Glossator 5: On the Love of Commentary [co-editor/contributor]

GLOSSATORPractice and Theory of the Commentary

Volume 5

On the Love of Commentary

Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary

Volume 5

Editor-in-Chief

Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College, City University of New York).

Co-Editors Ryan Dobran (Queens College, University of Cambridge). Karl Steel (Brooklyn College, City University of New York).

International Editorial Board Nadia Altschul (Johns Hopkins University). Stephen A. Barney (University of California, Irvine). Erik Butler (Emory University). Mary Ann Caws (The Graduate Center, City University of New York). Alan Clinton (University of Miami). Andrew Galloway (Cornell University) David Greetham (The Graduate Center, City University of New York). Bruno Gulli (Long Island University). Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University). Jason Houston (University of Oklahoma). Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville). Ed Keller (Parsons, The New School for Design). Anna Kłosowska (Miami University of Ohio). Erin Labbie (Bowling Green State University). Carsten Madsen (Aarhus University). Sean McCarthy (Lehman College, City University of New York). Reza Negarestani (Independent Scholar, Malaysia) Michael O’ Rourke (Independent Colleges, Dublin). Daniel C. Remein (New York University). Sherry Roush (Penn State University). Michael Sargent (Queens College and The Graduate Center, City

University of New York). Michael Stone-Richards (College for Creative Studies). Eugene Thacker (The New School). Evelyn Tribble (University of Otago). Frans van Liere (Calvin College). Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco (Columbia University). Robert Viscusi (Brooklyn College, City University of New York). Valerie Michelle Wilhite (Miami University of Ohio). Scott Wilson (Lancaster University). Yoshihisa Yamamoto (Chiba University).

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GLOSSATOR

VOLUME 5

ON THE LOVE OF COMMENTARY

Edited by Nicola Masciandaro & Scott Wilson

http://glossator.org

ISSN 1942-3381 (online) ISSN 2152-1506 (print)

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Glossator 5: On the Love of Commentary (2011)

CONTENTS Jordan Kirk WHAT SEPARATES THE BIRTH OF TWINS

1

Scott Wilson PROSOPOPEIA TO PROSOPAGNOSIA: DANTE ON

FACEBOOK

19 Karmen MacKendrick WHEN YOU CALL MY NAME

57

Eileen A. Joy ALL THAT REMAINS UNNOTICED I ADORE: SPENCER

REECE’S ADDRESSES

69

David Hancock PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM AND COMMENTARY FOR LOVE

85

Gary J. Shipley DREAMING DEATH: THE ONANISTIC AND SELF-ANNIHILATIVE PRINCIPLES OF LOVE IN FERNANDO

PESSOA’S BOOK OF DISQUIET

107 Mathew Abbott ON NOT LOVING EVERYONE: COMMENTS ON JEAN-LUC NANCY’S “L’AMOUR EN ÉCLATS [SHATTERED

LOVE]”

139 Michael Edward Moore THE GRACE OF HERMENEUTICS

163

Anna Kłosowska TEARSONG: VALENTINE VISCONTI’S INVERTED

STOICISM

173


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WHAT SEPARATES THE BIRTH OF TWINS

Jordan Kirk 0. OBJECT OF THE COMMENTARY Haec enim regula dilectionis divinitus constituta est: diliges, inquit, proximum tuum tamquam te ipsum, deum vero ex toto corde, ex tota anima, ex tota mente.1 1. AUGUSTINIAN HERMENEUTICS

In principle, the procedure for the interpretation of scripture laid out in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana is as straightforward as it is well-known. All biblical passages should be referred to the double commandment to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. No matter what a given chapter and verse would seem to say, its ultimate meaning is no more and no less than what has been called the “doctrine of charity.” To understand holy writing is to discover in what way it can be seen to command the double love of God and other people. Accordingly, were Augustine to produce a scriptural concordance, every verse would point its reader to Matthew 22:37-9 and the associated places where the “twin commandments” can be found, and under the entries for these verses would be recapitulated the holy writings in their entirety. Augustine does not shy away from the implications of his method. For he does not stop at saying that anyone who thinks he understands some part of the sacred writings, but makes no reference to the “twin love” of God and neighbor, has in fact failed to understand it at all. He goes so far as to maintain that, so too, anyone who does come up with a reading that promotes this love, but misses what the person who wrote the passage in question really meant to say, “has not made a fatal error, and is certainly not a liar.”2 To discover a reference to the commandments of love in a

1 Augustine, De doctrina, I.22. All passages from this work are taken from the edition by R. P. H. Green with an accompanying translation; Green’s English has been modified where indicated. 2 Ibid., I.36. Quisquis igitur scripturas divinas vel quamlibet earum partem intellexisse sibi videtur, ita ut eo intellectu non aedificet istam geminam caritatem dei et proximi,

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passage where no such reference exists is, if only minimally, to understand it. This is a precept and a method for the production of commentary. It is not a question of declaring that such a reference is invariably present but in elaborating each time the itinerary along which it will pass. This is in no small part because the transfer of sense Augustine calls for is not only a movement from one location to another within the biblical corpus: the reason a given passage is to be brought back to the commandments is that it will be brought thereby to other people. Here is the doctrina of the book’s title: an instruction of other people consisting in explaining to them the meaning of the holy writings.3 For these writings are sometimes more and sometimes less obscure, but they will become clear from first to last when they have been commented in such a way that their clarities and obscurities both are referred to the commandments of love. Although commentary thus conceived would appear, no doubt rightly, always to produce the same interpretation no matter what it has before it, this seeming reductiveness is only the inverse of the great proliferation of explanations that must result when every verse, even the most intractable, is declared interpretable with reference to a single precept, and explicable to even the least apt. But the commentary Augustine instructs in will lead not just to sanctimonious redundancies for a reason more fundamental still. This is that the “twin commandments” are themselves refractory to the understanding, their meaning obscure not only incidentally or temporarily but permanently and insofar as they remain scripture’s principle of intelligibility. The hermeneutic program laid out in De doctrina is founded squarely on an inability to understand the passage in whose light all others will become clear, as Augustine indicates in the extraordinary sentence that is the object of the present commentary.4

nondum intellexit. Quisquis vero talem inde sententiam duxerit, ut huic aedificandae caritati sit utilis, nec tamen hoc dixerit quod ille quem legit eo loco sensisse probabitur, non perniciose fallitur nec omnino mentitur. On lying, cf. also De magistro 13. 3 On doctrina, cf. Green, “Qué entendió San Agustin.” Still excellent remains Marrou, “Doctrina et disciplina.” 4 If the frequency of its mention in certain circles is any guide, the threat of “Robertsonianism” remains keenly felt. But to seek references to an Augustinian “doctrine of charity” in medieval literary texts might turn out to be a different endeavor than has been imagined, by champions and detractors alike, if that doctrine itself concerns not the positive enunciations of a law but

KIRK – WHAT SEPARATES

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2. NOT OTHERWISE Given the apparent reducibility of all scriptural sententia to that of

the twin commandments, it is first of all necessary to ask if the rest of scripture could just be dispensed with, and only the commandments themselves retained, for instance in the form in which they appear in Matthew: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.5 But needless to say, Augustine does not go in for such an efficiency. This is because it is both pleasant and rewarding to be exercised by the obscurities of scripture. 6 Indeed, it is necessary to affirm of such writing that it should not have been written the least bit differently than it has been. For Christian sacred texts, and this is the presupposition of the “redeemed rhetoric” the later parts of De doctrina take up, are not only full of truth, Augustine claims, they are also eloquent. The question arises in Book IV whether it is fit to call auctores nostri eloquent, or whether theirs is a wisdom having nothing to do with the realm of rhetoric. The question, Augustine claims, is easily resolved: scripture is not only the wisest writing but also the most eloquent. “I venture to say,” he continues, “that all who correctly understand what [our authors] are saying understand at the same time that it would not have been right for them to express it in any other way.”7 The force of this suggestion is clear: to understand scripture at all is to understand simultaneously (simul intellegere) that what is understood ought not to have been expressed otherwise. The very words used, no matter how resistant they may be to the would-be commentator, are the best and only words for the purpose.

a contentless principle of intelligibility. As will become apparent below, following the procedures of “historical criticism” to the letter would then mean discovering in failures of reference to the twin commandments the most closely guarded inheritance of Augustine’s law of love. (A summary of D. W. Robertson’s program can be found in his “Historical Criticism” and a recent and very rewarding appraisal of that program and its reception in Justice, “Who Stole Robertson?”) 5 As the King James version renders 22:37-39. 6 Cf. e.g. De doctrina, II.6. Nunc tamen nemo ambigit et per similitudines libentius quaeque cognosci et cum aliqua difficultate quaesita multo gratius inveniri. On this point, cf. Pépin, “Saint Augustin et la fonction protreptique.” 7 De doctrina, IV.6. Translation altered. Et audeo dicere omnes qui recte intellegunt quod illi loquuntur simul intellegere non eos aliter loqui debuisse.

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Non aliter loqui debuisse, moreover, is not merely a question of which particular words are used, but no less of the order in which they appear. This becomes explicit in Book II, when Augustine undertakes to demonstrate the preeminence8 of the Septuagint over all other translations: for, he writes, the mark of the divine assistance afforded the seventy translators is that even though they were separated each in his own cell, “nothing was found in anyone’s version which was not found, in the same words and the same order of words, in the others.” And in the face of this agreement on words and their order, he continues, “who would dare to adapt such an authoritative work, let alone adopt anything in preference to it?” 9 The authority of the established scriptural text resides in the words it uses and in the order in which it uses them, and it defies anyone either to alter those words and their sequence or to put some other words, or sequence of words, in their stead. This remark about word order, furthermore, is not made casually, nor is it simply occasional; it resumes a doctrine found in Jerome’s famous remarks on translation in his Epistle 57, where the inviolability of the sequence of words is the very distinguishing mark of sacred text: “in fact I not only admit but openly declare that in translation from Greek texts (except in the case of sacred Scripture, where the very order of the words is a mystery) I render the text, not word for word, but sense for sense.”10 Ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est: in scripture, even the sequence of words is holy. 3. AN ALTERED SEQUENCE

These then are the lineaments of Augustinian interpretation. Proper understanding of scripture consists in the simultaneous activity of two distinguishable operations: a reading of the very words on the page in the order in which they appear and no other, and the discovery in them of a reference to the commandments to love God and the neighbor. Something very strange happens, however, when

8 Note, however, Augustine’s preference of another version at IV.7, at which last it is exactly the insufficient literality of the Septuagint that causes him to prefer Jerome’s translation. 9 De doctrina, II.15. …nihil in alicuius eorum codice inventum est quod non isdem verbis eodemque verborum ordine inveniretur in ceteris, quis huic auctoritati conferre aliquid, nedum praeferre audeat? 10 Epistulae, 508; Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 48–9.


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these commandments themselves first appear in Augustine’s text. His citation takes the following form:

Haec enim regula dilectionis divinitus constituta est: diliges, inquit, proximum tuum tamquam te ipsum, deum vero ex toto corde, ex tota anima, ex tota mente. For this is the divinely established rule of love: you shall love, it says, your neighbor as yourself, but God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.11

Needless to say, the commandments are in the wrong order. When the commentator introduces that passage to which all others are meant to refer, he alters the order of words and adopts in preference to it his own rendering. The very “summary of the law” itself is subjected to a derangement. If to understand a passage is at once to see how it ought not to read otherwise than it does and to find in it a reference to the twin commandments, to read the twin commandments themselves—it seems—is to make them read otherwise than they do. And this alteration is in fact the mark of an internal reference they undergo at Augustine’s hand, their being referred to themselves, each being brought back to the realm of the other. But this reference back to themselves consists in nothing else than their alteration.

What they are referred to, in other words, is no longer entirely identifiable as the “double law” itself, insofar as the order of words is inseparable from their meaning; and thus it appears that Augustine’s citation at once alters the order of a scriptural passage and refers it to something that is not quite the commandments of love. This is for Augustinian interpretation to reach the limit separating its two simultaneous operations. The citation of the commandments in a mode of hysteron proteron allows a question to pose itself which might not otherwise have been addressed: if the means by which a given scriptural utterance becomes understandable is its being referred back to what has been understood already, the twin commandments, how are these themselves to be understood? The internal reference of the hysteron proteron is first of all an indication that their meaning is not

11 De doctrina, I.22. Translation modified.

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altogether clear, that they too demand to be understood. 12 They should thus prove susceptible to the method Augustine lays out.

When faced with an expression that is not yet understood, he says, the interpreter must determine whether it is propria or figurata, literal or figurative.13 This can be done by seeing in what way it can be referred ad regnum caritatis: if the passage in question commands love proprie, it is not figurative, but if it seems to teach something other than or opposed to love, it should rather be considered a figure. 14 That is, if it says just “love god and the neighbor,” its significance is literal and no figurative explanation is to be sought. Augustine’s point is one that has been underscored in an important article by Kathy Eden: that the opposition between literal (propria) and figurative (figurata) is by no means to be identified with that between literal (literalis) and spiritual (spiritualis). As Eden puts it, “Augustine resists identifying the spiritual with the figurative reading, the corporeal with the literal (propria), and preserves at least a theoretical distinction” between them.15 It is possible for the spiritual reading, which for Augustine will always consist in an ultimate reference to the twin commandments, to correspond to the literal meaning of the words, and for the literal sense thus to take precedence over the figurative. “Augustine, in other words,” Eden writes, “upholds the literal over the figurative reading whenever the

12 Augustine’s influence is so great that the meaning he finds in the two commandments, and even the fact that he finds such great meaning at all, seems scarcely remarkable; its novelty will be seen in some instructive remarks by Oliver O’Donovan: “it is surprising how little attention is paid to the ‘summary of the law,’ the ‘two commands’ of love-of-God and love-of-neighbor, in either the Western or the Eastern Fathers. Clement of Alexandria and Origen both comment on the summary and argue that the ‘neighbor’ whom we are to love second to God is Christ; Gregory of Nyssa mentions it, and adds as a third command love of one’s wife. ‘Barnabas’ tactfully glosses the phrase ‘as yourself’ to mean ‘more than your own life.’ Until more detailed research proves otherwise, we must make the supposition that Augustine is responsible not only for the currency of ‘self-love’ in the theology of the West but also for the predominance of the ‘summary’ in Western Christian ethics.” Problem of Self-Love, 4. 13 Cf. De doctrina, III.24. Maxime itaque investigandum est utrum propria sit an figurata locutio quam intellegere conamur. 14 Ibid., III.15. 15 Eden, “Rhetorical Tradition and Augustinian Hermeneutics,” 58.


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former provides an interpretation in keeping with charity. In some cases, then, the spiritual and the literal (propria) coincide.”16 Chief among these “some cases” would of course be the giving of the law of charity itself. According to Augustine’s criteria, the twin commandments of love should be utterly literal, to be withheld totally from any figurative reading. It would be an absurdity, at best, to seek anything besides their literal meaning. It is instructive, however, to consider the account Augustine provides of figurative expression: “the words in which it is expressed will be found to be taken either from things that are similar or things that are in some way connected [ab aliqua vicinitate attingentibus].”17 What distinguishes figuration is that it produces signification by means of the similitude and vicinity that can obtain between things. While this might seem to be a reference to something like the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, more than an identification of any particular types of figure, which Augustine treats elsewhere and distinctly, this is the return in De doctrina of exactly what his inversion of the commandments has elided. For Augustine does not only alter their sequence; he also removes from between them the verse that, in the form they are given in Matthew, separates the one from the other, 22:38: this is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it. This verse, which declares—if obscurely—both the fact and the manner of the commandments’s twinness at the same time as it holds them apart by being interpolated between them, does not appear when the second commandment is placed before the first. For clearly its discussion of a first and a second could not easily survive the derangement of the sequence to which these ordinals refer. But in addition to the difficulty its retention would pose for Augustine’s hysteron proteron, the presence of the verse would be liable to raise doubts about the exclusively literal nature of the commandments. What it declares is that a relation of similitude obtains between the two of them, and that, their being subsequent the one to the other, so too does a relation of vicinity. Any interpretation of the commandments taking this verse

16 Ibid., 59. Denys Turner has remarked this point more recently, and with a slightly different emphasis, in his “Allegory in Christian late antiquity,” 77–8. On Augustine’s refusing, in a series of letters with Jerome, to deny a literally true meaning to any portion of scripture at all, cf. Nirenberg, “Politics of Love,” 596–8. 17 De doctrina, III.25. …verba quibus continetur aut a similibus rebus ducta invenientur aut ab aliqua vicinitate attingentibus.

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into account would have to understand them insofar as something of their significance can be established on the basis of their being similar and proximate, and thus, according to Augustine’s own indications, insofar as they are at least partly figurative. 4. TWINS

The inversion of the commandments thus accomplishes at least two things: it is the recursive interpretive movement of a reference to the twin commandments having come up against its internal limit; and it is the stripping from them of their susceptibility to figuration. It thus insists on their literal signification even as it makes plain that this is not altogether established in advance. Much of the work of De doctrina goes, in fact, into establishing that literal meaning, and not just in the book devoted to things as over against signs, that is, the first book, where the inversion in question appears. No, the precise elements of Augustine’s inverting commentary on the twin commandments must be pieced together from indications spread throughout the treatise. The way to do this is to work backwards from figurations to be found elsewhere in the book of the “literal” double law in its inverted form. Now, if Augustine instructs those who would interpret holy text to always find in it the twin commandments, he does not neglect to follow his own dictum: for instance, and most famously, by identifying some twin-bearing sheep in the Song of Songs as an indubitable figure of, among other things, the love of God and neighbor. 18 In so doing, because his reading there and elsewhere is by any measure quite far-fetched, he opens himself to such charges as that he peddles in mumbo-jumbo and “arbitrary exegesis and number-symbolism.”19 There is agreement in some quarters that Augustine finds in scripture what he wants to find, indulging in a kind of hermeneutics of superstition that misrepresents totally indifferent things as if they were significant—as if they referred, namely, to the regnum caritatis when in fact they do not. But he himself has quite a bit to say about superstitious interpretation; and it appears to have gone unremarked, first of all by Augustine himself, that in that connection too he is centrally concerned with nothing else than a pair of twins. Appearing as it does in a book preoccupied with what it calls tirelessly a gemina caritas, a dilectio gemina, the twin commandments of a

18 Ibid., II.6. 19 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 457.


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twin love, this single mention of twins in De doctrina in an apparently distinct context should be attended to carefully. Augustine adduces a pair of twins, Jacob and Essau, in order to dispute the legitimacy of a superstitious interpretive system: horoscopy. Like ascribing meaning to bird flight or to the spilling of salt, divination according to astral position at the time of birth, Augustine declares, rests on arbitrary facts that take on significance only because of an agreement entered into with demons. His ire is directed at something very like the “arbitrary exegesis” for which he will himself come under suspicion: “the signs by which this deadly agreement with demons is achieved have an effect that is in proportion to each individual’s attention to them . . . These signs are null and void unless accompanied by the observer’s agreement.”20 The point is not first of all that superstitious interpretation leads to false results—for things regularly come to pass in accordance with the predictions and indications of these interpreters21—but that it is based on demonic rather than human convention. Still, the falsity of this basis can itself be demonstrated. To refute horoscopy, for example, it suffices to recall that “it can happen that some twins follow one another so closely out of the womb that no interval of time can be perceived between them and recorded in terms of constellations. It follows that some twins have the same constellations, and yet their actions and experiences turn out to be not the same but often quite different.” What will dismantle the claims of the arbitrary exegetes who read horoscopes, Augustine says,22 is the inescapable presence of a minimal interval, what he goes on to call a momentum minimum atque angustissimum temporis, quod geminorum partum disterminat: the smallest and most constrained moment of time, which separates the birth of twins. This interval is at once that by which twins remain always distinguishable, different people with different destinies, and the proof of their indistinguishability under the scrutiny of a certain

20 De doctrina, II.24. . . . sic etiam illa signa, quibus perniciosa daemonum societas comparatur, pro cuiusque observationibus valent . . . nulla ista signa sunt nisi consensus observantis accedat. 21 Ibid., II.23. 22 The argument certainly does not originate with Augustine; it can be found as well, for example, in De divinatione, II.43, where Cicero puts it in the mouth of Diogenes the Stoic. Augustine makes use of it in a great number of places, notably City of God, V.4 and Confessions, VII.6., where he ascribes his learning of it to one Firminus. A useful account of its history can be found in Hegedus, Early Christianity and Ancient Astrology, 43–84.

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superstitious reading. This minimal temporal difference is what definitively separates each twin into his own time and ensures that the two times remain impossible to tell apart, that they pass for a single time. It cannot be recorded, and by the same token it cannot go unrecognized, for its signs are everywhere apparent in the divergent lives of the twins whose birth it has separated: “one may live to be blissfully unhappy,” Augustine continues, “the other to be desperately unhappy, like Esau and Jacob who, we are told, were born as twins with Jacob, the second to be born, holding in his hand the foot of his brother born before him.”23 Is this not just how the commandments themselves are born? Brought hand to foot by the deletion of an intervening verse (this is the first and great commandment . . . ), they are nevertheless still separated by the “vero” (and, but, in truth) Augustine inserts to mark their distinctness. This particle, however, is placed not between the two commandments but within one of them, so that even as they are emphatically differentiated they nonetheless go on touching “hand to foot” with no separation at all: proximum tuum tamquam te ipsum deum vero ex toto corde, “your neighbor as yourself god however with all your heart.” And just as it is the confutation of interpretation not grounded in the commandments of love, what separates the birth of twins is the confirmation of the reading practice Augustine teaches. Inasmuch as it is a figuration of the “literal” commandments, the adducing of twins in the context of the confutation of horoscopy can only be understood to mean that there is a minimal difference, impossible to ignore and impossible to record, between the commandment to love God and the commandment to love your neighbor. 5. LOVE OF SELF

Augustine does not fail to name this minimal difference. When the two commandments change places, when the moment in which each is uttered becomes the moment in which the other is uttered, they remain distinct, the love of God being distinguishable from the love of the neighbor. But something else emerges when their order is

23 De doctrina, II.22. Unde necesse est nonnullos geminos easdem habere constellationes, cum paria rerum vel quas agunt vel quas patiuntur eventa non habeant, sed plerumque ita disparia ut alius felicissimus, alius infelicissimus vivat, sicut Esau et Iacob geminos accipimus natos ita ut Iacob, qui posterior nascebatur, manu plantam praecedentis fratris tenens inveniretur.


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changed, something that might otherwise have escaped notice. “Although love of God comes first and the manner of loving him is clearly laid down,” Augustine writes, “nothing seems to have been said about self-love. But when it is said at the same time [simul] ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ your own self-love is not neglected.”24 Because the commandment to love God comes first, in other words, something remains obscure; and this obscure thing emerges into clarity not when eventually the second commandment comes to be issued but rather when it is said simul, at the same time as, in the very time of the first. 25 What emerges when the commandments switch places is that your love of yourself is seen not to have been left out after all. The alteration of their sequence thus constitutes an attempt to come to grips with one of the more daunting of the obscurities that prevent the literal meaning of the commandments from being already understood, namely, the force and function of the words as yourself. When nothing at all has yet been said about loving yourself, already it is the model on which another kind of love is to occur, the love of other people. Augustine’s solution to this difficulty is, in brief,26 to claim that everyone loves himself, whether he wants to or not, whether commanded to do so or otherwise, by a kind of natural law; but that the commandment to love God entirely means that he should refer that inevitable and ineradicable love to God, to love

24 Ibid., I.26. Translation modified. Cum enim praecurrat dilectio dei eiusque dilectionis modus praescriptus appareat, ita ut cetera in illum confluant, de dilectione tua nihil dictum videtur. Sed cum dictum est, diliges proximum tuum tamquam te ipsum, simul et tui abs te dilectio non praetermissa est. 25 The second commandment’s issuing in a first instance can be seen as following from the necessary firstness of all commendment—from the coincidence of “commandment” and “origin” in the word arche that has been the emphasis of recent lectures by Giorgio Agamben. Insofar as the place of commandment and the place of origin are the same, if it is to be any commandment at all the second commandment must occupy the position of the “first and great.” But it should be noted here that what Augustine says will emerge when the second commandment attains to its first position is something else again, a third element alluded to in this second commandment but not located there. 26 Considerations of space preclude an adequate discussion of this matter; Oliver O’Donovan’s study The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine is much to be recommended, as are the careful and thorough readings contained in two articles by Raymond Canning: “Love of Neighbor in St. Augustine”; “Love your Neighbor as Yourself.”

