceived as “courtships” and games of honour between erastēs and erōmenos. Foucault reads the first speeches of the Symposium as pastiche of customary understandings of love (Foucault 1985: 230). Foucault claims that Socrates’ speech, which refers to Diotima’s words, frames the whole question in a different way: the question no longer is who and how should one love in order for the relationship to be honourable. The question is: what is love? What is love in its very being? (233). 134 Chapter Eight Foucault doesn’t actually wish to stress the fact that we can find the theme of directing love to the soul of the beloved rather than to the body. He sees the importance elsewhere. The truth acquired through Eros’ involvement is not for all: Diotima speaks through Socrates’ mouth that those who are “pregnant in their souls” (and Socrates is the midwife), bring forth prudence and virtue, of which the highest concerns the regulation of cities (Plato 1925: 209a). This kind of person welcomes beautiful rather than the ugly bodies in this pregnancy, also resourceful discussions of virtue, and that’s where the education of the noble should begin (209b-c). Diotima provides a philosophical justification for an important institution of Athenian male society and an ethic of pederasty (Halperin 1990: 258). The most famous part of the dialogue is Diotima’s description of climbing up the ladders from a beautiful body to other beautiful bodies, then beautiful deeds and finally beauty itself (Plato 1925: 210a). Beautiful bodies are part of the process, but disparagement of the carnal love does not in itself signify the essence of true love: true love is beyond the appearances of the object. It is in the relation to truth (Foucault 1985: 239). The problem of the relationship, or that of the object, doesn’t fully disappear in Foucault’s reading. Thus, the question considering the problematic relation is responded to differently. In the Phaedrus, even when an asymmetrical game between erastēs and erōmenos is presupposed, they both have alike movements in their souls towards the truth: also the beloved one gets uplifted by the wave of desire and wings start to grow in his soul (240; Plato 1925b: 256c-d). In the Symposium, however, the one who is better acquainted with the concerns of love is also the master of truth. Foucault finds a new figure making its appearance on the scene: the personage of the master turns the game upside down. In the replacement of the lover it is now the master who becomes the object of love for all those young men looking for the truth. To be more precise, the object is the master’s wisdom — of which Lacan also discusses in the 1960–61 seminars. Master’s wisdom is also the principle keeping one from yielding. The young, gorgeous boys with rival suitors are now the ones following Socrates, doing everything they can to seduce him (Foucault 1985: 241). Socrates introduces the type of domination in these relationships, which is based on the dominion which he exercises over himself. In their journey together the master of truth teaches the meaning of wisdom, and what is the love that one is feeling. In the centre of the observation are not the object and his status, but love and the truth, to which the subject is capable of. Socrates doesn’t try to define proper and acceptable conduct, but the type of self-movement — work upon oneself The Art and Truth of Love 135 — which enables to establish a relation to true being (243). The aim of asceticism was not to turn down the love of young boys, but to find a way of giving it a form and valorising it through stylistics (245). Hence, the characters that remain are the master and a bunch of active lovers. It’s not a coincidence the others are doing their best in praising Eros, all in their unique and brilliant style, but Alcibiades praises, and insults, Socrates. In Diotima’s description Eros sounds very much like him: Eros, just like Socrates, functions as a mediator between gods and human beings (Plato 1925: 202e).7 He is ugly, poor and defined by a lack, but always machinating on the behalf of beautiful and good: Now, as the son of Resource (Poros) and Poverty (Penia), Love is in a peculiar case. First, he is ever poor, and far from tender or beautiful as most suppose him: rather is he hard and parched, shoeless and homeless […] always weaving some stratagem; desirous and competent of wisdom, throughout life ensuing the truth (203c-d). Eros/Socrates is between ignorance and wisdom, because if he possessed wisdom, there would be no need for philosophy (204a; Tuominen 2011: 8). Everything he gets in his hands slips away. He “is flourishing and alive at the hour when he is abounding in resource; at another he is dying, and then reviving again” (203e). Eros is not the object of love, which are always all beautiful and lovely, but a love, which is more complex, a multi-dimensional being (204c). He doesn’t possess and he cannot be possessed. The Empty Object of Desire and the Role of the Third Foucault’s reading doesn’t stretch as much beyond Diotima’s words as Lacan’s. Lacanian interpretations seek more detailed analysis of the dynamics of the last part of the dialogue. Lacan draws a parallel between Socrates’ intellectual midwifery and analyst’s role (Lacan 1961: 21; Miller 1998: 213). Paul Allen Miller writes that Lacan’s point is not to psychoanalyze Plato or provide an ahistorical reading of the Symposium, but to demonstrate why analysts should read Plato — the situation, in which a person presupposes certain knowledge to be possessed by, or hidden in, the other, is not unique to the analyst’s couch (Miller 1998: 210; Lacan 1961: 166). Lacan also wishes to diversify the interpretation of such a scene. Lacan sees transference in the Symposium as more complex than just a metaphorical love, in which the analyst occupies the place of the object of desire in the patient’s extra-clinical life (Miller 1998: 210). 136 Chapter Eight Hence, I think there is no reason to restrict his reading to a clinical context. Alcibiades does see Socrates’ knowledge as something desirable and something he wants to possess, but Socrates himself wants to indicate he knows nothing (Lacan 1961: 166). Alcibiades compares Socrates to the statues of the Sileni, ugly creatures following Dionysius. Despite the hideous surface the little silenoi contained jewels within. The image is simultaneously repulsive and seductive as Socrates is a jewel inside its casing (Cake 2009: 227-228; Lacan 1961: 151): Whether anyone else has caught him in a serious moment and opened him, and seen the images inside (ta entos agalmata), I know not; but I saw them one day, and thought them so divine and golden, so perfectly fair and wondrous, that I simply had to do as Socrates bade me (Plato 1925: 216e217a). The precious things within him (agalma) are made exactly of the same material — nothing (Lacan 1961: 156). Socrates wants to point out desire and its power beyond himself and guide Alcibiades to find the philosophical path and his own potentiality (Cake 2009: 238). When Alcibiades tells Socrates he will come and sit by his side, Socrates responds: “By all means […] here is a place for you beyond me” (Plato 1925: 223e). As a younger boy Alcibiades had believed, that if he only followed Socrates and let’s himself be guided, he would gradually learn to see eternal and immutable beauty, and give up his dreams of wealth and glory. His gaze would be that of thought (Moronchini 2007: 19). In Lacan’s seminar, Socrates denies he would possess the substance within him, which is the object of Alcibiades’ desire. Socrates recognizes instead, that in fact Alcibiades desires Socrates’ desire, and seeks any signs of Socrates’ love to be able to possess it as an object. In itself, the object of desire is empty for Lacan, and the analyst’s role is to make visible the “lost object” of human desire (Miller 1998: 212). Whereas Foucault concentrates on the overturning of the subject-object relationship, for Lacan the manifold transferential interplay between Socrates and Alcibiades has two levels: 1) inversion in which erastēs and erōmenos exchange places, but also 2) occupation of the possible, empty third position (210). In the end of the Symposium the love triangle takes place between Socrates, Alcibiades and Agathon. Agathon (Gr. good) represents everything that the Greek thought was noble, desirable, good and beautiful in appearance. He lies next to Socrates until Alcibiades wedges himself in between the two. Agathon is one of Alcibiades’ new cynosures, but being almost in his 30’s, neither is he a young boy. It is The Art and Truth of Love 137 made clear that Socrates is Alcibiades’ first love, but Socrates has systematically rejected him despite the persistent attempts of seduction — he refuses to adopt the position of being Alcibiades’ erōmenos. Now Alcibiades must also become a lover instead of being the beloved one. In the Lacanian reading, Socrates mistreats Alcibiades in order to make him the subject of his own desires, to recognize his own desire in Socrates’ rejection. The third party, and identification with the Socrates' vacant third position, makes possible the relationship between erastēs and erōmenos to change the active/passive or subject/object oppositions (213). By praising Agathon’s beauty, Socrates displays Alcibiades as a lover, which confirms Alcibiades’ new position (213). Socrates also, now in his turn, calls Alcibiades’ speech a Silenic act, in which Alcibiades is the active seducer, Agathon the presumed object: [F]or you think you must keep me as your undivided lover, and Agathon as the undivided object of your love. But now you are detected: your Satyric or Silenic play-scene is all shown up. Dear Agathon, do not let the plot succeed, but take measures to prevent anyone from setting you and me at odds (Plato 1925: 222d). Lacan’s interpretation makes possible a theoretical construction of intersubjective relation, which I find dangerous if seen universally: Bruno Moronchini writes that here intersubjective relation necessarily follows the structure of subject-subject-object: in order for the two to become subjects, equals, they need a third, which is not a subject. Lacan ends his seminar by saying: “Agathon, towards whom, at the end of the Symposium, Socrates’ praise is going to be directed, is a royal idiot. He is the biggest idiot of them all; he is even the only complete idiot!” (Lacan 1961: 372). Does Socrates in fact offer Agathon the role of erōmenos, whose task is to reject and yield in appropriate alternation? It does seem at first that Alcibiades and Socrates are throwing Agathon around and he changes seats to sit next to Socrates as the game proceeds. Earlier in the dialogue, in the beginning of Socrates’ speech he makes Agathon respond to his questions only by yes or no answers, and just to follow the predefined signification chain. However, in the quote above, Socrates invites Agathon not to accept the position of an “undivided object”. In order to be a fullscale seducer, subject also must become an object of the other’s desire if he really wants to be a subject (Moronchini 2007: 18). I think it's not fully clear whether Agathon remains an object. Referring to Foucault, the younger men would now also become lovers: (Halperin 1990: 293) they are aware of Socrates’ lack (293). 138 Chapter Eight Reflections I have argued in favour of reading the Symposium as a unity, in which Alcibiades’ speech plays the most significant role. In the ethical discourse on pederastic relationships taking the political setting into consideration, it is very difficult to read Alcibiades’ entrance as a mere joke. Foucault, however, sees Platonic-Socratic love being argued in Diotima’s words emphasizing scala amoris, rising gradually from the beautiful bodies to the intellectual level. Lacan, on the other hand fails to see the new hierarchy created between the master and the younger men. In the end of the dialogue the conflict is far from being solved. Alcibiades’ speech does cause some laughter because of its frankness (parrēsia): he is tragic and comic, and everything lightens up — but what did they learn in fact? It would be too easy to claim that Alcibiades just doesn’t yet realize that he has reached the position of a subject, and instead he continues asking Socrates for the signs of love with no awareness of his progress (Lacan 1961: 140). Martha Nussbaum reflects Alcibiades partly wishes to remain an erōmenos, (Nussbaum 2001: 188) I prefer thinking he just no longer allows himself to be educated by the master. If his words are directed to Agathon, as expressed by both Alcibiades and Socrates, he posits himself in-between, becoming the third party (Moronchini 2007: 21). Alcibiades doesn’t want just to be loved, but to love like Socrates loves (18). Perhaps Alcibiades actually sees the nothingness, the impossible, who knows. Or maybe he restlessly continues to search the objects of desire elsewhere never really finding anything else but the lack (20). We know Alcibiades will ruin his political career within a year after being accused of mutilating the faces and genitals of the Hermae statues, signifying hope for the Athenians. He will be murdered after a conspiracy, in which Plato’s family took part (Nussbaum 2001: 169, 171). And Socrates, what does he learn? As the morning comes and the cocks are crowing everyone else, except Agathon, Aristophanes, the comedy writer, and Socrates, is ether asleep or gone. The three men are discussing and drinking out of a large vessel (Plato 1925: 223c). In fact, Socrates is arguing with Agathon and Aristophanes until he makes them agree (homologein) “that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well.” They were being driven to the conclusion, by Socrates, just like he always does. Aristophanes falls asleep, and eventually Socrates and Agathon, the man who represents tragedy and everything that is desirable, are the only ones awake (223d). When Agathon falls asleep too, Socrates rises, goes away and spends the day at the Lyceum like any ordinary day, as if nothing at all had happened the night before — nor touched his soul. The Art and Truth of Love 139 References Aristotle (1934): Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham. London: Harvard University Press. Cake, A.D.C. (2009): ‘Lacan’s Psychoanalysis and Plato’s Symposium: Desire and the (In)Efficacy of the Signifying Order.’ In, Analecta Hermeneutica, no. 1, pp. 224-239. Foucault, Michel (1981/2001): ‘Lacan, le ’liberateur’ de la psychanalyse’. In, Dits et Écrits II, eds. Daniel Defert & François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 1023-1924. —. (1983/2001): ‘Usage des plaisirs et techniques de soi’. In Dits et écrits II, eds. Daniel Defert & François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 1358-1380. —. (1984): Histoire de la sexualité III. Le souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard. —. (1984b/2001): ‘L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté’. In Dits et Écrits II, eds. Daniel Defert & François Ewald. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 1527-1548. —. (1985): History of Sexuality II. The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books. —. (2001): L’herméneutique du sujet. Cours au Collège de France 19811982. Paris: Gallimard. —. (2009): Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France 1984. Paris: Gallimard. Halperin, David M. (1985): Platonic Erôs and What Men Call Love’. In, Ancient Philosophy no. 5, pp. 161-204. —. (1990): ‘Why is Diotima a Woman? Platonic Erōs and the Figuration of Gender’. In, Before Sexuality. The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, eds. David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1961): Transference. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan 1960–61. Book VIII, trans. Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts. Miller, Paul Allen (1998): ‘The Classical Roots of Poststructuralism: Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault.’ In, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, no. 5(2), pp. 204-226. Moronchini, Bruno (2007): ‘On Love. Jacques Lacan and Plato’s Symposium.’ In European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Humanities, Philosophy, Psychotherapies, no. 25(2). Nussbaum, Martha. (2001): The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 140 Chapter Eight O’Hara, Daniel T. (1991): ‘Michel Foucault and the Fate of Friendship’. In Boundary 2, 18(1), pp. 83-103. Tuominen, Miira. (2011): ‘Plato’s Symposium: Erôs of the Individual in Diotima’s Speech,’ (An International PPhiG Symposium Feminist Theory and the Philosophical Tradition, University of Helsinki. Plato (1925): Symposium. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9, trans. Harold N. Fowler. London: Harvard University Press. —. (1925b): Phaedrus. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 9, trans. Harold N. Fowler. London: Harvard University Press —. (1955): Alcibiades I. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vol. 8, trans. W.R.M. Lamb. London: Harvard University Press —. (1967/68): Laws. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 10-11, trans. R.G. Bury. London: Harvard University Press. Plutarch (1952): The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Notes 1 On the difficulty of translating erôs, see Halperin (1985) and Tuominen (2011). The Cynics made a certain difference in this respect as their aim was to show the scandalous and dispised by their own behaviour (Foucault, Le courage de la vérité 2009). 3 Foucault is especially interested in the most problematized relationships: those between mature men and young boys. David M. Halperin remarks the adult male citizens could only have sexual relations with inferiors in social and political status: women, boys, foreigners and slaves — those who did not have the same political and legal rights and privileges. It was not acceptable for the future rulers of Athens to show willingness to adopt a subordinate role with other men. (Halperin 1990, 266−267). 4 Pausanias, on the other hand sees as respectable those relationships, which are established at older age. (Symp 181c–d.) 5 Physical activities were an essential part of the education of the noble, but Foucault explains that in Alcibiades I the investigation is to be done on the highest level, that of reflection with the master, by theoreia: looking the other in the eyes and seeing the sense, sight, itself instead of the material (Foucault 2001, 68). 6 Foucault points out that Xenophon indicates in his Symposium that there is nothing wrong with Socrates’ educational goals. Rather, it is one’s own fault s/he hasn’t continued the constant combat in controlling himself. The ongoing struggle for continence, the maintenance, which rules over pleasures and desires, is called enkrateia. (Foucault 1985, 65.) See, Xenophon, Symposium. Xenophon in Seven Volumes. Vol. 4. (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1979). 7 See Pierre Hadot. Qu'est-ce que la philosophie antique? (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). 2 CHAPTER NINE LOVE AND THE PRECIOUSNESS OF THE INDIVIDUAL ELIZABETH DRUMMOND YOUNG The role of love as knowledge-provider has been well-attested in modern times. Developments in the philosophy of emotion have led to a greater understanding of what we can learn about others when we love them. I would like to examine the thought that a particular type of love has a vital role in highlighting the individual as unique and irreplaceable. The consequences of establishing this, although I do not discuss them here, stretch well beyond the bounds of academic moral philosophy into the realm of practical applications of this point in political and legal systems. To develop this theme, I have chosen to focus on the work of two contemporary philosophers, Raimond Gaita and Jean-Luc Marion. There are two themes concerning the sacredness of individuals and the importance of love in the philosophy of Raimond Gaita which can be fruitfully explored through the work of Jean-Luc Marion, despite the fact that each philosopher operates within a different tradition. The first theme coalesces around the idea that each human being is sacred (or precious, if we wish to avoid religious overtones) and irreplaceable. The second theme concerns the nature of the love which, it transpires, is a source of our knowledge of this preciousness. According to Gaita, the sacredness of individuals has a philosophical role over and above a mere Kantian-style acknowledgement of the dignity of each human being, although sacredness and dignity are certainly related. If we recognise individuals as sacred, we do more than respect them; we both understand and feel the effects which extremes of good and evil have on them and this recognition has profound implications for morality. Explaining how we come to recognise this sacredness is integral to Gaita’s philosophical project, which is deeply ingrained with his view of life as a whole and not merely a matter of academic interest. He considers that such sacredness is often made clear to us by witnessing 142 Chapter Nine love, particularly what he calls the “impartial love of the saints.” This love underpins the view that each individual is sacred and it is distinctive in that its purity is a brute fact of the world. Gaita considers there to be no further metaphysical fact of the matter beyond this pure love.1 Gaita’s account faces two challenges, which I suggest can be addressed by linking his work with that of Jean-Luc Marion.2 The first challenge is that Gaita’s reluctance to provide any background, metaphysical or otherwise, to the love which supports this crucial moral insight of the sacredness of the individual may seem inadequate, since this sacredness is an underlying factor behind many important ethical concepts such as dignity and rights. This dismissal of anything behind this love has resonances with the work of Jean-Luc Marion. Marion claims to reach beyond metaphysics both in his theological work, where he talks about God ‘without being’ or beyond being, thus escaping the Kantian proscription on speculative metaphysics, and in his discussion of love, where he claims that love precedes being metaphysically.3 Although he is reticent about it in his writings on love, Marion’s description of love has an ultimate grounding in God, which Gaita’s does not, although some have argued that Gaita is wrestling against the inevitable and that his work is undeniably theological.4 My suggestion is that Gaita and Marion have common ground in the acceptance of love as irreducible, but that Marion can help by filling in the background which Gaita chooses to ignore. The second challenge to Gaita concerns his use of the term ‘impartial’ in the context of ‘the impartial love of the saints’. Gaita implies strongly that there is a close connection between particular, partial love (and he gives parental love as the example) and impartial love, as exemplified by universal love or love for our fellow man. He considers the idea of some kind of interdependence between the two, before finally coming down on the side of impartial love as the grounding for the sort of behaviour which he regards as saintly. The worry is that the term ‘impartial’ seems at odds with Gaita’s desire to establish a view of morality where what matters morally is recognising a person as an individual rather than following universal principles which proclaim dignity and rights for all. My suggestion is that it is partial rather than impartial love which is the origin of the saintly love portrayed by Gaita, even if partiality is not its full characterisation. Unlike the contrast which Gaita draws between partial and impartial love, Marion proposes the view that love is univocal. Friendship, charity, filial, parental, sensual and carnal love, love of God all fall under the erotic phenomenon according to Marion. We are all lovers before we are anything else, he claims. His characterisation of love goes beyond the usual distinctions of partial and impartial. Love and the Preciousness of the Individual 143 I propose to add support to Gaita’s two themes, namely the sacredness of individuals as revealed by love and the nature of that love, by drawing on the resources of Marion’s work, in particular The Erotic Phenomenon. In doing so, I hope to provide some answers to the two challenges I have outlined. First, I want to illustrate the core of Gaita’s philosophy with regard to the importance of the individual and its relation to dignity and respect. Gaita's work usually proceeds by provoking discussion of startling, real-life examples, some of which are autobiographical, as in the spirit of Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon. In the introduction to his work, Good and Evil, Gaita outlines the kinds of examples he uses to discuss the various manifestations of human dignity: The encounters I mark are dramatic........Dramatic though my examples are, I suggest that they all reveal something universal..... I do not always characterise in the same way what is revealed. Sometimes I say that it is the inalienable preciousness or the infinite preciousness of every human being. (I acknowledge that when 'infinitely' qualifies 'precious' it signals desperation, but no more, I think, than when “unconditional” qualifies “respect” or when “inalienable” qualifies “dignity”). Sometimes I speak of seeing the full humanity of someone. At other times I adopt more Kantian idioms and speak of the unconditional respect owed to every human being, or of the inalienable dignity each human being possesses. (Gaita 2004: xv) Gaita uses the word “sacred” to encapsulate these different expressions concerning an individual's worth. He thinks the word “sacred” points in two different directions; firstly, to theological and metaphysical doctrine, and secondly, to the language of love. He claims there is little philosophical writing which deals with the second aspect of the sacredness, namely the “sense of awe, mystery and beauty that is naturally expressed in the language of love”. Jean-Luc Marion's work supplies precisely this sort of writing and this is particularly evident in The Erotic Phenomenon, which charts the progress of what Marion terms an erotic reduction, following roughly the manner of a phenomenological reduction, and concentrating mainly on describing love between a man and a woman. Gaita on Remorse and the “Metaphysical Core” Before turning to his discussion of love, it is worth noting that Gaita also considers that the reactive attitude of remorse is capable of highlighting the importance of the pricelessness of the individual and the irreplaceability of each of us. In general, Gaita finds a consequentialist 144 Chapter Nine morality deeply unappealing, where what matters for moral judgment is the state of affairs which is brought about by an agent’s action. This is partly because he considers such a morality completely inadequate to the task of explaining reactive attitudes such as remorse, because the focus is on the doing of wrong rather than on the individual to whom wrong is done, and indeed fails to recognise the fact that the person is an individual rather than merely one among many. In Gaita’s writings, remorse plays a strong part in understanding evil and he thinks that there must be a real sense of wronging a particular person for remorse to be properly understood. Remorse for Gaita brings together the significance of the evil which has been carried out by someone together with a sense of the reality of the victim. This sense of reality is not merely a collection of particular personality traits or indeed any recognizable characteristics derived from traditional theories of self-identity. Gaita’s view is that: “There is a form of human presence that is not wholly explicable in terms of the impact of a person’s individuating features. My claim is that this individuality is internal to our sense of what it is to wrong someone” (150). The power of other humans to affect us in their individuality is seen clearly in the response of remorse. Remorse makes us realise that even the anonymous person whom we have wronged is subject to the demands which are internal to friendship, no matter whether he has any friends or not; that he is subject to the demands and rationality of love, we might say. Gaita also makes the point that others have this effect on us unconditionally; we do not have to value any qualities that an individual has nor indeed to know anything about them to feel remorseful towards them. Remorse is directed at the harm done to a particular individual, not to just another human being and it is in our attitude of remorse that we appreciate fully their individuality. Gaita often quotes Simone Weil with approval, but it would seem that she would not agree with Gaita in this aspect of his discussion of suffering and remorse. The idea that there should be something left, a metphysical core, for want of a better term, which individuates the person after all dignity has gone, is repugnant to her, as it seems to undermine both suffering and the doing of evil. 5 She wants us to understand the reality and force of evil by accepting that it can destroy an individual totally – that is what is so terrible about it. The thought that something inviolable might remain in an individual even after appalling suffering seems to diminsh the force of evil for Weil, but the opposite is true for Gaita. It is interesting that Gaita is happy to acknowledge something like a metaphysical core by referring to, “a form of human presence that is not wholly explicable in terms of the impact of a person’s individuating features”, in the context of Love and the Preciousness of the Individual 145 suffering, evil and remorse, but shies away from this in his discussion of love. Gaita’s Example of Pure Love I now want to describe one of Gaita's best known examples where he witnesses a nun's behaviour towards certain psychiatric patients (Gaita 2000: 18-27). These people were “at rock-bottom”, he says. They had been incarcerated for over