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himself not for his own sake but for the sake of God. And thus as yourself is to say, “in the same way that you are to love yourself”: by referring love from one thing to another; so that in short the neighbor too is to be loved not for his own sake but for the sake of God. This is the doctrine Augustine lays out in Book I of De doctrina. But why does he think it becomes clear when the order of the commandments is altered? For nothing further has been said about the love of self, only the order has changed, and indeed the Matthean intervening verse removed. What consultation with the example of the twins who confute horoscopy makes clear, however, is that love of self is “not left out,” non praetermissa est, when the minimal interval obtaining between the commandments is made to appear. Love of self is just the interval separating love of God from love of neighbor. Neither the positivity of a natural law nor the imperative of a commandment, the love of self as it shows itself here is no more and no less than the possibility of distinguishing between the love of neighbor and the love of God. But if it is the possibility of telling the difference it is at once the impossibility of telling what that difference might be, like the obvious but unregistrable distinction between the moments of the birth of twins. The self-love that is revealed in the re-ordering of the commandments answers to a different description than the self-love that is dictated inconcussa naturae lege, by an unshaken law of nature, though no doubt they are the same love. What Augustine uncovers is not amour propre, not self-esteem, not the pulsing of the organism in self-preservation: it is rather the barest understanding, a minimal recognition that there is a difference between love of other people and love of God, that other people are not God, nor God other people. This knowledge is simultaneous and coincident with a permanent failure to understand in what that difference might consist, just as the good interpreter knows even less, perhaps, than the reader of horoscopes what will be the particular fates of two twins born under the same constellations, but unlike him does know that these fates are not, in principle, the same. What this amounts to is a final impossibility of saying how and why there is not simply one commandment of love but two.


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6. TWO ORDERS Still, that there are and must be two cannot be doubted.27 What

remains uncertain, however, is how Augustine conceives of the inverting operation by which he brings about the interpretability of the commandments, an operation so seemingly at odds with his hermeneutic program. De doctrina itself is of no help here, but an explanation is not lacking. It is to be found elsewhere, in the seventeenth of Augustine’s tractates on John.28 In that commentary, on John 5:8, the method for interpreting scripture laid out in De doctrina can be observed in full swing: Augustine takes Christ’s words to a sick man “Arise, take up your bed and walk” to signify, as might be expected, nothing else than the twin commandments. That there are three imperatives here gives the commentator only the slightest pause: “He said three things: ‘Arise,’ ‘Take up your bed,’ and ‘walk.’ But ‘Arise’ was not a command of work, but the working of a cure. But he commanded the cured man two things, ‘Take up your bed and walk.’” Having dispensed with the word arise, Augustine continues: “How, then, may we find, in these two commands of the Lord, those two commandments of love signified?” He explains that, in the sick bed, the invalid has been taken care of by others; so that

27 This notwithstanding the widely held view that Augustine so far subordinates the love of neighbor to that of God that, in effect, he does away with it altogether. Among the more vituperative—and influential—statements of this position (where Augustine is guilty of a “perversion” that “destroys just what is most characteristic of the Christian idea of love”) is that of Anders Nygren: “It is a basic idea of Augustine’s that the commandments of love to God and to neighbor are not really two, but one single command. God is the only worthy object of our love. When God commands us to love our neighbor, we are not strictly to love our neighbor, who is not worthy of such love, but God in our neighbor.” (Agape and Eros, 97–8; 549. A summary of the debate over Nygren’s claims will be found in O’Donovan, “Usus and Fruitio,” 361–4.) So also e.g. Hannah Arendt: “every beloved is only an occasion to love God [….] It is not really the neighbor who is loved in this love of neighbor—it is love itself” (Love and Saint Augustine, 97.) Although it is quite true that Augustine allows himself to be understood in this way, it is exactly the purpose of his inversion of the commandments to make plain their absolute discretion, even as it is to insist that both loves, not just that of the neighbor, are always virtually each other. The idea that Augustine considers love of the neighbor a special and inferior case of love of God is strictly mistaken. 28 The following passages will be found in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 36, 173–5; Tractates on the Gospel of John, 2:115–17.

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take up your bed means to take care of those others, and thus signifies love your neighbor. Moreover, and walk means that the sick man should not simply care for others but should conduct them toward God, so that it can be seen to signify, in its turn, love God. This explication shows take up your bed and walk to be a figuration of the double commandment love your neighbor as yourself and love God: a figuration of the commandments not, in other words, in their proper sequence but in the same order they are given when they first appear in De doctrina. Augustine is quite aware that this irregularity demands an explanation, and he provides one:

The love of God is first in the order of commandment [praecipiendi], but the love of neighbor is first in the order of action. For one who would enjoin [praecipere] this love on you in two commandments [praeceptis] would not recommend to you the neighbor first and God afterwards, but God first and the neighbor afterwards. But because you do not yet see God, by loving your neighbor you merit seeing him; by loving your neighbor you cleanse your eye for seeing God.

This is, at last, the answer Augustine will offer to the questions this essay has posed. Dei dilectio prior est ordine praecipiendi, proximi autem dilectio prior est ordine faciendi. There is an order of doing and an order of commanding, and the one is the inverse of the other. To put the love of the neighbor before the love of God is not to derange the order of commanding but rather to observe the order of doing.

What, however, is the ordo faciendi? Where is it in effect? Augustine’s homiletic remarks allow it to be imagined that it is you who are commanded who follow the order of doing in carrying out commandments issued in their own proper order. And this is no doubt the case. Christ commands in the order of commanding; you obey according to the order of doing. But the occasion of Augustine’s making this distinction, the instance of ordo faciendi that must be explained, is nothing else than an imperative issued by Christ, namely take up your bed and walk. It is these words that follow the order of doing, and not first of all any action you may or may not take: so that the ordo faciendi is, in the first place, that sequence in which Christ himself rephrases the twin commandments for the purposes of instruction. In other words, if to do the commandments is to invert them, this is not because, generally speaking, doing is the reciprocal


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form of commanding. Facere praecepta does not merely entail but consists in hysteron proteron: the inversion of the order of the commandments is itself their observation.

As Augustine has it, the reason Christ rephrases his own commandments is that in their proper order—the order of commanding—they are obscure. What is necessary is a “cleansing of the eye” that will be brought about by putting the love of neighbor before the love of God, by substituting for the ordo praecipiendi an ordo faciendi that will make the meaning of the twin commandments clear. In short, to alter the sequence of the commandments as Augustine does in De doctrina is to fulfill them by making them understandable to others. This is why, as Oliver O’Donovan has rightly summarized, “in practical terms”—as who should say, in the ordo faciendi—“love of the neighbor is evangelism.”29 It is to produce, for the purposes of doctrina, a minimal commentary, one whose operation is to change the sequence of the verses that are its object and to remove from around and between them every other verse, while maintaining the totality of scripture, down to its last particular, as virtually present in the two verses remaining. At the heart of the hermeneutic homiletics of De doctrina is this mere slip of an exposition, a form of commentary that adds nothing more to the commented text than a particle (“vero”), but reduces and reordinates what is to be read in view of its impartability. So that what is spread abroad in love of neighbor as “evangelism” is the barest interpretability of the commandments, and it is because even that interpretability is not assured in advance, because it must be taught, that love can operate at all: “there would be no way for love, which ties people together in the bonds of unity, to make souls overflow and as it were intermingle with each other, if human beings learned nothing from other humans.”30 The proximity in which love of neighbor can come about is the fact that you are susceptible of being taught. 7. VITA AETERNA

A recent collection of essays on the neighbor has begun with the axiom, as it affirms, “that it is only with the emergence of the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious—with the emergence of the

29 Problem of Self-Love, 112. 30 De doctrina, praefatio. Deinde ipsa caritas, quae sibi homines invicem nodo unitatis astringit, non haberet aditum refundendorum et quasi miscendorum sibimet animorum, si homines per homines nihil discerent.

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subject of psychoanalysis—that we can truly grasp the ethical and political complexity introduced into the world by the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself.”31 This psychoanalytic concept of the self is put to compelling use there; and yet it is worth noting that in Augustine’s account, in which the authors show little interest, it is exactly the “complexity introduced into the world by the injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself” that generates its own “emergence of the subject.” In De doctrina, that is, the interpretive difficulty of the commandments discloses a love of self otherwise withheld. Augustine’s reading sets up a thinking of the self as minimal differentiability between other people and God that remains distinct both from the “psychoanalytic concept of the self” and from the Levinasian subject to which it is opposed.32 The authors are entirely right to maintain that “neighbor-love functions more as an obstacle to its own theorization than as a roadmap for ethical life…the injunction to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ involves interpretive and practical aporias in all its individual terms, and even more so as an utterance…something in the call to neighbor-love remains opaque and does not give itself up willingly to univocal interpretation.” 33 Consultation with Augustine allows for the further specifications that these interpretive aporias are the very basis of neighbor-love itself, as the possibility of doctrina; and that what remains opaque to interpretation is the self as minimal differentiability, an obstacle to theorization but the beginning of love as sharing of intelligibility.

For De doctrina presents love of neighbor as a program for producing and understanding a certain kind of commentary: one that builds up gemina caritas by locating the minimal difference between love of God and love of neighbor; considering it as their principle of intelligibility; and identifying it as a form of self-love without positive content, consisting only in the slightest recognition that there is—that it itself is—some distinction. Commentary thus conceived consists in the exposition of an unregistrable differentiation, that is, it amounts finally to a reading of no text at all. Its object is not this passage of scripture or this other but what maintains some distinction between them even when they have been chopped up, rearranged, expunged. Likewise, when it is before its proper object commentary speaks in its own voice only a single word, a mere particle, some indeterminately

31 Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard, The Neighbor, 10. 32 Cf. especially Žižek’s contribution to the volume. 33 The Neighbor, 5.


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assenting punctuation: vero. Commentary is thus, at its most characteristic, the minimization to the point almost of removal of both its object and itself. In this it resembles Augustine’s famous description, in another of his commentaries on John, of the “eternal life” as a fullness of understanding in the presence not of the text of the gospel but of its giver, “when the pages of the text and voice of the reader and the exegete have been removed.”34 Commentary is the production, today,35 of this fullness of understanding. Its eternal life is the working of a minimal intelligibility assured only by human instruction: the understanding that God is not other people and other people not God, coincident with the utter failure to understand in what their difference might consist. This utter failure is the paradise of a self-love without object. BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah. Love and Saint Augustine. Edited by J. Scott and J.

Stark. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Augustine. Confessions, Books I-VIII. Translated by W. Watts.

Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1912. ———. De Doctrina Christiana. Edited by R. P. H. Green. Translated by

R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. ———. In Ioannis evangelium tractatus CXXIV. Edited by R. Willems.

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 36. Turnhout: Brepols, 1954.

———. Tractates on the Gospel of John 11-27. Translated by J. Rettig. Vol. 2. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1988.

Canning, Raymond. “Love of Neighbor in St. Augustine: A preparation for or the essential moment of Love for God?” Augustiniana 33 (1983): 5-57.

———. “Love your Neighbor as Yourself (Matt. 22. 39): Saint Augustine on the lineaments of the self to be loved.” Augustiniana 34 (1984): 145-97.

Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages:

34 …remotis omnibus lectionis paginis, et voce lectoris et tractatoris. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 36, 223; Tractates on the Gospel of John, 2:198. 35 Cf. Nicola Masciandaro’s remarks on the anagogical sense of hodie in his “Getting Anagogic.”

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Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Eden, Kathy. “The Rhetorical Tradition and Augustinian Hermeneutics in De doctrina christiana.” Rhetorica 8, no. 1 (1990): 45-63.

Green, R. P. H. “Qué entendió San Agustin por doctrina cristiana?” Augustinus 26 (1981): 49-57.

Hegedus, Tim. Early Christianity and Ancient Astrology. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.

Jerome. Epistulae. Edited by Isidorus Hilberg. Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 54. Vienna: Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996.

Justice, S. “Who Stole Robertson?” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 609– 615. Marrou, H.-I. “‘Doctrina’ et ‘disciplina’ dans la langue des pères de

l’église.” Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 9 (1934): 5-25. Masciandaro, Nicola. “Getting Anagogic.” Rhizomes 21 (2010). Nirenberg, David. “The Politics of Love and Its Enemies.” Critical

Inquiry 33, no. 3 (2007): 573-605. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. O’Donovan, Oliver. The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. ———. “Usus and Fruitio in Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I.”

Journal of Theological Studies 33, no. 2 (1982): 361-97. Pépin, Jean. “Saint Augustin et la fonction protreptique de l’allégorie.”

Recherches Augustiniennes 1 (1958): 243-86. Robertson, D. W. “Historical Criticism.” In English Institute Essays,

1950, edited by A. Downer, 3-31. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.

Turner, Denys. “Allegory in Christian late antiquity.” In The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, edited by Rita Copeland and Peter Struck, 71-82. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Žižek, Slavoj, Eric Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Jordan Kirk is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he is writing a dissertation on the concept of non-significative utterance in medieval logic, Chaucer, and the Cloud of Unknowing.


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PROSOPOPEIA TO PROSOPAGNOSIA: DANTE ON

FACEBOOK

Scott Wilson It is well known that the poems that would later be collected in Dante’s first book Vita Nuova emerged as part of a “social network” of fellow adolescents and poets in Florence. Among them were Dante di Maiano and a lute maker called Belacqua who may have put a ballata, included in the book, to music. Most importantly, Dante’s main interlocutor was Guido Cavalcanti, a poet and theoretician ten years Dante’s senior who would become his mentor. Vita Nuova establishes, in the Western tradition, love as inextricably bound to the commentary that it generates in prose and poetry. This essay looks at the centrality of ideas of love and friendship that are maintained in the interminable online commentaries on contemporary social networks, particularly Facebook. Further, this essay considers the fate of the face where it becomes no longer a phantasmatic locus of imaginary projection, but an ever-shifting marker of nodal points of data predicated on an empty mediating space for the exchange of information. As such, I am going to suggest, the relation to one’s face becomes affected by a generalized psychic prosopagnosia in which the face begins to lose its previous significance in relation to the profile-image that has displaced it as the most important indicator of identity. At the same time, Facebook, supremely, provides a forum for contemporary prosopopeia, or face-making.1 It is a machine for self-narrativization through which

1 The interdependence of these two terms is perhaps implied in the etymology of the word face. See for example, Isidore of Seville’s etymological

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we negotiate our (self)love, online romances, filial and friendly relations, increasingly becoming our main means of self-promotion, the way we establish our market value on the basis of the pure form of an empty template. The central conceit of this essay is the formal impossibility of the amorous relation and the interminable commentary that it generates. Here is a romance between two allegorical figures: Prosopopeia, the personifier, the maker and perceiver of faces and personae everywhere, and Prosopagnosia, s/he who is unable to recognise individual faces, even or especially her own. This essay is in two columns that run side-by-side. The first, in another more fanciful conceit, conjures a Dantesque online discussion about love and commentary in the form of Facebook for those who are unfamiliar with the form (there must still be some). The second discusses Facebook, the two recent corporate histories of the company and David Fincher’s film The Social Network in its commentary on the face and facelessness. Both parts of the essay comment obliquely on the other. The essay concludes with a discussion of Facebook as a new “trans-parental” form of governance.

definition of face (facies) in terms of recognition: “Face is called ‘facies’ from effigies, image. There lies the whole depiction of a person and the recognition of anyone.” Isidore of Seville, Etymologies edited and translated by Priscilla Throop, Charlotte, Vermont: Medieval MS, xi.1.33 Faces are continually changing “with a variety of movement”, being made and un-made, by the will or “voluntas” (xi.1.34), and thereby recognised or misrecognised according to the changing imaginary relations to different systems of symbolisation in different times and places.

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In quella parte - dove sta memora prende suo stato, - sì formato, - come diaffan da lume, - d’una scuritate la qual da Marte - vène, e fa demora; elli è creato - ed ha sensato - nome, d’alma costume - e di cor volontate. Vèn da veduta forma che s’intende, che prende - nel possibile intelletto, come in subietto, - loco e dimoranza. [In that part where the memory resides / Love comes and as the diaphane is brought / To form by light, so Love is given form / By dark from Mars; with memory it abides. / A habit of the soul, will of the heart, / It is created, sensate, has a name. / From the intelligible form we see, / Love comes into the possible intellect, / And there it dwells as in a thing substantial.] – Guido Cavalcanti, “Donna me prega, - per ch’eo voglio dire,” Canzone XXVII, 15-23.1

This is a movie about kids’ faces

– David Fincher, The Social Network.28

On [Mark Zuckerberg’s] own Facebook profile he lists his interests: “Openness, breaking things, revolutions, information flow, minimalism, making things, eliminating desire for all that really doesn’t matter”

– David Kirkpatrick29 I. KIDS’ FACES “It is with our faces that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Our age and our sex are printed on our faces. Our emotions, the open and

1 Guido Cavalcanti, Complete Poems, translated by Anthony Mortimer. London: Oneworld Classic, 2010, 59. 28 David Fincher, The Social Network. Columbia Pictures. Sony DVD, 2010.

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I It was night on the terrace when Belacqua noticed Dante’s latest post, still stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. Beatrice, linking love to the cosmic abyss, was accounting for the inconsistency of the universe, the spots on Diana’s face. The lunar pock marks are not, she insists to Dante, marks of Cain, a reminder of the original fratricide, but evidence of the process of cosmic unbinding as the soul is diffused into dust: E come l’alma dentro a vostra polve / per differenti membra e conformate /a diverse potenze si resolve (Paradiso II: 133-35).2 Profile: Belacqua A maker of musical instruments. Single. Florence. Philosophy Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Averroes, Avicenna, Albertus Magnus. Music Mayhem, Xasthur, Deathspell Omega, Enoch, Lurker, Rostau, particularly ‘Celestial Hive Mind’. Books Timeaus, Symposium, Poetics, Enneads, Kitab al-Shifa, Vita Nuova, The Divine Comedy, More Pricks than Kicks, Hideous Gnosis, Les Paul in his Own Words

instinctive emotions which Darwin wrote about, as well as hidden or repressed ones which Freud wrote about, are printed on our faces, along with our thoughts and intentions . . . And, crucially it is by our faces that we can be recognised as individuals.”30 Neither a face, but a collection of profile pics, mug shots, icons, logos, tags, emoticons, nodes, nor a book but rather in different ways a website, screen, interface, portal, network, platform, Facebook has subjected both the face and the book to the full rigour of Mark Zuckerberg’s interests. It has opened them out to a regime of ‘radical’ or ‘ultimate’ transparency, and in such a way broken them up, re-made them, revolutionized them, turned them into bits of information that flow across the bandwidth of the globe, flickering on sleek screens and laptops; no longer a Baroque enigma, glimpsed in the chiaroscuro of thought and expression, one’s face to the world has become abstracted, flattened out, reduced to the minimalist white and blue lines of a profile, a wall, a newsfeed in which information about oneself is mechanically distributed across nodes and connections according to

29 David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect. London: Virgin, 2010, 11. All further page references cited in the essay. 2 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. Charles S. Singleton, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. 30 Oliver Sacks, The Mind’s Eye. London: Picador, 2010, 82.


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Activities and interests Lazing about beneath rocks, dreams of fair to middling women, rotten Gorgonzola toasted sandwiches, lobsters. Politics Melancology Groups The Late-Repentants, Petro-Punk Collective Friends (21) Dante Alighieri Cecco Angiolieri Samuel Beckett Brunetto Brunelleschi Guido Cavalcanti Donna Gentile Guido Guinizelli Eileen Joy Sparkles Joy Anna Klosowska Dante di Maiano Nicola Masciandaro Mark Musa Michael O’Rourke Beatrice dei Portinari Barbara Reynolds Francesca da Rimini Dorothy L. Sayers Spirito animale Spirito naturale spirito vita Belacqua noticed that the number of his Friends had gone down from 22 to 21. It was a pathetic number anyway, and someone else had now ‘un-friended’ him. He sighed, tried not to feel anxious. He ought to improve the quality of his status

algorithms calculating interests on the basis of previous distributions. Evidently, desire is being eliminated relative to that which really matters, and what really matters about Facebook is the assimilation and manipulation of information according to a certain form and function. Desire, stripped of its metaphor, of the face as phantasmatic locus of imaginary projection and mystery, becomes pure mechanism, pure metonymy; a hieroglyphic faciality that flickers in a data-mirage that pulls and dissipates desire in the digital desert of shifting displacements of an endless flow of information, such that desire ultimately defaults to a drive that pulses to a different order of technological rhythm. Zuckerberg and his colleagues Sean Parker and Dustin Moskovitz called it ‘the trance’. “‘It was hypnotic’, says Parker, ‘You’d just keep clicking and clicking and clicking from profile to profile, viewing the data’.” (Kirkpatrick, 93) Kids’ faces, always already repeatedly photographed (even in the womb), are further multiplied, replaced and displaced by thumbnails, icons, logos. As such, on Facebook and elsewhere in the bureaucratic, neoliberal technocosm, faces are no longer primarily objects of demand, desire or recognition, but are ever-shifting markers or nodal points of data predicated on an empty mediating

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updates, post some amusing Youtube clips, get involved in a campaign, a revolution or a counter-revolution; they were all the rage this spring. He couldn’t think of anything to write, had no idea what, of his miserable existence, might interest or amuse his ‘Friends’, half of whom he’d never met, or appeared to be dead, or half-dead, in a Limbo of inexistence. He had no idea what they could possibly want from him. Except prayer, perhaps. They should make an app. for that. Belacqua turned away from the fatuous discussion on Facebook, turned down The Funeral of Being, and lay his face upon his thigh. The News Feed continued to update itself. Dante Alighieri A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core nel cui cospetto ven lo dir presente, in cio che mi rescrivan suo parvente, salute in lor segnor, cioe Amore. [To every loving heart and captive soul / into whose sight these present words may come / for some elucidation in reply, / greetings I bring for their great lord’s sake, Love.] (Vita Nuova, III)3

View all five comments: Dante di Maiano Dante, go wash your bollocks and clear

space for the exchange of biometric and economic information. They constitute, in the phrase of Zuckerberg, a “social graph, in the mathematical sense of a series of nodes and connections. The nodes are the individuals and the connections are the friendships ... we have the most powerful distribution mechanism that’s been created in a generation” (Kirkpatrick, 217). This destiny of the face was always, precisely, envisaged in theFacebook’s initial logo, designed by Zuckerberg’s friend and classmate Andrew McCollum. He used “an image of Al Pacino he’d found online that he covered with a fog of zeros and ones – the elementary components of digital media” (30): the close up of the Hollywood star is rendered increasingly unrecognisable, intelligible only as lines of digital code. Say hello to my little friends. This image, and indeed Facebook generally, is perhaps a symptom that the relation to one’s face has become affected by a generalized psychic prosopagnosia in which we no longer recognise the face that has been displaced by the digital profile-image. It is easy to see how the general imperative to have a face, or to make one, or to make a persona, an identity or profile is linked to a general disquiet about

3 Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.


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your head. Or take a sample of piss to your doctor. Cecce Angiolieri likes this. Mauro Senatore O Deo, che sembra quando li occhi gira! / dical’ Amor, ch’io nol savria contare (my favourite lines of those times) Guido Cavalcanti This is the point where I teach him all he knows. Barbara Reynolds In his own poems Cavalcanti showed how terms from physiology and psychology could provide a new vocabulary in which to analyse the effects of love, terms which Dante borrowed.4 Guido Cavalcanti and Dante di Maiano like this. Dante di Maiano And which you borrowed from Albertus and Averroes.

Guido Cavalcanti In place of memory, inhabiting Form, yet born of darkness and war, a force invades the soul and is created, given a name: amore. Beatrice dei Portinari L’anima mia vilement’ è sbigotita [My

faces. Common distaste for one’s passport photograph (‘that’s not me!’) that, in digital form, has become ubiquitous as a marker of personal identity throughout the (online) world of techno-bureaucracy is of course linked to the criminal mug shots that heralded the introduction of universal policing and surveillance from the nineteenth century. In comic fashion, it was this ambivalence that Zuckerberg exploited in his first foray into the world of college facebooks in the development of the notorious Facemash. As the movie-Zuckerberg notes in Fincher’s film, “some of the people on the Kirkland facebook page have pretty horrendous facebook pics,” and following the suggestion of comparing them with farm animals, Zuckerberg set up a site in which the passport-style photos of female students can be compared and ranked. Therein, Zuckerberg turned the relatively ‘horrendous’ faces of bureaucratic record into digital objects of exchange, currency representing differential value in an online libidinal economy. According to David Kirkpatrick, many people view Facebook as ‘a platform for narcissism’ (13), but the photographs do not primarily

4 Barbara Reynolds, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man. London: IB Tauris, 2006, 19.

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spirit is so vilely distressed]. In Cavalcanti, love is a fatal malady of the soul, an irruption in the heart of cosmic forces, sombre and violent. Donna Gentile “Love is a form of mental illness not yet recognised by any of the standard diagnostic manuals.” Stuart Sutherland, International Dictionary of Psychology, 2nd Ed. 1996.

Zachary Price But really, what’s so bad about mental illness? Myung-hye Chun and Ayşe Mermutlu like this.

Őykü Tekten We are all mad anyway. However some still prefer having their own mental dictionaries to define *things* rather than using the *official* ones. Ayşe Mermutlu likes this. Nicola Masciandaro Diagnostic manuals are an unrecognised form of love. Ayşe Mermutlu and Őykü Tekten like this.