thirty years in some instances, were no longer visited by family and friends and were treated brutally, inhumanly indeed, by many of the hospital staff, including some psychiatrists who were supposedly caring for them. The young Gaita, a worker on the ward, considered that he and a small group of good psychiatrists felt differently towards these patients. He held the view that the patients were his equals, even though they were completely bereft of dignity. He was happy with this view and his own behaviour in this regard, until he witnessed a visit by a nun to those same patients. By her body language and behaviour towards them, he realised that in fact he had only paid lip service to the equality and shared humanity of these patients; he and the like-minded psychiatrists had not felt it in their hearts, and he realised that this would be translated in his behaviour towards them. They had merely respected an intellectual ideal of equality and humanity, and that was not enough. By contrast, the nun showed the patients love, and this revealed their sacredness to Gaita as a witness to love. This is an example which is powerfully described, and I think it reflects a common ethical experience, namely, that we may hold to an opinion which involves practising some sort of benevolence towards others. We congratulate ourselves on holding this opinion, are rather smug about it; it may be said that we are more in love with the opinion and ourselves for holding it than we are with the others whom it purportedly concerns. This self-love or love of principle need not be exaggerated or distasteful, as Gaita's example of his own behaviour demonstrates. It need only be sufficient for those who hold it to be living under a misapprehension of their moral qualities. Gaita respected the humanity of the patients, but he did not feel it in his heart. The nun in Gaita's example, by contrast, does what he calls “the work of saintly love”. There is no condescension in her attitude toward the patients. Her demeanour toward them does not reveal the enormous disparity between the good fortune of her normal life and the isolated loneliness which is theirs. Gaita’s example has distinct phenomenonlogical overtones. An ethical truth - the sacredness of these patients in the absence of any ordinary 146 Chapter Nine conception of dignity- is revealed to him as he watches the tableau of the nun and the patients. Gaita himself says: “I felt irresistibly that her behaviour was directly shaped by the reality it revealed. I wondered at her [the nun], but not at anything about her except that her behaviour should have, so wondrously, this power of revelation” (19). The idea that Gaita is overcome by this revelation is reminiscent of Marion’s concept of the saturated phenomenon. Marion has developed this concept to explain those phenomena which exceed the Kantian categories of quantity, quality, relation and modality to such a degree that they interrupt or blind the intentional aim. The intuition, in the Kantian sense, is overwhelmed by the phenomenon. If it seems too strained to make this comparison between Gaita and Marion, it is worth remembering that Marion cites a particular and well-known example of friendship as an example of a saturated pheonomenon as event (that is, one which exceeds the Kantian category of quantity), which has similarities with Gaita’s example. Marion refers us to Michel de Montaigne’s commentary on his friendship with Etienne La Boetie, a friendship frequently cited in the literature of love and friendship and characterised as “perfect” and consequently rare. Marion cites the three critical phenomenological characteristics of the first meeting between the two friends. Firstly, there is the displacement of the subject, so that he situates himself so that the other can come to him: “we are looking for each other before seeing each other”, says Montaigne. Secondly, the event of the friendship is accomplished all at once; “at our first meeting…we found ourselves so taken, so known, so obliged between ourselves, that nothing from then on was as close as we were for one another”, continues Montaigne. Finally, we cannot assign a single cause or any reason to its happening, other than the pure energy of its unquestionable happening, says Marion, referring to Montaigne’s famous attempt at explaining the nature of the friendship: “If one presses me to say why I loved him, I sense that this can only be expressed in replying: because it was him; because it was me” (Marion 2002: 37-38). I do not want to press this comparison between Gaita’s nun example and Marion’s example of friendship as a saturated phenomenon too far, but there is clearly a kinship there, albeit arrived at from different perspectives. It is the immediacy of the event, and the power of revelation, which seems to prompt Gaita into a denial of some further description of the nun’s saintliness beyond that of pure love. I suggest that Gaita faced a challenge by stating that the love which underpins sacredness is a brute matter of fact and that there is nothing metaphysical behind it. How does this powerful love in his nun example do its work? Part of the answer lies in acknowledging that there are Love and the Preciousness of the Individual 147 different ways of knowing something. In his example, Gaita tells us a little about the belief that he and the good psychiatrists held before witnessing the nun’s behaviour. They believed in the humanity and the equality of the patients but, Gaita concludes, they had not felt it in their hearts. This difference in knowledge was brought home to him by the nun’s behaviour. When he refers to “holding the belief” that the patients were equal, we can take it to mean that Gaita and the others subscribe to a moral principle which cites equality for all or something similar. By the very fact of subscribing to a principle and having it before them whilst they deal with the patients, they risk turning the patients into objects and destroy the possibility of actually treating them as equals. We can take it that the nun also shares this belief, but she in contrast acts as a lover rather than a rulefollower. Marion’s opening point in The Erotic Phenomenon adds something here, although Marion is not addressing the adequacy of moral theory. He is asserting the precedence of love over the certainty of knowing. He suggests that in looking for assurance from a skeptical stance, we should abandon the path taken by the Cartesian search for certainty. The end result of that search is ascertaining that we exist, but merely as an object in the world. This does not provide the assurance that is at the heart of the drive for the search for certainty. I am not an actual object by way of a table or chair, but instead I am a possible being and I need assurance on those lines, rather than guidance for middle-sized dry goods. So the question at the start of this search for assurance should no longer be “am I certain that I exist?” on Cartesian lines, but rather “does anybody love me?” Why that question? According to Marion, we can also ask the following by way of support; if we were to offer someone the opportunity to exist with certainty (in a state of actuality) for an open-ended amount of time with, as the sole condition, the definitive renunciation of the possibility that someone would ever love them, who would accept such an offer? No one, claims Marion, not even the greatest cynic. To accept such an offer, he says, would be like “operating a transcendental castration on myself. It would bring me down to the level of artificial intelligence, a mechanical calculator, an animal, a demon. I would lose my humanity”. We do not exist in the manner of objects (actually), before we can be loved (possibly), as if love were an optional add-on. The possibility of our being loved is our mode of being. It does not follow on from the fact of our existence. It turns out that even the question “does anybody love me?” is insufficient. It is too selfish a question to ask. It puts love into the 148 Chapter Nine economic arena and suggests that love is a matter of exchange. I will love you, but only if you love me. Immediately an object, the object of love, is envisaged and we are back to the world of people as objects again. This provides no assurance at all. In fact, love cannot be so characterised. Instead, Marion proposes that we have to advance first in the field of love and ask, “can I love first?” Even if we receive no answering love in reply, we have chosen to be lovers and that at least brings us something: The incomparable and unstoppable sovereignty of the act of loving draws all its powers from the fact that reciprocity does not affect it any more than does the desire for a return on investment. The lover has the unmatched privilege of losing nothing, even if he happens to find himself unloved, because a love scorned remains a love perfectly accomplished, just as a gift refused remains a perfectly given gift….the more he gives and the more he loses and disperses, the less he himself is lost, because abandon and waste define the singular, distinctive and inalienable character of loving (Marion 2007: 71). The lover is one who opens himself to the other, giving without counting the cost or hoping for return. Love itself is able to embrace nothingness, in the way that being cannot. Love can thrive in the void. How does this help Gaita’s nun example? We can start the interpretation by noting that the nun loves the patients, despite the fact that they have apparently nothing to give her in return. She effectively makes the advance and goes first into the field of love, without expecting an answer. Marion’s erotic reduction does not merely rescue the beloved from the status of an object, it also has implications for the status of the self, the lover. The lover advances, “goes first” and risks all, not knowing if he will receive a response. In deciding to love first, the lover determines his self, which is the place where he makes decisions. The lover in Marion’s erotic reduction identifies himself to others (and to his self) through his decision to love the other without reciprocity. With Marion’s help, we can now add more to Gaita’s example and his assertion that love is a brute fact beyond which there is no other. The nun’s love for the patients blocks the possibility of seeing them as objects in the world. Her love is a pure advance in Marion’s terms, which does not expect anything in return. The patients are no longer the objects of Gaita’s belief that they are his equal, and thus objects in the world, but part of an erotic reduction, part of coming before being. A change takes place in the lover, too, who is no longer the knower, remaining secure in his place as the subject who knows objects in the world. Instead, the lover opens herself to the possibility of being loved – the lover becomes an accusative Love and the Preciousness of the Individual 149 ‘me’ who may be loved, rather than nominative ‘I’, the knowing subject who carves out objects in the world, according to her beliefs. In Gaita’s example, we can contrast the advancing lover, in the shape of the nun, with Gaita and the good psychiatrists who know as knowing subjects that the patients are their equals. In claiming both that love comes before being and that love involves an advance on behalf of the willing lover, Marion lends weight to Gaita’s suggestion that love is the witness to the sacredness of individuals. It is true that lovers and those they love are no longer objects in the world, but there is more that can be said as a result of this lover’s advance. Each loved one is a particular one, an individuated being. It is this individuation which forms the link between the two issues raised by Gaita, that of sacredness and the nature of the love which reveals it. In showing the sacredness of the patients as she does by loving them, the nun also reveals them, not as an undifferentiated slice of humanity, but as individuals. Marion has something specific to say on this point, too. Marion on Individuation Marion talks about individuation in terms of the impact which the physical presence of the one who is loved has on the lover. The body which forms our limits and boundaries in the world becomes the flesh in the erotic reduction, transformed from an object in the world as the body to a part of us which is moulded by love. The face plays an important role. In the language of Levinas, the face of the 'other', the one who is loved, is the source of the gaze which is directed at the one who loves: “It detains me, precisely because it opposes me with the origin of the gaze that the other lays upon the world, and eventually, on me” (99). The eyes of the other exert a counter-intentionality on the lover, but also, according to Marion, a message, a signification. With an obvious debt to Levinas’ emphasis on the Other, Marion says “The face alone signifies to me, in speech or in silence, ‘Thou shall not kill’” (100). Of course, it would be possible for me to kill this person, says Marion, but that will then be murder, not simply killing. The face opposes the empire of the ego which until this stage in the encounter has so far met with no resistance. Marion asks us to note the particularity of this demand. It is not a universal command “Thou shalt not kill,” but it is delivered by a particular face, a particular other. Gaita too comments on the importance of the bodily language of love and of the face: 150 Chapter Nine “...... without the language of love there could not be the claims of love and there is no love without claims. No doubt, there must be more than, and much that has to be before, the language of love. There must be bodies with which we can feel at home and through which love's tenderness can find expression. More primitively, there must be faces. We could not love what did not have a face” (Gaita 2000: 162). Still this ethical call from the face of the other, this “Thou shalt not kill,” is not enough to particularise the call to the one who loves, albeit it is offered by a particular other. It is an ethical demand issued to all, merely by virtue of each of us having this particular physical presence in the world represented by our face. An interpretation of Levinas by Stella Sandford is relevant here. She points out that the command “Thou shalt not kill” in the encounter between a subject and the Other should not be seen as a reduction to a purely empirical ethical phenomenon – after all, this is not how humans typically encounter each other and we do murder each other quite freely. Rather, she interprets Levinas’ philosophical project as not summed up in the word “ethics,” but as an attempt to reassert “transcendence” or the priority of metaphysics. She quotes from an interview with Levinas: “I have never claimed to describe human reality in its immediate appearance, but what human deprivation itself cannot obliterate: the human vocation to saintliness. I don’t affirm human saintliness; I say that man cannot question the supreme value of saintliness” (Sandford 2000: 27). In Levinas, the face of the Other who makes this call that harm should not be done to him is not individuated, but universal. In Marion, who pursues a notion of hiddenness in his philosophy, the face is ultimately hidden from us, but nonetheless individual. In order to fully understand Marion's description of individuation we must first call to mind Marion's thesis of the univocity of love. Although he speaks in The Erotic Phenomenon of sexual love between a man and a woman, he is adamant that eroticisation of the flesh is not constrained to that instance of love. The eroticisation of the flesh applies not just to sexual lovers but to all lovers, parents with their children, friends who embrace, even as far as the love of God. The whole flesh is aroused in eroticisation. In the act of loving, a wave of eroticisation overcomes the whole of us. The face of the other ceases to issue the ethical universal “Thou shalt not kill,” but instead issues that most particular of commands, “Here I am, come!” In his description of the erotic reduction at this stage, Marion says: “She and I have left the universal, even the ethical universal, in order to strive toward Love and the Preciousness of the Individual 151 particularity - mine and hers, because it is a question of me and you and surely not of a universally obligating neighbour” (Marion 2007: 126). At this stage of the eroticisation, the universal has neither rights, nor the final word. Each of the partners is unsubstitutable. Each experiences their own flesh thanks to the other and only to that other. Each has to give themselves up for the other — a more urgent, particular and complete ethical demand than any universal maxim of respect. Marion goes so far as to call it leaving the ethical behind. At the same time, the other's transcendence appears even more clearly at this time; the eroticised face recapitulates all its flesh: “I see there the accomplished transcendence of the other through which she differs forever and always in me - her flesh in glory” (127). Drawing on Marion’s work, we can now begin to build some support for Gaita’s idea of pure love with no metaphysical backing which reveals the sacredness of an individual. Love has precedence over being according to Marion, because it provides a certainty beyond knowledge of objects. In love, our individual preciousness is revealed and this is accomplished not in our solitary consciousness nor by statement of a principle of moral theory, but in relation to the other’s flesh, where “flesh” is the eroticized body. Must such Love be Impartial? In the second challenge to Gaita, I suggested that his insistence that the love of people like the nun is impartial is problematic. This is because the concept of impartiality seems at odds with Gaita's insistence on the importance of the individuation of each human being in recognition of their sacredness. Very roughly, we can say that impartiality means treating everyone in the same way, without favouring anyone and this easily translates into a failure to recognise any distinguishing features about them, which mitigates against such individuation. It is true that the nun's love is impartial in that it is not directed towards someone with whom she has a special relationship. In that sense it is akin to the idea of agape or Christian universal love of the stranger. I take Gaita as meaning something more specific when he uses the term impartial, however. This is the thought that the nun, unlike Gaita and the good psychiatrists, does not have in her mind the difference in fortunes which exist between her and the patients—I have already noted that he stresses that the nun interacts with the patients without condescension. I suggest that, although this may be a feature of treating someone impartially, it is not inherent to impartiality and is instead based on the traditions and language of partial 152 Chapter Nine love, to which Gaita refers frequently. This ties in well with another aspect of saintly love which Gaita stresses, namely its unconditionality. It matters not what the response of the person is to the one who loves or whether they merit the love. Gaita has an example which is to the point here; it is that of a mother who has an adult, criminal and indeed evil child. The mother's love for this child is in no way diminished by her child's terrible circumstances or indeed whether or not her child deserves this love. It fails to recognise their difference in fortune and any conditionality on love. Now all of this is supported by Marion through his theme of the univocity of love. What is central to love for Marion is not the identity of the beloved—whether son, daughter, friend, lover, stranger or God—but the manner in which the lover loves. A true lover, one who has entered the erotic reduction, loves first, advances first, takes the risk first and abandons everything first, regardless of the recipient. This seems to be at the heart of Gaita's sense of unconditional love; the parent who has an evil criminal as a child, is in Marion's terms the “first” lover, advancing out into the field of love, without considering whether the child merits love. Indeed the suggestion of meriting love as we have seen in Marion is part of the economy of exchange and stands firmly outside the erotic reduction. So Gaita's nun advances with her love toward the patients, not considering whether they merit her love (as Gaita and the good psychiatrists do — they consider them to be “deserving”) but merely loving first. There is a twist in the tail of Marion's story of love, however. Even though lovers leave the universal in search of the particular, they can never quite find the other person. In addition to his themes of advancement and abandonment, Marion also considers that only so much is revealed and visible to us, it seems that reaching the other, whatever that might mean is always ultimately concealed from us. However much we want to reach the particular one, we can never quite do that. We are destined to keep on trying, through repeated acts of love. I suggest that this sense of never quite being able to reach the metaphysical core which is the mark of a particular individual is what lies behind Gaita's vacillation between attributing the source of saintly love to partial or impartial love. We start out on our journey of loving someone from the security of partial love, knowing that we must love first and in an unconditional way, like a parent. In seeking the other, we hope to meet the metaphysical core of the other, that “form of human presence not explicable in terms of individuating features,” as Gaita noted in his discussion of remorse. According to Marion, we can never do this, not because there is no such metaphysical core, but because, as humans we are Love and the Preciousness of the Individual 153 incapable of so doing. We can only complete part of the story of love. It remains for God to complete it since he alone can reach us in our particularity, according to Marion. Conclusion I began by suggesting that Gaita’s conceptions of sacredness and impartial love faced two challenges. What light has Marion’s work thrown on them? The first challenge was that Gaita’s statement that there was nothing metaphysical beyond the fact of pure love was not enough to support the importance that he puts upon love in his ethical work. Love is one of the main ways in which we understand the individuation and irreplaceability of human beings. By stressing that love comes before being, Marion can be seen to uphold Gaita’s view that there is nothing metaphysical behind pure love, but he adds significantly to the view by proposing that love is a source of certainty for us; if we love, we know that we are and who we are. If we are uneasy about pairing and comparing these two philosophers, I suggested that we can bring the two philosophers closer together by noting the phenomenological aspects of Gaita’s work, although these could not be formally recognised as such. Both Gaita’s use of examples and tableaux which recall Marion’s concept of the saturated phenomenon and his talk of the language of love as revealed through our bodies which bring to mind Marion’s characteristic talk of “flesh” in contrast to body, testify to this. The second challenge to Gaita concerned the nature of the love which underpins human sacredness; was it really impartial as he claims? Gaita also plays up the importance of partial love and frequently refers to parental love as unconditional. Marion’s characterisation of love does not follow that of the usual “opposing terms” manner; partial versus impartial, eros versus agape, and so on. Rather, he suggests that love is an advancement, a risk, where the lover goes first not knowing whether her love will be reciprocated. In acts of love, of whatever type, we strive to reach the particularity of those we love, the “metaphysical core” which represents their individuality and irreplaceability, but, being human, we always fall short. So Gaita’s “impartial love of the saints” is a love of this sort; saintly in its striving and illumination, but still human in its inexplicabiltiy. 154 Chapter Nine References Hart, Kevin (2007): Counter-Experiences, Reading Jean-Luc Marion. Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame. Marion, Jean-Luc (2002): ‘In Excess, Studies of the Saturated Phenomenon.’ In, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy No.27., pp. 37-38. —. (2007): The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Gaita, Raimond (2004): A Common Humanity; thinking about love and truth and justice. London: Routledge. —. (2000): Good and Evil: an absolute conception. London: Routledge. Sandford, Stella (2000): The Metaphysics of Love. London: Athlone Press.p.27. Notes 1 Gaita’s discussion of sacredness appears both in (Gaita 2000) and (Gaita 2004). In this paper, I refer mainly to (Marion 2007). 3 I want here merely to acknowledge all the difficulties behind the term ‘metaphysics’, rather than elaborate on them. Suffice to say that Raimond Gaita wants to stick to the value of examining ‘real life’ examples for the purposes of his philosophical writing and his use of the term ‘metaphysical’ needs no further comment. Marion, as a phenomenologist, is carrying the weight of the post Kantian tradition and there is no room to give his position justice here. Simply put, he started out by asserting the primacy of phenomenology over metaphysics, claiming that phenomenology allows a ‘radical empiricism’ to unfold. Subsequently, he nuanced this view, saying that phenomenology does not actually overcome metaphysics so much as open the possibiltiy of ‘leaving it to itself’. 4 Original objections to what has been called Marion’s ‘theological turn’ came from Jacques Derrida and Dominque Janicaud. For a suggestion that Gaita cannot evade theology, see Mark Wynn, “Saintliness and the Moral Life”, Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 31, issue 3. pp. 463-485. 5 See Christopher Hamilton, “Simone Weil’s “Human Personality”: Between the Personal and Impersonal”, Harvard Theological Review, 2005, 98:2 pp. 187-207 for discussion of Weil’s position and her attack on Personalism. 2 CHAPTER TEN LOVE AND SYMPATHY: BUILDING ON THE LEGACY OF MAX SCHELER ALEKSANDAR FATIĆ Introduction Sympathy is an attractive value to try to found an ethics system on. Cultures permeated with sympathy tend to be more pleasant to live in. Everyday social interactions seem less difficult and more satisfying to all if they take place against a background of sympathy. However, there are philosophical difficulties with sympathy playing the role of a founding value for ethics, because its normative attributes are unclear. On the one hand, sympathy arises either from shared values in a community, or from a culture where it is regarded as a moral norm. Examples certainly include “Samaritan” communities, such as closely-knit Christian groups, which often appear as ideal organic communities. Such groups are governed by what Max Scheler calls “fellow-feeling”; this allows them to be highly tolerant and supportive of members who deviate from the values shared by the majority, and facilitates relatively simple rituals of reintegration where infractions have occurred. The concept of repentance as a way of returning to the community of values is a highly effective mechanism of reintegration. On the other hand, however, reintegration would not be possible without a strong background of sympathy and a promise of genuine forgiveness. Strongly forged substantive values, combined with moral dynamics of forgiveness and an emphasis on mutuality, as well as a constant quest for deep commonalities based on sympathy, generate highly resilient organic communities such as many religious groups are. However, when sympathy is considered as a potential foundation of formal ethics, numerous problems arise, primarily connected to sympathy’s seeming inability to serve as the criterion of right and wrong, good and evil. This is perhaps why Scheler, the champion of philosophy of sympathy at least in the European tradition, decisively denied that sympathy can serve as a 156 Chapter Ten foundation of ethics, while writing excitedly about its role in cognition and imagination (Scheler 1979). One way to approach sympathy that facilitates a full appreciation of its functional benefits for a community is to treat it as a social language, or social grammar — the normative system that mediates communication. Where such a grammar exists, the so-called “transaction costs” of everyday interactions are lower, because cooperation tends to replace confrontation on most issues. While this point has enthused communitarian philosophers to go as far as asserting that virtue should be defined as a “capacity to participate in common projects”, sympathy fails to tell us how to differentiate the good from the bad, or in the stronger formulation, good from evil (Macintyre 1981). Not everything that contributes to common projects is necessarily morally good: the existence of evil communities, which cherish deviant values and relish in the suffering of others is entirely possible. Such are backward local communities whose practices violate the sense of decency of the broader community. A community may be unjust and cruel just as an individual can. Thus, while a sharing of values certainly strengthens moral arguments in social ethics, the sharing alone does not make a value ethically plausible. One may sympathise with the victim of unjust persecution, but one also may sympathise with a war criminal who is being sought after by an international tribunal, and in both cases the “one” may plausibly be replaced with “many”. Sympathy itself needs, it would seem, something more to render it a founding value for sustainable ethics. Sympathy as a “social grammar” Human relations exhibit in large part an immediacy that cannot be explained by rational reasoning. This is especially the case with expressions of inner events, which meet with an intuitive recognition by others. Certain signs given away by others allow us to become aware that the other person is sad, revolted, excited or optimistic about something. We have here, as it were, a universal grammar, valid for all languages of expression, and the ultimate basis of understanding for all forms of mime and pantomime among living creatures. Only so are we able to perceive the inadequacy of a person’s gesture to his experience, and even the contradiction between what the gesture expresses and what it is meant to express (Scheler 1979: 11). This immediacy of recognition can be explained in various ways, but in all cases it clearly includes a pre-existing knowledge of the meaning of gestures and signs we may have never seen before. This type of “fellow- Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 157 feeling” (Mitgefüll) as Scheler calls it, or of sympathy, as I shall call it here, provides a transparency in communication that allows considerably greater intimacy. Yet, the ability to feel sympathy cannot be construed rationally, nor can it be advanced by deliberate policies; it is simply a gift in communication that is being gradually lost as communities become larger and individuals are increasingly driven by solitary agendas that insulate them from one another. The functionality of sympathy in small communities The functional reason for the principle “small is beautiful” lies in the fact that sympathy, which allows immediacy in the perception and understanding of the other’s viewpoint and basic interests, springs from a communal well of trust. Trust, on the other hand, requires a deeper set of commonalities than are those typically associated with modern forms of “certified” membership in a community, such as citizenship. The sovereign state produces citizenship as a form of common identification by its constituents. Smaller, organic communities, on the other hand, have more comprehensive mutual identifications that arise from shared experience and life prospects. Such common experience and prospects generally arise in people who live close to each other. Modern nation states tend to be multicultural. This is a cognitive benefit, because various shared experiences can be exchanged and various traditions can benefit from each other. Such exchange, however, occurs primarily between communities and much less so between individuals, because communities are the primary bearers of culture and tradition as manifestations of shared values. One fundamental aspect of solidarity based on sympathy is the ability to identify with another. Trivially, this ability allows the understanding of another’s point of view and empathising with it. In the minimalist sense, it makes possible the tolerance of another who harbours different values — the very foundation of social peace. However, not all types of mutual identification are conducive to sympathy. Political mobilisation has been known to seek to foster the type of mutual identification that Scheler calls “emotional infection”. This is a phenomenon of mass-psychology whereby a human group acts similarly to a group of animals. Just as a herd becomes “infected” by suggestive moves made by several individuals, and may internalise the mood as their own panic, aggression, or fight-or-flight reaction, so a human crowd can internalise the emotions of the leaders, be they “national emancipators”, “freedom fighters” or “protesters for justice”. Most cases of mass hysteria are induced by this type of “pathological 158 Chapter Ten identification”, as Scheler calls it, where direct contact between individuals and leaders proves particularly dangerous (12). Emotional infection is pathological because it erases the boundary between the individual and another person. Thus one does not sympathise with the feelings and views of the other; one does not even share the feelings and views of another — emotional infection allows the masses to feel as though the moves made by the leader are their own. In Scheler’s words: The process of infection is an involuntary one. Especially characteristic is its tendency to return to its point of departure, so that the feelings concerned gather momentum like an avalanche. The emotion caused by infection reproduces itself again by means of expression and imitation, so that the infectious emotion increases, again reproduces itself, and so on. In all mass-excitement, even in the formation of ‘public opinion’, it is above all this reciprocal effect of a self-generating infection which leads to the uprush of a common surge of emotion, and to the characteristic feature of a crowd in action, that it is so easily carried beyond the intentions of every one of its members, and does things for which no one acknowledges either the will or the responsibility. It is, in fact, the infective process itself, which generates purposes beyond the designs of any single individual (15– 16). Non-essential differences Although small communities embody commonalities that are functionally required for sympathy, the dynamics of (i.e. motivation for) sympathy does not require excessive inter-personal similarities. This is evident from empirical observation of the functioning small communities, where both the individual similarities and differences, eccentricities included, are known to most people, but there is a fundamental “agreement to disagree” on certain things. In such communities there is usually a broadly accepted respect for non-essential individual differences. This respect, or “tolerance”, is made possible by far more significant and strong, shared fundamental commonalities. These typically include similar life prospects, social, economic, ecological and other circumstances that affect everyone in the same way, and — rather often — a shared gene pool. Complemented by long-entrenched customs and a consensually adopted micro-culture, the above factors are powerful catalysers for social interaction and cooperation. On the negative side, they may also catalyse animosities towards “others”, whose values and collective identities are, or are perceived to be, different. Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 159 Phenomena related to (confused for) sympathy Sympathy is but one of several closely related psychological phenomena that imply shared sentiments between members of a group. To distinguish sympathy from other related feelings, Scheler first makes a distinction between “a community of feeling”, or shared feeling, and “emotional identification”. The community of feeling implies that the same sentiment is shared by several individuals. They all genuinely feel the same thing. Perhaps the simplest examples include common grief over the loss of a loved one, where all members of the family often tend to feel the same. Emotional identification, on the other hand, is closely related to emotional infection, and it can play an important role in collective mobilisation. This is often dangerous, because it deprives members of the group of their autonomy in decision-making. Emotional identification implies that one’s identity is either superimposed on another’s, or overwhelmed by the other. One of the more primitive examples of such identification was that of totems, which could be specific individual animals, trees, or rocks, and people were able to collectively identify with them. Later in the evolution of the human society the identification was carried over to ancestors, followed by the emergence of ancestor cults. These were two different stages because, in identification with the ancestors, the members of a tribe really believed that they were their ancestors (the common theme in the doctrine of reincarnation), while the ancestor cult involved merely a veneration of the ancestors, which presupposed the perception of identity difference between the ancestors and the venerating generation. According to Scheler, emotional identification can take two forms: the idiopathic and the heteropathic. The idiopathic occurs when the actor takes on the identity of something or someone else (as with totems or ancestors), whereas the heteropathic identification occurs when the identity of the spectator is “sucked in”, or overwhelmed by, the identity of the observed object. Heteropathic identification is particularly close to emotional infection. It plays a crucial part in one’s becoming “infected” by another’s emotion and, conversely, in imposing one’s own emotions or views upon others. All of these phenomena are highly relevant in a number of practical contexts, including, for example, both psychological and philosophical counselling. They often arise in discussions of autonomy and authenticity of decisions made by people who uncritically accept the values of others, or, conversely, by those who are such “strong personalities” that they “conquer other minds” by imposing their values on 160 Chapter Ten others. The study of Scheler’s distinctions between the various types of identification seems to lend itself particularly readily to psychoanalysis and transactional analysis, which rest on the practical application of structural analysis of personality based on various “ego states”, two of which are defined through identification through past influences (e.g. Stewart 2008). Heteropathic identification is relatively pervasive in nature. Scheler mentions the example of a rabbit or squirrel meeting the gaze of a hungry snake. Rather than running away, which is a feasible option, the animal becomes “hypnotised” or overwhelmed by the snake’s gaze and moves closer to the snake, sometimes even literally throwing itself into the jaws. The prey “establishes a corporeal identity” with the predator through heteropathic identification. The rabbit should have no trouble escaping the snake from any distance other than that of imminent strike. On the other hand, if the snake is close enough to strike immediately (this almost never occurs), it would have no need to “hypnotise” the prey, nor would the prey have room or time to move towards the snake before being grabbed. According to Scheler, the key dynamic force at work in this phenomenon is the snake’s overwhelming projection of “appetitive desire”. It is hard to resist drawing a parallel here with strong projections of “appetitive” or “ambitious” force or desire by human leaders who infect the entire group. Consider abusive politicians who cause wars and other tragedies to their constituents, yet they win popular elections. In some parts of the world, there is an anecdotal principle that people “will vote whoever is currently in power”, until things become extreme in ways that truly necessitate change at almost any cost. This “electoral lethargy” has its psychological explanation, and it may in fact be a form of social pathology. Resistance to change is natural to a degree, but in all extreme cases heteropathic identification should be at least considered as an explanation. A special case of identification is what Scheler calls “identification through coalescence” — the case where members of a community “give in” to a common flow of feeling and instinctual sensibilities “whose pulse thereafter governs the behaviour of all its members, so that ideas and schemes are driven wildly before it, like leaves before a storm” (Scheler 1979: 25). It is easy to see how this type of collective coalescence may play a part in the most radical types of homogenisation of the human group. In cases where the emotions coalesced in are based on devaluing prejudice about others or on fear-mongering, the results have been known to be particularly destructive. Consider the examples of gravest group violence in the last 100 years, such as the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when in the span of weeks more than 800,000 men, women and children Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 161 were killed. The genocide was triggered by a persistent and pervasive campaign of fear-mongering by ethnic leaders through national radio programmes, until the entire ethnic groups coalesced in the hate and raised the machete on each other. The same, to a lesser extent, may have been true for the Bosnian civil war 1993–1995 (Woodworth 1995: 333–373). The last psychological phenomenon that Scheler distinguishes from sympathy proper is “anticipating identification”: a sort of in-born capacity to transcend the psychological and physical boundaries of an individual’s integrity and anticipate previously completely unknown structures and sensibilities of the other, often another species in the animal world, without ever having directly experienced such structures in another individual. According to Scheler, this is a capacity that degenerates in direct proportion with civilizational development. Some wasps are able to sting caterpillars directly in the nerve centres that cause the caterpillar to become paralysed until it is fertilised by the wasp, without killing the caterpillar. The wasp has no direct experience of the inner nerve structure of the caterpillar; it has never before stung the caterpillar, yet it unmistakably hits the right spot. This pre-programmed way of interacting between the species might mean that “(u)nquestionably, we must suppose the wasp to have some kind of primary ‘knowledge’ concerning the vital processes of the caterpillar” (Scheler 1979: 29). In the case of human interaction along this model one is tempted to speak of “instinct” or some reference to a supposed “prior community” that allow us to know the minds of others to varying extents: (…) to be aware of any organism as alive, to distinguish even the simplest animate movement from an inanimate one, a minimum of undifferentiated identification is necessary; we shall see how the simplest vicarious emotion, the most elementary fellow-feeling, and over and above these the capacity for understanding between minds, are built up on the basis of this primitive givenness of ‘the other’ (1979: 31). Scheler notes that, if primitive organisms have this capacity, so much more it must be the case with the different racial, ethnic and linguistic communities in human society. Each such community most likely possesses fine inborn instincts of identification and anticipation which, if adequately put to work in society, can contribute immensely to the society’s achievement of its goals, including a high degree of social harmony. The deep-seated commonalities of the human group that Scheler sees as the fountain of all the various types of mutual anticipation, identification and ultimately sympathy, seem to create a firm foundation for ethics. They appear to eliminate the epistemic and cognitive obstacles 162 Chapter Ten to knowing other minds (and, by extension, preferences), at least on a very general level. Thus they seem to greatly assist the development of a normative system that would adequately focus values that arise from what really matters to us and to others. However, Scheler was adamant that sympathy or any of the related cognitive and psychological capacities that spring from instinctual commonalities should not be used for the development of ethics. He writes: We nevertheless reject from the outset an ‘Ethics of Sympathy’ as such, holding as we do, that the problem of sympathy in general has aspects and affinities which simply cannot be reached at all by a one-sided analysis and consideration from a purely ethical point of view (xivii). Scheler’s hope is to develop a comprehensive theory of sympathy that would apply across the various disciplines, and he sees an ethics of sympathy as a limiting normative context for such an elaboration of sympathy. His biologistic language and evolutionist method witness the intent to study sympathy not only in the context of social relationships, but also as it pertains to the natural sciences. His view of sympathy, identification and fellow-feeling as the basket concept for these and related phenomena arising from “primal” commonalities is set on a philosophy of nature. In this, he is close to Henry Bergson’s accounts of the moving force of nature that refer to a universal “vital instinct” or ‘vital force (Élan vital) in his 1907 Creative Evolution. Scheler makes clear parallels with Bergson in his writing and thus helps the reader position his context of consideration of fellow-feeling in a way very different from the dominant contemporary context of the study of sympathy, which focuses social interactions (28–29). On the other hand, however, although he sees instinctual affinities and commonalities as sources of enormous explanatory power in the philosophy of nature, Scheler is quite cynical about the instinctual foundations of fellow-feeling in human affairs. For him, the human world fundamentally differs from the rest of nature, so much so that the more one (instinctually) identifies with others, the more of an animal one becomes. Conversely, the more a person is independent from primal commonalities, the more of a human being one becomes. Scheler decisively casts the human person aside from the world of nature, which is governed by somewhat mystical instinctual capacities. His views of mutual identification and the various forms of mutual predirectness between individuals may have much to do with contemporary discussions of intentionality of the mind (Searle 1983). Scheler’s concept of sympathy requires a clear awareness of distinct identities between those Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 163 who sympathise and those with whom they sympathise. Further, it requires of those who sympathise the ability to generate an emotional “bridge” towards those with whom they sympathise, in addition to a cognitive bridge that allows them to sufficiently understand the minds, especially the feelings, of others. Both those requirements are key to unlocking issues of intentionality in the inter-subjective realm, with potential benefits for a broad array of practical applications, not least in counselling and various forms of “talk therapy”. Scheler himself decisively casts the “instinctive” foundations of fellow-feeling aside from the discussion of ethics. His understanding of the specifically human relations is strongly separated from his understanding of the natural world, so that allowing the principles that explain the dynamics of the natural world to play a role in the explanation of human affairs is an affront to human dignity and uniqueness of the person. For him, instead of instinct, the ultimate standard of human action is love, which he sees as a purely expressive act of the human spirit — one that he seeks to rid of all teleological meaning. The remainder of this text will focus on Scheler’s views of love. The argument will proceed by exploring the logical connections between instinctual (or at least instinctually inspired) forms of sympathy, love, and ethics. This part of the argument will challenge Scheler’s position on a strong discontinuity between instinctual sympathy on the one hand, and love on the other. Based on an interpretation of sympathy that rests on Scheler’s views, I will show towards the end of the paper how an ethics of sympathy is not only possible, but also very simple and elegant, as well as coherent with traditional methodologies for moral judgements. Scheler on love Scheler’s view of love marks his sharp departure from instinctivism in understanding the fellow-feeling. While fellow-feeling derives from the natural world, and its various forms exist in animals, love is a spiritual act reserved only for man. In fact, Scheler goes so far in portraying love as an elevated act of the human mind that he denies any teleological content or use to it: if an emotion has teleological elements, as many emotions do, according to Scheler, it does not qualify to be called love. Unlike fellow-feeling, which allows speedy communication and nonverbal understanding within and even between species (and this facilitates various types of teleological action, such as breeding or fighting), love is a “purely expressive act”: 164 Chapter Ten In all endeavor there is a content to be realized, which is inherent as its goal (or “purpose”, when we will). Love does not have this at all. What does a mother have to “realize” when she gazes lovingly at her bonny child asleep? What is supposedly “realized” in loving God? Or in loving works of art? 141). Scheler goes further and argues that love is in fact not a feeling at all: “Love is not a ‘feeling’ (i.e. a function), but an act and a movement. (...) (L)ove is an emotional gesture and a spiritual act” (143). It concerns values rather than “purposes”, and is in a sense more aesthetic than practical. Sympathy may be extended to people we do not love, however even in such cases sympathy is made possible by an act of love which is directed to a different object than that of sympathy. For example, in commiserating with someone’s misfortune, the sympathy with the person one does not necessarily love comes from one’s “love” for the entire human species or, as Scheler points out, for a group the individual belongs to (family, profession, etc.). This interpretation readily applies to accounts of sympathy in terms of deeper solidarity, even affection that arises from kinship (McInturff 2007). However, the “broader love” that makes possible sympathy is not limited to relations of kin: it extends to a variety of shared collective identities. A soldier may commiserate with the predicament of his fallen comrade’s family, even though he may not have known the other soldier and certainly did not “love” him. However, in Scheler’s context, the sympathy shown to the family springs from the love the soldier feels for the entire group, all soldiers, and by extension for their families. Thus, although sympathy cannot exist without love, it may show itself between individuals who do not love each other; there is a certain “directional divergence” between the act of love that is involved in such acts of sympathy, and sympathy itself. On the other hand, when there is love between two people, there is necessarily also sympathy between them. One who loses a loved one will suffer, and one whose loved one suffers a misfortune will necessarily feel sympathy for them. Thus, in a sense, love is a necessary and sufficient condition for sympathy, while sympathy is merely a manifestation of love (Scheler 1979: 142). Scheler’s explanation is that love is somehow “intrinsically about values”, whereas sympathy is “essentially valueneutral”: “In acts of love and hate there is certainly an element of valuation present, positively or negatively (...); but mere fellow-feeling, in all its possible forms, is in principle blind to value” (5). The relationship between love and sympathy described above is accounted for in terms of value-commitments: “(L)ove is extended, not to the suffering of those in Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 165 distress, but to the positive values inherent in them, and the act of relieving their suffering is only a consequence of this” (144). Scheler’s view of love as essentially aesthetic thus allows teleological manifestations in the form of sympathy, but it does not contain such elements in its definition. He insists that love is a “spiritual expressive act”, which may equally have as its object another person or a work of art. It is questionable how plausible the attribute “spiritual” is here, as it typically denotes higher realms of conscious action with normative capacity to influence one’s behaviour, rather than merely aesthetic appreciation of values inherent in people or objects. It appears that Scheler’s view of love is unduly limiting: essentially it disallows the lover to treat the loved one as a means, in much the same way as Kantian ethics rests on revulsion to using other persons as means. This structural parallel is quite gripping in Scheler’s writing. Kant, who is an inspiration to Scheler, insists that it is immoral to treat others “merely as means”, but they may be treated as means if at the same time they are treated as “ends in themselves” — e.g. if they agree to be used as a means for something. Scheler, on the other hand, does not allow that love might involve any instrumental, or “teleological”, value to be attached to its object in the eyes of the one who loves. Love is thus constrained exclusively to the intellectual or “spiritual” realm. In fact, for Scheler love is modeled upon aesthetic contemplation. Studying a work of art does not invite contemplation of any use for the artifact; it is confined to the mere appreciation of the mastery of the artist and the value of the work itself. With persons, if they are perceived in the same way as works of art, one may feel a direct connection to their “intrinsic values”. Once the “loved” person is in distress, sympathy will be triggered, in much the same way as once a painting is damaged, one who truly appreciates it will feel alarm. Still, the feelings triggered by the suffering of the loved one are not elements of love; the love is directed to the values of the person regardless of the misfortune that has begot it. In the same way, if a painting is damaged by water, with paints running from it, one will feel the urge to “do something”, to set things right, or will at least be distressed at the destruction of the painting. While acting to save the painting, however, whatever feelings one might have, they are not the love for the running colours, but for the painting as it was. The destruction of the painting, just the same as the suffering of a loved one, threaten and possibly destroy the values that one loves in either a work of art or a person. The reaction to such threat or destruction, while necessary, is conceptually very different from the love itself. 