Guido Cavalcanti Love is not just an effect of commentary, love is always already commentary. Elli è creato. Created of prosopopeia, given a name to name nameless horror, love assumes a face to veil an incomprehensible facelessness, E

function as a support for flattering self-representation. “MySpace was a world of carefully posed glamour shots, uploaded by subjects to make them look attractive. In Facebook, photos were no longer little amateur works of art but rather a basic form of communication” (155-6). Facebook photographs are, in that sense, the faceless, endlessly fluctuating record and guarantee of existence predicated upon an anxiety about existence (the in-existence of Facebook), about having a life that Facebook both guarantees and supports. Shaun Dolan from New York, a 25 year old assistant in a media firm, is quoted saying “my generation is unbearably narcissistic ... when I go out with my friends there is always a camera present, for the singular goal of posting pictures on Facebook. It’s as if night didn’t happen unless there’s proof of it on Facebook” (Kirkpatrick, 206). Supremely, Facebook provides a forum for contemporary prosopopeia, that is, personification or face-making. It is a machine for self-narrativization through which contemporary Narcissus can negotiate his or her (self)love, online romances, filial and friendly relations, increasingly becoming the main means of self-promotion, the way people must establish their market value on the basis of the pure form of an empty template. Over this empty, minimal space, flow billions of images. “By


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non si pò conoscer per lo viso (XXVII: 63).

Guido Cavalcanti BTW. This is precisely what I suggested Dante make evident with Vita Nuova after the death of Beatrice. Death resides like the shadow of Mars in the hollow of love, its condition as infinite commentary. His little book is a diagnostic manual for poets and lovers, both therapeutic cure and viral poison. Guido Guinizelli “Some people would never have been in love, had they never heard love talked about.” La Rochefoucauld. Beatrice dei Portinari ALL people. Cecce Angiolieri Oh not that tired old cliché :( You’ll be getting out your Roland Barthes and Jeanette Winterson next ;) There was a young girl from Firenze / Who met an old Priest called Mackenzie / she . . . [This content is currently unavailable]

Samuel Beckett Yes, I loved her, it’s the name I gave, still give alas, to what I was doing then. I had nothing to go by, having never loved before, but of

late 2009,” Kirkpatrick writes, “Facebook was hosting 30 billion photos, making it the world’s largest photo site by far” (156). But Facebook is not really an archive or reservoir, nor even a great lake of images into which Narcissus may gaze, but an ocean of data made up of multiple streams and eddies of information distributed according to the movements of previous information that feeds itself more information in traces of transient interests, photos, tags, posts, comments, likes, groups, affiliations, selections in a great churn of profile-love and ‘friendships’. The myth of Narcissus that from Ovid to Freud provides the classical pattern for the psychic structure of love and love poetry (not to mention the reflective philia of knowledge and self-knowledge from the Socratic tradition onwards) reaches its apotheosis in the courtly tradition of western epideictic poetry from the Troubadours, Dante and Petrarch. Here, the luminous, reflective face of the beloved is the highly formal, generic inspiration which provides the impetus to forge the poetic personae that sets the pattern for the emergence of the self-reflecting, self-making modern individual. Narcissus is a figure for modernity in various ways, not least to the degree to which it is an image that he falls for rather than a person. As such he is a figure for the

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course had heard of the thing, at home, in school, in brothel and at church, and read romances, in prose and verse, under the guidance of my tutor, in six or seven languages, both dead and living, in which it was handled at length. I was therefore in a position, in spite of all, to put a label on what I was about when I found myself inscribing the letters of Lulu in an old heifer pat or flat on my face in the mud under the moon trying to tear up nettles by the roots.5

Dante di Maiano Everyone knows it’s important to name the symptom; you have to give a name to the trauma, it is the first indispensable step on the way to a diagnosis. Nomina sunt consequential rerum. Then you take your piss to the doctor. Lulu You know you make me want to SHOUT! Guido Cavalcanti This wild and sovereign force, ‘è fero ed è si altero’ (XXVII: 3), we called ‘Lord’, Dante and I, ‘del segnor’. But love is not a Prince like Emperor Henry VII, it is, rather, like chance, ‘d’un accidente’ (XXVII: 2), a purposeless miracle. Georges Bataille likes this.

frequently illusory and self-deluding aspect of love, especially unrequited love, of being in love with love, or of amor fou. And since Narcissus in his delusion if not madness does remain faithful to his love even to the point of death, he is both an ironic and tragic figure for the truth of love and the love of Truth. To the degree that Narcissus is also taken as a figure for vanity or self-regard or the self-love and romantic egotism of the modern individual, this is an effect of a double delusion. The (self) identification of the romantic egotist is predicated upon a misrecognition of the self-love of Narcissus that it takes as its model and template. The curious thing about Narcissus is that his own face is the very thing that he fails to recognise in falling in love with its reflection. The self-making or prosopopeia that finds its amorous structure in the myth of Narcissus is strangely predicated on a case of prosopagnosia, the condition that names an inability to read or recognize faces, even or especially one’s own face. Prosopagnosia is a figure from modern neuroscience, describing an inability to recognise faces. Martha J. Farah writes, “most prosopagnosics complain of an alteration in the appearance of faces. Although they have no difficulty perceiving that a face is a

5 Samuel Beckett, First Love and other Novellas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 73.


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Nicola Masciandaro It’s like trying to name a beautiful, dangerous, and indifferent animal passing through the room that no one else seems to see (but which they must if they are seeing anything).

Barbara Reynolds “Cavalcanti strives to analyse the nature of love in relation to psychology, setting forth the inherent tensions between the real and the ideal, between the senses and the mind, which render the experience destructive and disintegrating rather than joyful and fulfilling.”6 Guido Cavalcanti ‘He’, Love, is the personification of the new and the miraculous, La nova- qualità move sospiri, the strange and the marvellous, offering access to unimaginable knowledge born solely and paradoxically from the burning passion that takes away the reason proper to knowledge. Prosopopeia is addressed to a profound prosopagnosia from which it is derived, an impossible formless – non format – beauty that cannot be comprehended from the face, ‘E non si pò conoscer per lo viso’ (XXVII: 63), or the mirror that it offers; always in excess of language and the face, it is not a question of

face (and do not generally mistake wives for hats), they often speak of seeing the parts individually and losing the whole or gestalt.” 31 Agnosias are important for cognitive neuroscience in determining, among other things, whether cognition is the effect of an over-arching ‘functional architecture’ or a more modular system comprised of contingent features that have arisen due to specific evolutionary problems. Prosopagnosia, suggesting as it does that faces are ‘special’ objects of cognition, implies the latter. The poetry of courtly love, Dante and Petrarch oscillates between prosopopeia and prosopagnosia. In its positing of a generic face comprised of a blazon of highly conventional features (since Petrarch these have been golden hair, black eyes, ruby lips etc.), there could be said to be something prosopagnosic about the poetry of courtly love. At the same time, the fixation on certain isolated aspects of the face (common in the case of people with prosopagnosia) is in amorous poetry both the condition and the means of the production of poetic subjectivity as an effect of the interminable amorous commentary on its own anxiety concerning the desire of the beloved that it generates. As we

6 Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, translated by Barbara Reynolds. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 14. 31 Martha J. Farah, Visual Agnosia. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004, 94.

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a figure of speech or rhetorical ornament . . .

Dante Alighieri E questo mio amico e io ne sapemo bene di quelli che cosi rimano stultamente [And this friend of mine and I know quite a number who compose rhymes in this stupid manner].

Beatrice dei Portinari I am the faceless face of nameless horror! LOL Donna Gentile con 7 l’altre donne like this

View all 9 comments: Nicola Masciandaro Horreo ut intelligam Dante Alighieri You are the face of bliss, beatitude and Theology. Francesca da Rimini His passion burns like the corpse of God, cackle. Xasthur likes this Cecco Angiolieri @ Beatrice: you are the number 9, babe, the de-mathematization of number – not measure nor metrics but diagram. ;) Professor Daniel Charles Barker 9=0, the key to decimal

will see, a similar problem with faces is, for psychoanalysis, a common effect of anxiety. In its understanding of prosopagnosia, neuroscience makes a ‘platonic’ distinction between form and perception whereby “object recognition is accomplished by repeatedly transforming the retinal imput into stimulus representations with increasingly greater abstraction”; 32 the process that transforms the raw ‘stuff’ of perception into the pattern of ‘things’, 33 thereby producing the formal template, the Platonic Ideal necessary for face recognition. At the heart of the myth of Narcissus, then, as prosopagnosiac pattern for courtly love, hidden it seems from view, is the tale of a profound alienation predicated upon a disjunction, a radical heteronomy between eye and brain, perception and form, in which the organism negotiates the traumatic limits of its own reality beyond all possibility of ‘Narcissistic’, that is self-loving reappropriation. II. ROMANCE Unrequited love, according to The Social Network (2010), David Fincher’s movie about kids’ faces, was the premise for the production and expansion of Facebook. Movies and the books upon which they are frequently based as

32 Farah, Visual Agnosia, 3. 33 Farah, 18.


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syzygetic complementarity, the graph of abstract intensive waves of distribution controlling the social networks of competitive decentralization. Robin MacKay and Ray Brassier like this. Samuel Beckett Extraordinary how mathematics helps you to know yourself. Dante di Maiano Been counting farts again? Guido Guinizelli Enough! Amor e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa. Love and the noble heart are but one thing. Georges Bataille What I suddenly saw, and what imprisoned me in anguish --- but which at the same time delivered me from it – was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.7 Guido Cavalcanti likes this

Francesca da Rimini Per più fiate li occhi ci sospinse, Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso:

narratives are linked to a long literary tradition in which prosopopeia is a central and formative trope, casting often inhuman or superhuman forces into human forms (Gods, spirits, Ideas and so on). The Social Network thus recasts the technological sophistication of writing code and developing Facebook and the complexity of backroom legal battles into the form of a love story. Thus a certain facelessness (computer hacking and corporate lawyers) becomes transformed through the process of prosopopeia so that Zuckerberg-Eisenberg becomes the ‘face’ and metaphor for Facebook. What is the quality of this face and can it really serve as a metaphor for an online procedure in which faces are transformed into digital profiles with everything that implies? According to The Accidental Billionaires,34 Ben Mezrich’s book on which the movie is based, it is the unstated romance between Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg that provides the narrative tension, hinging on the question of betrayal. While the betrayal essentially concerns

7 Georges Bataille, Tears of Eros, translated by Peter Conner. San Francisco: City Lights, 1990, 207. 34 Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Making of Facebook. London: Arrow Books, 2010. All subsequent page references cited in the essay.

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Ma solo un punto fu quell che ci vinse. Quando leggemmo il disiato riso Esser baciato da cotanto amante Questi, che maid a me non fia diviso La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse: Quell giorno più non vi leggemmo avante [Time and again our eyes were brought together / by the book we read; our faces flushed and paled. / To the moment of one line alone we yielded: / It was when we read about those longed-for lips / now being kissed by such a famous lover, / that this one (who shall never leave my side) / then kissed my mouth, and trembled as he did. / Our Galehot was that book and he who wrote it. / That day we read no further . . . (Inferno V: 130-38)8

Francesca da Rimini Beyond the Book and the Commentary, Love is the experience of the divine that is lacking, of the divine as lacking, and yet this is at the very heart of the divine. I am in Hell (Inferno V 127-38). But is it any better for Him? I will post something on this soon. Pope Boniface VIII Blasphemer!

control of the business involving the dilution of share prices, in the book this is refigured as a love triangle, a struggle between Savarin and Sean Parker for the affections and loyalty of Zuckerberg. The narrator remarks on Eduardo’s jealousy after Zuckerberg’s move to California leads to Parker’s increasingly central role in the company, “maybe he was starting to think like the crazy girlfriend he was already considering dumping, maybe being a little jealous” (Mezrich, 174). Much of this remains in The Social Network, but the movie frames its own narrative by resurrecting a more obscure if conventional figure, the young woman whose face rebuffs Zuckerberg’s advances and thereby inadvertently launches untold billions of profiles, status updates, comments and ‘likes’, as if it were the uncontrollable expression of a monstrous passion. “I need to do something to take my mind off her. Easy enough, except I need an idea,” he writes on his blog Zuckonit, before conceiving the idea of Facemash which will ultimately lead to theFacebook and Facebook.35 About 50 minutes into the film, after Facebook has gone live and taken Harvard by storm such that he and Eduardo are

8 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy Vol.1: Inferno, translated by Mark Musa. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 35 Fincher, The Social Network. Facebook was initially called theFacebook, a change in the film attributed to Sean Parker.


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Dante Alighieri How did that old bastard get in here? Block him, unfriend him! Unfriend him! St. Peter Quelli ch’usurpa in terra il loco mio …/ fatt’ha del cimitero mio cloaca / del sangue e della puzza [He that on earth has dared usurp that place of mine … / has made my burial-ground a running Rhine / of filth and blood] (Paradiso XXVII, 22-27).9

Samuel Beckett Love brings out the worst in man and no error. But what kind of love was this exactly? Love-passion? Somehow I think not. That’s the priapic one, is it not? Or is this a different variety? There are so many, are there not? Platonic love, for example, there’s another just occurs to me. It’s disinterested. Perhaps I loved her with a platonic love? But somehow I think not. Would I have been tracing her name in old cowshit if my love had been pure and disinterested?10

View all 16 comments: Cecco Angiolieri You’re obsessed with shite. Dante di Maiano and

attracting serious female attention, Zuckerberg is again rebuffed by Erica Albright at dinner with friends. His response is further sublimation: “We have to expand,” he says and plots theFacebook’s move on to the campuses of Yale, Princeton, Stanford and beyond. The thwarted romance with Albright also provides the film’s central question or dilemma concerning Zuckerberg’s person or moral character. It is of course the central prosopopeia of the movie, the personification of the question concerning the beneficence of Facebook itself, Zuckerberg’s ‘gift’ to the world.36 At the end of the scene in The Thirsty Scholar that forms the prologue to the movie, Albright memorably ends their brief relationship by correctly predicting that he is likely to become “a very successful computer person” before adding, “but you are going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you are a nerd. And I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” The question of whether Zuckerberg is just an (ironically) socially awkward nerd or an ‘asshole’ capable of intellectual

9 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 3 Paradise, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 10 Beckett, First Love, 73-4. 36 For Zuckerberg’s enthusiasm for potlatch and gift economies, see Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect, 287-8.

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Brendan Behan like this Dante di Maiano Anal eroticism. There’s the counting too, remember. Beatrice dei Portinori Writing in the cowpat of the heart, counting . . . music, moody food of love . . . love seems to be an effect of the incursion of in-human particulate systems. Did someone say the word signifier? Cecco Angiolieri “The poetry of courtly love tends to locate in the place of the Thing certain discontents of the culture.”11 Beatrice dei Portinori What thing? Dante di Maiano You. Cecco Angiolieri The Thing’s thingness consists in its hole or vacuole: the void that holds. Dante di Maiano Isn’t that Heidegger? Beatrice dei Portinori Are you saying that the most important thing about me is

theft, exploitation and betrayal of friends and colleagues (not to mention a systematic invader of privacy and sinister controller and manipulator of the personal information of huge populations around the world) is left for the cinema audience to decide. By the end of the film, Albright’s initial objection to Zuckerberg’s ressentiment towards the athleticism of rowing crew and the elite Harvard Final Clubs (later embodied by the Winklevoss twins) combined with his snobbery concerning Albright’s own social and intellectual status, has been compounded by numerous other instances of arrogance and betrayal of close comrades. These include, perhaps, conspiring with the police to bust his colleague and rival Sean Parker for taking cocaine with interns at a Facebook celebration party that Zuckerberg himself suspiciously failed to attend. “I’m not a bad person,” he says in the final scene of the movie, apparently to himself, yet is overheard by the female lawyer involved in his court cases with Savarin and the Winklevosses. The lawyer concurs, though informs him that he will have to settle with the twins because he would have no chance convincing a jury of this; his “clothes, hair, speaking-style,

11 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Dennis Porter, London: Routledge, 1992, 150.


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my hole? OMG Do me a favour. Dante Alighieri Ella è quanto de ben pò far natura / per essemplo di lei bieltà si prova [She is the sum of nature’s universe. / To her perfection all of beauty tends] (XIX, 49-50)12 Beatrice dei Portinori Blow into my trumpet and see if your sublimation still holds up. Cecco Angiolieri “By means of a form of sublimation specific to art, poetic creation consists in positing an object I can only describe as terrifying, an inhuman partner.”13 Guido Guinizelli Signifier, inhuman, faceless? How can that be? Beatrice dei Portinori Language is an alien virus consisting of letters that mortify, that turn all to waste, to litter :) Jacques Lacan and William Burroughs like this Guido Guinizelli Surely love is an effect of sight – love at first sight – a vision of excess!

likeability” all testify against him. It is a question of perception and self-presentation. “You’re not an asshole, Mark,” she concludes, “you’re just trying so hard to be.” The utterance of the word ‘asshole’ is a repetition and recalls the first scene of the film, triggering Zuckerberg’s memory of Erica Albright. Left alone in the half-light, Zuckerberg stares yet again into the screen of his laptop and types her name into the Facebook search engine. He scans her profile intently, his cursor hovering over the ‘Friend Request’ button, presses it and waits, looking unblinking at the screen. He refreshes the page a number of times before the credits start to roll, the cinema audience unsure whether the end of the film suggests the likelihood of resumed romance or the ironic pathos of the formal instigator of many millions of new friendships and romances remaining unable to connect with his only love apart, perhaps, from the screen he stares through and his reflection at the digital profile. It is this final cinematic image of an unsatisfied Narcissus gazing at the screen of a laptop that dominates The Accidental Billionaires. “To an outside observer” Mezrich writes, “the relationship [Zuckerberg] had with his computer seemed much smoother than any relationship he’d ever had

12 Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, translated by Barbara Reynolds. 13 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 150.

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Dante Alighieri She appeared to me almost in the beginning of her ninth year, and I first saw her near the end of my ninth year. (Vita Nuova, II)14 Dante di Maiano quasi. Almost.

II Dante Alighieri At that moment, and what I say is true, the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the least pulses of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it spoke these words: “here is a god stronger than I, who shall come to rule over me.” At that point the animal spirit, the one abiding in the high chamber to which all the senses bring their perceptions, was stricken with amazement, and speaking directly to the spirits of sight, said these words: “now your bliss has appeared.” At that moment, the natural spirit, the one which dwells in that part where our nourishment is attended to, began to weep, and weeping, said these words: “Alas wretch that I am, from now on I shall be hindered

with anyone in the outside world” (42 see also 98-9). While the book is written in the third-person, the narrative’s perspective is largely that of Eduardo Savarin, so a reader is led to perceive a certain frustration in comments like “Mark sat there in silence, lost in his own reflection as it danced across the screen” (99). Eduardo, in both the book and the movie, is the vehicle of identification and wonder at the boy genius, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. In the book and in the movie it is the blank impassivity of Zuckerberg’s face that provides the point of fascination for Eduardo and the audience, the movie-Zuckerberg, played with a beautiful ‘autistic’ vacancy by Jessie Eisenberg, prepared to give only the absolute minimum of attention to anything (lawyers, the legal process, potential advertisers) other than the image of his own genius. For the narrator/Eduardo, Zuckerberg “never seemed happier than when he was looking at his own reflection into that glassy screen” (Mezrich, 42): ma più ne colpo i micidiali specchi / che ‘n vagheggiar voi stessa avete stanchi [but most I blame those murderous mirrors which you have tired out with your love of yourself] (Petrarch, Canzionère

14 Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.


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often.” Let me say that from that time on Love governed my soul . . . (Vita Nuova, II.30)

View all 17 comments: Spirito vita “Here is a god.” But who or what is this idol? I know not nor what relation it has to God, the One, al-Lah or Yahweh. Is it a simulacrum? A semblance, an illusion? Is it a demon in the guise of a god? God or demon it is an apparition, a form that makes the whole body tremble, displaces me from my seat in the heart and mortifies me … how is it possible that this form reduces me to an experience of formlessness? Spirito animale Yes I was amazed, but at the same time it leaves me cold. You’ll notice that the beatitudo, the ‘bliss’, is not mine but is rather something offered to the perception of sight at the level, as it were, of appearance. It does nothing for me. This beatitudo makes of the pleasure of form a limit. We are not yet here confronting the problem of Universal Form which lies beyond the threshold of pleasurable perceptions (but what could be beyond the limit of

46; 7-8). 37 Zuckerberg here is described in his self-absorption, from the perspective of the narrator, as if he were a cruel mistress indifferent to the agonized anxieties of the lover, a sovereign beauty like Petrarch’s Laura or Dante’s Beatrice. Indeed, Savarin’s first encounter with Zuckerberg takes something of the form of an innamoramento, a love at first sight, as his face is described in a blazon of striking attributes including, quite conventionally, his eyes:

. . . a prominent nose, a mop of curly blondish brown hair, and light blue eyes. There was something playful about those eyes – but that was where any sense of natural emotion or readability ended. His narrow face was otherwise devoid of any expression at all. And his posture, his general aura – the way he seemed closed in on himself, even while engaged in a group dynamic, even here, in the safety of his own fraternity – was almost painfully awkward. (Mezrich, 15)

Eduardo is significantly struck by

37 Francesco Petrarch, Rime Sparse, edited by Richard Durling, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

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pleasurable forms other than formless agony?) Out of the mass of perceived data, the Active Intelligence must produce the appropriate abstraction to enable the apprehension of the soul and its pleasurable objects. The animal spirit of the brain “extracts information about local visual properties before computing the larger scale structure of the image.”15 But this is still only an approximation of Universal Form, produced through the animal spirit’s adaptation to the Outside. I, the brain, am this threshold, the neuroplatonic locus of the heteronomy between form and perception. Spirito naturale This trauma makes me weep, but I am determined to weaponize that which hinders me, since it hinders only the axiomatic verity and somatic integration of my interiorized horizon. I shall mobilize the Insider so that this localized trauma may be deepened into the exteriorizing absolute thereby transforming the horizon of this liver into an immanent terroristic weapon.

the ‘prosopagnosia’ of courtly passion in which a “discrete number of physical attributes” becomes the focus of rapt attention, yet the face itself, as Petrarchan scholar Isabella Bertoletti notes, “never comes together as a portrait.” 38 Zuckerberg’s faceless face, ‘devoid of expression’, is the central part and focus of Savarin’s amorous frustration: “Eduardo stared at Mark, but, as usual, couldn’t read anything from his blank expression” (Mezrich, 115). But if this prosopagnosia is an effect of Eduardo’s passion, it seems to be shared by others including the Winklevoss twins for whom it was also “hard to read the kid’s face” (73). In this movie about kids’ faces, Zuckerberg’s expressionless face is the metaphor for a generation whose lives are spent staring into screens, large or small, most hours of the day, at work or leisure, shadowy faces coming in and out of focus. An ‘accidental’ billionaire, there is nothing remarkable about Zuckerberg in his ever present fleece, T Shirt and flip flops, but as such he functions perfectly as a blank screen for projection and identification in the book and the movie. But the faceless screen offered to the world by the movie-Zuckerberg is precisely the

15 Martha J. Farah, Visual Agnosia. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004, 19. 38 Isabella Bertoletti, “Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta: Mourning Laura,” Quaderni d’italianistica, XXIII (2002), 2, 25-43, 26.