166 Chapter Ten The aesthetics of love espoused by Scheler extends in a practically particularly important context to the interpretation of sex and parenthood. For Scheler, sex is a metaphysical union between two persons; it is sacred to the extent that it allows unique cognitive insights into the inner value of another person. There is no other way in which this particular type of knowledge of another can be obtained. All the practical problems arising from sexual relations are in fact due to the conceptual degradation of sex to pleasure, a way of serving the preservation of the species, or entertainment: (W)e must restore the idea of the sexual act to that true metaphysical significance (...). This significance and meaning attaches to it quite apart from the delectable joys by which it is accompanied in consciousness; it is equally remote from the consummation of the objective biological purpose of procreation, and still more so from any subjective design for the propagation, preservation, increase or betterment of mankind. We regard the metaphysical degradation of the sexual act as a principle essentially fatal to the correct governance of sexual relationships and to the enlargement and improvement of population in the Western world of modern times; it is the prime source or every error and aberration in matters of this kind (Scheler 1979: 110). Like love itself, the sexual act “represents an expressive act which does not differ essentially from the many other expressions of love and affection, such as kissing, caressing, etc.” (110). Procreation, which results from sex, has a metaphysical purpose to make the human race better. The aesthetics of love, in itself an emanation of human spirituality and intellectuality, externally serves this purpose, because the values loved in the loved one are ones that, in their spiritual dimension, may be inherited, even improved, through procreation. No child is merely a combination of characteristics of its parents; each is a unique person, who may carry a higher value than any of those possessed by one’s parents. The pre-requisite for this understanding of procreation is an approach to love and sex that sees them as reaching for and beyond the best of each partner — loving, in the other person, those values that one would want enlarged and improved in one’s offspring. This approach to love is at once metaphysical and existential. Sex that is motivated by pleasure or desire for mere biological procreation, while being deprived of true love, simply reproduces, “whereas love creates. For love is simply an emotional assessment of value, anticipated as offering the likeliest chance for the qualitative betterment of mankind” (113). The idea behind the described interpretation of love is that intellectual appreciation of value will, eventually, lead to a greater realisation of that Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 167 value in the real world. The way to appreciate is to understand, and “(m)an’s point of entry into identification with the life of the cosmos lies where that life is nearest and in closest affinity to his own, namely in another man” (108). Through another man, one reaches the climax of understanding the value of human life. “(F)or the civilised man, the loving sexual act discloses, not knowledge indeed, but a source of possible knowledge, and metaphysical knowledge at that, which he can otherwise obtain only very imperfectly (...)” (109). The more loving sex is, and the more authentic the love as an expressive and aesthetic act is, the greater the likelihood that the children produced will embody the values that set the standard of one’s aesthetic appreciation of others, and even transcend the level of perfection of those values that the partners love in each other. Consequently, the “beastly” sex focused on calculations of offspring or merely on pleasure is value-neutral, or even negative, and is thus limited to mere biological reproduction, which is the same as in the rest of the natural world. For Scheler, love is the highest “spiritual” capacity of the person, one that most purely distinguishes man from the rest of nature. Love in its sexual form is not merely mating, but a penetration of one person by another: the metaphysical point of contact between two human microcosms and at the same time the most immediate gateway into the “cosmos of life.” The progress of the human race depends on procreation through loving sex. Conversely, it is directly threatened by reproduction through recreational sex or one calculated to produce children without love. From the point of view of an individual person, such love must be completely removed from practical considerations and instrumental concerns, and must have the intellectual purity of aesthetic appreciation of value. From the point of view of the human species, such individual disregard for the “teleology” of love and sex results in the most highly valued, higher-order teleology: betterment of mankind. Sympathy, love and ethics Scheler’s account of love and sympathy depends on his understanding of a fundamental divide between the natural side of man and his spiritual side. Thus, he feels obliged to deny any possibility of ethics based on sympathy, for sympathy is something biological and instinctive that unites man and animal in the same natural context. At the same time, he is unable to found ethics on love, because love is completely free, thus it cannot be subjected to duty. Scheler is extremely critical of the Christian ethics of love that posits love of another man as a moral duty. He goes as far as 168 Chapter Ten making cynical comments that the “old priestly morality” has denied a free love and turned love into a moral duty “partly from professional jealousy”, leading the church to “deny what they have had to forgo” (116). Furthermore, he argues that freedom of love has been curtailed by the Church because it could not stand the prospect of love for woman (or man) competing with one’s love of God (116). On the one hand, Scheler’s philosophy of love as a metaphysical relationship between people, which is endowed with significant cognitive gateways into the world of another and, by extension, into our own nature and that of “cosmos”, is attractive. On the other, his view of love as severely restricted to aesthetic appreciation, to a value-relationship, and devoid of any practical intent or passionate pleasure as a part of its meaning (not as consequences of being in love), is exaggerated and excessively polarised against an underestimated sympathy. This makes it impossible to ground ethics in either fellow-feeling or love. Scheler acknowledges the “misfiring” of ethics in these contexts very clearly and readily. However, it appears that the exaggerated polarisation between sympathy as instinctive and love as excessively aesthetic and “spiritual” is unwarranted, and that much of Scheler’s basic teaching about both sympathy and love can be factored in an ethics of sympathy. Scheler’s argument that sympathy, with its immense cognitive potential for intra- and inter-species cooperation, is strictly teleological, while love “has an intrinsic reference to value”, and is thus a purely spiritual expressive act, rather than being a feeling, is the main problem here (141). There is at least a plausible alternative view that sympathy can have a fundamental reference to value. If one adopts Scheler’s view of sympathy as primarily an epistemic tool to quickly and immediately communicate within the natural world (close to a sort of inborn intuition of the species), this has interesting consequences when transposed to the context of complex modern societies. Such societies repeatedly mediate “natural” relations between individuals by institutions. As they are highly non-transparent (they are large and difficult to understand, and their members do not know each other, or about each other), institutions play a key cognitive role: they allow people to relate to each other via the institutional arrangements. Institutions paternalise varying scopes of social interactions in ways that contribute to transparency and, indirectly, allow sympathy between members of the community who otherwise might be entirely unable to sympathise with one another. Institutional decisions typify life situations, obligations and avenues for the satisfaction of interests and fulfilment of life prospects in ways that are relatively understandable to most. They Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 169 generate social routes for the achievement of certain social goals, and, depending on the quality of their organisation and operation, monitor movements along these routes. In this way they act as social “traffic lights”: one knows the meaning of the various lights and the typical situations that people find themselves in when they face each light. Institutions, if effective, also allow sympathy to be extended to those who run the lights and face sanctions, because they make it possible for everyone to understand what it means to run a light, and how most people feel about the consequences. If they are sufficiently constructive, and not predominantly repressive, institutions play an important epistemic function. In complex communities, they make possible sympathy and other more complex forms of fellow-feeling, including those that play key parts in solidarity and trust. This role of institutions is easily overlooked because of their predominant perception as regulators. On a more sophisticated level, institutions play their epistemic role by reference to values. They exert an educational influence and, by formalising the leading role of social (including political) elites, set key values and standards for the society. These values in themselves also serve as beacons for sympathy. Societies adopt common moralities, generalised attitudes to key issues, and ultimately depend on a degree of consensus on these fundamental concepts. In addition, social solidarity depends not only on sympathy, but also on the shared values: in fact, it could be said that sympathy arising from solidarity is based on a consensual adoption of certain values. People whose communities’ values are threatened tend to feel marked sympathy for their peers who excel in the protection of those values. A person who is imprisoned because of protesting against an authoritarian government on behalf of a repressed community will likely receive sympathy from the members of that community, most of whom do not know the person. Even those who dislike her on a personal level will likely sympathise with their situation, because that situation is predicated upon the adoption of common values. This is arguably one of the most common and obvious forms of sympathy arising from solidarity in modern social contexts. Scheler’s idea that sympathy is fundamentally unrelated to values appears both unintuitive and empirically infeasible. His idea that sympathy is incapable of founding an ethic seems equally infeasible, because at least an ethics of duty must envision a moral obligation between members of the community regardless of their free exercise of love for each other. If one is to act morally, one must have a standard that allows one to map the avenue of required action towards others even if one hates them. A 170 Chapter Ten feasible ethics must be able to relate our action towards those to whom we might otherwise be indifferent or antagonistic. Strictly speaking, acting constructively towards a loved one is not a matter for ethics, because such action is usually the result of the love itself, exceptions granted. Normally one wishes to act well towards a loved one. On the other hand, at least the duty of ethics relates our moral obligation not to our wishes, but to normative criteria that include others’ rights, among other things. Thus it appears that sympathy as a sentiment with strong cognitive attributes, which is capable of motivating constructive relations without recourse to love in the strict sense (the completely free exercise of aesthetic and metaphysical love described by Scheler), is in fact a good standard to found an ethic. It is, of course, one thing to point to problems within a theory, and quite another to prove a different point. In what follows I shall attempt to illustrate, rather than conclusively prove, a possibility and potential uses of an ethics of sympathy. In doing so, I will confine my argument to the definitional bounds for the concepts of sympathy and love drawn by Scheler. This will illustrate the possibility of an ethics of sympathy not just in general, but within a broad context of his philosophy of sympathy. An ethics of sympathy Discussions of ethics of sympathy have almost systematically tended to adopt the so-called “sentimentalist” ethics as their defining frame of reference. Sentimentalism is a tradition that sees morality as predominantly based on emotions, or moral sentiments. Thus David Hume believed that “morality is founded upon and rooted in feeling” (Slote 2003: 79). Other representatives of sentimentalism included Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith. The western intellectual history knows the latter mainly as an economist, although he was primarily an ethicist and one of the founders of sentimentalism in ethics (Smith 1997). Smith’s discussion of sympathy is programmatic for the modern ethics of empathy as a foundation of ethics, because he insists that the foundation for the moral judgement of others’ actions is to place ourselves in their position — not merely cognitively, but also emotionally. He speaks about “sympathy with the dead” as a mental experiment whereby we place “our own living souls in their unanimated bodies” and examine “what would be our emotions in this case” (7-8). What Smith discusses is clearly not sympathy in Scheler’s sense; rather it is empathy as it is conceptualised today. The reason moral sentimentalists had used the term sympathy for theories that required an emotional “engrossment” in another’s situation is Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 171 that empathy as a concept was introduced only in the 20th century. (Slote 2007: 13). Moral sentimentalism has recently been put forward as an ethics in its own right by Michael Slote. His definition of the moral good is simple: moral goodness consists in one’s emphatic care for others (10‒11). Robert White clarifies the key elements of this position in the following way: According to Slote, moral goodness does not consist in merely caring for another, but in empathically caring for another. When we morally approve of another’s caring, we do not merely approve of their caring, we empathise with their empathic caring (White 2009: 464). Empathic caring for another provides insights for observers into the character of the moral agent. The perception of his virtue by others is directly influenced by his emotional engrossment in the situation of another, in addition to trying to alleviate their suffering. While an ethics of empathy has obvious social advantages and is potentially productive of cooperation in the community, as a self-contained ethics it suffers from a seeming inability to adequately incorporate duties. On the one hand, it is virtuous to empathise with others. On the other, the idea that the achievement of virtue entails the moral obligation to empathise does not imply the rights of those who are in distress to such empathy by their peers. One may or may not exercise empathy: in the former case, one fulfils a moral obligation that stems from virtue; in the latter case, one simply lacks virtue. However, given the voluntary nature of the decision to empathise the sufferer cannot be considered to possess a right to empathy by others. If one does not empathise with peers in distress one will be seen as lacking virtue, however this will not violate any rights of those in distress, because, strictly speaking, there are no such rights (467). Empathy is merely an act of benevolence on the part of the moral agent. Scheler’s view of sympathy sharply divides sympathy from empathy in a rather similar way to his distinction between sympathy and love. Empathy, somewhat like love, is a free act of the human “spirit”, or mind, which is not conditioned upon instrumental considerations, and which requires transference of emotions between the sufferer and the moral agent. Sympathy, on the other hand, is primarily cognitive: placing oneself cognitively in another’s shoes requires the recognition of the salient features of the other person’s position, choices and emotions, but not one’s “heteropathic identification” with another. In order to sympathise, one must both be in another’s position in the cognitive sense, and maintain a 172 Chapter Ten clear perception of one’s own identity difference from that of the sufferer. This is a situation that suggests care for another, but not empathy. An ethics of sympathy would rest on the largely innate capacities of the human mind to relate to other members of the same species in the way that Scheler so elaborately accounts for. It would be able to entail one’s duty to take into account another’s position. Such an ethic can appreciate virtue arising from a propensity to sympathise. In this context moral goodness is defined as a highly developed capacity for sympathy and the resulting care for one’s peers. The work required for the development of such virtue would be the practicing of sympathy, or ‘the frequent perusal of virtue’ that eventually leads all those who are ‘tolerably virtuous’ to become good (Hume 1963: 174). Unlike in the ethics of empathy, duty and rights can be readily inculcated in an ethics of sympathy. One’s exercise of sympathy constitutes one’s fulfilment of moral obligations required by virtue, but also one’s moral duty. Scheler’s philosophy posits sympathy as largely a pre-given capacity, and indeed inclination, which is predominantly instinctive. Thus there is really no question about everybody’s ability and general predisposition to sympathise with others. The extent to which this is possible depends primarily on one’s exercise of virtue, discipline and control over one’s character, all of which is entirely consistent with the requirements of a morally developed life. It is therefore clear that sympathy can be posited as a moral duty, as it is both morally desirable and members of the community have a general capacity to exercise it. Once it is defined as a moral duty, it follows that all members of the community have a right to sympathy by others, and this suffices for a selfcontained ethics. The way in which other rights will be defined in a community that embraces an ethic of empathy does not really matter to such ethics: the crucial thing is that in exercising moral judgement, by whatever yardstick the community may choose, the over-riding “moral methodology”, and at the same time substantive requirement, is sympathy. While an ethics of sympathy does not prima facie exclude any substantive values or political ideologies, it exercises a systematic influence on them. For example, if a community has a liberal ideology with a strong emphasis on minimal regulation and the dynamic force of the market, the system will be “softened” towards those who are vulnerable through the exercise of the rights to, and duties of, sympathy. In such a community, which may possess a bustling capitalist economy, the poor will not be left homeless and uncared for, and the sick will not be left without medical care if they cannot afford it. Automatically, the social Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 173 democratic elements will “creep in” if sympathy is the over-riding moral value. If a community embraces a retributive approach to punishment, this too will be softened by the role of sympathy. Punishments may still be meted out according to perceptions of “just deserts”, however the perceptions themselves are likely to be less harsh once there is a moral requirement to try to also see the crime from the point of view of the perpetrator. In such a system the role of extenuating circumstances, various legal pardons and other alleviating factors will likely be far greater than may otherwise be the case in retributive criminal justice. In societies permeated with a morality of sympathy, violence and crime would likely decrease, at least as far as they are predicated upon social circumstances of exclusion, deprivation, or the aggressive ideological stereotypes of “success” (Merton 1938; Cloward and Ohlin 1960; Fatić 2010). Predatory behaviour in humans that is encouraged by ideological models of competition and evolutionist views of “survival of the fittest” being uncritically transposed to social life would also likely mellow down. Undoubtedly exceptional social benefits could be expected from a broad adoption of the ethics of sympathy. This makes it an excellent candidate for utilitarian ethics. However, an ethics of sympathy would also satisfy the traditional Kantian deontic requirements: anybody could reasonably desire that the “maxim” of one’s (sympathetic) action becomes a “general principle.” In the deontological context sympathy is a substantive moral requirement that is readily universalisable. Finally, an ethics of sympathy is a ready virtue ethics, which envisions the development of the virtue of sympathy as a moral task. All of the above considerations suggest that Scheler’s interpretation of sympathy can be principally maintained in a self-contained ethics of sympathy. Such ethics is compatible with all three main traditional ethical methodologies — utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics. Finally, the ethics of sympathy would be useful in a variety of contexts, and would provide a clear and simple formulation of the virtue whose general cultivation and enhancement the society could foster unequivocally. Thus, while Scheler is correct in arguing that there are serious problems in the conceptualisation of an ethics of love, conceived as a free exercise of value-appreciation in another, he is wrong in arguing that sympathy is incapable of sustaining an ethics of its own. In fact, an ethics of sympathy is not only possible, but also very simple and capable of elegantly fitting in the traditional conceptual frameworks of moral philosophy. 174 Chapter Ten References Cloward, Richard and Lloyd Ohlin (1960): Delinquency and Opportunity. New York: The Free Press. Fatić, Aleksandar (2010): Uloga kazne u savremenoj poliarhičnoj demokratiji (The Role of Punishment in Polyarchic Democracy). Belgrade: Institute of International Politics and Economics. Gilligan, Carol (1993): In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Held, Virginia (2006): The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume, David (1963): ‘The Sceptic’, Essay 18 in Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Macintyre, Alasdair (1981): After Virtue. London: Duckworth. McInturff, Cate (2007): ’Rex Oedipus: The Ethics of Sympathy in Recent Work by J.M. Coetzee’. Postcolonial text 3, postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/download/623/494, accessed December 2012. Merton, Robert (1938): ‘Social Structure and Anomie’. American Sociological Review 3: 672-682. Noddings, Neil (2003): Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. O’Neil, Onora (2004): ‘Global Justice: Whose Obligations’. In The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, Edited by Deen K. Chatterjee, New York: Cambridge University Press: 242‒259. Scheler, Max (1979): The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath, edited by W. Stark. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Searle, John (1983): Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slote, Michael (1992): From Morality to Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press. —. (1998): ’The Justice of Caring’. Social Philosophy & Policy 15: 171195. —. (2003): ’Sentimentalist Virtue and Moral Judgement: Outline of a Project’, Metaphilosophy 34: 131-143. —. (2004), ’Moral Sentimentalism’. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7: 3-14. —. (2007): The Ethics of Care and Empathy. London: Routledge. —. (1992): From Morality to Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press. —. (2007): The Ethics of Care and Empathy. London: Routledge. Love and Sympathy: Building on the Legacy of Max Scheler 175 Smith, Adam (1997): The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Washington: Regnery. Stewart, Ian (2008): Transactional Analysis: Counseling in Action. Ithaca: Sage Publications. White, Robert (2009): ’Care and Justice’. Ethical Perspectives 16: 459483. Woodworth, Susan (1995): Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War. Washington: The Brookings Institution. CHAPTER ELEVEN LOVE THROUGH PROXIMITY AND DISTANCE IN GOETHE AND BENJAMIN SONIA ARRIBAS Walter Benjamin wrote that nearness and distance, as well as appearance and disappearance, are important representational motives to think of love and the erotic. In the unpublished philosophical fragment “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem”, (Benjamin 1996: 393-401) he maintains, for example, that whereas sexuality is connected to nearness, erotic life is ignited by distance. Benjamin writes here that these spatial categories serve to describe the body’s reaction to other bodies — its physical reaction to the encounter with other bodies in the face of the limitation and individuality that characterizes it. The crucial thing, however, is that he thinks of the body as intrinsically connected to historical events — even world events — i.e. never as a substratum independent of the temporal and historical determinations in which the body finds itself. His idea, then, is to discern the way in which these categories do indeed tell us, when we use them, about the historical and temporal way in which an always embodied subject interacts with, and is confronted with, another embodied subject. Nearness and distance are thus not mere physical categories, as the natural sciences usually take them to be, but first and foremost (in his own terms) “psychophysical” categories, i.e. categories that speak about how a historical and embodied subject relates to other historical and embodied subjects. In Section VI of “Outline of Psychophysical Problem,” entitled “Near and Distance (continued)”, Benjamin also introduces two opposed terms that, in his view, are commonly employed to describe how a subject situates himself with respect to the historical and temporal determinations that precede him and which at any moment act on him (398-400). These are fate and character. As is well known, only three years before, in 1919, he had already written a whole text (“Fate and Character,” published in 1921) about these two terms and their meaning in moral philosophy (201- Love through Proximity and Distance in Goethe and Benjamin 177 206). We will come back to it a little bit later. In the aforementioned fragment he connects them with the spatial categories that we want to discuss in this essay. He thus writes that when fate imprisons man, it is because he is determined by what is close to him. And if, on the contrary, man is said to be free, then it is because fate operates in him from a distance. In relation to erotic life, distance and proximity function as indexes that refer to how two sexed beings relate to, and affect, each other. Benjamin suggests that in the ideal perfect love distance and nearness appear to be in complete balance, as two forces that mutually influence each other without neutralizing their powers. If Dante places his beloved Beatrice far away, among the stars, he does it by thinking that in Beatrice — or we could also say, thanks to her — the stars will at the same time be close to him. Thus in perfect love distance and nearness exchange roles in equilibrium, without dissolving the tension inherent between the two poles. Perfect love exemplifies ideally why proximity and separation are decisive for any kind of love. For Benjamin believes that distance is a spatial category that allows us to represent whatever force determines the subject’s body, whereas proximity can be used to represent a force that impels one subject to influence another subject. The intense feeling of longing caused by the absence of the beloved, by the distance between the lovers, testifies to the former. “Yearning is a state of being-determined” (400). On the other hand, extreme closeness testifies to an uncontrolled desire to bind oneself to the other’s body. Benjamin suggests that the sexual relations that are performed by the married couples portrayed in Strindberg’s plays are a good example of that oppressive proximity. The corollary of this is that some kind of distance, even the fear of an abyss, has to exist and act as a counterbalance to the perils of extreme closeness if an erotic or passionate intimacy is to arouse between two subjects. Again, what Benjamin is trying to do with the recourse to this spatial terminology is to think of a way to thematize the subject’s body as necessarily mediated through historical determinations. He is also figuring out why in philosophical reflection, but also in everyday language, we use spatial categories to describe the subject’s embedment in historical events and his (in)capacity to act freely. A man is subjected to fate when the people or the circumstances that are close to him determine his actions. If he is capable of altering that which lies near at hand, or if distant things have effects upon his life, then we say that he is free. Benjamin contends, in this sense, that the ancient habit of interrogating the distant stars is connected with the search for freedom. The idea is thus to think of the subject as always embodied, as always situated in a spatial environment that can be modified by him, or that can modify the subject himself. Both 178 Chapter Eleven the degree to which the subject is capable of modifying this environment, and the distance of the people and things that inhabit it, tell us about his freedom. He says that distance represents a subject capable of reacting with prudence to what befalls upon him. And that proximity represents a subject that, subjected to his fate, broods over what is to come. But it can also sometimes represent a subject that is capable of freely determining his life and having effects on his environment. It is in Benjamin’s essay on “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” where we find in great detail how distance and proximity can be used as representational motives to convey the interaction (attraction / repulsion) between subjects in an erotic relationship (297-360). It could also be argued that Benjamin drew some inspiration for this insight from his reading of Goethe, as the Elective Affinities, as we will see, vividly uses many of these motives. As is well known, the title of the novel is a technical term used by Goethe following the Swedish chemist Torbern Olof Bergmann that refers to the different combinations that natural phenomena adopt when they enter into contact with other natural phenomena, that is, the ways in which they can disintegrate from the original chemical compound in order to form a new compound. Goethe takes this idea and translates it into human relations: the novel starts with the compound of a married couple (Charlotte and Eduard). The plot shows how their relationship can endure (or not) as a formal union between husband and wife once its increasingly separate elements enter into contact with a third (the Captain), and a bit later on, a fourth element (Ottilie). It is because of the central role that marriage occupies in the novel — as well as for the biographical fact that when Goethe wrote it he had married just two years before the woman with whom he had lived for a long time and had also fallen in love with a younger woman — that many commentators have written that marriage as an institution recognized by the law is indeed its central motive or, in Benjamin’s words, its “material content”. Benjamin dedicates a number of paragraphs of his essay to criticize the insufficiency of this reading. He considers that the task of the critic is to investigate not only the “material content” of a work of art, but also its “truth content”. When Goethe’s Elective Affinities is examined by also taking into account its truth content — a content that was most certainly unknown for the artist himself and the public of his time for it requires the passage of time to become visible — then what we find is clearly a much more interesting interpretation. Mittler, that peculiar character that plays the role of the “mediator”, expresses very clearly the view according to which marriage, the indissoluble union of husband and wife, is the pinnacle of culture. His Love through Proximity and Distance in Goethe and Benjamin 179 belief is that it is the fundamental institution of all moral society. “There were no divorces and the local judiciary was not pestered by a single suit or contention during the whole period of his incumbency,” Goethe writes ironically about him (Goethe 1971: 33). When we concentrate on this sole aspect of marriage, then what we have is a novel that shows what happens to its main characters when its institutional and foundational nature is violated. And the paradox of the novel is that it shows marriage to be in decline, at the same time that Mittler — who, by the way, is a bachelor — defends it at all costs. At a deeper level, however, Benjamin claims, the novel is not mainly about marriage as a social phenomenon, no matter how much it seems to be so at first glance: “The subject of Elective Affinities is not marriage” (Benjamin 1996: 302). It is true that the main characters of the novel struggle to stay within its grip at all costs, and that they do this in the name of their cultivation [Bildung] and conscience. Eduard thinks, for instance, that the life that he shares with his wife will not be turned upside down by the arrival of a third party because they are both “educated by experience, and more aware of themselves” (Goethe 1971: 25) than the majority of people. Charlotte is reassured by the fact that the Captain seems to have a great “insight about himself and… so clear a perception of his own position and that of his friends” (37). But, as Benjamin writes: “At the height of their cultivation, however, they are subject to the forces that cultivation claims to have mastered” (Benjamin 1996: 304). It is also certainly true that, even when they put themselves in the thorniest situations, they conform to their customary behaviors and to the rituals of marriage as if nothing had happened. In that terrible night when the baby is conceived at the end of Chapter 11 of Part 1, for instance, Charlotte is capable of acting like a shy and loving bride, and Edward can be as kind and affectionate as a man who has just fallen in love. But their embraces and their tenderness are only possible because both of them are imagining that they are sleeping with someone else. Are these two bodies not completely distant in the moment when they are most closely together?: In the lamplight twilight inner inclination at once asserted its rights, imagination at once asserted its rights over reality. Eduard held Ottilie in his arms. The Captain hovered back and forth [Orig.: näher oder ferner (closer or further)] before the soul of Charlotte. The absent and the present were in a miraculous way entwined, seductively and blissfully, each with the other (Goethe 1971: 106). 180 Chapter Eleven Is this not the most violent form of adultery? Eduard will call it a “double adultery” (260). Indeed, it will leave its unmistakable traces on the body of the child to be born. If the marriage portrayed in the novel interests Benjamin, then, it is not because marriage is an institution enforced and protected by the law that here is shown to be in crisis, but rather because it is an expression of the continuance of love (Benjamin 1996: 301). The subject of the novel has to do with the way in which the main characters react to the encounter with the new elements, with the degree to which they let themselves be dominated by the power of the natural forces that operate in the original situation, or the degree to which they are willing to change that situation, and follow their newly encountered desires, in order to create a new relationship, a new love. It is here and in this precise sense, then, that the chemical metaphor of the “elective affinities” is used in the novel. Recall the passages of the novel in which this mechanism is explained, and Eduard, the Captain and Charlotte imagine the different combinations that could develop out of it. Some natural phenomena will always refuse any kind of interaction with other phenomena and will continue the way they were; others will unite with the new element without transforming each other in any way, and others will change with the help of new laws and customs. “Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined” (Goethe 1971: 52). Edward thus concludes: [T]he most complicated cases are in fact the most interesting. It is only when you consider these that you get to know the degrees of affinity, the close and stronger, the more distant and weaker relationships; the affinities become very interesting only when they bring about divorces (53). There is no need for long psychological descriptions of the emotions of the characters. Goethe depicts very carefully, with the skill of a chemist and almost without us noticing, how a situation gradually arises in which both partners are confronted with moments of freedom in which they have to choose whether they continue playing their familiar roles of husband and wife, or whether they act according to their newly felt impulses. The spatial terminology of nearness and distance expresses the tension inherent in this process. Sometimes it is also used to convey how the desire for everyday things depends on how far these things are, as when the Captain says that: “Food and drink taste better after a long [Orig.: entfernte (distant)] walk than they would have tasted at home” (77). At other moments it simply refers to the need to go far away when things are not Love through Proximity and Distance in Goethe and Benjamin 181 going so well: “She [Charlotte] feels that distance alone will not be enough to cure the disease, it is too grave for that” (118). If the elements separate and form a new combination, then clearly an “elective affinity” has taken place, since one relationship was preferred to another and chosen instead of it. But the freedom necessary for this choice comes at a price: “Far from opening up new perspectives for them, it blinds them to the reality that inhabits what they fear” (Benjamin 1996: 303). Husband and wife feel the possibility of altering the original compound as if it was a struggle against natural forces. Indeed, these forces are the power of custom and habit, the rituals of marriage, their daily loving gestures, and the past that Charlotte and Eduard share — and none of them should be underestimated. Who, except Charlotte, could play music so nicely with Eduard? Whereas she plays the piano very well, he is a bad player of the flute, but only Charlotte can manage it so that nobody notices: “it would have been very difficult for anyone else to get through a duet with him” (Goethe 1971: 36). All these shared experiences and common practices operate as natural forces that husband and wife will have to alter and leave behind in order to dissolve their marriage and create a new union. Similarly to what Benjamin says about the body in his “Outline of Psychophysical Problem”, in the Elective Affinities nature is not to be understood, then, as an inert substratum prior to the historical, but rather as a site of conflict in which a subject struggles with more or less success to take upon himself a situation in order to alter it according to his new desires. But the subjects of the novel fail in this task: “Marriage seems a destiny more powerful than the choice to which the lovers give themselves up” (Benjamin 1996: 308). Marriage as an institution recognized by the law is then the material content of the deeper theme of the novel, which we could start spelling out as a question: to which extent can the natural forces of habit and custom determine a subject, and to which extent — at what prize we could also ask — can the subject persevere in altering such forces according to his newly found desires? Or, as Charlotte exclaims after she has heard what the elective affinities are about: “I would never see a choice here but rather a natural necessity and indeed hardly that; for in the last resort it is perhaps only a matter of opportunity… Once they have been brought together, though, God help them!” (Goethe 1971: 54). Is it a choice, a natural necessity or, rather, a matter of opportunity? What is clear in the novel is that the effects of the elective affinities turn out to be really violent. Benjamin interprets all the premonitions that appear in the Elective Affinities as expressions of fate and as a symbolism of death: “In its most hidden features, the entire work is woven through by that symbolism” 182 Chapter Eleven (Benjamin 1996: 305). He argues that all these different signs are connected around the episode of the crystal cup, which was supposed to be destroyed on the occasion of the inauguration of a building. A young workman throws it into the air, but it does not come back to earth because it is caught in mid-flight. Benjamin also notices that the first three chapters of Part II are filled with conversations about the burial-ground were Ottilie’s body will lie. We could also add that Goethe’s account of how the main characters interpret these omens are filled with references either about the proximity of those that we love or about the disappearance of bodies in the distance to the point of death. When Ottilie walks around the church she gazes up and around “it seemed to her that she was and was not, she felt her existence and did not feel it, she felt all her existence and did not feel it, she felt that all this before her might vanish away and she too might vanish away” (Goethe 1971: 169). These thoughts about her own disappearance will accompany her until the final moment. When the two women are walking around the memorial, Charlotte for her part says that she has some kind of aversion against portraits: “They point to something distant and departed and remind me how hard it is to do justice to the present” (160). Ottilie holds the opposite view about portraits; for her, a portrait brings us closer to those who are far away and allows us to enter life after death as a second life, even if it is this second existence will also be extinguished. The most vivid omen takes place when all the faces that the architect has been painting on the chapel begin to look like Ottilie. The proximity of the beautiful girl, Goethe explains, must have forced his hand to copy in detail what he was carefully observing every day: “one of the last of the little faces… it seemed as if Ottilie herself were looking down from the vault of heaven” (168). According to Benjamin, this constant repetition of images and signs are to be recognized as expressions of fate. This is because the union that is shaken by the interference of the new elements produces guilt in its members, and fate and all the symbolism of death associated with it are the typical aesthetic representations of guilt: “fate unfolds inexorably in the culpable life. Fate is the nexus of guilt among the living” (Benjamin 1996: 307). The inexorability with which the main four characters are gradually overpowered by guilt is only fully noticed at the end, with the tragic and sudden death of Ottilie. This comes to the reader as a surprise, when all the premonitions find their encounter with reality in her fatal sacrifice. In the meantime, what we see is how unions that up to some point were strong and stable come to be substituted by other links that are equally powerful, though not so solid. All these transformations take place as the development of natural forces that are altered by the encounter with the Love through Proximity and Distance in Goethe and Benjamin 183 new elements. New forces are created that will strive to become natural and that will be unforeseeable in their effects. The original elements of the compound interact with the third and fourth elements, they distance themselves to different degrees, and they approximate to the other elements also to different degrees. And distance and proximity, as we will see, will mean different things depending on the type of relation that is established. In the first chapters of the novel Charlotte appears as the loving wife of Eduard, and says about their relationship: “We rejoiced at what we remembered, loved what we remembered.” (Goethe 1971: 23) Theirs is a love based on memory. When she falls in love with the Captain, the first thing she does is give up her own plans for the park, something she would have never done with Eduard as he never interfered in her designs for the estate. What Goethe merely tells us about what occurs between Charlotte and the Captain is that they start working together and getting things done in the park in accordance with his plans. At the very beginning of the novel we are told that Eduard, for his part, had won Charlotte “through an obstinate constancy which bordered on the fabulous.” (28) It comes to us as no surprise, then, that when he is induced by the Captain to attract his attention to Ottilie, or when his wife is not thinking about him any more as a loving partner, he continues to be obstinately attached to her as he used to do. However, Ottilie’s charms gradually seduce him: in his eyes she becomes an angelical being. The first thing that we are aware of is the affection that she feels for him, for she only enjoys to do things for him, and pays attention to cater to him every whim—“What he wanted she tried to provide, what might provoke his impatience she sought to prevent”— (71) to the extent that she ends up being indispensable to him. Eduard then begins to strangely identify with Ottilie and recognizes his own inclinations in many things she thinks or does. For instance, when Ottilie comes up with an idea for the location of a building dedicated to pleasure, he is “as proud of it as if it had been his own.” (77) The improbable union between him and the young girl is then marked as a sign on the glass cup that is saved from its destruction: into it the letters E and O, entwined, had been cut: “made for him as a boy.” (86) It is at this point that we begin to realize that their attraction is of a very different kind than the one that until now existed between him and Charlotte. We see Eduard and Ottilie playing music together, and how Ottilie has managed to learn to play exactly as he does, so that his shortcomings become her own as well, and the resulting performance even turns out to be agreeable. For what is happening in front of our eyes is the formation of an affinity between Eduard and Ottilie that is based on their gradually becoming very similar. 184 Chapter Eleven He eerily sees himself in everything that Ottilie does. Yet he only perceives that the passion that invades him is reciprocal when one day he looks at her handwriting and discovers that it is exactly like his. When he shows his astonishment to Ottilie, she remains silent, but cannot hide her satisfaction. They cannot stop looking into each other’s eyes. The Captain is the last of the four main characters to be shown to react to the experiment that is taken place in Goethe’s novel. Surely, we know that Eduard shows a lot of interest for his good friend, and that Charlotte from the very beginning is very concerned about his arrival in the estate as she thinks that his presence could disturb the calm bourgeois life that she has together with her husband: “I have a premonition that no good will come of it.” (25) She even says to Eduard that neither experience nor being aware of oneself is of any help against the intrusion of a third person in their shared life. But her only feelings are for Eduard and for her niece Ottilie. When the Captain is finally with them the main disturbance that he introduces is his criticism of the way that Charlotte laid out the park. We cannot yet foresee that the intimate union that she maintains with Eduard is about to break down. The Captain spends time together with the other three discussing new plans for the estate, all of which except one seem quite convincing. Ottilie disagrees with his idea of building the new pavilion over against the mansion; she wants it far away, on the highest place on the hill, and her idea is clearly the best. Days quickly pass by and neither the married couple nor the two new elements notice it, since they are all too distracted by the contradictory forces that are operating on them: “time was beginning to be a matter of indifference to them.” (72) Charlotte and the Captain observe with bemusement and a bit of envy Eduard and Ottilie playing music together. It is only then that they realize that an affection is growing up between them, one that is as strong as that between the other two. But, Goethe writes, “since Charlotte and the Captain were more serious-minded, more sure of themselves, more capable of self-control, it was an even more dangerous affection.” (80) How can these conflicting emotions triggered by the encounter of a married couple with two new elements develop the way they do? Are the elective affinities not as simple as chemistry describes them, that is, as a painless reorganization of established natural forces by the emergence of new ones? The formal structure says this: Imagine an A intimately united with a B, so that no force is able to sunder them; imagine a C likewise related to a D; now bring the two couples into contact: A will throw itself ad D, C at B, without our being able to say which first deserted its partner, which first embraced the other’s partner. (56) Love through Proximity and Distance in Goethe and Benjamin 185 Benjamin maintains that the elective affinities whose spell influences the main characters do not produce any kind of harmonious resolution of the tension, but instead many different conjunctures where something is always slightly amiss. As we have seen, Ottilie adapts herself really nicely to Eduard’s flute playing, but his playing is simply not correct. And Charlotte is easily convinced that the Captain’s designs for the park make more sense than hers, but isn’t it the case that Ottilie then suggests something better and more eccentric than the Captain for the construction of the new pavilion? At those conjunctures we see that love is a peculiar force whose effects can be perceived precisely in those moments when the failures and gaps in the unions are exposed. But fate develops as a force as strong as that of love, and it is difficult to thwart its power. Everybody is ashamed of what they do, even in the least obvious circumstances. Charlotte and Eduard, for instance, after having spent the night together, encounter “the Captain and Ottilie as if they were ashamed and contrite. For the nature of love is such that it believes it alone is in the right, that all other rights vanish before the rights of love.” (107) A bit later on Charlotte feels a terrible melancholy when she is in a boat alone with the Captain. Whilst he is talking about his intentions for the park, she only half listens. Goethe beautifully describes the still landscape that surrounds them, and the strange thrill of fear and sadness that overcomes her, and then takes recourse to another spatial motive to convey the strange tension that she feels: “It seemed to her as if her friend was taking her a long away to leave her in some distant place.” (110) The scenes that take place in the medium of water always express the power of fate that is overcoming them. In the beautiful scene in the boat in which Charlotte is seized by a feeling of dejection, she begs the Captain that she wants to go back to the shore. It is already quite dark, and the Captain is not familiar with the lake. He tries to find a safe place to disembark, goes a little aside, thus Charlotte starts to panic in her impatience. The boat gets stuck. Since the water is shallow, the Captain can carry her safely in his arms. When they reach the shore he kisses her violently on the mouth, and immediately after he asks for forgiveness. Charlotte’s reply is devastating, as she expresses clearly how this is one of those crucial moments when everything is at stake: “We cannot help it if this moment is an epoch in our lives, but whether this moment shall be worthy of us does lie within our power. You must go, dear friend, and you will go.” (111) Paradoxically, Goethe then explains that Charlotte is clinging herself to those traits of hers—self-knowledge and experience— that before she had declared to be of little avail when the forces of love 186 Chapter Eleven unleash. However, her renunciation will not bring things back to the state they were before the process began. A few days later they organize a party to which they invite a few people with the excuse of burning a bunch of fireworks. These are to be set off beside the lake, whilst the audience is supposed to stay under some trees in order to see the spectacle as a reflection: “in safety and comfort, they could observe the effect from the proper distance, see the reflections in the water and watch the fireworks which were intended to burn while floating on the water.” (121) Unexpectedly, lumps of earth separate from the dam due to the weight of the crowd, and a few people fall into the water. Those who are safe help to pull out everybody except one boy. The Captain throws himself into the water and brings him back to the shore. Eduard wants to continue with the party and burn the fireworks, but Charlotte replies to him that this is not a good idea, since the boy is not well. She and most of the guests leave the park and go inside the house. Eduard is left there with Ottilie, and he interprets the accident as a moment of luck, since the consequence is that they are now together. He decides to burn the fireworks anyway. Ottilie watches them in the distance very agitated. Charlotte back in the house feels uneasy; she thinks that everything is weird, a presage of “a significant but not an unhappy future.” (128) In the essay “Fate and Character” Benjamin argues that both phenomena can only be apprehended through signs, not in themselves. The Elective Affinities are full of signs of an “unhappy future”—of fate. The essay explains that the definition of fate must be completely separated from that of character, as they are two wholly divergent concepts. Fate is associated with guilt, and never with happiness, for the latter is precisely “what releases the fortunate man from the embroilment of the Fates and from the net of this own fate.” (Benjamin 1996: 203) The person who judges life events in the light of fate can perceive the latter wherever she pleases, as Charlotte does when she interprets the Captain’s rescue of both her and the boy from the perils of water as signs of some misfortune to come. For its part, character is commonly associated with fate, but this is, according to Benjamin, a mistake that is based on searching for character in the intricate connections that take place between personality traits that form a net, even a tight cloth. If the notion of character is to be properly comprehended, it has to be disconnected from that of fate, and instead be observed in a “single trait, which allows no other to remain visible in its proximity.” (205) And then he states: While fate brings to light the immense complexity of the guilty person, the complications and bonds of his guilt, character gives this mystical Love through Proximity and Distance in Goethe and Benjamin 187 enslavement of the person to the guilt context the answer of genius. Complication becomes simplicity, fate freedom. (205-206) In “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” Benjamin restates this idea when he says that to “attribute to a human being a complicated character can only mean, whether rightly or wrongly, to deny him character.” (335) He then relates it to sexuality and claims that whereas the drive of sexuality can easily be associated with fate, and thus become an expression of guilt, character, on the contrary, is characterized by the “unity of spiritual life.” (335) The four main characters of Goethe’s novel are entangled in a complex network of randomly meaningful interactions. But all of these interactions turn around that night—which Goethe calls “daemonic” (Goethe 1971: 106)—in which the two bodies of Charlotte and Eduard were simultaneously closer than ever and more distant than ever, as they each imagined sleeping with either the Captain or Ottilie. In that sinful night adultery and fidelity became completely indistinguishable, which is obviously an extremely disturbing thing to experience: “for every manifestation of bare sexual life the seal of its recognition remains the insight into the equivocalness of its nature.” (Benjamin 1996: 335) It is clear that the child that is conceived that night inherits the guilt of his parents, and thus must pass away. One could even argue that he also inherits that of Ottilie and the Captain, as they were both present and absent in the imagination of the married couple. His features and figure are creepily similar to those of the Captain, whereas his eyes resemble Ottilie’s. They constitute another piece in the tight network of multiple signs of fate that is being painstakingly sown around the four characters. When Eduard sees the child’s eyes, big and black like those of the young girl, he remembers “the fatal hour” (Goethe 1971, 260) when he was conceived, and wishes to atone for that moment in her arms. But their only embraces will be those of a terrible farewell: “Hope soared away over their heads like a star falling from the sky. They fancied, they believed they belonged to one another (…) they had to tear themselves away from one another.” (261) Ottilie then sees in the distance Charlotte’s white dress on the balcony of the pavilion that lies on the hill. Benjamin says that the house, depicted as an isolated presence, as well as the image of Charlotte in its balcony, show clearly how in the Elective Affinities material things are always symbols of something, and thus exert power over human beings (Benjamin 1996: 308). Ottilie has to cross the lake that separates her from the building. The element of water brings with it, once again, the unavoidable fate. She nervously rushes to a boat, and then drops the child. When she pulls him, he is already dead. His death and Ottilie’s a few 188 Chapter Eleven pages later are both sacrifices for the expiation of the guilt that everybody shares. The formal structure of the Elective Affinities, as is well known, follows that of the classic German Novelle or novella (the prose narrative that is longer than a short story, but shorter than an actual novel), and it was intended to be written in this way. It finally grew longer and became a novel, but some traits of the original plan remain. Its emphasis on the plot is one of them. In it, of course, everything is structured around the basic formula of the elective affinities, as it was quoted above. This is a very organized and almost symmetric unitary form that is imposed upon the action, so that its resolution will follow from the set out plan. Another trait that it shares with the novella, and which is immediately connected to that of the very ordered plot, is the representation of a somehow secret conflict that leads to a surprising, but logical ending that is brought about by the previous events. This conflict is incarnated in the novel, to my understanding, in that night of “double adultery” in which the child was conceived, and which Eduard describes to Ottilie, already anticipating the fatal resolution, like this: [T]his child was begotten in twofold adultery! It sunders me from my wife and my wife from me as it should have united us. My it bear witness against me, may these lovely eyes say to yours that in the arms of another I belonged to you; may you feel, Ottilie, feel truly, that I can atone for that error, for that crime, only in your arms! (Goethe 1971: 260) Now, the curious thing about the Elective Affinities is that it contains a small version of an actual novella inside of it: “The Wayward Young Neighbours”. Benjamin argues that the opposition set out between the novel and the novella inserted in it allows us to unveil the secret of the novel—“[Goethe] had its secret to keep,” he writes (Benjamin 1996: 311)—that is, it allows us to come to terms a bit better with its truth content. In fact, he thinks that the latter is to be found in the contrast that obtains between the characters in the novel and those of the novella, and not in the one that exists between the four main characters of the novel. This fundamental contrast is represented in the formal structure of the entire composition, that is, precisely in the fact that the whole picture appears divided into two perspectives that contradict and complement each other like a thesis and an antithesis: that of the novel itself, and that of the novella. The novel and the novella appear for the reader, so to say, at two distinct levels, yet at the same time when they are combined they constitute a single image, like the one that comes forth when one looks through a stereoscope. Benjamin puts it this way: “For if the novel, like a Love through Proximity and Distance in Goethe and Benjamin 189 maelstrom, draws the reader irresistibly into its interior, the novella strives towards distance, pushing every little creature out of its magic circle.” (330) And a bit later on: [N]o feature of the novella is in vain. With regard to the freedom and necessity that it reveals vis-à-vis the novel, the novella is comparable to an image in the darkness of a cathedral—an image which portrays the cathedral itself an so in the midst of the interior communicates a view of the place that is not otherwise available… For his literary composition remains turned toward the interior in the veiled light refracted through multicolored panes. (352) The truth content of the Elective Affinities is to be found, then, in the deep discordance that the novella introduces at the heart of the novel. This discordance allows its truth content to come to the fore as a relief. That is, only thanks to the contrasting image offered by the little tale as against the main plot, can we attain a grasp of what the novel is about. Contrary to the characters of the novel, whose love is frustrated under the dominion of fate and the multiple complications that they always encounter in their way, the two lovers of this short tale persevere in their desire. And whereas the signs to be read in the novel recurrently symbolize death, the only presentiment that the two characters of the novella intuit has nothing to do with fatalities, but with a “life of bliss” (352). When the two lovers of the tale are separated, and the girl longs for her “distant neighbor”, Goethe writes about her yearning not in the present tense, not even as a hope for the future happiness that one day could be theirs, but as an act of the imagination about what happened between them in the past, with fond memory of their constant fights when they were children. Moreover, he describes her imagination about things past as completely modulated and colored by her desire: When she looked back, indeed, it seemed to her she had always loved him… she wanted to remember what a supremely pleasant sensation it had been when he had disarmed here. She imagined she had felt the greatest bliss when he tied her up. (239) It is for this reason that Benjamin concludes that it is not really from their will to happiness that their love arises. Both the novel and little tale stick to the strict form of the novella and thus both have a mysterious conflict in its nucleus. However, the important differences between them result in the fundamental tension that Benjamin is talking about. The conflict of the novel is contained in the formula of the elective affinities, and even more deeply, in the representation of the 190 Chapter Eleven ambiguous night spent together by husband and wife. This (almost impossible, one could say) representation is of the sexual embodiment of the affinities chosen by the characters. But, as Benjamin remarks, whereas in the novel the catastrophe, though constantly anticipated, only appears at the end, in the novella catastrophe takes place at the very center of the story. And it is this catastrophe that constitutes its conflictive nucleus. When the girl notices that her old friend simply treats her as a brother, and not as a lover, she resolves to die by throwing herself into the water when they are sailing down a river. Her aim is to punish the one she loves, to be remembered by him. But water is in this case a “friendly element,” (242) the medium through which her desire is fulfilled, and the boy immediately throws himself after her into the water, saves her, and ardently tells her that he will never leave her. Benjamin points out another important difference between the novel and the novella. This is the different weight that social or worldly ties have in the lives of the main characters, and how this influence is represented in the two plots by means of the motives of distance and proximity. The characters of the novel live a secluded life, apart from all family and social ties. Ottilie, for instance, has to get rid of the memory of her father and her home in order to be loved by Eduard. The main characters in the Elective Affinities try—and fail—to attain extreme proximity between them by distancing themselves completely from the world and by cutting off social relations. The main consequence is that the more they try to detach themselves, and the more they try to gain their independence, “the more rigorously the temporal and local circumstances of their subjection to fate” (Benjamin 1996: 332) fall upon them. The lovers of the novella also separate themselves from their relatives in order to attain a life in common, following their desires. But they achieve this not by withdrawing into a life of bourgeois privacy, but by symbolically appearing as a married couple (with borrowed wedding dresses) in front of their families, confronting them. They manage to distance themselves from their relatives neither by negating the influence that these have upon them, nor by excluding themselves from their circle or from the world, but by actually entering into relations with them and transforming their interactions with them. By doing this, they achieve two things: firstly, they attain proximity between themselves—a proximity based on knowing when to let the other separate. Right after he has declared his love to her, Goethe writes: “she gladly released him so that he might look after himself” (Goethe 1971: 243). Secondly, they manage to distance themselves from their family, but not by hiding from them, or by Love through Proximity and Distance in Goethe and Benjamin 191 denying themselves contact with them (like Ottilie does with her own family), but by directly appearing in front of them. Benjamin also connects these two divergent forms of distance and proximity with the difference between the “choice” or “election” (Wahl) taken by the characters of the novel and what he considers to be a more fundamental act performed by the lovers in the novella: a decision. The four characters in the novel strive for freedom, but their freedom is falsely conceived, as they think that it can be attained by radically distancing themselves from the world, when the only thing they actually do is knit around them an extremely tight web of signs that will demand a sacrifice and will lead them into disaster. Hence, their freedom can only be conceived as the choice between one element and another. The couple of the novella, by contrast, “no longer have a fate,” (Benjamin 1996: 332) since what they have is character. This is made evident in that they move beyond the intricacies of guilt, and do not demand any sacrifice from each other. They risk their lives for the sake of bliss, not atonement: Whereas the characters of the novel linger more weakly and more mutely, though fully life-sized in the gaze of the reader, the united couple disappears under the arch of a final rhetorical question, in the perspective, so to speak, of infinite distance. In the readiness for withdrawal, is it not bliss that is hinted at, bliss in small things…? (333) References Benjamin, Walter (1996) Selected Writings. Volume 1. 