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Spirito vita Naturale’s been reading Reza Negarestani’s blog again, Eliminative Culinarism. Spirito naturale → Spirito vita Reza Negarestani, ‘On the Revolutionary Earth: A Dialectic in Territopic Materialism’ written for Dark Materialism, Kingston University, London. Spirito animale Does this mean you are going to become an anorexic suicide bomber mad for love of the absolute? Spirito naturale It’s not what you think. The absolute is pure contingency; it is neutral and incommensurable. To make oneself into a bomb would be to give oneself over to the energetic index of exorbitance: that is counter-revolutionary. Spirito vita Why? Spirito naturale Because it would be to bind oneself, economically, within the affordable duplicity of capacity and excess.

paradoxical personification of a digital culture in which reading and cinematic forms of identification have given way to a different order of ‘interactivity’. Here again, Zuckerberg is the metaphor for a generation shaped by computers to such a degree that it seems to have altered their subjectivity, “there was something very computer-like about the way he spoke; input in, then input out.” (Mezrich, 20) The faceless face of Zuckerberg, its ‘blank expression’ and ‘unreadability’ is, then, another form of literary prosopopeia, but paradoxically of a generalized prosopagnosia, a personification of Facebook’s digital erasure – or overwriting – of both the face and the book. III. FACEBLIND “It is with our faces that we face the world, from the moment of birth to the moment of death.”39 In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks evokes the essential importance of the face only to confess that he has had problems identifying faces “for as long as I can remember” (83). Sacks has ‘developmental’ prosopagnosia, which is a much more common form of the condition than prosopagnosia that is ‘acquired’ because of brain damage, stroke or degenerative diseases. Following publication in 1985 of his case history “The Man

39 Sacks, The Mind’s Eye, 82. Subsequent page references cited in the text.

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Spirito animale Even as you spectacularly unbind yourself with Semtex Spirito vita Can we get to the point. We have an alien intruder Dante calls ‘Love’ that is having paradoxical but ultimately deleterious effects, at least in so far as the spirit of life is concerned. I likened it to a god. From whence comes it and what relation does it have to the One or, if you like, the Absolute? Spirito animale Tradition would say through the eyes. ‘Pegli occhi fere un spirit sottile’ (Cavalcanti, sonetto XXVIII). Spirito naturale Yes but for Cavalcanti this spirit is not love, love is only a contingent effect – ‘l’accidente’ – of this spirit’s subtle incision and traumatization of the mind’s interiorized horizon: Pegli occhi fere un spirito sottile, / che fa ‘n la mente spirito destare, [A delicate sharp spirit through the eyes / strikes home to wake a spirit in the mind] (XXVII: 1-3).16 The question is whether love can be a revolutionary force of exteriorization, or is it

Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” 40 Sacks began to receive many letters from people comparing themselves with the subject of Sacks’s case history. Sacks began to realise that “‘my’ visual problem was not uncommon and must affect many people around the world” (90). Indeed, Ken Nakayama, who has set up the research centre Faceblind at Harvard University, “has long suspected that prosopagnosia is relatively common but underreported” (107).41 Like many with developmental prosopagnosia, Sacks has difficulty even recognising his own face:

On several occasions I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror. The opposite situation once occurred at a restaurant with tables outside. Sitting at one of the sidewalk tables, I turned to the restaurant window and began grooming my beard, as I often do. I then realized that what I

16 Guido Cavalcanti, Complete Poems, XXVIII, 65. 40 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Touchstone, 1985. 41 See www.faceblind.org


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counter-revolutionary? Spirito animale But you didn’t let me finish. How far is the contingency determined by number, and in this case the number 9? Is it related to the Trinity or to the Neoplatonic One? Or zero, the plane of intensity? Is it a cause or an effect of numerological psychosis? Is it the key to the mode of proliferation of libidino-schizo-capital, $99.99, the ultimate diagram of capitalist counter-revolution, its machines “incarnating market mechanics within their nano-assembled interstices and evolving themselves by quasi-darwinian algorithms that build hypercompetition into ‘the infrastructure’ . . . time itself.” 17 Is your absolute mathematizable or the principle of de-mathematization? Spirito naturale It is not a question of cause or origin but of the structure of ururtrauma and the infinity of traumatic interconnections. The secret is to investigate the nature of its force as trauma. Negarestani’s master here is Sandor Ferenczi.

had taken to be my reflection was not grooming himself but looking at me oddly. There was in fact a gray-bearded man on the other side of the window, who must have been wondering why I was preening myself in front of him. (Sacks, 2010, 85)

In his book, Sacks is concerned with possible neurological bases for his condition, but his anecdotes here correspond to psychoanalytic and literary models. In the first instance, there is an unmistakeable moment of an ‘uncanny’ shock at the apparition of the double, while in the latter instance, the shock occurs at the disturbance of narcissistic satisfaction. While Sacks struggles to recognise his face, he confesses to a certain fascination with it, ‘preening himself’ in front of a mirror. In both instances it is the frame and screen of the mirror / reflective window pane that provides the condition for misrecognition. While he is a neuroscientist, Sacks has a background in psychoanalysis and in his discussion takes the trouble to give an account of the development of face recognition. Citing Everett Ellinwood, Sacks writes about how the mutual

17 Nick Land, Fanged Noumenon. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 625-6.

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Spirito vita I suggest we risk a Ferenczian interpretation of Dante’s dream.

Spirito vita Nine years after the first traumatic encounter, Dante meets his object once again, precisely – he emphasizes the precision of number here on more than one occasion – on the ninth hour of the day. The repetition betrays the action of the automaton, that is to say, the unconscious. Is this a numerological unconscious or one structured like a language? It seems to be the former. In any case it is described: “In my reverie a sweet sleep seized me, and a marvellous vision appeared to me. I seemed to see a cloud the colour of fire in my room and in that cloud a lordly man, frightening to behold, yet apparently marvellously filled with joy. He said many things of which I understood only a few; among them was ‘I am your master’. It seemed to me that in his arms there lay a figure asleep and naked except for a crimson cloth loosely wrapping it. Looking at it very intently, I realized that it was the Lady of the blessed greeting, the lady who earlier in the day had favoured me with her salutation. In one of his hands he held a fiery object, and he seemed to say these words: ‘Behold your heart’. And

smiling between mother and child, from about two and a half months, initiates “the processes of socialization . . . The reciprocal understanding mother-child relationship is possible only because of the continuing dialogue between faces” (82-3). In this way the imitative relation with the mother provides the ground and support for the moment of self-identification in the mirror image, as Lacan famously explicates. But even at the moment of the “inaugural experience of recognition in the mirror,” the child requires the support and confirmation of the mother who, for Lacan, represents the Other and thus ratifies “the value of the self-image.”42 The face of the mother is, then, the ‘ur-face’ that provides the pattern for the child for all future faces including, especially, his or her own face, imbuing it potentially with a foreignness that is reinforced, in turn, by the self-image itself that is located in reverse form in the mirror:

It is at that place, at the place where in the Other, there is profiled an image of ourselves that is simply reflected, already problematic, even fallacious; that it is at a place that is situated

42 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan X: Anxiety 1962-63, translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts, Karnac Books, III, 4.


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after a short while he seemed to awaken the sleeping one, and through the power of his art made her eat this burning object in his hand. Hesitantly, she ate it. It was only a short while after this that his happiness turned into bitterest weeping, and weeping, he folded his arms around this lady and together they seemed to ascend towards the heavens. I felt such anguish at their departure that my sleep could not endure; it was broken and awakened.”18

Spirito naturale Well obviously it’s about child abuse. Spirito animale Hmmm, but you don’t need Ferenczi and his obsession with child abuse to see that this is a scene of anxiety (Dante comes to realise this just as he wakes) at the phantasmatic proximity of the father as frightening figure of joy and incomprehensible knowledge, or père jouissance as they say in France. Spirito vita But I have no memory of child abuse. Spirito animale The spirits of vision saw nothing. Spirito naturale We could

with respect to an image that is characterised by a lack, by the fact that what is called for there cannot appear there, that there is profoundly orientated and polarised the function of the image itself, that desire is there, not simply veiled, but essentially placed in relation to an absence, to a possibility of appearing determined by a presence which is elsewhere and determines it more closely, but, where it is, ungraspable by the subject, namely here, I indicated it, the o of the object, of the object which constitutes our question, of the object in the function that it fulfils in the phantasy at the place that something can appear.43

It is the paternal naming of the lack that is supposed to stabilize the (self)image, hooking it on to the symbolic order, such that disturbances in the symbolic fabric may produce a destabilization and questioning of the value and reality of the image. Such a de-stabilization exacerbates the enigma of the

18 Dante, Vita Nuova, III, 6-7. 43 Lacan, Seminar X, IV, 2.

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have repressed it. His mother died when he was a child ... did he imagine and fear replacing her in his father’s affections? Psychic exchange . . . remember he used usury as a pretext for denouncing his father . . . Spirito animale The scene is always already fantasy; I’m a strict Freudian on this point. In the dream we clearly see the narcissistic splitting of the ego into the little girl Beatrice as ideal ego. The father picks up the child naked out of bed, the unconscious apparently returning to the original scene of trauma. As Dante dreams himself as a little girl in order to become the object of his father’s obscene enjoyment, all that remains is his heart and the theft of the lost object that is consumed by his own imago. He was 9 when it happened; Beatrice was nine, and seeing her again 9 years later triggers the memory of the perversion of paternal love. The French would say

Other’s desire, causing the objet petit a, Lacan’s object-in-desire, to manifest itself in the strangeness of the image. Jean-Claude Maleval writes, “l’objet a se manifeste, c'est volontiers par l'entremise du surgissement d'une image perturbée, étrangéifiée.” 44 Maleval notes that while the specular image is ordinarily an object of narcissistic satisfaction, when it is no longer recognised as such it lacks adhesion and becomes uncanny, often taking the appearance of a strange and pervasive double. 45 While the specular image may begin to lose its narcissistic satisfaction, the trauma of its emergent strangeness and lack of recognition does not render it any the less anxiously fascinating. Maleval cites a case study concerning ‘Jean-Pierre’ who, during the long hours he spent before the mirror saw nothing but a blank image (vide). “Elle lui semblait déshabitée. ‘C’est moi, disait-il,mais j’ai peine à me reconnaître. Mon image manque de sens.” 46 That the image lacks sense or meaning is crucial for Maleval because it indicates that the subject is not fully incorporated into the symbolic order: “elle témoigne nettement que la texture

44 Jean-Claude Maleval, “Il n’y a pas d’angoisse psychotique,” Quarto (2005) 11, 66-73, 66. 45 “L’image speculaire est ordinairement un objet de satisfaction narcissistic, mais quand elle n’est plus reconnue comme telle, le manque colle à elle, et elle devient un objet unheimlich, qui prend souvent l’apparence de l’image étrange et envahissante du double,” 66. 46 Maleval, “Il n’y a pas d’angoisse psychotique,” 70.


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that it is precisely the failure of symbolic law to protect the child from the oppressive presence of the parent that ushers in psychosis and the reign of number – and what are we anyway but psychotic symptoms? Spirito naturale There is no psychotic anguish (Maleval) Spirito vita But you’ve missed out the interesting part wherein, if we follow Ferenczi we can see that the incursion of the force of trauma has the same symptoms as love: a “frightening whirlwind, a terrible vertigo” and a waning of the natural spirit such that he dreams of death and dematerialization. 19 We all know Dante’s morbid attachment to the dead: the dead girl, the legions of the damned, the souls tortured in purgatory and those in heaven, even St Paul, still raging about some rival paternal figure, Pope Boniface VIII, supposed to be enjoying himself at Dante’s expense. The dead girl: what does he actually write when he hears she has died? Nothing, he just

symbolique du sujet se défait.”47 Facebook is of course a site teeming with symbols of various kinds but its means of authenticating identity is not simply predicated on ‘the name of the father’, the paternal function that for Lacan names maternal lack, thereby substituting desire for demand. Authentic naming is indeed essential to Facebook; its key difference from previous social networking sites is precisely that it attempts to prohibit and restrict the multiplication of different, false or playful, identities. But in the context of its peculiarly privatized yet open space, it is not simply parental authority or the state that authenticates identity; rather it is one’s ‘Friends’. Kirkpatrick writes, “these friends validate your identity. To get this circular validation process started you have to use your real name” (13). One’s ‘Friends’ on Facebook adopt a ‘trans-parental’ function in the authentication of both self-image and symbolic identity. Facebook’s Friends are not simply those friends gained over a lifetime’s social interaction at school, work and leisure. These friends are subjected to a different regime of online sociality that may include people you have never met or know very

19 Sandor Ferenczi, Final contributions to the problems and methods of psychoanalysis (Reprinted London: Karnac Books, 1994), originally published in 1930, 222-223. 47 Maleval, “Il n’y a pas d’angoisse psychotique”, 70.

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goes on and on again about the number 9. She has become pure number, if she was ever anything else, a number that abstracts and sucks the spirit of life out of him, turning him into a mechanomic writing machine. Here, no doubt, we can see how desire is numerologically de-mathematizised and death-driven towards the inorganicism of the heavens. Let’s go to Paradiso Spirito naturale But this number is not simply economy, not just calculation. Numerology is surely a form through which trauma becomes nested in the psyche, numbers marking a certain gradient of the universal that is at the same time exterior to the interiorized horizon of family romance. Spirito animale That’s a way of putting it.

III Belacqua awoke having dreamt about the lobster. “Christ!” he said to himself, “it’s alive.” He saw it exposed, “cruciform on the oilcloth,” 20 dreaming that the lobster was God made flesh, God made lobster-flesh with claws and antennae, maybe even tentacles.

little about, a regime that collapses distinctions between professional colleagues, intimate friends, lovers, family, people with shared interests or alliances, even perfect strangers. The principle that determines these Friends as a collection seems to be quantity, the latter being the metric of value or prestige that is established through a competitive market in ‘friendships’. “Friending had an element of competitiveness from day one, as it had on MySpace and Friendster. If your roommate had 300 friends and you only had 100 you resolved to do better . . . causing it to spread faster” (Kirkpatrick, 92). Soon it was not uncommon for people to have thousands of Friends all over the world, Facebook thereby modifying if not changing forever the meaning of the term ‘friend’ to something like a ‘node’ or link in a network of connections describing a ‘social graph’ for the distribution of information. Where desire becomes affected by anxiety (and sometimes anger and upset) in the context of Facebook it is no doubt an effect of the law of competition to which desire and the value of identity is subject, where the subject is variously ‘friended’ or ‘unfriended’ according to the whims of online popularity among a multiplicity of different interests. This anxiety is perhaps compounded by

20 Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks. London: Picador, 1974, 18.


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Perhaps it was all the nonsense being posted on the web about Lovecraft lately, but he imagined God “in the depths of the sea” breathing secretly in his lobster pot Empyrean. Out he has been plucked and is going now alive into an inferno of scalding water. Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all. It is not.21 Who is speaking here? The authorial voice, terse and appropriately authoritative, countermands his character’s prayer for a quick death. As such he denies the prospect of God’s small mercy in the stress of sacrifice, underscoring the pathos of the equivalence of all His creatures at the level, at least, of suffering. But in so doing the equivalence is extended, as if in the shape of so many nested traumas, all the way to God himself, in a way already intuited by Belacqua, returning us to the idea of divine suffering. God is a large marine crustacean, sentient and splendid until, plucked from his watery universe, he gasps at the limpid exterior surface of his own milieu. Does he catch a glimpse therein of his reflection at the very point where he is exposed to the creation of a new airy cosmos? Behold, I am. In the form of a lobster, the self-reflection of the absolute survives “the Frenchwoman’s cat and his

Facebook’s commitment to ‘transparency’ and the automated, hyper-visibility represented by the introduction of the News Feed in September 2006 in which “your every move on Facebook might become news for your friends” (Kirkpatrick, 296). The News Feed “treated all your behaviour identically – in effect telescoping all your identities, from whatever context, into the same stream of information” (211). Activity is necessary to produce the visibility that is the pre-requisite for one’s popularity – quantified by an algorithm that distributes information according to the number of ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ received by the various posts, profiles, groups and pages. For Sherry Turkle, it is this un-homely nature of Facebook, in which the home becomes trans-parental, that is most anxiety producing:

Facebook feels like “home,” but you know that it puts you in a public square with a surveillance camera turned on. You struggle to be accepted in an online clique. But it is characterized by its cruel wit, and you need to watch what you say. These adolescent posts will remain online for a

21 Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks, 18.

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witless clutch” only to be plunged again into the scalding depths so that Belacqua can “lash into it” for his dinner. Its geochemistry now the alien Insider fulminating with anonymous materials . . . Belacqua pauses, scrolls down the text: “Here trauma as the self-excision or self-reflection of the absolute, transplants exteriority within interiority and fabricates topologically nested gradients of the universal.”22 It is Beatrice who both anticipates and answers Dante’s questions concerning the nature of God and creation. Concerning the ‘where’ and the ‘when’ of God, Beatrice says: Non per aver a sé di bene acquisto, ch’esser non può, ma perché suo splendore potesse, risplendendo, dir “Subsisto,” in sua etternità di tempo fore, fuor d’ogne altro comprender, come i piacque, s’aperse in nuovi amor l’etterno amore. [Not to increase His good, which cannot be, /But that His splendour, shining back, might say: / Behold, I am, in His eternity, / Beyond the measurement of night and day, / beyond all boundary, as he did please, / new loves Eternal Love shed from His ray.] (Paradiso, XXIX.13-18)23

lifetime, just as those you “friend” on Facebook will never go away. Anxieties migrate, proliferate.48

For the subject of Facebook, two poles of anxiety and inhibition are produced concerning the desire of the Other where the insistence of the Other’s desire is indicated by the News Feed. Or rather it is perhaps not desire so much as an abstracted demand that is rendered infinite by the News Feed. ‘I’ am ‘fed’ news by Facebook before I have the opportunity to ask or look for it; it flows down my page in an infinite yet unique stream, ‘mechanomically’ selected especially for me. For Lacan, famously, it is not lack that produces anxiety, but the lack of the lack. “What is most anxiety-provoking for the child, is that precisely this relation of lack on which he establishes himself, which makes him desire, this relation is all the more disturbed when there is no possibility of lack, when the mother is always on his back, and especially by wiping his bottom, the model of demand, of the demand which cannot fail.” 49 Facebook is continually massaging the organ of exchange, of the exchange of data

22 Reza Negarestani, “On the Revolutionary Earth.” 23 Dante, Paradise, 309. 48 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together. New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. 243.


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Both Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds gloss these verses on the moment of creation by highlighting the importance of God’s desire for self-consciousness. “The act of creation and the things created could not add to God’s goodness, which is infinite. His motive in creating was that His reflected light (‘splendour’) should shine back to him in self-awareness.” 24 “‘Why did God create?’ [Beatrice’s] answer is that God created not to increase His good, which cannot be, but in order that His reflected light might shine back to Him self-existing and in self-awareness.” 25 God in his solitude, it seems, was not content persisting in the boundless immanent goodness of eternity, he required a moment of (self)transcendence in which he could properly realise himself through becoming apparently for the first time truly aware of himself through looking at the mirror image of himself in the light of his self-illumination. Subsisto! God in a flutter of jubilation reassures Himself of His splendour by looking in the mirror of creation,

and information, rendering it smoother, quicker, more efficient. The anal register, here, is also consistent with Zuckerberg’s morality which informs and justifies both his commitment to transparency and his apparent belief that privacy is an impediment to an open society, “To get people to this point where there’s more openness – that’s a big challenge . . . The concept that the world will be better if you share more is something that’s pretty foreign to a lot of people and it runs into all these privacy concerns.” 50 Zuckerberg goes on to say that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity . . . the level of transparency the world has now won’t support having two identities for a person” (199). In other words, it will be impossible to separate the personal from the professional, the private from the public, the intimate from the open; one’s dirty linen continually exposed as information proliferates on the internet and elsewhere. This is Facebook’s “radical social premise” and it is easy to see

49 Lacan, Seminar X, IV, 10. 24 Dorothy L. Sayers in Dante, Paradise, 314. See also Ibn Arabi et al on the hadith ‘I was a hidden treasure that was not known, so I loved to be known.’http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/divinerootsoflove.html 25 Barbara Reynolds, Dante, 392. 50 Mark Zuckerberg, quoted in Kirkpatrick, 200. Kirkpatrick suggests that “Zuckerberg sees privacy as something Facebook should offer people until they get over their need for it.” (203)

http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/divinerootsoflove.html

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and lo from his Eternal self-love flow all the new loves (nuovi amor) of his creatures from the angels to humanity. The mysticism of God: to desire everything? Dante wrote in Il convivio that love is the cosmic force that establishes the affection and relation between all things (Section III, chapters 2-3: 285). In Virgil’s great Discourse on Love from Purgatorio, he emphasises that love is not only a contingent but also a neutral force, source of evil as well as good. Quinci comprender puoi ch’esser convene amor sementa in voi d’ogne virtute e d’ogne operazion che merta pene. [Bethink thee then how love must be the seed / In you, not only of each virtuous action, / But also of each punishable deed.]. (Purgatorio, XVII. 91-96; 103-5)26 This cosmic love, that is essentially an effect of divine self-love, is internally riven, like all love, with the ambivalence with which it conflicts all relations and affections. What deficiency, imaginary or otherwise – what trauma – produced this infinitesimal moment of divine vanity and celestial narcissism? When he looked in the

that it has a revolutionary potential: a neoliberal communism that abolishes privacy yet sustains the individual in relation to a generalized narcissism of absolute visibility and transparency. “There is not narcissism and non-narcissism” insisted Jacques Derrida in an interview that broached his relation to his own photographic image, “there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended.” 51 Is Facebook such a comprehensive, generous, open, extended narcissism? A genuinely revolutionary narcissism? IV. THE STRUCTURE THAT TOOK

TO THE STREETS David Kirkpatrick begins The Facebook Effect, the authorized history of the company, with an account of Facebook’s utility as a “political tool.” He tells the story of a campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC); it is, then, not so much an account of Facebook’s revolutionary potential, but rather, in this instance, its effective means as a tool for counter-revolution, for popular revolt in support of a weakened and ineffective state. “Oscar Morales was fed up,” begins the book, because the

26 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 2 Purgatory, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 198-9. 51 Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews 1974-94, edited by Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, 199.


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mirror of creation did He see his own face or that of a stranger or of a mass of faceless creatures hymning praise, or did he see nothing? Was God’s face part of the Creation, God produces himself for himself in an act of divine prosopopeia? Behold, I am. Is this pride – the very sin for which Lucifer is cast into the inferno? Belacqua puzzled once again over the paradox, peering into his laptop in silence, lost in his own reflection as it flickered across the screen. “Infinite regress,” he murmured. “It’s traumatized Gods all the way up.” Exhausted, Belacqua lay his face upon his thigh. His News Feed continued to update itself. “. . . it can be deepened, another trauma by which the infinite interconnected traumas can be widened – it is the one that makes sure the narcissistic wound keeps bleeding.”27 “I love you, even if you don’t want it.” “I desire you, even if I do not know it.” “I’m not mad, I function.” “To love someone is unforgivable.”

Columbian’s holiday period, like much of the country apparently, was being disturbed by “the suffering of a little boy named Emmanuel” who was being held hostage along with his mother Clara Rojas and others including the politician Ingrid Betancourt by FARC. Expectation was high that at least little Emmanuel, if not all the hostages, would be released by Christmas 2007 as a result of negotiations between the guerrillas and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. By the New Year the boy still hadn’t been released, but to everyone’s surprise in early January the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe announced that Emmanuel was no longer in the hands of the FARC, but in foster care. For Morales and many others, this was the last straw. “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry [...] we felt assaulted by the FARC. How could they dare negotiate for the life of a kid they didn’t even have? People felt this was too much. How much longer was the FARC going to play with us and lie to us?” (Kirkpatrick, 1-2). Morales set up a Facebook Group called Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC (A Million Voices Against FARC). Information about the Group and its plea was rapidly distributed through Facebook’s ‘social graph’, and in a few weeks

27 Reza Negarestani, “On the Revolutionary Earth.”

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“E a la riva / cuopre la notte già col piè Tunisia.”

the Group had thousands of members, and a large demonstration was organised. The demonstration attracted the attention of the Press as indeed did

the novel means of its organization and the campaign spread further – in the process expanding the number of Facebook users since it was new to Columbia and associated only with ‘kids’ (4). The very visibility of the numbers of the Group emboldened the campaigners – “Facebook gave Columbia’s young people an easy, digital way to feel comfort in numbers to declare their disgust” – and the site itself provided a key point of organization and liaison. “Facebook was our headquarters ... It was the newspaper ... the central command ... the laboratory” (Morales quoted by Kirkpatrick, 5). President Uribe eventually succeeded in negotiating the release of the hostages but the Facebook campaign and the demonstration were credited with applying pressure on the FARC. Oscar Morales’s “group and the subsequent demonstration made him into a national and international celebrity” (6).

The anecdote illustrates nicely how Facebook establishes a social bond though the production of ‘faces’: the new technology of the social networking site enables Oscar Morales to become the face of the protest against FARC, and ultimately achieve ‘celebrity’. In Seminar XVII Lacan famously organizes the social bond across four terms:

agent other truth production

It is clearly Facebook and the Group it enables (Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC) that is the ‘agent’ here, addressed to the ‘other’ whose reference is FARC. The authority and ‘truth’ of the Facebook Group is grounded in the number of members of the Group galvanized in relation to the guerrillas. Although they were in the thousands rather than millions (there not being enough Facebook users in Columbia at the time), millions of people did demonstrate in cities across Columbia, inspired by the Group. In contradistinction to the inhuman facelessness of FARC, then, Facebook produces Oscar Morales as the (human) face of a Group actually made up of


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thousands of other faces like so many pixels or the digital code into which the face dissolves in the original Facebook logo.

The four main forms of the social bond for Lacan are the discourses of the Master, the Hysteric, the University and the Analyst. It seems to me that Facebook, appropriately given that it was developed at Harvard, is an example of University discourse in which knowledge (S2), supported by the signifier of the master (S1), is in the position of agent which, through its address to the lack constitutive of desire (objet petit a), produces the subject ($).