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. (1971: Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. CHAPTER TWELVE “EXCUSE ME, SIR, WHAT DOES IT MEAN, ‘TO KISS’”? THINKING BEYOND UNIVERSALISM AND EUROCENTRIC IDEAS OF LOVE SARAH LAWSON WELSH In Europe (and the West more generally) literary texts are often read in relation to certain dominant ideas about love: theorizations of love as both entity and process, means and end, as a dialectical relation between lover, loved (and perhaps also the love relation itself), as Eros or Philia, the platonic subject-in relation, in forms spiritual or sensual, transient or eternal. Love has historically been conceptualized, variously, as lack or plenitude, as redemptive and self-authenticating or endlessly destructive, as linked to procreation and the will-to life or distanced from desire and the sexual drive most famously theorized by Freud. Most of these concepts of love can be traced back to distinct Platonic or Judaeo-Christian traditions of thinking about love, or are the recognizable intellectual legacies of thinkers such as Montaigne, Rousseau, Schlegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Freud and Lacan. Despite the various differences — as well as confluences — in these thoughts on love, many of these ideas seem so ubiquitous, that they can seem as universal and selfevident. Love itself is often regarded as a fundamental and universal human trait and it is tempting to see many of these theoretical thoughts on love as unchallengeably universal. Yet to be ubiquitous and self-evident in one culture, indeed to belong to hegemonic structures of thought, does not mean such ideas are appropriate to, or even relevant in other cultures. To cite just one prominent example, in 2012, the year in which London hosted the Olympics and the Head of the Commonwealth celebrated her Golden Jubilee, the Royal Shakespeare company hosted a series of productions of Shakespeare plays from around the globe, in a number of different languages “Excuse Me, Sir, What Does it Mean, ‘To Kiss’”? 193 including Arabic, Urdu and Chinese. As part of the Cultural Olympiad, these productions elicited significant audiences and considerable media attention. One of the key questions which audiences and critics returned to again and again was the idea of the global “reach” of Shakespeare (a universalist argument) versus the cultural specificity of individual productions with their different interpretations of the power relations, genre conventions and the nature of human emotions such as love, desire, jealousy, rivalry and revenge in Shakespeare’s dramatic texts. My discussion in this essay is underpinned by just such issues of power, visibility and cultural relevance which pertains to what might broadly be defined as the interface between hegemonic, European thoughts on love, and those presented by less visible and less dominant non-European discourses. I also consider the ways in which a reading of literary texts from outside a European tradition — in this case, the creolized thoughts and narrativised conceptions of love to be found in a selection of Anglophone Caribbean texts — can help to unsettle and challenge so called “universal” ideas of love. How might a critical consideration of European thoughts on love be productively complicated and interrogated by a critical engagement with non–European, non-hegemonic sources? How might these sources act to problematize and contest the universality of the former? In ‘Heroic Ethnocentrism’ (Larson 2006) Charles Larson reflects on his experiences of teaching English Literature to High School pupils in Nigeria in the early 1960s. Teaching a Thomas Hardy novel — in which European rituals of courtship and love are, of course, central — Larsen recalls encountering: a number of stumbling blocks, which I had in no way anticipated—all of them cultural… matters related to what I have learned to call culturally restricted materials… “Excuse me, sir, what does it mean “to kiss”? [was] a much more difficult question to answer [from pupils] than the usual ones relating to the plot or the characters of the novel — a real shock… Nevertheless, that question and others of a like nature kept recurring — in part, no doubt, because we were reading…Far From the Madding Crowd. Why did Hardy’s characters get all flustered when they were kissed (or more likely when they weren’t kissed)? When I asked one of the Europeaneducated African teachers why…I was more than surprised to learn that Africans, traditionally at least, do not kiss; to learn that what I thought was “natural” in one society is not natural at all, but learned, that is, cultural. Not all people kiss. Or stated appropriately, not all people have learned to kiss. (When I later attended American movies with Africans, I could understand why the audience often went into hysterics at the romantic scenes in the film) (77). 194 Chapter Twelve Larsen’s anecdote about the cultural specificity of the romantic kiss needs to be read in context as a snapshot of a particular time and place — early 1960s Nigeria. Moreover, his observation that there was, at this time, a dearth of African novels centred around romantic love, courtship and seduction, as defined by European standards, needs to be qualified by the tremendous shifts in both social and cultural mores in many modern African societies and the engagement of post-1960s African writers in explorations of an ever-diversifying range of subject matters. To cite just one well-known example, J.M. Coetzee’s Booker-winning novel, Disgrace, mounts an elegant and coruscating interrogation into the nature of “love”; what it is and what it might mean in the specific context of postapartheid South Africa, though famously the term love is only very sparsely used in this text. One should also sound a note of caution about Larsen’s generalized use of the term “African” for “Nigerian” in the context of this article. However, at the heart of Larsen’s piece is an important issue: that of universalism. Universalism: the belief that belief systems or, in this case, literary texts are universally applicable or express “universal” themes and experiences, is the unspoken foundation of liberal humanism and operates as the handmaiden of Eurocentrism (Larsen 2006, Achebe 1988, Serequeberhan 1998). It also has a very long historical pedigree. In recent decades, the issue of universalism (and that of its attendant essentialisms) has exercised critics working in gender studies, queer theory and most centrally in the field of postcolonial studies, as it seems to stand for the very opposite of the gendered, sexual, historical and cultural specificities these scholars seek to privilege in their analyses. But what Larsen taps into, albeit in a rather anecdotal way, is important. I will term it here, the spectre of universalism — the ways, in which European and Western concepts and theories have historically been considered — by Europeans and the West — as universal to all cultures. The origins of such universalisms — and importantly, their perpetuation — owe much to the disproportionate power, visibility and influence of Western critical theory and Western philosophical discourses globally. Defamilarizing our habitual gaze on this state of affairs allows dominant Western discourses to be seen for what they are: important but nonetheless totalising and dominating discourses. Such discourses not only came into being at times of historical, cultural and discursive inequalities of power but were, moreover, fundamentally dependent on subordinating the nonEuropean in order to attain globalized centrality and intellectual hegemony (as Serequeberhan 1998 argues). Emmanuel Chukwdi Eze goes as far as arguing that “significant aspects of the philosophies produced by Hume, “Excuse Me, Sir, What Does it Mean, ‘To Kiss’”? 195 Kant, Hegel, and Marx have been shown to originate in, and to be intelligible only when understood as an organic development within larger socio-historical contexts of European colonialism and the ethnocentric idea: Europe is the model of humanity, culture and history itself (Eze 1998: 6). So for example, Hegel argued that the African is somehow outside of history because Africa was “no historical part of the world”. Only when we uncover such privileged power relations can we start to reconsider and critique the Eurocentric myth of European as rational “norm”, non-European as irrational “other”. As Edward Said has argued (1978, 1980, 1993), a notable occlusion or blind spot in many histories of Western ideas is the massive role played by ideologies of imperialism and the practices of colonialism in constructing the West’s idea of itself and establishing the discourses of Europe or the West as hegemonic. So, for example, the idealism and aspirations of the “golden age” of European colonial explorations in the early modern period need to be seen as being accompanied — and indeed facilitated — by deep-seated European beliefs that only European man was truly civilized and therefore capable of reason. Similarly the age of Enlightenment in Europe was, on the one hand, a period of unprecedented fecundity and advancement in Continental European philosophical thought, but simultaneously a period in which colonially endorsed racial hierarchies were defined and refined and found their logical end in the violent epistemic erasures of slavery and the forced migration of millions of Africans to the plantations of America and the Caribbean. When Marx argues in the early pages of The Communist Manifesto that historicity “has at last compelled [Man] to face with sober sense his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind” (Marx and Engels 1983: 12) he employs the language of universalism once again and makes a link between modernity, Europe and “the real” which is predicated on the implied binary opposite of the “ephemeral non-reality of non-European existence” (Serequeberhan 1998: 89). Serequeberhan argues that in this formulation, Marx is not unique. Despite the originality of his ideas, Marx can be seen here as the intellectual inheritor of certain of Kant and Hegel’s philosophical ideas on history which located “in European modernity...the real in contrast to the unreality of human existence in the non-European world” (89). If, as Said argues “imperialism was the theory, colonialism…the practice of …reconstitut[ing] Europe abroad” (1980: 78) then one of the things which linked this “widely varied group of little Europes scattered throughout Asia, Africa and the Americas” was the perception that “despite their differences…their life was carried on with an air of normality” (78). This “normality”, Said argues, was based on an 196 Chapter Twelve “idea, which dignifies [and indeed hastens] pure force with arguments drawn from science, morality, ethics, and a general philosophy” (78), a kind of ‘metaphysical ground for the legitimacy of European global expansion and conquest: that is, the consolidation of the real” (Serequeberhan 1998: 25). European imperial expansion was, of course, predicated upon such notions of European modernity and superiority. Crucially, the drive towards “global invasion and subjugation of the world” (89) was accompanied by annihilation of native cultures, including it should be noted, alternative traditions of theorising and of philosophical thinking. Such annihilation produced in the colonised subject, as Frantz Fanon has shown, self-alienation within a colonial world where to be non-European is necessarily to be divided and “other”. Henry Paget has called this dispossession of the non-European thinker “Calibanization”, as — in this case the African is formulated as the definitive non-European man ( Paget 2000: 12), devoid of reason and thus of the potential to philosophize, destined never to be a maker only a taker (or consumer) of philosophy. As another black intellectual, contemporary Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter has remarked: “to write at all was and is for the West Indian a revolutionary act. Any criticism that does not start from this very real recognition is invalid” (Wynter 1996: 27). Hamid Dabashi has recently made some playful and provocative points in a piece called ‘Can non-Europeans think?’, a lively but also considered response to what he terms “a lovely little panegyric for the distinguished European philosopher Slavoj Zizek, published recently on Al Jazeera”(2). Dabashi opens with a reference to the opening lines of Zabala’s 2012 piece, ‘Slavoj Zizek and the role of the philosopher’: Zizek...is “what Jacques Derrida was to the 80’s” — the thinker of our age … There are many important and active philosophers today: Judith Butler in the United Sates; Simon Critchley in England, Victoria Camps in Spain, Jean-Luc Nancy in France, Chantal Mouffe in Belgium, Gianni Vattimo in Italy, Peter Sloterdijk in Germany and Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek, not to mention others working in Brazil, Australia and China (Zabala 2012: 2). What immediately strikes the reader…is the unabashedly European character and disposition of the thing the author calls “philosophy today” — thus laying a claim on both the subject and time that is peculiar and in fact an exclusive property of Europe. Even Judith Butler who is cited as an example from the United States is decidedly a product of European philosophical genealogy, thinking somewhere between Derrida and Foucault, brought to bear on our understanding of gender and sexuality. “Excuse Me, Sir, What Does it Mean, ‘To Kiss’”? 197 To be sure, China and Brazil (and Australia, which is also a European extension) are cited as the location of other philosophers worthy of designation, but none of them evidently merits a specific name to be sitting next to these eminent European philosophers. He concludes: “the question of course is the globality of philosophical visions that all these prominent European (and by extension certain American) philosophers indeed share and from which people from the deepest corners of Africa to the remotest villages of India, China, Latin America, and the Arab and Muslim world (“deep and far”, that is, from a fictive European centre) can indeed learn and better understand their lives” (2). For Dabashi, the heart of the issue is not a questioning of the “eminence” of these philosophers but rather a need to foreground the fact that “the philosophy they practice has the globality of a certain degree of self-conscious confidence without which no thinking can presume universality” (3). For Dabashi the “question of Eurocentrism is now entirely blasé. Of course Europeans are Eurocentric and see the world from their vantage point, and why should they not?” (3). Such universalist thinking is, as postcolonial scholars have shown, one of the important legacies of imperialism: “they are the inheritors of multiple (now defunct) empires and they still carry within them the phantom hubris of those empires and they think their particular philosophy is “philosophy” and their particular thinking is “thinking” and everything else is — as the great European philosopher Immanuel Levinas was wont of saying — “dancing” (3). Why, asks Dabashi, are certain thinkers given the pedigree of “a public intellectual” and others not? And why are these overwhelmingly western, Eurocentric voices? “What about other thinkers who operate outside this European philosophical pedigree, whether they practice their thinking in the European language they have colonially inherited or else in their mother tongues— in Asia, Africa, in Latin America” (3). How might a “constellation of thinkers” from a particular region, say African thinkers like Henry Odera Oruka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Okot p’Bitek, Taban lo Liyiong, Achille Mbembe, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and V.Y. Mudimbe (3) “come together to form a nucleus of thinking which is conscious of itself… [and] why do they so rarely qualify for the term “philosopher” or” public intellectuals”? (3). For Dabashi the prime reason is the persistence of an ethnographic gaze which all too often frames Western and European encounters with Asia, Africa and the Arab and Muslim world and delegates its intellectual traditions to the realms of “ethno- philosophy” 198 Chapter Twelve (3). The tyranny of “ethnos” for the non-European is that it is unevenly applied: it should logically be applicable to all thinking rather than merely non-western or non-European thought. The spectre of universalism is not just historically located as a legacy of imperialism. Universalism can also act to define, delimit and police disciplinary boundaries, so that, for example much of the best known and most revered writing on love has been “philosophical” only in accordance with narrowly European conceptions of the discipline. This is a problem which lies at the heart of any endeavour to relocate “thoughts of love” within culturally specific contexts. The very nature of philosophy as a discipline, especially in its most idealist formations, lends itself to abstraction rather than specificity. Indeed, Antiguan scholar, Henry Paget opens his provocative investigation of Afro-Caribbean philosophy, Caliban’s Reason (2000), with the following observation: There are idealist views of philosophy that see it as an affirmation of the autonomy of a thinking subject. As the primary instrument of this absolute subject, philosophy shares in its autonomy and therefore is a discipline that rises above the determination of history and everyday life. The distinguishing characteristics of Afro-Caribbean philosophy do not support this view. Here we find a tradition of philosophy…indelibly marked by the force of an imperial history, and by its intertextual relations with neighbouring discourses…From the Afro-Caribbean perspective, philosophy is an intertextually embedded discursive practice, and not an isolated or absolutely autonomous one. It is often implicitly referenced or engaged in the production of answers to everyday questions and problems that are being framed in non-philosophical discourse [including literary discourse]. However, it is a distinct intellectual practice that raises certain kinds of questions and attempts to answer them in a variety of styles of argument that draw on formal logic, paradox, coherence, the meaningful logic of lived experiences, and the synthetic powers of totalizing systems (1-2). Moreover, much of what the West considers philosophical or theoretical writing is only so when viewed through a Eurocentric, Western or Universalist lens. Caribbean-born, African-American feminist theorist, Barbara Christian has commented on the “Whiteness” of much of what passes as universal thinking or theorizing and the disproportionate visibility — and thus hegemonic position — of many Western philosophical ideas. Indeed, it is salutary to remember that the Western models we use are not the only available models for theorising: People of colour have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our “Excuse Me, Sir, What Does it Mean, ‘To Kiss’”? 199 theorising … is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking… (457). The consequence of thinking about love only in narrow, ethnocentric or Universalist terms is, in Biodun Jeyfo’s words, “A social and historical context which is massively overdetermined…” (1987: 33). How are these debates played out in literary texts from non-European cultures? The Anglophone Caribbean is a fascinating example. It has long been observed within postcolonial studies that counter-discursive strategies involve more than simplistic resistance manoeuvres, especially in textual terms. Thus the opening up of the literary and critical terrain in thinking about love is not simple: it is never simply a matter of resistance to, or a banal replacement of “bad” universalist ideas with “good” culturally specific ones, especially since the binaries of colonial and Eurocentric thought are so deeply entrenched in Western as well as post-colonial cultures. For me, what makes philosophical and theoretical writing within an Afro-Caribbean context simultaneously challenging and fascinating is that it is creolized: it draws upon European as well as African influences and intellectual traditions. Caribbean thinkers such as C.L.R. James, Franz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Edouard Glissant, Wilson Harris and Antonio Benitez Rojo can rightly be said to have made major contributions to debates within Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructualism, existentialism, phenomenology and transnational studies. However, European ideas have tended to dominate in Caribbean thinking, as Paget demonstrates. Indeed, the Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James wrote explicitly about his indebtedness to these Western traditions of thought, as has St Lucian Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott within a different (primarily poetic) context. It is thus logical that Caribbean thoughts on love do indeed draw upon and combine elements of both European and nonEuropean traditions. For the purpose of this chapter, however, I am most interested in examples of the latter although because of the hybrid, creolized nature of much — some would argue all — cultural production in the Caribbean, it is unhelpful to see the two as always distinct or discrete. What creolization offers in its most nuanced forms, is a model for and possibility of producing new articulations and new cultural formations out of the collision and combination of different traditions, ethnic, cultural, intellectual and spiritual which have formed the Caribbean as it is today. And it is these creolized thoughts and narrativised conceptions of love which present a challenge to Universalist notions and forms of writing on love. 200 Chapter Twelve I use the term “narrativisation” quite deliberately here, since the telling and retelling of stories and myths has been a major way in which thoughts on love have been framed from the earliest commentators such as the various contributing voices of Plato's Symposium. However, narrative is also important since in a Caribbean context, the philosophical and the literary are often deeply entwined. Not only does the philosophical often take narrative form but literary narrative is often, itself, philosophical. The best example of this in a Caribbean context is the work of Guyanese writer, Wilson Harris, whose writing and thought take this crossover form and draws on indigenous Amerindian, African and continental European influences (Burns 2012 and Burns and Knepper 2013). Paget argues that the main philosophical writings to emerge from the Caribbean belong to either a historicist or poeticist tradition, the latter which he defines as a reworking, within a primarily aesthetic framework, of diverse and “broken traditions” (Paget 2000: 16). Indeed, important theoretical philosophical ideas have often been formulated by thinkers who are also creative writers, such as Aime Cesaire, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris. This is a good example of what Paget terms philosophy as “intertextually embedded discursive practice” (2). Given this interplay between the literary and the philosophical and in keeping with the protean nature, openness and permeability of Caribbean discourses more generally, an attention to what Caribbean literary texts have to say about love becomes particularly valuable. This final section will now look at a small selection of Caribbean poems and the ways in which they can be read as challenging or problematizing Universalist readings and concepts of love. In the poem ‘Configurations’, first published in 1989, Guyanese born, British-based writer, Grace Nichols writes on Eros but within specific historical and cultural parameters. ‘Configuration’ is a complex reworking of the collective sexual fantasies and mythologies underpinning the encounter between Europe and Africa — sexual and otherwise — the desire for conquest, ownership and submission and the complex semiotics of attraction and threat which both drew Europe to and repelled it from its “others”. 'Configurations' uses the sexual encounter between the European colonizing male and a generic black woman as a metonym for a longer history of mythologizing and commodification of the black female body as well as representing the unequal exchange between colonizer and colonized. Although, the poem is ostensibly an account of a contemporary and consensual sexual encounter between a white male and a black woman it also invokes a longer and altogether murkier history of rape and forced sexual acts perpetrated on black women during colonial slavery. This is “Excuse Me, Sir, What Does it Mean, ‘To Kiss’”? 201 just one of the ways in which the poem resists a Universalist reading of this erotic encounter. In her opening lines, Nichols puns on the sexual connotations of her title: “He gives her all the configurations/ of Europe” (Nichols 1989, 31), but is also concerned to excavate a whole history of European myths and misrepresentations of the black female body: that it is exotic (“she gives him a cloud burst of parrots”), “primitive” (“she gives him her “Bantu buttocks”), grounded only in physicality and more “sensual” than the European (“He rants about the spice in her skin”), allencompassing (“she delivers up the whole Indies again”), and initially at least, potentially threatening to the white male because so powerful (“But this time her wide legs close in slowly”). In contrast, his gifts for exchange are inorganic materials external to his body (“uranium, plutonium, aluminium and concord”) and tellingly he does a “Columbus” on her “shores”. Gina Wisker argues that 'Configurations': enacts and explodes the male coloniser's myths of the highly sexed Black woman, a dumb female Caliban over-awed by the white imperialist's stunning civilised gifts. The poem works by using a naïve point of view, exaggerating the achievements of the coloniser, a contemporary Columbus who conquers the girl, claiming the kudos of European civilization, including [ironically, an element capable of producing both energy and weapons of destruction] plutonium. In the exchange, she gives him all the white coloniser's fantasies of highly sexed, obedient native women. 