A certain modification is necessary however in order to discuss Facebook as a form of social bond with regard to this structure. Facebook is certainly a product of the University, but does not so much represent the ‘knowledge’ of the University as its ‘information’; it is not the agent of operative knowledge, but operative information. As such the structure can organize all the rankable degrees of University life on the same plane from social grooming to academic and professional achievement.52

Famously, Facebook was developed at Harvard in a kind of perversion of its bureaucratic procedures. All Universities, colleges and fraternities have a ‘facebook’ of passport-style photographs that are held along with other information as a record of its staff and students. Zuckerberg and his colleagues, initially through Facemash leading to theFacebook used these procedures as a means for student enjoyment: self-promotion, narcissism, dating, voyeurism and so on. From the very beginning there was something ‘superegoic’ in the way in which its ‘obscene’ content (inspired by the initial idea of comparing female students’ faces to farm animals for example) was conveyed by the apparent neutrality of bureaucratic form.

52 Not surprisingly the University has adopted the structure both in the form of the pan-academic networking site Academia.edu (that is linked to Facebook itself) and within individual universities (including my own) where it is used as a tool that can bring together social, pastoral, pedagogic and administrative functions into the same space in ways that are, in my view, far from unproblematic.

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Accordingly, the signifier (S1) that is the governing support of Facebook (S2) is not the name of a Master or a governing Idea of the University (Truth, Culture, Excellence), but a number (1) that stands for numbers generally, metrics, statistics, quantification and so on. The ‘knowledge’, then, if there is any, is statistical information that is operative through the manipulation of computerized data through the use of algorithms. With the Oscar Morales story, number (Un Millon Voces) provides the hyperbolic, even performative command that brings the Group into being as a mass, and its authority as a number provides its ‘comfort’ and security.

As everyone knows there is something uncanny about passport photographs and their inability to deliver a satisfyingly narcissistic image of one’s face (enabling them to be compared to farm animals, for instance). I don’t recognize this image; it’s not me! It is as if the photo booth steals some aspect of the face essential to its enjoyment as a mirror image. The digital face-making, or prosopopeia of Facebook, is predicated upon a generalized prosopagnosia (or prosop – a – gnosia) where the a stands for the lost enjoyment stolen by the bureaucratic passport photograph. However, the theft of enjoyment in the Oscar Morales story concerns the fact that he and his countrymen were cheated by the FARC of the collective joy that would have been brought by the sight of the face of Emmanuel, his suffering relieved by his release on Christmas day. The fact that he was quietly released by the hostages into a foster home without fuss or announcement seems to have produced an irrational rage in the Columbians, strange given the possible alternative: “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry” (Kirkpatrick, 1). It is therefore into this gap, marked in its absence by the suffering or joyful face of Emmanuel in the field of mediatized visibility, that Facebook pours its information, a million faces combining to producing Oscar Morales as Columbia’s first Facebook star, making him “a national and international celebrity” (6). As such, however, he inevitably loses something, loses his offline, off camera ordinariness, becoming vulnerable to the harsh light of media attention and expectation as a hero of political and moral virtue.

Lacan presented his theory of the four discourses in the context of the events of May 1968, most notably in a rowdy exchange with students at Vincennes. 53 Memorably, Lacan claimed that “the

53 See ‘Impromptu at Vincennes’ in Jacques Lacan, Television. NY: Norton, 1990, 117-28.


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aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master.” 54 At the same time, as Matthew Sharpe notes, Lacan also made the claim that university discourse “is increasingly becoming the dominant structure of social relations.”55 While Lacan initially had in mind “the societies of the now-former Soviet bloc,” Sharpe shows that new forms of advertising in their ‘superegoic’ appeal to transgressive (as opposed to officially sanctioned) enjoyment are organized according to the same structure, since advertising “faces, and educates, a more or less unformed, ignorant individual” which it compels to consider, “from a quasi-superegoic position of neutral self-observation ... what we really are and really want, beneath whatever social masks and roles we may from time to time have taken up.”56 Since about 2008, Facebook’s core business, its means of making money, has been advertising, but it is claimed that this is purely a means rather than an aim, and in any case “the word advertising is really no longer the right word for what is going on at Facebook” (Kirkpatrick, 263). Rather, Kirkpatrick argues that Facebook provides a space in which producers and consumers interact to the point of becoming indistinct as mutual users of the site. From the beginning “Thefacebook had no content of its own. It was merely a piece of software – a platform for content created by its users” (31) in which marketers can now pay for visibility for their products but “can no longer control the conversation” about them (263). For Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook ‘monetization’ merely generates the revenue necessary for a much more profound social project. The company is “founded on a radical social premise – that an enveloping transparency will overtake modern life” (Kirkpatrick, 200), and this premise is the foundation of Facebook’s utopian promise. As the story of Oscar Morales relates, Facebook can be an effective tool working for popular causes in the aid of the state – no doubt in other states it can work against them. As such, however, Facebook is not a neutral ‘tool’ for the political expression of popular reason. It is a form that is itself transformative of other political structures, ushering in a new kind of governmentality. “In a lot of ways,” Zuckerberg argues,

54 Lacan, Television, 126. 55 Matthew Sharpe, “The ‘Revolution’ in Advertising and University Discourse” in Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (eds) Reflections on Seminar XVII, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006 56 Sharpe, Reflections on Seminar XVII, 309.

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“Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies” (Zuckerberg, cited in Kirkpatrick, 254). While particular technology companies are always vulnerable to the rapid exploitation of new technological innovations and a certain boredom threshold concerning their formats, Facebook has it seems made a decisive breakthrough in its reformatting of the social bond. In its infinite streams of commentary, ‘likes’ and followers of Groups and interests, Facebook has transformed the meaning of ‘Friendship’ and opened it up so that a transparent – or ‘transparental’ – love has become the principle of a new technology of neoliberal governance. Whatever the fate of Facebook, for this model to become truly revolutionary would require a further turn clockwise towards the discourse of the Master in which love for the face of the ‘transparental’ One, the index of the multiple, supports the total operationalization of social reality without remainder other than the facelessness that is produced as its surplus and condition. Scott Wilson is Professor of Media and Communication in the School of Humanities, Kingston University, London. His two most recent books are: The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment (SUNY Press, 2008) and Great Satan’s Rrage: American Negativity and Rap / Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism (Manchester University Press, 2008). He is co-editor (with Michael Dillon) of the Journal for Cultural Research (Taylor & Francis).


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WHEN YOU CALL MY NAME

Karmen MacKendrick At the opening of his sermon on Acts 9:8, “Paul rose from the ground and with open eyes he saw nothing,” Meister Eckhart tells us that the cited line has four meanings.

First, when he rose up from the ground, with his eyes open he saw nothingness, and this nothingness was God. Indeed he saw God, and that is what he calls a nothingness. Second, when he rose up, he saw nothing but God. Third, in all things, he saw nothing but God. Fourth, when he saw God, he saw all things as nothingness.1

Anyone who has ever read Eckhart will be familiar with the

dizziness that increases the more we consider these options together. God seems to be all things and nothing, and every thing is no thing, at least insofar as it is God—though not otherwise. God is no thing, and in being no thing is alone in being indistinct from each thing (all things are distinct from one another). This is what Paul’s conversion illuminates for him, shows him when his eyes are opened: the “nothing” of the vision beheld by closed eyes, yet a nothing that is everything, now. Much of the sermon that follows dwells on the nature of that illumination, of light and especially of the divine light of what we would call knowing, were knowing not so very strange in Eckhart’s thought—and were Paul’s knowing not, so importantly, a knowing of nothing, the illumination of—and by—what we cannot see, strangely indistinct from the dark. But after these considerations, Eckhart suddenly turns to commentary upon a text that he considers to be related, though the relation is not so immediately obvious. “In the Book of Love,” he

1 In Reiner Schürmann, ed., Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy, 119-126, at 119.

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declares—we would say, in the Song of Songs— “the soul speaks the following words: ‘In my bed, all through the night, I sought him whom my soul loves, and I found him not’” (3:1). Eckhart considers what it means to seek at night, when the light by which Paul saw nothing is hidden from the soul. And he goes on to provide exegesis of several more lines, all of it fascinating. I want to focus, though, on his further consideration of this line about nighttime seeking, and on his curious commentary on the name that the soul gives to the one she loves. More specifically, I would draw our attention to this passage:

But she, why does she say: ‘he whom my soul loves?’ . . . she did not name her love. There are four reasons why she did not name him. The first reason is that God is nameless. Were she to give him a name, one would have to imagine [a content] to it. But since God is above all names, no one will be able to pronounce God.

[God, Paul saw, is nothingness; how would we name what is nothing, above all things?] The second reason why she did not name him, is this: when the soul dissolves entirely by love into God, it knows about nothing any longer except love. It believes that everyone knows him as itself does. It is surprised when someone knows still another thing rather than God alone. [There is, as Paul saw, nothing but God; how would we then know what is not God? How would we name divergent things in their distinction from him?] The third reason is that it does not have enough time to name him. It cannot turn away long enough from love. It can pronounce no other word than love. [In all things, the soul says only love, a word that takes up all the time there is for speaking; as in all things, Paul saw only God, taking up all the space that there is for sight.]

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The fourth reason is that [the soul] supposes perhaps that he has no other name than ‘love.’ Saying ‘love,’ it pronounces at the same time all names. [And Paul, seeing God, sees all things—as nothing. No thing can be all things; no name can be the pronunciation of every name at once. Unless that thing is not a thing, that name not a proper name, after all. In this all and no names, the four meanings of the phrase are drawn together.]

We find here Eckhart’s typical structural precision: four ways of seeing line up with four senses of naming. The no-thing of Paul’s vision lines up with the all-names of the soul’s saying. But Paul sees nothing—because his eyes are open, or opened. And the soul does not name her love—because this is the only way to name him (I use Eckhart’s pronouns here for convenience and to retain as best I can clarity in connection to his text). Eckhart moves from his consideration of this un-name straight back into a reconsideration of light and knowing. Let us, however, digress from his sermon to dwell on the names for a bit. To make that dwelling possible, I need to make some more general observations about names, and especially about the strangeness of (the) divine name(s). I will hardly be saying anything new if I note that names—proper names, and not just nouns that name in the sense that we might ask, “what is the name of that strange looking plant?”—occupy an odd position in language. I suspect that this position is somewhat archaic; that is, that names continue to perform some of the functions that the rest of language loses as it loses its tight connections to theology and becomes in various ways more practical and productive, even in literature. This is a move upon which Andrew Cowell remarks in At Play in the Tavern, where he notes that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we begin to see “a new model of the essential nature and social function of literature, a model that posits not theosis but semiotic play and overproductivity – profit – as the central feature of literature.”2 This shift takes language away from the pronounced theological focus of late ancient semiotics, in which the world is, and is filled with, the sign of its creator, from whom meaning comes, to whom meaning returns – a complex notion

2 Andrew Cowell, At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins, Bodies in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 4.

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rendered more so by the strange priority of call over designation, as the return must return the calling. That move has already occurred a few centuries before Eckhart begins to preach and to write, but it is worth remarking upon for the light it may shed on the strangeness of names.

On the older model, meaning, and all our ways of speaking it, lead (back) to God — a notion that becomes wonderfully disconcerting if we link it with theologies of a God beyond being. When Eckhart delivers his sermon early in the fourteenth century, he suggests that at least one feature of language, the name called out by the soul in the night, is not concerned to produce, not intended to finalize and move on, but moves archaically toward the undesignatable God beyond being: named with all names by the “love” that there is no time to call out, and that is called out in all speaking.

Some, and not just the dogmatically Christian, are suspicious about this God said beyond saying. In Sauf le nom, Jacques Derrida voices his suspicion that even in aphophatic or negative theology, some trace of a god-being lingers — that it is not quite negative enough. But a name is not a being, and even Derrida is intrigued by the particular sign of the name itself as a trace, all that is left of God in apophasis after its language is emptied of everything that might hold still.3 He wonders, not only of “God,” whether the name is even in language, and what that could mean.4 Certainly the nameless name in Eckhart’s sermon seems strangely out of place and even strangely displacing — as if we could say nothing, put into words what we see in the dark. The name of the beloved is what we call out not to designate, but in place of designating. This name is a sign of the divine, we might say, but one that fails to provide us with a referent.

Aren’t we then running the risk of talking about nothing in another sense, as if we were making small talk or reifying a fiction – ultimately admitting that to speak of God is nonsense? If we are, it is a risk worth running, as it is one that thought must run when it stretches toward its own limits. As Denys Turner points out, “In the sense in which atheists . . . say God ‘does not exist,’ the atheist has merely arrived at the theological starting point,” the place, Turner

3 See Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” in On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 35-85, at 55-56. 4 Derrida, “Sauf le nom,” 58.


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says, from which theologians such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, or Meister Eckhart begin.5 In naming God, the soul — or Paul, or the theologian — names nothing. Or, rather, it names no thing — at least in the sense of the name as designation. But, assuming the soul is not calling out nonsense, there must be other ways to think of names.

So let us look again at that name of God. Nancy writes, “‘I am God’: it is perhaps impossible to avoid this answer, if the question ‘what is God?’ presupposes that God is a Subject. And either it does presuppose that – or else it must take the extreme risk . . . of giving no meaning to the word ‘God’ and taking it as the pure proper name of an unknown.”6 Let us suppose with him that this risk too is worth taking. Then we find that “‘God’ signifies: something other than a subject. It is another sort of thought.”7 This is a start, at least. A name for what does not exist, not a subject, not an object, “God” must then occupy an improper place in any sentence. Yet this is the improper place of a proper name: “What is a proper name? Is it part of language? This is not certain, or at least it is not certain that it is a part in the way a common noun is. It does not behave like a sign. Perhaps its nature is that of a Wink, of a gesture that invites or calls.”8 It does not behave like a sign — not insofar as a sign is that which designates something. The wink is a distinct yet indirect invitation. It does not indicate, but invites — or invokes. Holy names are lacking, says the poet Friedrich Hölderlin; he links this lack to the inadequacy of our joy in the face of divine delightfulness.9 Nancy plays on this notion: “‘God’ is that common noun (that metaphor, proper/improper by definition) that becomes a proper name only when it is addressed to that singular existent who lacks a name. It is thus

5 Denys Turner, “How to be an Atheist,” in Faith Seeking (London: SCM Press, 2002), 3-22, at 8. 6 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Divine Places,” trans. Michael Holland, in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 110-150, at 145. 7 Nancy, “Of Divine Places,” 145: “But I cannot answer the question ‘what is a god?’ by saying I am he. ‘A god’ signifies: something other than a subject. It is another sort of thought, which can no longer think itself identical or consubstantial with the divine that it questions, or that questions it.” 8 Nancy, “Of Divine Places,” 119. 9 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Heimkunft” (“Homecoming”) in Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 164-65: “Schweigen müßen wir oft / Es fehlen heilige Nahmen.” “Silence often behoves us/ deficient in names that are holy…”

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prayer, invocation, supplication or whatever – addressed to the lack of a name.”10 God is the name that calls out to the lack of a name that would fix a designation (“she did not name her love”). It is properly an address, but an address deprived of a designated object becomes rather improper again. The name does not quite fit within language; it is language as it breaks with its own systematic structure.11

Not precisely a proper name, the divine name (whatever, however we call it) is perhaps a sort of improper name, a name that does not stay within the constraints of propriety—of clarity, singularity, or accepted use. In fact, says Nancy, “God’ – what we call ‘God,’ and not the name Deus/Theos and all its metaphors – is is the very name for the impropriety of the name.”12 We have no proper labels, no fixable meaning or singular sense, but even as we remain without possession, we call, and we respond to a calling to which our own return call is sometimes an answer. We have no thing, but we desire. It is clear from Eckhart — clear, at any rate, in that distinctive Eckhartian way — that there is something about the divine that perfectly suits the improper name. Often edgy about naming God at all, in this sermon — in this odd digression within a sermon, a sermonized commentary on a line that has called to him beyond his ability to resist — Eckhart is willing to allow a strange kind of naming, a naming that is without names, or is all names, or is the quasi-name tossed out by one who cannot be distracted from love long enough to be bothered with naming as such. And it fits rather elegantly with a sense of divine name as a name that calls without designation, to such an extent that what the name “designates” is only calling, questioning, mystery in its seductive or drawing sense—a mystery not separated from intimacy, linking us to the premodern God of infinite distance who is nonetheless found in an inward turn. This is not quite so bizarre a view of names as it might at first seem. Proper names, in their odd positioning, generally serve two

10 Nancy, “Of Divine Places,” 117. 11 Though it is beyond the scope of the present paper, it might be interesting to consider the function of language, and of the vocative name, as a mediation or correlation in the sense in which Eugene Thacker develops it in “The Wayless Abyss: Mysticism and Mediation,” Postemedieval 3:1, especially paragraph 43 and following. A name does not precisely correlate to its object, but neither does it altogether fail to do so. 12 Nancy, “Of Divine Places,” 116-117.


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functions much more strongly than do other nouns. The first, oddly enough, is designation. Most nouns designate generally; “cat” does not tell you which of the world’s many felines is intended. We can add articles or other indications—the cat, your cat—but even here we must sometimes recognize substitutability; you might in your life own many such animals. A proper name, though, seems to be as close as ordinary language gets to the marvelous “rigid designator” of possible-worlds philosophy: wherever and whenever that name is used, it picks out just that entity.13 Google has taught us, of course, that we have to qualify such a claim; when I search for an author with a common proper name, for instance, I find that the designator picks out a great many people in whom I have no interest. When that happens, we try to make the proper name more proper — including a middle name, for example, to specify a person; or a state or country, to specify a city. But insofar as any word or phrase picks out its signified with true precision, that word or phrase will be a proper name (or a definite description, but let us leave that point aside as not, I promise, quite relevant to our purposes). The second function particularly pronounced in names is one that links them to that ancient and late ancient sense of language’s theological ground: they call. They are words we use when we want to draw something or someone toward us. Like theology, they reach toward, they draw, they exclaim. To then hear that a name may in fact be a kind of word characterized by its refusal (or failure) to designate must be strange indeed, and of course it is not true that all names, or all senses of naming, so refuse. Most names both designate and call; when we ask “what are you called?” — a query admittedly more idiomatic in many other languages than it is in English — we ask for a designator as much as for a means of summoning. Nor do we summon all named things; one does not try to entice a city to be closer, however much one might wish to be closer to that city. For a name to refuse to designate at all, or for it to designate only in a strange and apophatic manner, it must not be the name of a being. Beings may be designated, pointed out. And that, of course, narrows down our list of such names considerably.

Why bother to name what is not? Obviously, we might use a name in error, thinking that it designates some existing thing or

13 See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

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person that does not, it turns out, in fact exist after all. But we would use such a name deliberately and correctly only if we were naming what is not simply inexistent any more than it is a being, and this, of course, puts us squarely back into classic apophasis, there at Turner’s starting point for theology. What I want to ask is a variation on the very old negative theological puzzles about divine names, but it is also a variant on Augustine’s musing in the Confessions, as he tries to work out what he loves when he loves his God. Augustine will go through his senses and declare God at once in excess of each and fully both enticing and satisfying: “Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God: a light, voice, odour, food, embrace . . . where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food that no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part.”14 Standard interpretation assures us that Augustine intends here to get beyond the sensual and into the love of a God of pure abstraction, through the superior “spiritual” senses. I would argue instead that he is intensifying the sensual beyond any possibility of reduction to either abstraction or matter. But whichever turns out to be true, we may also notice something a little bit odd: he talks about each sensory pleasure, but he doesn’t really describe some being that gives them all, only the pleasures themselves. What he loves is this infinite enticement, these pleasures that continue to call him long after an ordinary pleasure of the senses would have led to satiation. What then does he love when he loves his God? A sight, a sound, an embrace. What then does the poet name, for Eckhart, when he names the love of his soul? That name names nothing, designates no content; the soul names no thing, having no distinction from love by which to have a voice; she cannot take the time to name the love she is too busy experiencing, because there is no time outside the love itself, and even a single word takes time for the speaking. And, perhaps most interestingly of all, she need name no other name, because “love” names with all names. Surely, however, all names cannot at the same time name nothing, unless by a very peculiar twist of logic. So it is not the case that all names are rendered indifferently the same here.

14 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 10.6.8.


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Love cannot name with all names if by that we simply mean to identify every existing object with love — and this despite the fact that it is sometimes (not always) a little tricky to absolve Eckhart of pantheism. If “God” is “love,” then no given object is God. The name that is all names is not all-designating; indeed, there are no things picked out by its designation. But it is all-calling: that is what naming in love does. Here I would like to digress with a promise of return. Like Eckhart’s, my digression will at first seem deeply peculiar, and maybe not only at first. I want to compare Eckhart’s name that calls all names and yet has no time to be called to the names used in both essay and fiction by the French philosopher, translator and pornographer Pierre Klossowski. In both fictive and philosophical work, Klossowski is drawn to desire, particularly to desires of unusual intensity. Philosophically, he writes about Sade, for example, not as an incomprehensibly distant figure but as “my neighbor;” about Nietzsche, not as the last metaphysician but as the thinker of recurrence as a consequence of the astonishing experience of pure affirmation. He acknowledges the influence of “Gnostic thinkers” — he seems to have the Carpocratians especially in mind — on his own thought and writing, and some of that influence seems to have to do with his valuations of desire. In his fiction we find a similarly strange sort of repetition and recurrence. Under the repetition of the same names, we find not the same subjects, appearing stably across time, but the same intensities of desire, which re-emerge as the stories almost repeat themselves, but not quite, and as we gradually realize that the same name is not calling quite the same character.15 The exemplar in Klossowski’s fiction is probably the name of Roberte, who (or which) recurs in the trilogy The Law of Hospitality as a figure of desire, primarily masochistic desire, but not as the same person. A still more bewildering example occurs in The Baphomet, in which in which the very narrator’s name “registers repetitive embodiment.”16 As Ian James writes, “Klossowski’s work bears witness to a

15 It is thus unsurprising to note that Gilles Deleuze, with his emphasis on difference in repetition, is among those influenced by Klossowski’s account of return. Really, though, you can’t be a French Nietzschean and not be influenced by Klossowski somewhere. 16 Mark D. Jordan, “Liturgies of Repetition: A Preface to the Prologue of the Baphomet,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 41.2 (2009): 63-82, at 64.

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proliferation of names, both historical and fictional, all of which become the object of repeated questioning or obsessive fascination.”17

These names, like “God” or “whom my soul loves,” name some sort of mystery, some perpetually fascinating unanswerable, infinitely replied-to query. James adds, “Throughout Klossowski’s oeuvre the proper name articulates a double and paradoxical movement; it both designates a figure with an apparent history, identity and coherence . . . yet at the very same time it marks the abolition or suspension of identity, history, and coherence.”18 The name reembodies — not the subject, not even the I. Like the Nancyan proper name, the name for Klossoski is a very strange, and very inviting, sort of sign. It is as if, compelled by a sufficient force of desire, the name could become the very inverse of a rigid designator19 – it does not point out at only one, but beckons toward to every one. But it does not summon indifferently, nor does every name persistently appear. As Mark Jordan writes, “The form of Klossowski’s work may not be obsession so much as anamnesis. His capacity for fixing desire on a singular sign, on a name above all other names, may be diagnosed as monomania or fostered as liturgical citation.”20 We might consider Klossowski’s obsessiveness, then, not as pathology but as that particular form of the linguistic that we call liturgical. The name is prayed: called out by the love of the soul. It is sought in the night in which those who love can see nothing. Only the name as liturgical citation, the divine name desired with all the desire in language, can name with all names. That is: only such a name can call out all names, all loves, all desires, the pleasures of all the senses. When names fail in designation, they may intensify in evocation: they keep calling. They call what cannot be designated because it does not belong to the realm of knowledge; cannot be known, both because it is no thing and because we call in the dark, when there is nothing to be seen. They call in desire. The desires that call by these recurring names share the peculiarity of being unfulfillable, or self-renewing. They do not work in the manner of the appetite for food, but in that of the Augustinian, and indeed more

17 Ian James, Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of the Name (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), 1. 18 James, 1. 19 I do not intend by this a Kripkean “flaccid designator,” but rather a non-designating, purely vocative name. 20 Jordan, 79.


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widely premodern, appetite for God, in which desire is not consumed by its own satisfaction but rendered infinite in its very delight.

The deeply strange, utterly beloved divine name is lacking, but it lacks nothing: only the object to which it might point, only designation, and it designates nothing. In saying love, the soul names with all names: it calls out in perfect desire to every and no thing. In calling in the night, it knows nothing, and thus, like Paul, it knows God: it wants everything, it is everything it wants; it wants no thing, and it knows nothing at all. It is to that nameless name that it reiterates its prayers, to that love that it calls out. Karmen MacKendrick is a professor of philosophy at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY. Her work centers on philosophical theology in its engagements with language, embodiment, and desire. Her recent works include Fragmentation and Memory (Fordham, 2008) and Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions with Virginia Burrus and Mark Jordan (Fordham, 2010). Her next book, Divine Enticement: The Seductions of Theology is due out from Fordham in Spring 2012.