'He does a Columbus' flinging himself on her shores. But the Anansi-wise Black woman mocks power in an initially exciting sexual act, making a 'stool of his head'. The double reading of stool (to sit on, faeces, excreta) shows her subtle triumph (Wisker 2000: 292). Wisker’s reference to Anansi, is to the West African spider god and trickster figure who survived the “Middle Passage” transit of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and is still a figure of cultural potency in the present-day Caribbean (Zobel Marshall 2012). Whilst the black woman seems to command control of the sexual act and does resemble the cunning cultural resistance of Anansi, it is possible to read the poem's ending as altogether more ambiguous. What Wisker fails to note is the importance of the “golden stool” as a sacred artefact in Ghanaian culture, the ceremonial seat upon which the Ashanti King would sit, for one day only each year. Indeed, in another Nichols’ poem, 'The Assertion', the female protagonist appropriates just such a “golden stool” from the male elders and “refuses to move… [saying] This is my birthright” (1984: 8). The last line of ‘Configurations’: To “mak[e] a golden stool of the empire/ of his head” thus suggests extraordinary reverence rather than disdain, 202 Chapter Twelve although Wisker may be right to stress the woman's cunning and the possible irony of this most intimate form of reverence. One of the Anglophone Caribbean’s most important and outspoken writers and critics, Barbadian born, Kamau Brathwaite observed of Caribbean love poetry in a 1991 interview: The people who write love poetry, the people who claim to be making the philosophical point, they always write abstract work without any Caribbean focus. I think they feel that to bring in the Caribbean element would be to remove the universality (Braithwaite 1991: no pagination). This may be a thinly veiled reference to the other towering figure of Anglophone Caribbean literature, St Lucian poet and playwright, Derek Walcott. Walcott, the Caribbean’s first Nobel Prize winner for literature, started his poetic career writing very much within a European tradition, drawing poetic inspiration from European writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne and the metaphysical poets as well as from his local Caribbean environment, its poets, painters and peasantry. His 1976 poem “Love after Love” from the collection Sea Grapes, fits very much into a European tradition of the love lyric, though the love poem is addressed to the self as “the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another” rather than the beloved as is usually the case in love lyrics. It focuses on the return of the self to itself as a new kind of “love after love”. The peeling away of the trappings of romantic love in the poem: “the love letters…the photographs, the desperate notes” thus become liberatory rather than the signs of failed love. Interestingly, in this poem both romantic and spiritual love are alluded to as the poetic persona welcomes the “stranger” his self has become, saying “sit here. Eat...Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself…Feast on your life” (Walcott 1986: 328). Walcott’s ‘Love after Love’ is a sublime love poem and deservedly frequently anthologised but nothing in it, including its language, marks it as distinctively Caribbean. Traditionally, such poems have been regarded as imitative of European forms and traditions and even as failed Caribbean poems because they speak to the metropolitan centre rather than to the local. However, this is an exception even in Walcott’s prodigious — and prestigious — oeuvre. There are many other Caribbean poets who have experimented with creolizing the love poem by appropriating and adapting European forms such as the sonnet or the dramatic monologue and making them their own or making them speak subversively. They include James Berry’s creole voice portraits in Lucy’s Letters and Loving (1982), David Dabydeen’s similar experiment in his first two poetry collections Slave “Excuse Me, Sir, What Does it Mean, ‘To Kiss’”? 203 Song (1986) and Coolie Odyssey (1988) and innumerable poems which celebrate maternal love such as Grace Nichols’ ‘Praise Song for my Mother’, Jean Binta Breeze’s ‘Spring Cleaning’ (1992) or Lorna Goodison’s ’For My Mother (May I Inherit Half Her Strength)’ (1986). An interesting example of an early-twentieth century Caribbean poet whose use of the sonnet form was originally considered imitative, “sentimental” and critically uncomfortable not to say embarrassing is Una Marson. Una Marson was born in Jamaica and came to live and work in London in the 1940s after having acted as personal secretary to HIM Haile Selassie after Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. She was a founder and key figure in the BBC’s Caribbean Voices, a radio programme in which Caribbean writers in London produced a regular programme which was transmitted back to the Caribbean. For many, the programme launched their literary careers. Marson’s poetry provides some fascinating examples of the subversive use of the European sonnet form, notably her witty riposte to Kipling in ‘If’. However, as Alison Donnell has observed it is Marson's love poetry which presents the most interesting and, for critics, the most problematic politics of love within a Caribbean context. As Donnell notes in her introduction to Marson’s Selected Poems (2011): [when read in] “The context of Jamaican colonial culture, in which acquiescence, mimicry and subordination were everyday imperatives, the presentations of willing devotion and female dependence which dominate Marson’s love poems are understandably difficult to interpret. It is perhaps not surprising that...Marson’s love poems represent the neglected archive of an already marginalised poet. Both their content and form present a problem to feminist and postcolonial critical approaches that commonly work in parallel to foreground moments of agency and resistance” (Marson 2011: 30). Donnell’s work on Marson and other early twentieth-century Anglophone female Caribbean voices has been a significant recuperative project. As she argues of Marson’s neglected love poems: The overlapping of romance and mastery that is a repeated refrain...creates a troubling matrix of signs, and yet the recurring image of the woman achieving self-definition through the act of giving the self disrupts a simplistic reading of devotion to either the lover figure or to Eurocentric poetic forms (31). Non-European literary texts like these can be seen as examples of exactly the kind of less visible, less dominant, culturally situated discourses 204 Chapter Twelve which I argue act to unsettle and challenge so called “universal” ideas of love; moreover, through their creolized, hybrid nature (drawing on the African as well as the European) they critique the idea of universality itself. In this way, we can see European thoughts on love being productively complicated and interrogated by a critical engagement with non–European, non-hegemonic sources. Eze identifies “philosophizing from particulars” within an African and Africana context as “spurred by deep concerns about universalism: that Universalist philosophies (i.e. that emphasise universal metaphysics [are deeply problematic]” (Eze 1998: 222). This functions as an anti-universalist ideal but as a viable counter practice to Universalist thinking it is far too simplistically conceived and articulated. Serequeberhan’s idea of Western thinking as a kind of “pre— text” which requires critique (Serequeberhan 1998: 92) is more useful. For him: the de-structuring critique of this ‘pre-text’ – the Occidental surrogate for the heterogeneous variance of human existence – is the basic criticalnegative task of the contemporary discourse of African philosophy. It is the task of undermining the European-centred conception of humanity on which the Western tradition of philosophy – and much more - is grounded. The way one procedes in this reading is to allow the texts to present themselves, as much as possible, and to try to grasp them without ‘anticipating the meaning’…or superimposing on them the accepted reading which they themselves help to make possible (92). Eze’s formulation infers that the hugely influential “edifice” — or to use Serequeberhan’s term, the “pre-text” — of European thinking (for example on love) might be overturned or excised. However, even if this were desirable — and clearly it is not — this nativist position is both unsustainable and logically flawed. In a postcolonial context, such thinking is already mixed, creolized, hybridized; it is protean and unfixed, drawing from different influences and sources. What is necessary critically is that we remain open to possibilities and different ways of thinking about love that draw on a wider range of cultural traditions whilst remaining alert to the differentials of power, influence and visibility which exist between them. “Excuse Me, Sir, What Does it Mean, ‘To Kiss’”? 205 References Achebe, Chinua (1988): ‘Colonialist Criticism’ in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-1987. New York: Doubleday. Ashcroft, B. Griffith, G. and H. Tiffin eds. (2006): The Postcolonial Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland (2002): A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage. Berry, James (1982): Lucy’s Letters and Loving. London: New Beacon Books. Binta Breeze, Jean (1992): Spring Cleaning. London: Virago. Brathwaite, E.K. (1991): Interview in The Caribbean Writer. University of Virgin Islands. Burns, Lorna (2012): Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze: Literature Between Postcolonialism and Post-Continental Philosophy. London: Continuum Literary Studies. Burns, Lorna and Knepper, Wendy (2013): Special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing on Wilson Harris. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Christian, B. (1987): ‘The Race for Theory’, Cultural Critique, 6, pp. 5163. Coetzee, J.M. (2000): Disgrace (Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dabashi, H. (2013): ‘Can non-Europeans think?’ http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013 accessed 15.01.2013. Dabydeen, David (1986): Slave Song. Coventry: Dangaroo. —. (1988): Coolie Odyssey. Coventry: Dangaroo. Eze, E.C. ed. (1997): Race and the Enlightenment. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. —. (1997): Post-colonial African Philosophy. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. —. ed. (1998): African Philosophy: An Anthology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Hallward, Peter. (2001): Absolutely Postcolonial. Manchester: MUP. Jeyifo, Biodun (1990): ‘The Nature of Things: Arrested Decolonization and Critical Theory’, Research in African Literatures, 21/1, pp. 33-42. Larson, C. (2006): ‘Heroic Ethnocentrism: the Idea of Universality in Literature’. In, Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin eds. The Postcolonial Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge. Marson, Una (2012): Selected Poems. Edited by Alison Donnell. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Marx, K. and F. Engels (1983): The Communist Manifesto. New York: International Publishers. May, Simon (2012): Love: a History.New Haven & London: Yale University Press. 206 Chapter Twelve Nichols, Grace (1984): The Fat Black Woman’s Poems. London: Virago. —. (1989): Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman. London, Virago. Paget, Henry (2000) Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. New York & London: Routledge. Plato (1999): The Symposium. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Said, Edward (1978): Orientalism. New York: Random House. —. (1980): The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books. —. (1993): Culture and Imperialism New York: Vintage Books. —. (2003): Freud and the Non-European. London & New York: Verso. Serequeberhan, T. (1998): ‘The Critique of Eurocentrism’. In, E.C. Eze ed., African Philosophy: An Anthology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Walcott, Derek (1986): Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber. Wisker, Gina (2000): Post-Colonial and African-American Women's Writing: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke & London: Houndmills. Wynter, Sylvia (1996): ‘We Need to Sit Down and Talk About a Little Culture’ [1968] in Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh ed. (1996): The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. London & New York: Routledge. Zabala, Santiago (2012):‘Slavoj Zizek and the role of the philosopher’, http://www.aljajeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013 accessed 12.12.2012. Zobel Marshall, Emily (2012): Anansi’s Journey: a Story of Cultural Resistance. University of West Indies Press. CHAPTER THIRTEEN A STROLL THROUGH HELL IN SEARCH OF LOVE: DISCOVERING POLISH RESPONSES TO A CENTURY OF SUFFERING GAVIN COLOGNE-BROOKS As a colleague and I sat on a Berlin-bound coach from Kraków, passing endless white fields in a blizzard in the freezing March of 2013, I reflected on the fact that I had never been as shocked by a visit to an art gallery as I was the sleeting afternoon I reached the National Museum in Kraków. No doubt I had an amplified response to the paintings. The previous day we’d visited Auschwitz. The day before that we’d been at the Kraków under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945 exhibition at the museum in the former Schindler factory and I’d then trudged the mile or so to the snowbound site of the Płaszów concentration camp. No doubt, too, my solitude — the only visitor to the gallery that late afternoon — had an effect, as did the way the dim rooms only brightened when I stepped into them and then dimmed again as I left. But it was like strolling through a waking nightmare depicting horror and hatred. I felt like Faustus on his private tour of the world, or maybe Scrooge shown the past, present and future, except that everything seemed horrible. It would not be the first time I’d returned from a day at Auschwitz and felt a sense of the abject, especially here in terms of the numerous paintings of the human body, abstracted, dissected, humiliated, mutilated. “What is abject,” writes Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, “the jettisoned object, is radically excluded, and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses”. “There I am, at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border.” The paintings I was seeing seemed at first like “death infecting life”. They beckoned and threatened to engulf me 208 Chapter Thirteen (Kristeva 1982: 2-4).1 Nasty, nasty, I found myself muttering, painting after painting, this nasty world. Yet even as I felt this, I was also aware of something else within me; I was more than ever moved by the collective response of a melancholic, so often conquered people. I felt a warmth toward Poland, its people and culture, that was the very opposite of my repulsion from so much of what I saw, as if my extreme reaction in one direction required a counterbalance. As early as 1922, General Von Seeck was describing “Poland’s existence as intolerable and incompatible with the essential conditions of German life” (Shirer 1973: 459). “No nation re-created at Versailles had such a rough time as Poland,” William Shirer’s voice was reminding me as I wandered through the gallery. This resurrected nation had been at war with its neighbours, whether Germany, Russia, Lithuania or Czechoslovakia, long before Hitler’s contemptuous reference in 1939 to “this ridiculous state” (641). When war came the Blitzkrieg wiped the Polish army out: “Horses against tanks!” mutters Shirer. “The cavalryman’s long lance against the tank’s long cannon!” (625). Along with the Germans came the Russians to carve the country up between them, followed after the war by the triumph of Stalinism. But the sheer nastiness of what I saw that afternoon, and had seen at Auschwitz and the Schindler Museum, and imagined in the face of the bitter wind that crackled across the abandoned, snow swept hills and furrows when I stood at Płaszów, led me to see that we express ourselves, through art and music and conversation, in order to connect, to affirm and ultimately to find a tangible, meaningful, valuable sense of fellow feeling for people we will never meet, but whom we imagine through those we do meet and sometimes get to know. Certainly, on a personal level, my awareness of what cold hatred could do needed a response based on warmth, and perhaps even love. The theoretical basis for my approach to this experience has to do with the merging of art and life, and my commitment to the connecting up of creative activity, including literary and cultural criticism, with actual life, and our historical and social contexts. Partly because my main area of scholarship is American writing and culture, the approach I’ve found most relevant has been that of American pragmatism. Articulated in the writing of William James, John Dewey, and others, pragmatism emphasizes connection. It stresses the fact that, when we discuss literature, or art or culture or anything else, we do so as living beings in process. A key phrase in pragmatism is radical empiricism. As John J. Stuhr notes, both James and Dewey “insist that experience is an active, on-going affair in which experiencing subject and experienced object constitute a primal, integral, relational unity” (Stuhr 2000: 4). Its bias is thus inherently personal A Stroll through Hell in Search of Love 209 and acknowledged to be so. What matters is the value of our experiences for our own and others’ lives. Pragmatism has European antecedents. James pointed out more than a hundred years ago that there was nothing new about pragmatism, and that it was not a theory but a way of thinking. Its ideas go back at least to Socrates, and its precursors include Pascal, Schopenhauer, Emerson and Nietzsche, while its subsequent fellow travellers include Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty. For my purposes here, what matters is the sense, articulated by Nietzsche, that, in Alan Megill’s words, “‘the work of art,’ or ‘the text,’ or ‘language’ is seen as establishing the ground for truth’s ‘possibility’” (Megill 1985: 33). “What ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche together,” writes Rorty, “is the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves” (Rorty1982: 161). But the difference between Nietzsche, or say Heidegger, and the pragmatist is that the pragmatist views the world in terms of the possibility of improvement to the benefit of the individual and of others, a possibility predicated upon our capacity as individuals to change. The pragmatist believes that, even if we accept the role of art in shaping meaning — the artful nature of all meaning and of all minds — what counts are the practical consequences of what we do. What matters in the end, pragmatists like Rorty tell us, “is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right” (166). Pragmatism is a philosophical tool to be reshaped for the task at hand. In James’ words, it “has no dogmas and no doctrines” but “only an attitude of orientation” (James 2000: 197). It favours experimentation, revisionism, fallibility, uncertainty rather than certainty, and pluralism and individualism over classification and system. Above all it emphasizes meliorism. It opposes all who would seek to oppress, to define, to control and to limit the basic freedoms of others. In other words, it is the enemy of totalitarianism. “Kunst Macht Frei,” announced a near replica of the cynical “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Work Makes (You) Free”, Auschwitz entrance sign, at the Contemporary Art Museum next to the Schindler Museum in Kraków the day I visited. Exactly: Art produces freedom. We are all artists, and we can use that ability to make meanings to create freedoms for ourselves and for others, by going out into the world and doing our “intellectual work,” to use Dewey’s phrase, of clarifying people’s ideas about “the social and moral strife’s of their own day,” and so becoming “an organ for dealing with these conflicts” (Stuhr 2000: 1). From this pragmatist point of view, it has therefore made perfect sense that, for half a decade now, my colleague and I have been bringing groups of students to Kraków. The central reason for this is to visit Auschwitz as 210 Chapter Thirteen part of a module on manifestations of evil. The heart of the trip is therefore grim. Students are apprehensive. We too were apprehensive when we first went there. It’s not that you become indifferent when you know what to expect, but you find ways of dealing with the experience that allow you to remain open to what you’re seeing. You’re aware of the kinds of responses the students will have; the way, in particular, that they will emotionally shut down and say they felt very little, will experience a numbness, quite unlike the horror they imagined they might feel. We don’t tell them to expect this. We let them find out for themselves. Nor do we tell them that their emotional response may reveal itself more fully at a later date. The only distress I’ve seen a student express was in one who had been the previous year. She burst into tears and refused to enter Room 5 of Block 4, with its glassed in exhibit of nearly two tons of human hair. Nor, in particular, do I tell them, my manly pride and childhood training being what it is, that it was a full two years after my first visit, when I gave a talk to colleagues about what it felt like, and combined it with photos and the music of Satie, that I actually revealed, to myself as well as to others, any emotion at what I had seen. I don’t make a habit of displaying that kind of emotion publicly, or indeed privately. But I realised something about my response, and perhaps my habitual response. Ordinarily, I knew how to block difficult emotions, but this subject matter, even though or perhaps because my own link to it was so indirect, was too strong to allow me to do this. I don’t doubt that my relationship with Kraków and with Poland is directly related to the horror of the death camps and of Polish history in the twentieth century, and to something it has touched in me to do with my relationships with family, with friends and with my everyday encounters. Brought up to hide any emotions that might signal weakness or sensitivity, I am now much more inclined to be open and express warmth, and to acknowledge the complex nature of how I feel toward people close to me and toward a vast array of individuals, however brief the encounter, in whom I recognise any sort of kinship. A display case holding shoes, or clothes, or utensils, let alone hair, concentrates the mind. My desire to celebrate everyday interaction seems related to a commitment to counter that horror, on a personal level, through an expression of feeling toward a people I have little ostensible connection with. To use William Styron’s phrases, albeit many pages apart in Sophie’s Choice, I’m all the more aware of “fellowship, familiarity, sweet times among friends” each time I confront “the bitter bottom of things” (Styron 1979: 68, 412). So when we visit Poland each March, as a balance to the bleak horrors of Auschwitz, my colleague and I delight in drinking piwo localne, or local beer, in A Stroll through Hell in Search of Love 211 Rynek Główny, Kraków’s Grand Square; eating pierogi, drinking Żubrówka, taking students to galleries, museums, Wawel Castle, synagogues, St. Mary’s Basilica where a trumpeter has played the Hejnał Mariacki on the hour every hour on and off through history since, the legend goes, the Mongol invasion of 1241, and generally absorbing the city. Some of our students trudge all the way up past the Contemporary Art Gallery and the Schindler factory to Płaszów, but we also encourage them to burrow down into the city’s underground tearooms and restaurants, as well as the museum of the city’s older history beneath Rynek Główny, and to scan the great square from the balcony of the art museum in the Sukiennice, the medieval Cloth Hall. We seek to educate our students about that period of European history in terms of Poland, and then Germany, on our extended trip to Berlin before flying home. This feeling toward the Poles has even led me to learn Polish. There is really no need to learn it, certainly not in the centre of Kraków. But I try to speak as much Polish as I can, and every time I do, and every contact I have with a Polish person, seems to me to make the world an infinitesimal degree better. Lest this essay begin to seem to champion the Poles ahead of the main victims of the holocaust, I should now say two things. One is that I have felt the same toward Jews and Jewish friends, for equally complex reasons I suspect, through the decades. The other is that two million of the six million Jews who died in the holocaust were Galician Jews from southern Poland or what is now the Ukraine. The Polish people were, many of them, culpable partners in pockets of what happened. The Jewish Museum in Kraków has a display of photographs of massacre sites by Christopher Schwarz that attests to the local, small-group killing of Galician Jews in an array of villages and rural areas. As Jonathan Webber explains in the book that accompanies the exhibition, for three hundred years Galicia was “home to the largest Jewish community in the world” and, until the nineteenth-century migration to America, held nearly ninety percent of the world’s Jewish population. Their “tragic absence” today was not the work of the Nazis alone (2009: 12). So I am aware that my urge to befriend, to be involved in a fellowship of some sort, is no simple matter. But nor is it mere sentimentality, nor an abstraction. It is a tangible expression, with tangible effects, of a determination to counter nastiness, a nastiness many of us carry inside us as much as we do the capacity for love. This need to express love, or camaraderie, is not ultimately about Poles or Jews or any other national or ethnic group; it is about countering the horror with expressions of human warmth. I now know, or feel I know, more precisely what is happening when we visit Auschwitz, and what we’re witnessing in terms of human behaviour. The memorial site is tended endlessly. It is 212 Chapter Thirteen cared for. It is, in a way that is hard to express, loved. It is a place of remembrance, and an expression of devotion to the very things the Nazi’s treated as detritus. Each item, each shoe, each hairbrush, each suitcase, is carefully preserved and treated with the utmost delicacy. Each photograph is looked after, each face looked at, each item of clothing cared for. When I attended a seminar run by Evan Zimroth of Queen’s College, the City University of New York, on American Holocaust Poetry, in October 2010, I was struck by a comment she made while discussing Myra Sklarew’s poem, “Lithuania,” in the preface of which Sklarew writes of one of the “central killing places in Lithuania—the Ponar Forest outside Vilnius” (Sklarew 2000: 14). These memorial sites, said Zimroth, particularly the burial pits that are now mounds and in spring covered in wild flowers, are “exquisitely beautiful,” possessing a “shocking, horrifying pastoral beauty”.2 Of course, graveyards can be beautiful, but my surprise had to do with the fact that these are places of cruelty, evil, atrocity where, in Skarew’s words in “Lithuania”, “every hill is suspect, every ravine, every tree” (37). Shocking as it might seem, Webber reminds us that at Auschwitz “the wooden watchtowers and elevated sentry posts have been subject to careful conservation, the barbed wire (highly susceptible to rusting) has been renewed” (Webber 2009: 103). Some of this is about bearing witness to atrocity, to be sure, but much of this “process of memorialization” (88) is unquestionably about love. To read the annual Sprawozdanie (Reports) on the work done at the Auschwitz memorial sites is to see this in action. The cover of the 2012 Report is an aerial shot of the perfectly-tended Birkenau site. Inside it, as each year, are letters from heads of state voicing international support. The whole text is produced in parallel Polish and English. There is an account of the year’s events. A section entitled “Auschwitz in the World’s Heart” provides visitor numbers. Page after page details the painstaking preservation work being undertaken on everything from documents to the Birkenau barracks to the remains of the gas chambers. There are explanations of work being done to improve storage conditions for synthetic materials such as suitcases, shoes and toys. A photograph shows a woman in a white coat and blue gloves handling items from the tangle of spectacles with tender care. But, as I say, eventually one leaves places like Auschwitz and Płaszów and returns to the twentieth century, or would do except that the past is part of the present. The visits to these memorial sites linger not just in the mind but manifest themselves in our group’s behaviour, and in my behaviour, during the rest of the trip and beyond. For our visit to Auschwitz also involves visiting the Poland of today, and, for us this year, crucially I now feel, the Germany of today, or at least contemporary A Stroll through Hell in Search of Love 213 Berlin. In the days following, including my visit to the National Museum, I find myself making connections between these memorial sites and Krakówians and Berliners love for their cities, and preservation of their histories, good and evil. This includes the preservation of the ruins of the old city of Kraków in the museum beneath Rynek Główny, and of the mummified priests in the Crypti Reformatόw Kakowskichta, the crypt of the