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ALL THAT REMAINS UNNOTICED I ADORE: SPENCER REECE’S ADDRESSES

Eileen A. Joy

Affirm survival, he tells us, and suddenly I am orphaned, since he gives us no instruction, and we are not told how, in the face of suffering, in spite of suffering, this affirmation is to take place. —Judith Butler, “On Never Having Learned How to Live”

(written on the occasion of Derrida’s death)

You’re not listening. I’m sorry. I was thinking How the beauty of your singing reinscribes The hope whose death it announces.

—Ben Lerner, “Mean Free Path”

all that remains unnoticed I adore to the used furniture to the broken door to the jalousie window slats I sing

—Spencer Reece, “xiv. Two Bright Rooms” I. THE APOSTROPHE: IT IS IN MY OWN HEART

The poetic address, or apostrophe, as Barbara Johnson has written, is “the calling out to inanimate, dead, or absent beings.”1 Important to recall here is the literal definition of ‘apostrophe’ as a ‘turning away’ [from the Greek apo, ‘away’ + strephein, ‘to turn’]. In the mode of ‘apostrophe,’ the poet averts his attention, looks away, from his supposed audience to address absent or imaginary beings. Quintilian described apostrophe as “a diversion of our words to address some person other than the judge” and he cautioned against it, “since it would certainly seem to be more natural that we should

1 Barbara Johnson, “Toys R Us,” Persons and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 6.

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specifically address ourselves to those whose favor we desire to win.”2 In this respect, I’m particularly fond of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics’s definition of apostrophe as “a figure of speech which consists in addressing a dead or absent person, an animal, or a thing, or an abstract quality or idea as if it were alive, present, and capable of understanding.”3 As if it were alive, present, and capable of understanding. In other words, as Quintilian understood: everything to lose here.

But one might also say that the apostrophe, or a diversion of one’s address, from a supposedly real and living and present (and one might imagine, proprietarily judging) audience to absent and imaginary (and possibly dead) figures, human and nonhuman, enacts a certain event, or presencing, of a speculative being-with, where both the poet and the objects she addresses, visible or invisible, alive or dead, real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, come together in a vibrantly materialist circuit of vocative speech, which is also a sort of vocal (if also written) commentary upon the text of the world, a counter-signature that, as Derrida might say, exercises a certain faith and leaves marks behind.4 As Johnson writes, “Apostrophe turns toward anything the poet throws his voice to, and in so doing magnetizes his world around his call.”5 Here, the poet’s call, or address, or ‘ring’ (as of a bell or telephone call) might even be only one thing among many other things that have gathered around her language which is, itself, once released into writing, suddenly detached, prosthetic, and thingly. The poetic address, which already has such a long history, would seem to have already been in sympathy with what is now referred to as ‘speculative reason’ and ‘object-oriented ontology,’6 understanding,

2Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), IV, i, 63. 3 ‘Apostrophe,’ in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, and O.B. Hardison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). 4 See Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stan-ford University Press, 2005), 141. 5 Johnson, “Toys R Us,” 10. 6 By ‘speculative reason’ and ‘object-oriented ontology’ I mean to invoke the recent work of Graham Harman and other theorists (such as Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton, and Steven Shaviro, among others) who have recently been working on non-human-centered, post-‘discursive turn’ and ‘carnal’ materialisms, metaphysics, phenomenologies, and onticologies (where the world is no longer merely the carrier of human signification), and who

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as Jane Bennett has recently articulated, that poiesis does not aim to capture things (always other to representation) via description, but desires, rather, to “get close” to the ontology of things and to throw some “sand and grit” into the spaces where things might otherwise “slide” into our co-option of them.7 This might also be to understand, as Graham Harman has argued, that things themselves are no “seamless fusion,” and that each object in the world is “fatally torn between itself and its accidents, relations, and qualities: a set of tensions that makes everything in the universe possible, including

also hold, following Harman, that “[i]ndividual entities of various different scales (not just tiny quarks and electrons) are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos,” and further, “[t]hese entities are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations” (“Brief SR/OOO Tutorial,” Object-Oriented Philosophy, July 23, 2010: <http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/brief-srooo-tutorial/>). This group of thinkers is in no way unified in their thinking, but for excellent introductions to and overviews of the history and development of the recent critical turns to Speculative Realism (SR) and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) see Kris Coffield, “Interview: Levi Bryant,” Fractured Politics, June 29, 2011: http://fracturedpolitics. com/2011/06/29/interview-levi-bryant.aspx, and Graham Harman, “A History of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology,” podcast audio, Symposium: “Hello, Everything: Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology,” University of California-Los Angeles, December 1, 2010; available at Ecology Without Nature, December 2, 2010: http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2010/12/graham-harmans-talk-on-ooo-and-sr-at.html. For important individual inflections of speculative and object-oriented philosophies, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011); Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011); Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009); Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011); and Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 7 See Jane Bennett, “Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material Agency,” podcast audio, Conference: “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” George Washington University, March 11, 2011: <http://www.archive.org/details/ PowersOfTheHoardNotesOnMaterialAgency>.

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space and time.”8 Calling to things, then, addressing them, does not so much make things appear, as it dives into the rifts and forks between ‘the things themselves’ and the apparitional, or sensual, qualities that stream out of them (what Harman terms ‘allure’).9 Like Xeno’s paradox, the poet would be a bard of splitting the difference.

The poet’s address may not really magnetize or halt the ‘slide’ of or dive into anything, of course, except her own desire, her own lovesickness or desperation for, or curiosity about, what no longer remains present or visible, or what seems mute, untouchable, incommunicative, obdurate, lonely, broken, abandoned, with-drawn, unloved. As Rousseau once wrote, “Insensitive and dead beings, this charm is not at all in you; it could not be there; it is in my own heart which wishes to draw everything back to itself” [“Etres insensibles et morts, ce charme n’est point en vous; il n’y saurait être; c’est dans mon propre Coeur qui veut tout rapporter à lui”].10 Here, apostrophe may understand, or insist: everything is lost, but I address it, anyway, in absent solidarity, or ridiculous hope. The poetic address then, as a form of hopeful yet foolish bravado, flowering on a ground of ruined shapes, of ruination itself. Apostrophe as the hailing of the ephemeral and the lost and inanimate of history as if they might understand and respond, as if anyone could. Poetic hailing as a form of being-with in which there is a wildly constructed (because fictitious) intimacy (but what other kind is there?) that retains, nevertheless, great distances, forever untraversable. Similar to commentary, the apostrophe as a ‘talking-writing’ to other ‘authors’ who have already left the building, but whose ‘signatures’ either remain as artifacts or as impressions of their absence, or of their muteness.

This is also to speak of the poetic address as a form of adoration (literally, ‘reverential’ or ‘worshipful’ address) for what has gone missing or been left unattended and unadorned, and which also pulls those lost and left-aside (and unloved) things into the temporal and shining Now of the poet’s address. As Jonathan Culler has written,

8 Graham Harman, “Space, Time, and Essence: An Object-Oriented Approach (2008),” Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010), 150. 9 Graham Harman, “On Vicarious Causation,” in Collapse, Vol. II: Speculative Realism, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic), 187–221. 10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Monuments de l’histoire de ma vie,” Ouevres autobiographiques (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 74; translation of Rousseau from Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, augmented edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 141.


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addresses such as Wordsworth’s ‘ye birds’ and ‘ye blessed creatures’ and ‘Thou child of joy’ (‘Ode to Immortality’) “locate [those items] in the time of the moments at which writing can say ‘now.’ . . . So located by apostrophes, birds, creatures, boys, etc., resist being organized into events that can be narrated, for they are inserted into the poem as elements of the event which the poem is attempting to be.”11 In this sense, the apostrophe, or address, also snaps things that might be dead or absent into present being, evoking [literally, ‘calling forth’ or ‘calling out’] that which remains hidden or buried before being called out, or called to. Which is not to say the thing itself ever fully materializes, since, cadging from Julian Yates, its “exteriority” precludes its “ready processing,” and the poetic address might ultimately be a form of a “nervous, attenuated,” and “melancholy” attention to, or “screen” for, the “call” of the nonhuman.12 A mating call. II. SPENCER REECE: I AM A PART OF THIS FRACTURED FRONTIER

Spencer Reece is a contemporary poet who is particularly fond of the address as a poetic form (although it might be argued that all lyric poetry is address, or apostrophe, in one form or another),13 and a large part of his book The Clerk’s Tale is devoted to a group of twenty “Addresses,” many of which do not even utilize the vocative voice. Indeed, for this very reason, Reece seems to be implying that all poetry is address, in one form or another (a point made by many critics all the time), while at the same time he wants to signal a particular section of his book through the formal register of “Addresses,” almost as if to ask his reader to pay special attention to the form of the call, and to the addressees themselves, human and nonhuman, who include his younger brother, the mute patients of a mental hospital, an old farmhouse in which he used to live, several landscapes, old lovers, empty rooms, a broken door, a hospital chaplain, three streets, the reader, a nurse, an apartment, Boca Raton,

11 Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 149. 12 Julian Yates, “It’s (for) You; or, the Tele-t/r/opical Post-Human,” postmedieval 1.1/2 (April 2010): 225, 230 [223–234]. 13 As Paul de Man once put it, “Now it is certainly beyond question that the figure of address is recurrent in lyric poetry, to the point of constituting the generic definition of, at the very least, the ode (which can, in turn, be seen as paradigmatic for poetry in general)” (“Lyrical Voice in Contemporary Theory: Riffaterre and Jauss,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hoŝek and Patricia Parker [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985], 61).

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Minneapolis, and so on. And what ties all of these objects together -- persons, things, and places -- is their impermanence, their fugitive nature, as well as all of the ways in which Reece is not sure “where I end and the dark starts,”14 which means he has a special propensity, as many poets do, for un-becoming, for getting lost, for going deep (or wide) into Otherness, into unlovable, or difficult, alterities. What also connects many of the addressees and figures of this group of poems, and what they share in common with other figures that predominate The Clerk’s Tale as a whole, is their status as the untouchables of history, the unseen, the disenfranchised, the forgotten, the incarcerated, the disappeared -- in short, those who are difficult or impossible to love: transvestites, ex-cons, alcoholics, the retarded, suicides, sales clerks, the handicapped, mental patients, homosexuals, migrant workers, and everyone with whom the world has made “a thousand thousand vows,” and “then broken” them.15 It is no accident that the collection as a whole is entitled The Clerk’s Tale, which not only references the book’s initial poem, about two gay men, one middle-aged and the other older, who work as mainly unnoticed clerks in a Brooks Brothers store in a mall outside of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota (“We are alone. / There is no longer any need to express ourselves”),16 but also Chaucer’s story about ‘patient’ (and long-suffering) Griselda. The title also points to Chaucer’s ‘Clerk of Oxford,’ the student and lover of books who tells the tale, and who is described by Chaucer in his ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales as holwe [‘hollow’ or ‘emaciated’] and wearing thredbare clothing, with “litel gold in cofre” [“little gold in his coffer”],17 thus signaling the spare and meager offices of those who read, reflect, and write. In Reece’s case, the poet is also one who lives in bare circumstances and with whom the world has made and broken a thousand vows, and he depends often upon the kindness of strangers, such as the hospital chaplain Miss Grace who “blessed” him “with holy water / and always promised to return.”18

14 Spencer Reece, “xix. I Have Dreamed of You So Much,” The Clerk’s Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 61. 15 Spencer Reece, “xvi. Loxahatchee,” The Clerk’s Tale, 58. 16 Spencer Reece, “The Clerk’s Tale,” The Clerk’s Tale, 4 [2–4]. 17 Lines cited from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), ll. 289–90, 298. 18 Spencer Reece, “vi. United Hospital,” The Clerk’s Tale, 48.


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As Louise Glück has described Reece’s poetry, “its longing for permanence is rooted in a profound sense of the provisional nature of all human arrangements . . . . The scene ‘you cannot enter,’ the world denied, recurs.” She further describes the book as one

of deprivations and closures, each somehow graver than the external sign suggests. Expansive description is sealed off in terse sentences: houses are sold, dogs are given away. Against these cumulative finalities, the dream of permanence makes an alternative or correction. And beauty, especially remembered beauty, which is insulated against erosion, functions in these poems like a promise: it holds the self firm in the face of crushing solitude and transience.19

Because of Reece’s ability to move deftly, at the same time, between a certain comic light touch and harrowing tragedy, between the affirmation, or loving notice of scenes such as “the rooms lavish with neoclassical beds” and the casual mention of a “retired stewardess with thick red lipstick” who “speaks of her umpteenth hospitalization,” Glück also describes his poems, with great wit, as “half cocktail party, half passion play.”20

More than several times throughout the twenty “Addresses,” the phrase appears, “I am not afraid,” as when Reece recollects his “blue” time as a small child when President Kennedy was shot and in “a basement apartment / deep in dark Minneapolis,” his mother “is crying again why does she cry,” and the poet proclaims, “I am small but not afraid,” and when he leaves Minnesota later, as an adult, “the day I leave Minnesota I am not afraid,” and when he leaves the mental hospital, “I leave the open unit and I am not afraid.”21 In the initial poem, set in a more present tense -- perhaps the most present moment of the twenty addresses as a whole and thus its placement at the beginning -- Reece writes, “I am ruined but I am not afraid . . . from state to state I send out my report.” In “my report,” we get the

19 Spencer Reece, “xx. Vizcaya,” The Clerk’s Tale, 62 [62–63]; Spencer Reece, “iii. To My Brother, 45,” The Clerk’s Tale; Louise Glück, “Foreword,” in Reece, The Clerk’s Tale, x. 20 Glück, “Foreword,” x. 21 Spencer Reece, “vii. Blue,” The Clerk’s Tale, 49; “xiii. Afton,” 55; “x. To Martha My Nurse,” 52.

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multiple senses of the poet’s account [a ‘reporting’] of his own melancholy (yet also affirmatively optimistic) biography along with the intelligence [the clandestine, secret ‘accounting’] he has conducted in certain small corners of the world (Minnesota and Florida, where he has lived), as well as his claims [‘writs’] upon these places, and also the ‘resounding noise’ or musical ‘notes’ of his addresses, made in the room that is “empty at last” and where “the sound of the last empty lots” of a hyper-commercially developed and also dying (or disastrously encroached-upon and thus disappearing?) Florida “is in [his] spine.”22 Both an itinerant, but also primarily rooted in two places (Minnesota and Florida), Reece dwells upon scenes of packing and unpacking, suitcases and vacated houses. And this is why he “sing[s] sacredly of suitcases and disappearances,”23 and on the “dead end” of Divinity Avenue, with “Buddhists / nuns ex-cons,” he “stood with suitcases / below that yellow sign,”24 and in the locked unit of the mental hospital where Reece once lived, and where his “roommate’s face is a peach that rots,” he tells us, “we are all ambassadors carrying suitcases.”25

The poet, who is ruined but not afraid, and who, like an ambassador, is sending out his “report” from “state to state,” swinging his “right hand up and down,” is reminiscent of a certain prototypical fairy tale character who is subjected to the worst deprivations and abandonments, yet always emerges from the dark woods with a perverse optimism about everything, such as the Grimm Brothers’ “maiden without hands” whose father’s pact with the Devil leads to him having to chop off his daughter’s hands with an axe: an act of mutilation she cheerily submits to, then gracefully takes herself off to the woods so she won’t be a burden to anyone. Or Hansel who, even after his mother has abandoned him and his sister Gretel deep in a forbidding forest, and the birds have eaten all of the breadcrumbs they were using to mark their path, tells his sister not to worry for, “We shall soon find the way.”26 Perhaps one of the most extreme representatives of this figure is little ‘Golden Heart’ in the Danish fairy tale of the same name (Guld Hjerte), upon whom the film

22 Spencer Reece, “i. To You,” The Clerk’s Tale, 43. 23 Reece, “i. To You.” 24 Spencer Reece, “ii. Divinity Avenue,” The Clerk’s Tale, 44. 25 Spencer Reece, “viii. To Those Grown Mute,” The Clerk’s Tale, 50. 26 See Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimm’s Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Anchor Books, 1983).


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director Lars von Trier based the female protagonists in his trilogy of films, Breaking the Waves, The Idiots, and Dancer in the Dark, all of whom are expressions of a certain extreme, selfless, and yet perversely upbeat martyrdom. The fairy-tale from von Trier’s childhood is about a little girl who embarks on a journey through the woods with pieces of bread and other things in her pockets. Along the way, she gives away everything she has, including her clothing (with nothing given to her in return), and whenever the animals of the forest question her risky behavior and impending destitution, at every bleak turn of the narrative, including one moment when she stands naked at the edge of the woods, she proclaims, “I’ll be fine, anyway,” or, in another translation, “But at least I’m okay.”27

I’ll be fine, anyway. What moves in that phrase, in that ‘anyway’? And also in that ‘at least’? “Regardless of what just happened, I’ll be fine.” “Although I have nothing now, I’ll still be fine.” “That was close, but anyway, I’ll be fine -- at least I’m still here.” “Whatever happens next, I’ll be fine -- at least there’s that . . . for now.” “Anyway, after all that, at the very least, I’ll be fine.” “Even if I’m killed in a minute, I’m fine now, anyway.” “However anything might happen, in any way, at a minimum, I’ll still be fine.” “However I might have to go on, in whatever-any-way, I’ll be fine.” More ruefully, perhaps, with an emphasis on a certain caesura between the ‘fine’ and the ‘anyway’: “I’ll be fine . . . anyway, it doesn’t matter what happens to me,” or, “I’ll be fine . . . anyway, let’s not think about that now.” Or more hopefully: “I’ll be fine (I’m fine right now) . . . anyway, what’s next?” The ‘anyway’ operates here too as a kind of placeholder for possibilistic subjunctivity, or the ‘as if’: as if everything already was and will be fine; as if it were still possible to speak of being fine, of being still able to go forth, to give something, even with an empty basket, having already lost everything (maybe even one’s own mind), and to still be willing to welcome someone or something, even if it might be your own end. The ‘at least’ says: something is always better than nothing. And the future tense of ‘will’ implies, all evidence to the contrary, that the self will somehow continue, go on, and: be fine, which is to say ‘without dross,’ polished and pure (despite the current despoilments), well, good, or more plainly and humbly and

27 See Stig Björkman, “Naked Miracles” (interview with Lars von Trier), trans. Alexander Keiller, Sight & Sound 6.10 (1996): 10–14, and Stig Björkman, ed., Trier on von Trier, trans. Neil Smith (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 164.

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pragmatically: I’m ‘okay’ . . . for now, anyway. “How are we to master suffering?” Louise Glück asks, and her answer, relative to Reece’s poems is that there is a “discipline” in “modesty . . . by which the desire to affirm can overcome repeated disappointment that threatens to become withdrawal or despair.”28 Or as Reece himself writes, “in my right hand I hold a key / my legacy is to leave the room empty.”29

There is a certain sympathy between Golden Heart’s “I’ll be fine, anyway,” or “At least I’m okay,” and Spencer Reece’s conclusion to his first address (“i. To You”), after reporting that he is “ruined but not afraid”: “I open my door I extend my hand / welcome.”30 And after nailing a crucifix on the wall of the “bright yellow” room he has rented after leaving the mental hospital, in the tenth address (“x. To Martha My Nurse”), he writes, “there is much to do much to see.”31 And in the fourteenth address (“xiv. Two Bright Rooms), Reece sings “to the used furniture to the broken door” and to “all that remains unnoticed,” which “I adore.”32Here, especially, we see a more explicit expression of the address, or apostrophe, as baroquely useless (yet somehow necessary as a hedge against creeping sadness and the decay of everything), futile (pace Quintilian), and also as a form of adoration, which, interestingly, is also a form of calling, or speaking, to an entity that is also being reverenced at the same time it is being saluted and addressed (the address itself is a form of reverence) [from the Latin ad ‘to’ + orare ‘speak’]: to adore something is to speak to it, to address it, with one’s mouth [Latin os, oris]. Addressing then, also becomes a sort of ‘facing,’ whereby (again, pace Quintilian) the poet turns away from the audience who might be reading or hearing his work (either in present or belated ‘after’-time) in order to speak with his mouth (which might also be a kiss) to imaginary, absent, present-but-not-human, and in Reece’s terms, unnoticed beings and things, with whom Reece may even imagine a sort of solidarity since at one point he says of himself, “anonymity is at home on me.”33 And of the town in South Florida, Lantana, where Reece finds the “two bright rooms” in which he

28 Glück, “Foreword,” xii. 29 Reece, “xiii. Afton.” 30 Reece, “i. To You.” 31 Reece, “x. To Martha My Nurse.” 32 Spencer Reece, “xiv. Two Bright Rooms,” The Clerk’s Tale, 56. 33 Spencer Reece, “xv. Boca Raton,” The Clerk’s Tale, 57.


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“sings” to “the used furniture to the broken door,” he also writes, “it is not Paris it is not Florence / but it has majesty in its anonymity / this town where people stop for gas.”34

Again, similar to the heroes and heroines of fairy tales who are abandoned in landscapes of desolate, forbidding beauty, and where they often find their way by speaking to birds, stone walls, brooks, foxes, and juniper trees, the poet addresses the supposedly non-communicative and inanimate, of which, through his art, he also becomes a part – “I am a part of this fractured frontier,” Reece writes of one of the islands in the Keys.35 And Reece’s addresses, to persons, places and to things, present and absent, but also always disappearing, under erasure (“this is the scene of what becomes of love when it is done,” he writes in the last address),36 are also gestures of welcoming (which is a form of love-as-hospitality), all extended from austere rooms “leached of extravagances” and from the locked units of hospitals where “the bank clerk who went off Lithium to have her first baby / has a brain that will not work” and “lies on her bed like a snail without a house.”37 In this scenario, the poet’s addresses become vocative holding areas designed to stave off, or assuage, the inevitable dissolutions, surrenders, and final acts, and thus could also be seen to move against the current of one of the signature philosophical movements of our time (which could also be argued to be a hyper-development of the Enlightenment image of a disenchanted world): the eliminative nihilism of Ray Brassier, who has written that,

Philosophy would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem.38

Brassier’s nihilist philosophy might best be summed up by the epigraph, from the Lovecraftian horror writer and cult figure Thomas

34 Reece, “xiv. Two Bright Rooms.” 35 Reece, “xvii. Summerland Key,” The Clerk’s Tale, 59. 36 Reece, “xx. Vizcaya.” 37 Reece, “viii. To Those Grown Mute.” 38 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xi.

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Ligotti, that he chose for his book Nihil Unbound: “There is nothing to do and there is nowhere to go / There is nothing to be and there is no-one to know.” By contrast, the poetic address, as thrown by Reece (and perhaps by all poets), is in fact, if even naively, trying to mend the shattered concord between man and nature (hell, between man, which is to say, ‘humans,’ and everything), insisting that there is always something, rather than nothing, as long as one can still call to it, and therefore, for every thing, human or otherwise, that appears into being and then ebbs and disappears from the world (which does, indeed, have a ‘reality’ that is always in surplus of and often beside the point of the human), the poet performs the office of yawping across the silence, and re-filling the world with the sounds of things, with their names, which is also a form of loving the world, however ridiculous. Until he can’t any more. III. I LEAVE, I LOOK BACK

It has been said that the lyric is well-suited, and perhaps designed, for the private, the privative, and privation, for the enclosure and the enclosed. It is a gesture as well of address, from the poet to herself, to others, the world, all the items of the world, the dark crack of oblivion and everything that falls into that crevasse. This is an address, moreover, that often wells up from a deeply avowed sense of the disintegration of everything: “how did the island come to have no room,” Reece writes, “who ruined it with deeds / house after house and all the butterflies and parrotfish gone”?39 Yes, we know that poetry has often been concerned, obsessed even, with death and nothingness, and with expressions of despair at the passing of everything (which might also then serve as the thin files in the cabinets of the counting-house of what came and went), and that poetry is also often discussed as a powerful and meaningful hedge against all of that (“the world ends, but the lines of poetry live!” cry the excited Shakespeareans). But let’s maybe agree, too, that there is no point any longer in burdening poetry with this job -- that sort of bravado and labor gets tiring after a while. We sometimes forget (and this is where the nihilists do come in handy) that when the world really ends, so, too, will go the poetry. Which is why poetry is not, as it turns out, for posterity (or at least, not a very long posterity): it’s for the present, it’s for us, now, while we’re still able to address the world, and each other, the living and the dead, the animate and

39 Reece, “xvii. Summerland Key.”


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inanimate, in all of their fragility, and also their terrible beauty, and even their indifference to us. But is the poet even writing, in his addresses, for, or to, us?

We might reflect, then, on the very present tense of the address: the apostrophe, by its very nature and inclination, is a transitive verbing – it seeks and hits its object at the very moment of its utterance, as if the object were actually there in the moment of being called, even when that object might be long gone, partially hidden, or withdrawn. As Graham Harman has argued, no object is ever exhausted by its relations, even when present to sight or touch (there is always something “in reserve” in the dark, volcanic recesses of things),40 but the address has a peculiar faith in the vibrancy of the world in all its fullness (which includes all of its temporal dimensions) and it wants relations with that vibrancy. The address will call to anyone and anything, real and unreal: the wind, Eurydice, America, a flower in a crannied wall, a Grecian urn, a dead dog, a salt shaker, the Muses, one’s youth, a stream, a lost doll. The address vibrates, it rings, it rings up, it puts a ring on things -- it congresses.

In his book Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions, Michael Snediker argues for a queer optimism of the lyric that fully embraces and learns from death, pain, and suffering “to the point of saturation, and in an act of bravery so unfamiliar as to seem impossible, departs from them.”41 But with Spencer Reece, I might also ask: or, stays with them? In a radical act of hospitality, of welcoming, of staying-on? This isn’t to argue for poetry itself as a form of staying-on (i.e., traditional notions of literary posterity), but rather, for the poet himself as a figure, an actual living figure, who stays on, in spite of it all, as long as he can, who cracks open the door of the soon-to-be-earthquaked-or-otherwise-annihilated-room and extends a ruined hand, a ruined voice, a counter-signature, and engages in an experiment in affirmation within the site of ruin itself, offers a last gesture, a something rather than a nothing, an “I’m still here,” even with nothing, maybe even speaking to nothing.

The poetic address, also then, as a form of vigil, of keeping the light on, or as Reece himself writes in another sequence of poems in the book, “Florida Ghazals”: “I keep vigil by the light of my 60-watt

40 Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 187. 41 Michael Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 39.

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bulb. / The unmarked mass grave of the 1928 hurricane beckons me.” Vigil is a form of unmixed attention, which is how Simone Weil defined prayer.42 It always requires looking back, or as Reece writes in his fifth address, “v. Coda,”

this is the day I leave leave the landscape I love the way lovers love love watch me how I leave I have begun to shake the hours are fleet yet expansive as at death I pack one suitcase the lake plashes and hacks Canada geese subtract their gossip from the field deer evacuate the sumac their rough thick tongues sandpaper the distances they say Don’t look back I leave I look back43

But vigil is also looking directly at the thing in front of you, and refusing to leave it. Even when it isn’t there. Because the poet has in fact left it behind. Or because it got left behind even before he got there. But similar to commentary, which is also a form of love, and which cannot stop speaking to (addressing) the thing that has itself stopped speaking, there is never any leaving anything behind with poetry like this. It keeps calling. Do you want to take this call, or should I?

42 “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer”: Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (1952; repr. New York: Routledge, 2002), 117. 43 Spencer Reece, “v. Coda,” The Clerk’s Tale, 47.


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Eileen A. Joy is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches courses in medieval literature, contemporary fiction, and modern theory. She is the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group (www.babelworkinggroup.org), Co-Editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and has published numerous essays and articles on medieval literature, cultural studies, post/humanism, and ethics.

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PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM AND COMMENTARY FOR

LOVE

David Hancock The following is not a commentary on Plato but a commentary on two readers of Plato, a commentary on commentaries: Leo Strauss’s On Plato’s Symposium,1 a transcription of a series of lectures, and Allan Bloom’s (Strauss’s own student) essay The Ladder of Love.2 For reasons of space this commentary will focus on the speech of Socrates only. Reading the commentaries of the master and student together can produce a third symbiotic commentary that allows the two to work on and feed off and through each other. The commentaries develop love with a double meaning and a double usage. Firstly, it is one part of Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction as the love of one’s own, the love of the city or the state, to love a friend and the opposite, to hate one’s enemies. To kill and be killed by one’s enemies for the love of one’s own. Without this love the human somehow lacks its humanness; Strauss will say that “it is somehow the contention of Plato that the nature of man, in a way, the nature of the whole is Eros” (PS, 10). But the first, political, love is superseded by another, perhaps more than human, love. The experience of Socratic or philosophic Eros goes beyond the mere love of one’s own and will in fact challenge it. The two cannot exist together so philosophy becomes the enemy of the state. The true experience of love, be that of the philosopher or of the lovers, cannot exist within the narrow confines of the love of one’s own; they cannot be constrained. This then is reason for the execution of Socrates and from this, for Strauss, is the reason for commentary. Commentary is not the love of the text. The text is merely the means to practice, to have or be in love. This is done by

1 Leo Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, University of Chicago Press, 2001 (Hereafter abbreviated in the text as PS). 2 Allan Bloom, The Ladder of Love, in, Love and Friendship, Simon and Schuster, 1993 (Hereafter abbreviated in the text as LL).

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means of an erotic hiding, the commentator can hide within the text, between its margins. Hiding allows the commentator to pursue what is his true love without that love or the fruits of that love being seen, but also this hiding is crucial to the existence of the love.

The first part of this paper is focused on the first two chapters of Strauss’s commentary and includes his introductory remarks and his reading of the setting of Plato’s dialogue. The second part is focused on the three chapters that constitute the commentary on the speech of Socrates (chapters nine, ten and eleven of twelve). Bloom’s commentary mirrors Strauss’s in its organization (though is much shorter) and I have used it to complement Strauss’s reading.

* 1. THE SYMPOSIUM – The setting and context of Strauss and Bloom’s commentaries. Referring to chapters one and two of Leo Strauss’s On Plato’s Symposium and Plato, The Symposium, 172a-176e3.)3

I am becoming more and more ‘Platonic’. One should address the few, not the many. One should speak and write as little as possible.4

Strauss’s reading of the Symposium was delivered as a course at the University of Chicago in 1959 but was not published as a book until 2001. The course was twelve weeks in length and each week represents a chapter in the book form. The first week is given over to an introduction to the dialogue and the course; the second is a commentary on the setting of the dialogue and focuses on the events that lead up to the speeches. Each subsequent week was dedicated to each of the nine speeches, apart from that of Socrates for whom three weeks were given. In his introduction, Seth Bernadette tells us that in 1966 when he first read the manuscript Strauss was not entirely happy with it and that only after a second reading did he agree to its publication. As the transcript of a course this book should be considered in a different light to other published texts by Strauss; it

3 Plato, The Symposium, Cambridge University Press, 2008, trans, Howatson, M. C. 4 Extract from a letter written by Alexandre Kojève to Leo Strauss, 30/1/1962. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, University of Chicago Press, 2000, page 308.

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was not written as a book to be published widely but was spoken to students in a classroom. Strauss’s reading here can then be thought of as more private than public, in this sense it will also mirror the conversation in the Symposium, a private dinner party for invited guests and not a public dialogue in the market place. Bloom’s essay The Ladder of Love was dictated by Bloom while he was partially paralyzed in hospital and was only published posthumously in 1993. It thus also mirrors another of the themes of the Symposium: the knowledge of mortality and the human desire for immortality.

Strauss begins his course by situating the Platonic text within the subject matter of political philosophy. For Strauss, the Symposium is a text on (or of) political philosophy. Its subject matter is not, strictly speaking, love. The text will be shown to be a Platonic alternative to positivism, historicism and relativism, the forms of modern thought that, for Strauss, constitute the ‘crisis of modernity’. Plato will show us an alternative to these value free forms of thought. But valuing is not straightforward. He tells us that Plato’s position is similar to that of Nietzsche: we do not possess the truth and neither does society, but philosophy is the love of truth as a quest, as a way of life. Strauss goes on to say that “Plato knew that men cannot live and think without finality of some sort” (PS, 5). This is the political problem for Strauss, the lack of but need for truth. This desire for truth or finality when manifested in the philosophic love of wisdom puts the philosopher in a difficult position regarding the state. Bloom tells us “Eros is connected with pleasure, and this would account for the philosopher’s continuing in his uncompleted quest” (LL, 432). The philosopher’s quest is ultimately about his own pleasure and it is not concerned with moral virtue or the polis. “Eros is pure, ranging free, without benefit of law or teleology. It is for its own sake, not for the city or family” (LL, 436). Eros is presented by Bloom as beyond law as a -instrumental and a purely excessive form; however, it will be shown that although eros tends beyond nomos the former is not entirely separable from the latter and that eros needs nomos. THE STRAUSSIAN COMMENTARY

The form of composition and style of writing has something to do with the political problem. Strauss tells us that “the dialogic character of the Platonic writings has something to do with the particular openness of the Platonic inquiries.” (PS, 5) As we know, Plato does not write in his own voice and it is not enough to simply assume that Socrates is his mouthpiece. This form of writing is a

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choice and this choice will ultimately have something to do with the political tension just introduced. But further than this we should also consider Strauss’s method because he does not write a system of philosophy but writes commentaries on texts. The choice of writing style will have something to do with this political tension. The dialogue lacks an obvious position, for example, we do not know Plato’s true position because he does not make declarative statements in his own voice. Plato’s voice exists within the relationships and tensions between the characters and settings. In Strauss’s work the commentary similarly hides the voice of the writer behind the subject of the commentary. In these methodologies the political is thereby avoided or tunneled under. It is not disturbed but neither does the political come into conflict with the movement of a thought; the mode of writing keeps the political and the erotic separate by a hiding of the erotic. It is worth considering this methodological approach for a moment. In an essay entitled How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws, Strauss focuses on Al Farabi’s retelling the story of the pious ascetic. 5 The pious ascetic one day aroused the hostility of the ruler of his city. The ascetic, fearing for his life, decided to flee but, unfortunately for him, the ruler had already ordered his arrest. The pious ascetic obtained some clothes for a disguise. He dressed up with a cymbal in one hand and started singing, pretending to be drunk. At the city gates the guard asked who he was, “I am that pious ascetic you are looking for” he replied. Thinking that he was only making a joke the guard let him through. The ascetic lied to the guard in deed but not in speech, this is an important distinction, speech and deed are not the same. Strauss tells us that “the story shows, among other things, that one can safely tell a very dangerous truth provided one tells it in the proper surroundings.”6 Farabi is writing a commentary on Plato, the same methodology that Strauss and Bloom employ, he uses “a kind of secretiveness which is mitigated or enhanced by unexpected and unbelievable frankness.” 7 Farabi, who was writing in the tenth century, “may have written the laws, as it were, with a view, to the rise of Islam or of revealed religion generally” and “he may have

5 See also Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, University of Chicago Press, 1988. 6 Leo Strauss, How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws, in What is Political Philosophy, University of Chicago Press 1959, page 136. 7 How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws, page 137.


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desired to ascribe his revised version of Plato’s teaching to the dead Plato in order to protect that version or the sciences generally.” 8 Strauss thinks that Farabi’s Plato is not, as is often said, a neo-Platonic one but a protected one, he willfully misread Plato in order to protect the teaching, he told the truth but we have to understand the context; the struggle here was between Platonic and Islamic law. “Not everything Farabi says in characterizing the content of Platonic dialogues is meant to be borne out by the text of Platonic dialogues.”9 The method of commentary is used to change the surroundings of a teaching; a commentary can willfully misread a text to produce a subtle new reading. There are two reasons presented here as to why one would do this. The first is to protect oneself, if the teaching in question is dangerous to the rulers of the city; the second is to protect the teachings themselves “lest they lose their character or be misused.”10 Both of these themes are brought up here regarding the Symposium.

This is part of what Strauss calls a ‘forgotten kind of writing’ or the ‘art of writing’.11 Philosophy and science in their quest for ‘truth’ tend to undermine the common opinion of the particular society and this produces a need for this art of writing. Strauss’s critique of what he calls ‘modern social science’ is that it fails to see the tension between the “requirements of social science . . . and the requirements of society.”12 Such a misunderstanding would lead to what Irving Kristol would call the ‘adversary intellectual’, the radicalized college graduate that appeared in large numbers during and after the 1960s, whose education puts him at odds with the culture that he lives in.13 For Strauss, Bloom and Kristol (who I take here as paradigmatic of neo-conservatism), this adversarial nature is damaging to society, the protection of which is the root of their conservatism.

To protect himself and also society the philosopher should engage in ‘political philosophy’, and Strauss has a particular meaning here: “the adjective ‘political’ in the expression ‘political philosophy’

8 How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws, page 144. 9 How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws, page 154. 10 How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws, page 136. 11 See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing and also Irving Kristol’s review, The Philosopher’s Hidden Truth, in Commentary, October 1952. 12 Leo Strauss, On a Forgotten Kind of Writing in What is Political Philosophy, University of Chicago Press 1959, page 222. 13 Irving Kristol, The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals, in Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, The Free Press, 1995, page 106.

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designates not so much a subject matter as a manner of treatment.”14 The philosopher must think politically, in the ways mentioned above, to ensure the safety of his teaching and himself – in this then both Strauss and Bloom are privileging the particular teaching, ‘it’ must be defended. The philosopher should be aware of or at least consider the affects of a teaching on the particular society within which it occurs. Strauss’s teaching here, as a conservative, is one of caution because of the complex and unknown nature of those effects; this caution produces an aversion to any form of political radicalism. PHILOSOPHY AND THE POLITICAL

Strauss will frame his reading as an encounter between philosophy and poetry, in particular between Socrates and Aristophanes. The philosopher, Strauss says, is “blind to the context within which philosophy exists, namely political life” (PS, 6). The philosopher is unable to communicate the philosophic teaching to the non-philosopher. This, at least, is Socrates as he appears in Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds. Poetry on the other hand manages to “integrate purely theoretical wisdom into a human context.” Poetry has a political understanding that philosophy lacks, but what is meant by political here? “What is the core of the political? Men killing men on the largest scale in broad daylight and with the greatest serenity” (PS, 8). In this formulation, of happily killing and being killed, we can discern an echo of Strauss’s earlier work on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.15 Ultimately, for something to be constituted as political, it must entail the friend/enemy distinction. It seems that philosophy is unable to produce the political and that this is a problem for it in its relationship with the polis. Poetry, on the other hand, is superior because it can produce the enemy and thus the political society.

Ultimately the political is constituted by the regime and its way of life, the habits and actions of the particular society. In other words, the values of the given regime produce the political and the particular enemy. We can see here why philosophy, as understood here, has a problem, because its subject is a truth that it knows that it cannot know; this is unlike science which does make some claim to truth.

14 Leo Strauss, On Classical Political Philosophy, in What is Political Philosophy, University of Chicago Press 1959, page 93. 15 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, The University of Chicago Press, 1996. This edition also contains Strauss’s commentary on the original Schmitt text.


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Philosophy is is unable to produce the values that are needed to sustain a political order because of this lack of certainty. Though we must note here that Strauss has already told us that Plato is the alternative to this problem, Plato’s philosophy will not have the problems that Socrates’s philosophy had. Thymos (anger/spiritedness) is the political passion, it “is essential for constituting the polis and is, in a way, most characteristic of the polis” (PS, 9). Thymos is opposed to what will be the subject of the Symposium, eros, Strauss tells us that if thymos is the political, eros is the non–political. It is this distinction that causes the tension. To understand the political an understanding of the non-political must also be developed, this is how the Symposium relates to the Republic as it is the other side of that dialogue. In some sense the non-political is the natural, “there may be something natural which transcends the political in dignity and which gives politics its guidance” (PS, 10). So the non-political is not the same as the pre-political or the Hobbesian state of nature, though this is a part of it. It is better thought of as beyond the political, a space un-constrained by thoughts of the political.

The Symposium is a private dialogue, this is opposed to the public dialogue of the Republic, and there is also talk of drinking wine. For Strauss, the wine drinking is relevant because alcohol is synonymous with frankness, the discussion will be open and the speakers will be able to take risks. They would not say the same things in public. For Bloom it “helps them leap over the chasm separating nomos and physis” (LL, 441).

As part of the contextualization of his reading Strauss now moves on to what he calls ‘noble dissimulation’. This has been a controversial concept for some recent readings of Strauss, particularly in more populist texts, being both banal – ‘Strauss says that politicians should lie to us’ as if this is some sort of revelation – and conspiratorial: ‘Strauss says that politicians should lie to us’.

By noble dissimulation he is really talking about irony, that is, moderation (a key Straussian concept) in speech and in writing. Here he gives an innocent interpretation of irony, “A man conceals his superiority out of politeness” (PS, 34). He should conceal his truth to protect the opinions of others which gives this a political edge. Opinion is what produces value, so in a certain sense, noble dissimulation teaches that one should be careful about trashing opinion because of the unknown social consequences that it could cause. The centre of Strauss’s conservatism is a fear of or wariness about radical political discourse in public. But as we have just said,

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the Symposium is a private conversation, though it is of course also retold as a written dialogue. Similarly Strauss’s text is a private conversation, a class, edited into a book. In both cases we are reading a private conversation that has been made public. The erotic discourse is not precluded but hidden by being private (at a symposium or a seminar) but this is disrupted when that private discourse is made public. However, the seminar is never a wholly private space and this is especially the case for Strauss who seems to have allowed a large amount of his seminars to be recorded (these are now being published by the University of Chicago’s Leo Strauss Centre). The teacher who is conscious of these considerations will stand back from that which is being taught and hide him or herself in the same way that the author of a commentary will.

Noble dissimulation also has a less than noble side. Irony, when it is found out, becomes insolent and offensive because people do not appreciate being taken for fools. “Strictly speaking, crimes against justice are punished only… when one is caught, when they are noticed” (PS, 34). The problems caused when it is discovered is the difficulty with noble dissimulation. To illustrate this point Strauss uses the example of tax evasion which he seems to be saying is only unjust if it is discovered, up until that point it is not unjust. This would be the same idea of justice as that of Thrasymachus in the Republic, that we are justified in doing as we please as long as we are seen to be just. There is dissimulation here but we can hardly call it noble, and it is this aspect of Strauss’s work that has led to the controversial/paranoid reading. However, we may point out that both Strauss and Bloom’s reading of Plato states that that what is revealed are political things and so not values, this form of ignoble dissimulation is just one of these ‘political things’.16

The dialogue that we hear in the Symposium is a retelling of speeches that had taken place a few years earlier, reckoned by Strauss to be 415 BC. The events took place on the eve of the Sicilian expedition, at the height of Athenian power; however, the Sicilian expedition was a disaster and led to the decline of that power. The retelling (404 BC) is during Athens period of decline but, Bloom points out that this period is also the period of the birth of philosophic dominance in Athens. “If philosophy did not destroy

16 See Strauss’s commentary on the Republic in, The City and Man, University of Chicago Press, 1978 and also Bloom’s commentary at the end of his translation in The Republic of Plato, basic books, 1968.


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Athenian culture, it prospered in its demise” (LL, 447). Socrates was executed in 399 BC and Bloom is suggesting that the Symposium has something to tell us about this and the relationship between philosophy (as the highest form of eros) and political power.

The events are retold by Appolodorus, described by Bloom as a groupie of Socrates, a ‘mediocrity’. Appolodorus listens to what Socrates has to say and then retells this to anyone who will listen for his own aggrandizement. “There is a danger that the pupil’s imprudence, partly connected with preening himself with this special learning will attract undue and hostile attention to that teaching” (LL, 448). The implication is that a teacher should practice an element of self protection because “among Rousseau’s pupils is not only Goethe but also Robespierre” (LL, 448), the same goes for Nietzsche and of course for Socrates who was accused of corrupting the young; here we have one of the reasons behind Strauss’s ‘art of writing’. The implication of this is that both Strauss and Bloom practice writing and teaching in this way, indeed, this is one of the accusations against them. Critics often point out that Strauss and Bloom taught many neoconservatives, we are perhaps left to wonder if we should consider them as either good students like Plato or Xenophon, tyrants like Critias, political disasters like Alcibiades or mediocrities like Apollodorus. An example of this use of a teaching would be an echo of what was mentioned earlier about ‘thinking politically’. Irving Kristol, who was impressed by Strauss’s work and the doctrine of the art of writing, chastised US oil companies during the 1970’s oil shock for not ‘thinking politically’. 17 The oil companies did not act to alleviate high prices for customers but did make record profits for themselves. Kristol was worried that not thinking politically here reveals the capitalist system as deeply unjust thus endangering the viability of the system;18 we could say exactly the same about bankers today. However, in this instance, if oil companies had tried to appear more just by lowering prices they would also actively have been more just. The question here is whether we think that this is a noble or ignoble use of a teaching, in his recommendations to big business is Kristol misusing Strauss? If so the Straussian project seems to be a failure because the private teaching now seems to be public and being

17 Irving Kristol, The Philosopher’s Hidden Truth, in, Commentary, October 1952. 18 Irving Kristol, The Corporate Dinosaur, Wall Street Journal (February 14, 1974) cited in Mark Gerson, The Neo Conservative Vision, Madison Books, 1996.

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used to advise oil companies. Or, is this the teaching? Is this just the correct understanding of ‘political things’ in a way that Thrasymachus would see? 2. THE SPEECH OF SOCRATES Part one: Between wisdom and ignorance – referring to chapter nine of Leo Strauss’s On Plato’s Symposium and Plato, The Symposium, 198a – 204c619 Strauss’s commentary on Socrates’ speech in praise of eros begins by telling us that “praise cannot possibly be true” (PS, 176), it is selective in its telling in that it will overlook that which is not praiseworthy.

Strauss reiterates the political tension between love of one’s own and love of the beautiful, “the love of one’s own leads to ideology; the love of the beautiful leads to the truth. If the fundamental fact is love of one’s own, one absolutizes one’s own and one seeks reasons for it. This is ideology . . . where as love of truth is not primarily concerned with one’s own” (PS, 183). This seems to be understood in part as the conflict between poetry and philosophy and encapsulates the political problem for philosophy that was mentioned above.

Socrates does not make a speech himself, instead he retells a speech that was given to him by Diotima, Bloom states clearly that she is “a made up person” (LL, 501). Diotima is a device for Socrates to describe his transition from a pre-Socratic into a Socratic philosopher. The pre-Socratic Socrates is the one that Aristophanes describes in the Clouds, this Socrates was a natural scientist and un-erotic. This is linked to his Delphic quest and his (claimed) knowledge of his own ignorance, “Eros is awareness or knowledge of a lack and therefore is linked to the knowledge of ignorance, which is obviously a kind of ignorance” (LL, 502). Diotima introduces to Socrates the idea that between ignorance and wisdom lies what she calls ‘correct opinion’ (PS, 187). Correct opinion is an opinion (so not knowledge) that is true, however, the possessor of the opinion is not aware as to why it is true; and so cannot explain it. This theme is taken up again when we get the suggestion that wisdom is the end of

19 Strauss divides the speech of Socrates in to three distinct sections and dedicated one class to each section. I have followed his schema here and deal with each of his sections individually.


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philosophy but that the ignorant are satisfied. 20 However, the philosopher is not wise, though neither is he ignorant, even though he may claim to be. Philosophy is in-between wisdom and ignorance, but so is correct opinion, so are we to assume that these two seemingly different things are the same? In a sense Strauss seems to think that they are, “A man who has right opinion on everything can exist only by virtue of some philosophizing and, on the other hand, the philosopher who is truly a philosopher is the one who starts from right opinions and does not throw out the right opinions” (PS, 195). It is in this sense that Diotima says that the god Eros is a philosopher because eros is not the thing that is loved; it is not the beloved but the lover (PS, 186). The god Eros loves the beautiful, so at this point philosophy appears as love of the beautiful. This is how philosophy and right opinion differ, the former loves the beautiful in itself but the latter does not, though it may love a particular instance of the beautiful. Part two: Love of the good – referring to chapter ten of Leo Strauss’s On Plato’s Symposium and Plato, The Symposium, 204c7-207a6. Diotima changes the subject from the beautiful to the good, Strauss notes that “this implies one crucial thing: that the good is not identical with the beautiful”. Diotima tells Socrates that possession of good things seems to make men happy. Happiness seems to be the end of man, this for Strauss is an example of right opinion, it is not presented as knowledge because of the use of ‘seems’. What is left unsaid, at this point, is exactly what happiness is (PS, 200).

Strauss tells us that “happiness is a state of contentedness, you want nothing further, and at the same time an enviable state. Because a moron, for example, might be perfectly content but we would no longer say that he is happy” (PS, 200). In this formulation happiness appears as the happiness of the last men, wanting nothing more, and this state is first called enviable and then moronic. The ‘moron’ is enviable because he is content and so the implication is that the non-‘moron’ will not be content and so not happy

“Eros is desire for happiness” (PS, 201). The difficultly here is that, as Strauss says, not all men are lovers because the content

20 This sentiment echoes Strauss’s correspondence with Alexandre Kojève where Strauss expresses his horror at the thought of the last men. See Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, University of Chicago Press, 2000, page 236 – 8.

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person is not erotic (and eros is the lover). The content moron would not be a lover, but he is happy; also, “Men who seek their happiness in wealth, or in strength, or in wisdom are not called lovers; but they are lovers because they seek their own happiness” (PS, 201). This problem is solved when considering some forms of happiness as base, for example wealth; moronic happiness would, I assume, also be base, if, for whatever reason the moron stopped being content he would desire happiness. Those who aren’t content are lovers and Bloom points out a distinction within the objects of love, (as the good), “external goods, goods of the body and goods of the soul” (LL, 508); objects, bodily satisfaction or soulful satisfaction.