Franciscan monastery on Ulica Reformacka, and the preservation of the remains of the Berlin Wall in a section along the River Spree. All these are statements of positive meaning between people. All of them are acts that are the diametric opposite of the viciousness of the Nazis and the grim paranoia and control-freakery of the leaders of the so-called German Democratic Republic. You can still experience the soulless, self-serving managerial mentality of that world if you venture to the former Stasi headquarters today, set as it is amid blocks of uniform housing, and consisting of mundane offices filled with brown furniture and the dead air of the petty vanity of vanished apparatchiks smiling smugly, not quite at you, from their official photographs. Sekretär Walter Ulbright and Sekretär Erich Honecker still look out at you but it’s gratifying how the colour photograph of Honecker has faded to a uniform beige, suggesting that eventually only the thick black frames of his spectacles will stand out. How wonderful it is to see the way their bureaucratic worldview has been shoved aside. The Poles and Germans preserve their recent pasts as testament to the human spirit that overcame it. On that sleety day in Kraków that I encountered twentieth-century Polish art, tired and unsure if the slog through the worsening weather would be worth it, I began by walking up from Kazimierez to see Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” at her temporary home in Wawel Castle, prior to her return to the renovated Czartoryski Museum. By chance of timing I received a private audience in her darkened room with the single light on her. She left me with a renewed sense that there was much that is calm and beautiful in the world and galvanized me to brave the thickening sleet northward to the National Museum. I had little more than an hour before the museum closed. I expected little, and certainly didn’t expect to respond strongly to whatever I’d see. This was naive in the extreme. The benevolent feeling Leonardo’s painting had provided was stripped from me by the first painting I saw. Gustaw Gwozdecki’s Glowa Chiopca or “Boy’s Head” (1902), on the right as you turn left into the gallery on the top floor, is truly horrifying. It’s all black except for a boy’s head, slightly off centre, down lit so that the eyes are in shadow. But the most macabre aspect of this painting is that when you look up close the eye sockets are congealed black paint that could as well 214 Chapter Thirteen be blackened blood. The fact that it is dated 1902 almost adds to the shock because, like the writing of Franz Kafka, it seems to anticipate the horrors of the century. Evidently Gwozdecki, obsessed with fundamental issues of existence, often used empty eye sockets. The painting exudes horror, and heralded the horrors that would periodically unfold through the century and before my eyes in the gallery. I moved on to some relatively benign if often uneasy paintings in that first room, only unnerved by the fact that there was no one else in the gallery and by those dimly lit spaces that brightened in anticipation of my presence and darkened as I moved on. Among the paintings that caught my attention were those by Josef Pankiewicz, including Kobieta Czeszaca sie or “Woman Combing her Hair” (1911), and Portret dziewczynki w czerwonej sukni (Józefy Oderfeldówna) or “Girl in a Red Dress (Josefa Oderfeldówny)” (1897). This exquisite, soft, mildly haunting portrait is the kind of painting that, if it were in the Musee d’Orsay, people would crowd around to see. It’s one of a series of paintings of women and girls in that first room, including, Olga Boznańska’s equally spooky Dziewczynka z chryzantemami or “Girl with Chysanthemums” (1894), Władysław lewiński’s Czesząca się or “The Combing”(1897), and Wojciech Weiss’s Melancholik or “Melancholic” (1894), and Demon (the same word in Polish as in English) (1904). Weiss was a name I’d heard before, but as a socialist realist painter employed by the state. This was altogether different, and revealed an underlying dark vision that might explain how Weiss came to accept the hijacking of his talent by that drearily sinister political cause. But further signs of physicality gone awry came in the next section and from here on my unease in the gallery increased exponentially. Leszek Sobocki’s Polok or “Pole” (1979) is a brooding, deeply melancholic painting. It depicts the muscular, sinewy bare shoulders and arms of a contemplative elderly man. The background is dark, but the man appears to be leaning on a blue lit table and the light rises up to brighter blue as it goes under his arms and up to his hands, as if he had no body but only spirit. The sense I had that this resembles Pope John Paul II, with hair that might almost be a skullcap, was accurate; Sobocki has circumvented the severe censorship of the time by merging himself with the newly-elected pontiff. Nearby are some equally eerie heads, again by Sobocki, a series of five on different materials, including road signs, a metal dish, a piece of wood and the back of a cupboard door. All appear to be of the same man, but each is somehow dismembered, or lacking substance. I look at the title: Portrety Trumienne or “Coffin Portraits” (1974-76). They resemble, indeed, the roman portraits on coffin lids displayed at the Natural History A Stroll through Hell in Search of Love 215 Museum in London. Then I encounter a series of grotesque images of women by Zbylut Grywacz, a Professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków through much of the second half of the twentieth century. Rozebrana (Orantka X) or “Demolished (Orant Woman 10)” (1969) is a nightmarish version of a Marilyn Monroe figure. It has something of the motif of the gouged out eyes in “Boy’s Head” and of the hollowed out chest of “Pole”: yet another example of the human body distorted or mutilated. Her hair is lacquered and she seems to be trying to make the best of herself but, like the Poland of the time perhaps, distorts herself to meet the world. Her face is half in shadow. Her rib cage beneath her breasts is so dark as to suggest it’s been hacked away. She is knock-kneed, her belly swollen, yet her hips, which clatter with her in-bent elbows, are skin and bone. Only toward the end of this gaze do I notice the three red marks, horizontal across her upper chest just below and between her collar bones. They are like suppurating scars, raw red, suggestive of the skeleton beneath. Two paintings down from this stands framed confirmation that the underlying point of the painting — the flesh as beautiful surface, but decay within — is a comment on communist kitsch: all surface, no acknowledgment of what is beneath. Orantka I or “Orant Woman 1” (1966) depicts a naked female body. It is not a woman in the sense that the head is beyond the frame. One breast is bluish, and the thighs are blistering red. The rib cage is muscle turning to bone; the belly is a skull, with the pubic bone the empty cavity of the mouth. “On the surface, an intelligible lie,” as Sabrina says of her paintings in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “underneath, the unintelligible truth” (1985: 63). I became very conscious of dates as I continued my solitary journey around the gallery, the light fading behind me and brightening before me, the only sound my own quiet steps. The next nightmarish vision was Andrej Wróblewski’s Rozstrzelanie Poznańskie (Rozstrzelanie II) or “The Poznań Execution (Execution II)” (1949). This “features from right to left, a businessman, a shirtless, shoeless, angry worker, a woman with her back to us, a little boy in green shirt and shorts, and, almost in shadow, an old lady in black with the Star of David vaguely outlined on her chest. This is bad enough, but nothing to the painting that perhaps shocked me the most. Again the date is significant. Again, I saw the painting, and only then looked at the title, and thereby received the double shock, the confirmation that the unease the painting gave me was justified by what had been in the painter’s mind while painting it. I was first attracted by the vibrant lively colours in the foreground, muted blues behind. I drew closer. It was a boy, his back to us, clinging to a woman, her form decapitated by 216 Chapter Thirteen the top of the painting. The boy’s arms are around the woman’s waist. Her pale arms seem heavy and lifeless. Her right arm is around his back, but as if placed there. Her left hand is stiff and flat beside her. The boy has black hair and warm-coloured skin, a tank top of black, orange and red rings, black shorts. The woman wears a blue, sleeveless dress and her skin is pale and bluish. The painting, I then see, is again by Andrej Wróblewski, and is called Syn I Zabita Matka or “Son and His Killed Mother” (1949). The shock is akin to that moment in M. Night Shyamalan’s film, The Sixth Sense (1999), when the Bruce Willis character realizes that he is dead. To turn back to the painting is to feel a sense of vertigo. The boy and mother are not standing figures. The woman lies dead. The boy lies on top of her. He has put her arms around him but one has fallen flat against the slab.3 A corridor off the main round of rooms brought me to some photographs as shocking as the paintings. These included Katarzyna Kozyra’s Olympia (1996), a series of harrowing portraits that include huge photographs of a young woman being treated for cancer. The first I see is the stark, uncompromising portrait of an elderly lady, naked and without her teeth in, her breasts sagging flat to her stomach, her thin legs together above tiptoed feet. She is holding what looks like a sanitary towel, and has a black ribbon around her neck. She looks straight at you, defiant, dignified. One thinks of the portraits of the starving women, naked, exposed, too weak to even raise their arms, but staring right at you from their position, life size on the walls of a room at Auschwitz I. The second image I came to was one of the portraits of the young woman being treated for cancer. Propped up by her right elbow, she stretches out on a hospital bed, wearing the same black ribbon around her neck as the elderly lady. She, too, gazes at you calmly, not using her free left hand to cover her hairless pubis, or any part of her hairless body. She defies you to look at her female form. The explanation for the black ribbon and the title becomes clear in a further photograph, where the same cancer patient has arranged herself to mimic Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). She has the same bold stare, has a similar cream bouquet as Manet’s model but somehow attached to the side of her hairless head, and as in the Manet there is a black woman offering her a larger bouquet. There is even the cat of Manet’s picture. But it’s not the black cat, meek and almost invisible, that Manet put in to symbolize prostitution. It’s a yowling, screeching, wildeyed ginger cat, recalling the ginger and white dog that features in Manet’s own source: Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), which itself refers back to Georgione’s Sleeping Venus (c 1510). Art builds on art, of course, but, as Oscar Wilde noted, life builds on art.4 For part of the shock was that I’d seen this image before, or an image like it, in a wholly different context. It A Stroll through Hell in Search of Love 217 reminded me of the photographs, taken years later, of the dying Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by radioactive polonium in 2006. Litvinenko, too, was dying of cancer, in the sense of radiation poisoning, but while there are differences of circumstance, the subjects share that same uncompromising stare. So I wandered on through the rooms, pinching my hand to see if in fact I’d invented all these images, so closely intertwined, and would wake up. Passing down a corridor of paintings related to Auschwitz; a room full of black hooks that might have been torture hooks; a wall with a small black box with a kind of doll’s head image in it, again the eyes blank sockets, I began to walk faster and stopped recording titles and dates. I thought maybe it was time to leave this silent gathering. But then one final painting beckoned me. Jerzy Nowosielski’s Egzekucja or “Execution” (1949) is a small, unobtrusive, cartoonish painting, line drawn like something out of a children’s book. A man in a blue suit, on stage before an audience, is calmly checking the nooses of four women — one of them half out of the picture, suggesting there are more beyond the frame. The women he is about to hang have their backs to the audience, who include us, situated some rows back with what look like coffins to our front right. They are in their underwear, the middle one bra-less, the one on the left in stockings, suspenders and high heels, the one on the right in knee-length blue stockings and red shoes. The middle woman has turned her head toward the man. We glimpse a profile. She looks calm, as do the audience, attentive to the show, which calls to mind the magician’s trick of sawing a woman in half and then miraculously restoring her to full body and health. The women have the appearance of being the man’s assistants. The other oddities are the black squares on white at the back of the stage. They suggest the windows of prison cells. The dreadful nature of the painting has something to do with its seemingly harmless banality, its cheerful colours. You might easily pass it by — small as it is — as a pleasant picture, until you register its subject. I felt like I was continuing the nightmare when I went briefly into the museum’s armoury. I entered a room that was so dark it seemed closed, then each time I stepped forward display cases of weaponry, helmets and uniforms would light up like souls stirred from their graves. These faceless, phantom cohorts wore dark, shining armour with feathers, armour with tassels, uniforms from all wars the Poles have fought. A display of flags included one, dated 1862, with a cross bound in barbed wire like the cross on the barren, snowbound wastelands where Płaszów death camp once stood, and where, to reprise Myra Klarew’s words, “every hill is suspect, every ravine, every tree”. Here, as at Auschwitz and 218 Chapter Thirteen Płaszów, and at the exhibition of photographs at the Jewish Museum in Kraków, depicting peaceful rural scenes across Galicia that were in fact the site of mini-massacres of local Jews by their Catholic compatriots and neighbours, I thought of some more lines from Sklarew’s poem. “I was trying to remember something I couldn’t / possibly know” (Sklarew 2000: 36). I left the building and trudged the mile or so back to Kazimierez in the twilight snowfall, and awoke the next morning for the bus to Berlin with the city covered in a new whiteness. The snow thickened as we sped toward Germany and the capital of the century’s worst crimes in a crimetorn century, and I began to write this account. And what, you might be asking, has this to do with “thoughts of love”? Well, everything. Museums, art galleries, memorial sites, these are all acts of emotional connection, and very often they are acts of devotion and sometimes acts of love. We paint what we care about. We write what we care about, and we preserve what we care about. It’s a strange business. In Berlin our hotel, the Michelberger, was a haven of warmth and friendliness. When I asked a desk attendant how to ensure we could get our students to the airport, she took my hand that held the map and reassured me just how easy it would be. Down the road toward what was once West Berlin across the Spree, there remains a mile long section of wall. I walked it to the Ostbahnhof one morning in brilliant sunshine. Beyond the west wall blinding white snow met the blue river. The fabled Gothic turrets of the Oberbaum Bridge stood in sturdy redbrick warmth against the blue sky. Yellow U-Bahn trains trundled on the upper tier against the sparkling coldness of the water beneath. But the east side, the side that the captive people would have seen daily, was in shadow, brightened only by art work that spoke to their anger, their indignation and ultimately their triumph. No wonder that part of Berlin in particular is so friendly, so bohemian, so full of affection. I have never shaken the hands of so many hotel and restaurant staff as I did in those few days in Berlin and Kraków, during the returns-to-life that interspersed the reminders of history. It really is as if the nastiness one witnesses, from Auschwitz and Płaszów, to the armoury and the Stasi Museum, and the Topography of Terror, the museum that sits on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters and displays photos and audio material of that vicious group of thugs who masterminded the horrors of 1933-1945, instigates in one an exceptional urge toward fellow feeling, toward revealing and bringing out in others, that side of humanity, of individuals, we perhaps take for granted day by day. I felt, as the double-decker train wound its way through blue snowy fields at dusk for our flight home, that I had strolled through hell — at Auschwitz and in the National Museum, and at the Stasi Museum — in A Stroll through Hell in Search of Love 219 search of life and fellowship, and found it, and that we and our students were returning home as better people, with a better understanding of the possibilities for horror around us and the need for us all as individuals to counter it each day in ways large and small. References Bartysel, Bartosz (2012): Sprawozdanie / Report, Oświęcim: Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w O więcimiu. Kristeva, Julia (1982): The Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kundera, Milan (1984): The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim. London: Faber. Megill, Allan (1987): Prophets of Extremity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rorty, Richard (1982): Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980, Brighton: Harvester Press. Shirer, William L. (1959): The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, London: Secker & Warburg. Sklarew, Myra (2000): The Witness Trees: Lithuania, trans. David Wolpe. Cranbury, NJ: Cornall Books. Stuhr, John J. ed. (2000): Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretive Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Styron, William (1979): Sophie’s Choice, New York: Random House. Webber, Jonathan (2009): Rediscovering Traces of Memory: The Jewish Heritage of Polish Galicia, Oxford: Pittman Library of Jewish Civilisation. Wilde, Oscar (2004): The Decay of Lying, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishers. Notes 1 “The corpse, seen without God, and outside of science, is the utmost abjection. It is death infecting life,” writes Kristeva. “It beckons to us and ends up engulfing us” (1982: 4). 2 Edan Zimroth (Queens College, CUNY) “American Holocaust Poetry: What Are the Limits (if any)?” Seminar, Rothermere Institute, Oxford University, 20 October 2010. Zimroth discussed the poetry of Miklos Radnoti, Irena Klepfisz, and Sharon Olds, as well as Myra Sklarew’s “Lithuania”. 220 3 Chapter Thirteen In fact, aged fourteen Wróblewski experienced a Nazi search of the family home in Vilnius in 1941, during which his father died of a heart attack. His mother outlived him, dying in 1994. 4 “But you don’t mean to seriously say that you believe that Life imitates Art,” says Cyril to Vivian in Wilde’s play, “that Life is in fact the mirror, and Art the reality?” (2004: 15). CONTRIBUTORS Sonia Arribas is Researcher and Professor of Philosophy in the Humanities Department at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. She is the author (with Howard Rouse) of Egocracy (Diaphanes Verlag, 2011); and with Germán Cano and Javier Ugarte of Biopolítica y capitalismo (Catarata, 2010). Gavin Cologne-Brookes is Professor of American Literature and Director of the Contemporary Writing Centre at Bath Spa University. His books include The Novels of William Styron (1995), Writing and America (1996), Dark Eyes on America (2005), and a travel memoir, If I’m Ever Back This Way (2008). Also a painter, his exhibition, “Paintings 1995-2011,” held at Corsham Court, Wiltshire, featured a portrait which now appears on the cover of his critical memoir, Rereading William Styron (2014). Jane Connell is a consultant psychiatrist in private practice. She has a PhD in critical theory and conducts seminars and presents papers that address the tensions between widely-disseminated tropes of the imaginaries of Western theory and their texts of origin. Polona Curk holds a PhD in psychoanalytic studies and feminist philosophy from Birkbeck College, University of London, where she also completed a Research Fellowship. On the basis of theories of subjectivity derived from psychoanalysis and gender studies, she has written on topics of agency, gender, violence, vulnerability, care, recognition, mothering, attachment, ambivalence and ethical responsibility. Dr Curk has previously worked as a counsellor-volunteer with victims of domestic violence, has taught psychoanalysis and psychology of gender at Birkbeck and Goldsmiths Colleges and Middlesex University. Aleksandar Fatić is Research Professor at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory of the University of Belgrade. He is also Director of the Ethics Study Group of the Centre for Security Studies in Belgrade. Aleksandar is also Deputy Chair of the Cambridge University Working Group on Bioethics Education in Serbia. His professional interests include applied ethics, including ethics for the public service, ethics for the 222 Contributors security sector, ethics for psychotherapists, and philosophical counselling as a form of contemporary applied philosophy. He is a Fellow and Certified Counsellor of the American Association of Philosophical Practitioners. He has published widely, and his primary current interests include the application of philosophical methodology to the development of professional ethics, including the ethics of counseling and therapeutic professions. Richard Ganis is currently an Assistant Professor in Political Philosophy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. He works chiefly within the Continental tradition, with a focus on contemporary moral and ethical philosophy, the Frankfurt School, and deconstruction. His is the author of The Politics of Care in Habermas and Derrida: Between Measurability and Immeasurability (Lexington Books, 2011), and has contributed articles to Comparative and Continental Philosophy, Radical Philosophy Review, and other journals. Rachel Paine is currently completing her doctorate at Heythrop College, University of London. She is a tutor with the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, specializing in the philosophy of mind, the emotions, and the concept of the self. Her website is: www.philosophylives.com Gary Peters is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at York St John University, UK. For many years (and still) a composer, musician, improvisor, Gary has a background in Sociology (LSE) and Cultural History (RCA). He has written widely on continental philosophy, aesthetics and pedagogy and improvisation. His first book was entitled: Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas (Ashgate 2005). His second book: The Philosophy of Improvisation was published by Chicago University Press in 2009. He is currently working on a second book for Chicago University Press entitled: Improvisations on Improvisation. Fiona Peters has a PhD in English, and is currently Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University. Her research interests are in psychoanalysis, discourses of evil, anxiety and love, and Crime Fiction. She is the author of Anxiety and Evil in the Writings of Patricia Highsmith (Ashgate: 2011), as well as having published book chapters and journal articles on a wide range of topics. Current research includes pieces on suicide and a forthcoming volume on Crime Fiction and The Gothic to be published by Edinburgh University Press. Thoughts of Love 223 Sanna Tirkkonen is affiliated with the Social and Moral Philosophy discipline at the University of Helsinki. She is a charter member of the Association for Women and Feminist Philosophers in Finland. She is a specialist in, and has published on Foucault's ethics. Georgios Tsagdis has a PhD from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, the University of Kingston. His work originates in the question of Nothing and the relation of presence to absence in the history of occidental thought and includes essays on Heidegger and the Inception of Logos, Foucault and the Heterology of Madness and Roy Anderson’s Songs From The Second Floor. Sarah Lawson Welsh has a PhD in Caribbean Studies from the Centre for Caribbean Studies, Warwick University UK. She is currently Reader in English and Postcolonial Literatures at York St John University, York, UK. Her co-edited collection, Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for a New Millennium was published by Routledge in 2010. Her monograph, Grace Nichols, was the first book-length study of this Guyanese/Black British writer to be published and appeared in the British Council 'Writers and their Work' series in 2007. She also coedited The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, first published in 1996. She is Associate Editor of the international Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She is also Caribbean editor for the online resource, The Literary Encyclopaedia. Elizabeth Drummond Young runs a course on the Philosophy of Friendship and Love at the University of Edinburgh as part of the Open Studies programme. After receiving her PhD from University of Edinburgh, she has tutored and lectured on moral and political philosophy at the University and has published articles on areas of her special interest; supererogation and the philosophy of religion. INDEX Abraham, 88ff, 100-101 abuse, 31 Adorno, T. 36, 41, 48, 58 aesthetics, 165, 170 agape, 89, 159 aggression, 12 aimance, 53 Althusser, L. 1 Aphrodisia, 125 Arendt, H. 107-123 Aristotle, 127-128 Augustine, 95,107,111, 115-116 Auschwitz, 207-220 Ayerza, J. 18 Badiou, A. 1, 4, 94, 98 Barnard, S. 15 Barthes, R. 2, 89, 96 Benjamin, J. 26-45 Benjamin, W. 176-191 Bergson, H. 162 ‘big other’, 16, 22 Birkenau, 212 Borromean knot, 16-18 boys, 128-129, 134 Breuer, J. 12, 24 brother, 90-93 Butler, J. 3-8, 26-45, 67, 196 care, 3, 48, 55, 57-58 caritas, 107, 114, 116-119, 121 castration complex, 14 choice, 191 Christianity, 90ff Cicero, 99 clichés, 7-8 Coetzee, J.M. 194 community, 159 craving, 115-116, 121 cupiditas, 107, 114-119 Dabashi, H. 176-177 danger, 28-45 Dante, 99, 177 Dasein, 55 death, 91-93 ‘death drive’, 14-15 Deconstruction, 52 demand, 13ff Derrida, J. 2, 43, 47, 52-56, 58, 66, 82, 88-89, 92 desire, 13ff, 30 destructiveness, 28-45 Dewey, J. 208 dialogue, 131 distance, 176-177 Dolar, M. 3-4, 7 Dravers, P. 16 drives, 11 drunkenness, 132 Eichmann, A. 107 empathy, 170-173 ethics, 28, 45, 47, 52, 55, 127, 130, 150, 155, 167, 170, 173 Eros, 47, 50ff, 88ff, 95-98, 102, 128, 135, 150, 159, 192 evil, 107, 144, 156 Eze, E.C. 194, 204 face, 149-150 fantasy, 13, 23-24, 32-34, 41 fate, 177, 182, 186-187 ‘fellow-feeling’, 155-157, 169 forgetting, 5 forgiveness, 155 Foucault, M. 38-39, 124-138 freedom, 35, 50, 93, 108, 110, 112, 180, 191 Freud, S. 10, 26, 49-50, 53ff, 69-70, 192 Thoughts of Love friendship, 53-54, 89, 103, 107, 129, 146 Frosh, S. 36 Gaita, R. 141-153 ‘giftgiving’, 53-54 Goethe, W. 176-191 grace, 118 Habermas, J. 47, 55-62 Hegel, G.W.F. 31, 57, 66-84, 92, 195 heterosexuality, 78 Heidegger, M. 3ff, 54-55, 111, 116, 209 Highsmith, P. 19 Hitchcock, A. 19-20 homosexuality, 80 Honneth, A. 48, 57-62 hospitality, 53-54 identification, 30, 159-162, 171 imaginary, 13, 16, 66 impartiality, 142, 151 individual, 111 individuation, 149 interpellation, 3-4, 7 instinct, 11 Irigary, L. 68 Isaac, 88, 99, 101 James, W. 208 jouissance, 15, 18, 22, 24 Joyce, J. 16 judging, 121 Kafka, F. 112 Kant, I. 47,50, 53-56, 58, 110, 115, 142, 146, 165 Kay, S. 19, 22 Kernberg, O. 59 Kierkegaard, S. 88-106 Kojeve, A. 66, 78-79 Lacan, J. 10-26, 66-68, 124, 135138 225 language, 2 lesbianism, 80 Levinas, E. 37, 47, 53, 149, 197 Loneliness, 119 loss, 13, 35-36 Lukacs, G. 48 lust, 117 Malabou, C. 82 Marcuse, H. 47ff Marion, J.L. 2, 144-153 marriage, 178-180 Marson, U. 203 Marx, K. 50, 81, 195 master-slave dialectic, 66-84 ‘mirror-stage’, 13 misrecognition, 58-59 Montaigne, M. 146 morality, 57, 144, 156, 179 mourning, 36 Napoleon, 78-80 narcissism, 59 narrativisation, 200 natality, 111, 121 nearness, 176-177 need, 13 neighbour, 59, 90, 102, 119, 151 Nietzsche, F. 4-8, 38, 103, 209 ‘nobody’, 120 Nussbaum, M. 124, 138 obsession, 118 one, 15-16 other, 93, 149 Orwell, G. 108 Paget, H. 198 passion, 30, 115, 133 performativity, 7 person, 111 philia, 90, 95, 98, 102, 192-130 Phillips, A. 10 Pinkard, T. 67, 74-77 Plato, 80, 99, 124-138 ‘pleasure principle’, 12, 14, 49, 51 226 Poland, 201, 220 Polis, 108-109, 121, 129-130 Pragmatism, 209 proximity, 90, 177-178, 183, 190 psychoanalysis, 10ff, 26, 28-45, 49, 160 real, 10-14, 16-20, 23 ‘reality principle’, 51 recognition, 13, 29, 31-45, 48, 57, 59, 73-75, 156 regression 59 remorse, 143 Romeo and Juliet, 88 Rorty, R. 209 sacredness, 142ff Said, E. 195 Salecl, R. 16 Sandford, S. 150 Sartre, J.P. 66 Scheler, M. 155-173 Secret, 101 self-consciousness, 71, 73 sex, 10, 50, 76, 117, 128, 166-67, 187 silence, 7, 88, 99-100 sinthome 16ff Smith, A. 170 Socrates, 113, 124-138 solidarity, 58-60 solitude, 119 space, 118 subjection, 30 Index subjectivity, 31 subordination, 30 suicide, 14 surrender, 36 symbolic, 17-18 sympathy, 155-173 Szondi, P. 69 terror, 68, 73, 81 thing, 15 ‘thirdness’, 34, 37, 42, 44 Totalitarianism, 120 transference, 10-26, 125, 171 trauma, 18, 33 trust, 157 universalism, 194-195, 198 Verhaeghe, P. 15 violence, 81 vulnerability, 31, 36, 39 Walcott, D. 202 Weil, S. 144 wholeness, 14 will, 4, 33 Winnicott, D. 31-32 Wisker, G. 201-202 woman, 24 young love, 6 Zizek, S. 10-12, 19-24, 196 Zupancic, A. 15