But before they loved the good, Bloom continues, men loved their own. He is describing a conflict between the good and one’s own, where the good exists beyond the polis. This is the problem with Socrates, he urges men to break with their own in favor of the good. To pursue the good you would have to give up your city, and this is what Socrates appears to do, “He lives in Athens but is not really of it, he is married and has children but pays little attention to them” (LL, 508), earlier Bloom had called Socrates a bohemian, now he says that he must “appear monstrous to the decent people who love their own” (LL, 509). Socrates is here described as the inverse of the pious ascetic; he is honest in deed because he stays in Athens even when his speech causes him trouble.21 Willingness to abandon one’s own is here depicted as a characteristic of philosophy, “Erotic men seem to have some of this willingness too, but only if their eros does not collapse into a defense of their own” (LL, 509). Eros is here described as collapsing into the thymotic, making the thymotic simply a base form of the erotic. Eros now appears as beyond but also protector of the city. Socrates can tempt men away from their own through their love of the good, but men also want good cities and laws, “Man’s divided loyalties lead to intolerable conflict and much mythmaking” (LL, 509); so the city and law are dependent upon myth. Philosophy (in the guise of Socrates) poses a question to myth and therefore to the polis, however, philosophy also requires good cities and laws to make possible the life of the philosopher (the erotic life).

21 Strauss and Bloom’s reading of the death of Socrates is that he chose execution by purposely angering the jury and then refusing a chance to escape.


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The definition of eros is next moved on to “the sempiternal possession by oneself of the good.” (PS, 204) This addition explains the meaning of happiness as including an element of self-love and eternality. Diotima says of eros, “in what manner and in what action would the zeal and intensity of those who pursue it be called eros?” (PS, 204) 22 There are different intensities of eros and we might assume that this intensity is related to the baseness or not of the happiness.23

In Strauss’s reading of Diotima’s speech, love is the sempiternal possession of the good by oneself, so where does sexual love fit here? Giving birth is directed to the possession of the good because the eternality of it relates to the immortality of the self which means that “eros implies the transcending of death” (PS, 208). Having children is a way to immortality and this is the love of one’s own, this is related to the immortality of the species. However, this does not take into account the city, “the political society is, of course, always a closed society. By a closed society I mean one which does not include the human race. The universal society would be, strictly speaking, the community of all human beings. The polis is never that. The polis is always some men’s own, even if there are 170 million” (PS, 209). Strauss was always opposed to ideas of the universal state,24 though not because it would be impossible but because (in the Schmittian sense) it would be neutralised and depoliticized.25 Strauss is repulsed by the idea of the end of history.26 The retention of the political and therefore the polis is an ever present theme in his work. We have here a seemingly implicit reference to the United States with 170 million being roughly the population in 1959. Eros has to be fashioned into the desire for the immortality of the particular state, and in this instance that state is the US.

Bloom makes another point regarding the love of one’s own: “today, one’s children are with difficulty conceived of as our own . . . This throws us back much more on our isolated selves” (LL, 513).

22Plato, Symposium, 206b1-4. 23 Intensity is also related to Schmitt’s concept of the political where the political is of different degrees of intensity, see also Heinrich Meier, trans. Harvey J. Lomax, The Hidden Dialogue, University of Chicago Press, 1995. 24 See Kojève/Strauss correspondence in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny. 25 See Schmitt, Carl, The Age of Neutralisations and Depoliticizations (1929), trans. Matthias Konzett and John P. McCormick, Telos 96, Summer 1993. 26 See Kojève correspondence.

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The corruption of the young (that which Socrates was also accused of) poses an existential problem to the parents/city. Children, Bloom is saying, no longer follow traditions so the desire for immortality that here manifests itself in offspring is disappointed. Children no longer live up to what is expected of them and Bloom’s implication is that Socrates’s bohemianism has something to do with this. 27 It is Socrates’s public love of wisdom and all that this entails that is the cause of the ‘moral decline’. It is not the love as such but its public nature and the possibility of a misinterpretation of the teaching by those who hear it. GEORGES BATAILLE AND PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LOVE

An interesting and worthwhile counterpoint to this Straussean understanding of love would be that of Georges Bataille.28 Love, for Bataille, is a manifestation of the excess, “the precondition for its appearance was given in the relative abundance of resources.”29 It transcends the useful in society but for this to happen there must first be abundance, it is beyond but also reliant upon what is useful. He makes a distinction between types of love, the procreating, universal, animal love and love as excess “this love necessarily had a sense of transgression opposing it to animal sexuality.” 30 This transgression goes beyond the animal, “lovers tend to negate the social order,” it goes beyond the state because “if we love a woman nothing is further from the image of our beloved than the image of society or, a fortiori, of the state.”31 The state is not loved by the lover of something else, but the state wants to be loved, it needs your love it wants sacrifice (ultimately on the battlefield). But also on a more mundane level “the state cannot in any way use up that part of ourselves that comes into play in eroticism or in individual love.”32 Lovers are not productive

27 We can see here Bloom’s closeness to the neo conservative critique of the US, see, for example Midge Decter, A Letter to the Young (and to their parents) in Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neo-conservative Reader, Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1996; Norman Podhoretz, Ex Friends, The Free Press, 1999, page 48. 28 Kojève worked with Bataille to get Strauss published in French in the journal Critique, see the Kojève/Correspondence in On Tyranny. 29 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume Two, trans. Robert Hurley, Zone Books, 1999, page 158. 30 The Accursed Share Volume Two, Page 159. 31 The Accursed Share Volume Two, Page 160. 32 The Accursed Share Volume Two, Page 160.


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for the state (unless their love drives them to fight for it), the excessive nature of love has no interest in anything beyond because “the beloved object is for the lover the substitute for the universe.”33 The only object of love that is in any way useful for the state is the state itself as this love can be channeled as a political love. However, for the lovers there is no interest in productivity, “theirs is a society of consumption, as against the state, which is a society of acquisition.”34

The society of consumption can be recuperated into in the society of acquisition via the married couple, where the lovers seek the recognition of others. Family and children are the stabilization of the lovers. Children are a pure field of consumption but the parents (the ex lovers) are now bound to acquisition. The pure eros of the lovers is transformed into the desire for immortality through procreation. We can see then why, for the neo-conservatives, marriage is the epitome of bourgeois value and because of this basis of the society and the state.35 But, Bataille says, “let us assume that the union is stabilized, at least in appearance. The sexual play of the lovers has reproduction and growth of a family as its effect, if not as its purpose.” 36 In marriage eros does not disappear but becomes private, the excessiveness of it is subsumed under the public appearance; remember that Socrates was both married and had children. Absolute excess ultimately leads to extinction and Bataille seems to be acknowledging that at some point, at least in public, it needs to be curbed if only for the survival of itself as excess; paradoxically it requires the abundance of the acquisitive society for it to be. The lovers who ignore the social and refuse to be, in some part, acquisitive will eventually fade, die and leave nothing behind. The lovers need to settle and appear to ‘live happily ever after’, satisfied. Part three: Eros and immortality – referring to chapter eleven of Leo Strauss’s On Plato’s Symposium and Plato, The Symposium, 207a6 – 212c3

33 The Accursed Share Volume Two, Page 161. 34 The Accursed Share Volume Two, Page 163. 35 For example, see Irving Kristol, Life Without Father in Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, or George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty, Basic Books, 1981, pages 68-69. Gilder is of particular relevance here because as Jean-Joseph Goux points out both he and Bataille situate themselves on the same terrain, via the notion of the Gift, see Jean-Joseph Goux, General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism in Bataille: a Critical Reader edited by Botting, Fred and Wilson, Scott, Blackwell, 1998. 36 The Accursed Share Volume Two, page 163.

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Desire for immortality now takes precedence, “eros is neither love of one’s own . . . nor is it love of the beautiful” (PS, 217). Procreation is directed toward immortality but these other two elements will remain and are still manifestations of eros. Directly after this we are told that “by denying that eros is eros of one’s own and that eros is love of the beautiful, one is led to the rejection of the gods . . . The gods are created through poets by love of the beautiful on the one hand . . . and by eros of one’s own on the other” (PS, 217). The gods are created by the poets and produce love of one’s own, they bind the polis together as polis, and a true understanding of eros is going to reveal a political problem to this construction.

Diotima now goes on to the last part of her speech, she considers ‘the brutes’ which is a way of avoiding consideration of calculation because “eros, in the case of man, is not based on calculation” (PS, 218); eros lacks any form of utility. So, in this sense it is different from the above description of poetry which did seem to have a use value in that it produces love of one’s own and therefore the polis.

The desire for children to assist in old age is here rejected as this would imply a calculation, Strauss now refers to it as an instinct, and this form of eros is seen by Diotima as ‘common to all animals’. Sexual union and care of offspring (this latter point is here introduced for the first time) are that which is common, but this second element is not strictly correct. All animals do not care for their offspring, in some cases this is a specifically female role if it is done at all, even if we consider caring for the young in the most minimal sense.37

“The calculating man never forgets himself. The madman, mad for good or ill, forgets himself. This self forgetting can merely be low, but it can also be higher than any calculation. In eros, then, there is a complete forgetting of oneself, a complete forgetting of one’s own.” (PS, 218) So, eros is akin to madness. We can also add that there can be combinations here between high and low eros, different intensities; forgetting of oneself for one’s own as in a sacrifice for the city; forgetting of one’s own for oneself as in a selfish action where one

37 This point about parental care is interesting if we consider it along side neo conservative discourses of the family and its demise in liberal society, there seems to be a connection between eros, the polis and parental care. – for example, see Irving Kristol, Reflections on Love and Family, in Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.


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profits from the city; and forgetting or a rejection of both, which is here positioned as the higher form of eros.

Added to the above is “that the parents are willing to die for their offspring” (PS, 219) and again this is hardly universal, the minimum that we can say is that parents protect their offspring when they are young and then in many cases abandon them. But the good polis would not abandon its children and would instead care for and educate them, though this extra care now seems to be unnatural and to have something to do with values. Love of one’s own (in the sense of offspring) is being given a higher status than it seems to deserve. This difficulty is expanded if we consider it along side love of one’s own (as in the polis), the polis needs the people to be willing to die for it but it seems that this is not entirely natural from the point of view of calculation or non-calculating eros. However, it also clear that self sacrifice for community is common and that it is related to eros. So, “every mortal being honors its own offspring. That means love of immortality, as discussed in this subsection, is love of one’s own . . . Love of one’s own, which is in many ways silly, is nevertheless a phenomenon of human nature” (PS, 222).

This last section of Diotima’s speech is separated by Strauss into three subsections. The second subsection is about ambition which “is concerned with immortal fame for virtue” (PS, 224). Virtue here is considered as a means to an end, the end of immortal fame. Strauss tells us that the eros here is ‘eros of one’s own’ and self-sacrifice for honour, but it also seems that this eros of one’s own is acting as a means, love of own is a means to immortal fame. So it would be more accurate to talk about merely the appearance of love of own for the means gaining immortal fame. It is only necessary for others to believe in your sacrifice; what is at stake here is self love. This is the sort of love of honor that is, in the Republic, associated with thymos.

“Love of one’s own, self love, inspires indeed all human action” (PS, 225). This is then specifically human, we can no longer say that it is common to all animals, but it also contains elements of the love of one’s offspring, it must be generated from that instinct. This second part of love of immortality regards “prudence and other virtues” (PS, 225) and “to this class belong the poets and the inventor craftsmen” (PS, 225). Ultimately, though, it regards the production of virtue and virtue is “the production of the most beautiful prudence, namely political prudence, the prudence of the statesman. This immortality is the preserve above all else, of the good poets, who are immortal in their works” (PS, 229). The poets educate the statesmen

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into political prudence, i.e. moderation and justice but also nobleness. Bloom adds to this the teacher, who “as opposed to the lawgiver, can actually propagate himself, and not just a distorted image of himself. In this way teaching is more erotic than lawgiving or poetry” (LL, 516). The difficulty here is that, as has already been pointed out, the teacher may not be understood and could produce the mediocrities or the tyrants, the teacher can propagate himself fully only in very rare circumstances (when he is understood); propagation into a mediocrity or a tyrant is not an actual propagation. All three, teacher, statesman and poet teach, though only the teacher teaches as an end in-itself the other two seem to teach as a means to an end; however, we can also say that all three teach because of a desire for immortality.

The subject of the final subsection is the highest form of eros and Diotima will see if she can make Socrates understand this strange phenomena. She introduces the love of the ‘beautiful sciences’ (by which she means maths), these are higher than the ‘beautiful pursuits’ because they are not necessary, “the sciences are beautiful in themselves” (PS, 231) because of their order; they are objects of contemplation. Strauss sees five stages in this final section; love of the body; love of all bodies; love of the beautiful pursuits and laws; love of the beautiful sciences; and finally love of the beautiful in itself. This last stage seems to lose the object, it is the ‘simply beautiful’. This last part of Diotima’s speech, Bloom tells us, presents a description of the philosophic experience, “the splendid vision she presents is intended to make one believe that the philosophic life is the most erotic life” (LL, 518). This comment relates to something said in his introduction, that the Symposium forces the speakers to “gives speeches praising the brute acts they perform” (LL, 433). This is Socrates’s justification of himself; he is defending philosophy and the philosophic life, which is here presented as the erotic life, against its accusers.

But, “The beautiful itself is the good” (PS, 238), what does this mean? The good is higher than the beautiful but “in this final presentation the beautiful is substituted for the good” (PS, 238). This substitution is connected with what Strauss says is the ‘poetic presentation of philosophy’ that Diotima is giving to Socrates. This presentation of philosophy is not a philosophic but a poetic one, how does poetry differ from philosophy? Poetry creates the gods which helps to produce political prudence, it creates the values of the polis. Poetry might, strictly speaking, be philosophically true, but merely ‘right opinion’. Diotima is giving a quasi mystical account of the


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philosophic experience and the philosophic way of life where the object of contemplation is the unspeakable.

Eros is eros of the good, including love of the beautiful and love of one’s own. So, “eros of the good is love for my well-being, my own perfection” and “If a man loves what is most his own, namely his soul, he loves the truth, the good” (PS, 242). Eros is again formulated as self love and as the desire for my own perfection via the philosophic life.

The political problem is further explained by returning to the poets. The poets love their own immortality not the beautiful itself because the beautiful is, for them, only a means to immortality. “But what is the beautiful? It is moral virtue and, in the highest case, political prudence, ultimately the polis” (PS, 242). Moral virtue and the polis are means to an end for the immortality of poets and statesmen and this is granted by their public (political) role. Those who inhabit the polis are “an arbitrary selection from the natural whole . . . There is no natural inclination comparable to procreation which is directed toward the polis as polis. There is no natural inclination toward moral virtue and the polis” (PS, 242). Love of the polis, love of one’s own (as in one’s fellow citizens) has to be created and it is created by poets and statesmen. Crucially, moral virtue is included here, there is no natural moral virtue; it has to be created. The ‘truth’ then as the highest form of eros of the good goes beyond moral virtue and therefore the state as well.

The Symposium transcends the love of one’s own, “Eros is homeless” (PS, 243), it is beyond the polis, but it also seems clear that although it is beyond the polis it is also reliant upon it; for the non-political to appear there must first be the political. The non-political is parasitic on the political with the political being merely a means for the practice of the non-political. But because of the threat that it poses to the political it is prudent that the erotic non-political remains hidden, just as the writer remains hidden in a commentary on a given text. Strauss points out that thymos is not mentioned in the Symposium because it is absent from eros, in particular it is not present in the highest forms of eros, so, may we assume that it is present in the lower? Thymos is present in love of own, love of polis and moral virtue rely upon thymos. Love of polis needs the thymotic to produce the anger and distinction that go into the production of the enemy, Strauss will say, in almost a repetition of an earlier statement “all that is we call interesting in human beings is in the sphere of thymos” (PS, 244), thymos is the creative element of the polis; it is the polis. In a

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reversal of the taming of Thrasymachus (thymos incarnate) by Socrates (eros incarnate) in the Republic, thymos tames eros into the polis (as we also saw in Bataille) through culture, which here appears as poetry; it is making productive of the excess. Strauss tells us that philosophy is a form of eros and that it lacks thymos, “Indignation has no place in philosophy” as it is directed toward the good, but, “In its utterances or in its teaching, this is another matter” (PS, 243). Once again we see the emphasis on the need for the political in the public teaching; the spoken teaching is not the same as the private experience.

Eros is necessarily incomplete, it lacks that which it is eros of; immortality is still the impossible for the philosopher. But Bloom tells that this is where philosophy can understand the human situation as “mortality longing for immortality” (LL, 523). This pessimistic construction is here presented as philosophy’s empty teaching, as it is the abandonment of eros as a rejection of action. Socrates is dangerous because he is not capable of producing a teaching on which political action can be based, for example, it will not give rise to the Schmittian decision. Without the political decision the polis would cease to function, it would be impossible for it to function or even be founded. “Above all, it (eros) provides the energy for flying out beyond nomos” (LL, 524). The highest form of eros is the end of law.

Strauss ends the commentary on Socrates’s speech with a discussion on writing. Poetry and philosophy are related in that they both share the same subject but that poetry takes it only as a means. For Socrates “his eros was only directed at the beautiful, not toward immortality” (PS, 246) Socrates had, in a sense, negated death so he had no need to write; the highest form of eros abandons itself. But Plato wrote (as did Strauss), the answer for Strauss is that Socrates could not write.

“I must again pay homage to that great man . . . al-Farabi, who asserted that Plato’s great achievement beyond Socrates was that he was able to combine the way of Socrates, by which you can teach, dialectically, nice people, with the way of Thrasymachus, by which you can persuade non-docile people who must be frightened and terrified. Socrates did not write because he could not write, more precisely, because he could not write on the highest level” (PS, 247).

The highest form of writing combines philosophy and poetry, it speaks to different people at the same time; this is Strauss’s art of writing. Socrates was guilty of corrupting the young and denying the


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gods because he was seen to do so. Strauss goes on to say that he lacked thymos (as he was a philosopher) but that Plato did not. Writing and teaching, we can now infer, both need the thymotic element because it is public. Plato, living in Athens after the death of Socrates, chose to hide philosophy (and eros) from the market place both in his academy and in his written dialogues. WRITING AND HIDING

The commentary is a method of writing that allows the author a space behind the text where thought can exist without interference. Love, in its authentic sense is not love of one’s own but the completion and abandonment of one’s own self; it rejects the desire for immortality and regains the natural intimacy that is lost in political society.38 The highest form of eros, as the non-political, both is and is beyond the natural – it has to go beyond in order to return to itself and in its purest form, for example, Socrates or Bataille’s lovers, it pays no heed to the political.

Because love, as love of the beautiful, is split between that of the lovers and the love of wisdom, it should pretend to be not quite what it is. So, for Bataille, the secrecy of the lovers is maintained by a marriage. But this is only the appearance of a relationship of accumulation over the initial form of pure expenditure. Likewise for the Straussian reading of Plato, Socrates’s demise was his failure to be political in word. Socrates’s Delphic quest, the outcome of the love of wisdom fundamentally questioned the society he lived in. By not accepting that he was wise because of the philosophic acceptance of a lack of truth, Socrates questioned the proclamation of the Delphic oracle regarding himself as the wisest man in Greece, and so Socrates challenges the legitimacy of the gods and political power in Athens.39

Strauss follows the Platonic style in his writing, but whereas Plato hides within a dialogue Strauss and Bloom hide within commentary. The highest form of eros now appears as the impossible, it is impossible because it cannot be sustained either by the lovers or as the individual lover of wisdom because it necessarily conflicts with political order. But, at least for Bataille, “clandestinity is not at all necessary to individual love, but it often increases the

38 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, Zone Books, 1992, trans. Robert Hurley. 39 Impiety was one of the charges against Socrates.

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intensity of feelings.”40 This very secrecy has an allure in itself, the very fact that it is not known outside of itself feeds and sustains it as transgression which is the outcome of eros. In the same way as justice is the appearance of justice (and for Thrasymachus the appearance is simply a cover for doing whatever one pleases) the art of writing is the appearance of conformity. Thought, when unbounded, always tends toward transgression. Political philosophy, as exemplified by Strauss’s Plato, is aware of the tension between the un-boundedness of thought and the necessarily bounded nature of political society. With this in mind the political philosopher acts (by writing and hiding) accordingly. David Hancock is a member of the London Graduate School, Kingston University. He is currently working on Leo Strauss & the cultural politics of Neoconservatism.

40 The Accursed Share Volume Two, page 157.


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DREAMING DEATH: THE ONANISTIC AND SELF-ANNIHILATIVE PRINCIPLES OF LOVE IN

FERNANDO PESSOA’S BOOK OF DISQUIET

Gary J. Shipley

Love […] opposes itself to identification (to knowledge) of the object, which is to say that its object is necessarily charged with a heterogeneous character (analogous to the character of the blinding sun, excrements, gold, sacred things).

Georges Bataille1 INTRODUCTION: A BAPTISMAL SLEW

Fernando Pessoa had many heads, seventy or more, but was essentially just an empty space behind a diverse drama of literary men: poets, essayists, prose writers, translators, philosophers, critics, etc. Pessoa’s orthonymic head – itself shredded into various personalities and roles – together with the predominant heteronymic Ghidorah of Alberto Caeiro (philosopher shepherd), Ricardo Reis (doctor and classicist) and Álvaro de Campos (naval engineer and excursionist) formed the drama’s core poetic Svetovid. The fictional actors working Pessoa’s unique literary universe ranged from mere characters and pseudonyms through to a nucleus of fully-fledged heteronyms, a status derived from the expansion of pseudonyms into autonomous human perspectives, each with its own distinctive literary style and personal history. It is for this reason that Bernando Soares, so clearly confluent with Pessoa-himself, did not have a head of his own,2 and why Pessoa (“person” in Portuguese, a fact which acted like a goad to the endlessly partible referent, who continually

1 Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. 2, (Ed. Denis Hollier) 141. 2 Even his vocation and place of residence is appropriated from the vacated heteronym Vicente Guedes.

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failed to reveal the unity that such a term implies) had no choice but to label him a semi-heteronym, for the two were not merely anent but overlapping. It was possible, and proved no real wrench, for Pessoa to have a hand in the deaths of Caeiro and the Baron of Teive, to see their deaths from a safe distance – the first from TB, the second from suicide. But this was not the case with Soares, for he, unlike the Baron, was made for the inherent incompleteness and open-endedness of The Book of Disquiet, and so would be there till the end, slowly accumulating himself in a trunk. In order to kill Soares, Pessoa would have had to commit a partial suicide. Partial, for there were differences and lacunas, or “mutilations” as Pessoa liked to call them – mutilations that make Pessoa’s fragmentary and displaced autobiography a portrait of the troubled emergence of the author who was to eventually write it. Soares, by far the more sombre of the two, has a personality that, while constructed in part from Pessoa’s life (and those convoluted mechanisms for contextualizing the various subtleties and inscrutabilities of his literary existence), is far more prone to indulge in the far reaches of societal disengagement, and it is this increased detachment that allows Soares to restyle Pessoa’s heteronymic territories into the elaborate displacements of some root futility. The book’s slow conception was itself entropic: a rag-bag personage becoming increasingly disorganized the more inclusive it became, for Soares, like Pessoa, is not a single voice but many, a proto-person essentially erased by his own diversity, a stand-in for the undermined multitude, the many-headed void, the entity both made and unmade by its own (un)self-induced polycephaly. It could be argued, then, that rather than being a mutilation of Pessoa, Soares is in many ways a true reflection of the distortion Pessoa had undergone, more a reflected distortion than a distorted reflection, a reflection of what Pessoa had done to himself in order to exist at all, to exist in Soares. Soares is the mirror-image of the reality of the book he’s to author – another false face for the many, a mangled perpetrator of a mangled creation, a mutilation of collectivity, a rimose fabrication. The book is the whole of two disunities: a struggle for concord where none exists, a whole where there can be only parts. Pessoa teaches by example, and his lesson is that every person is many, and the psychological adhesives we employ to hold the various together under one name, one I, all dishonesties and limitations; and being that all alterations are also deaths, he chose to honour those nonreducible roles with names and identities – tagging the involute fragments as he fell apart.

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With this in mind, and before proceeding any further with this lovesick commentary, the following abjuration is most likely requisite: Pessoa’s central undertaking in the book he eventually entrusted to Soares was no less than that of detailing the veracities (in all their slipperiness, and such as he could locate them), the intellectual and emotional substance, that reside in incompleteness, multiplicity, contradiction, disorder and penumbra; and so to falsely pin him/it/them down beyond this, to territorialize the drifting and merging waters of his/its/their thought, would amount to an assault, a betrothal not of adoration but of violence. The distortion and the conflict found in and between the four core Pessoan themes, of identity, dreams, death, and impossibility, gathered and ventured into here, will not be served by a process that unsnarls and harmonizes, for such a process would exemplify no kind of love. And so we arrive at the following exhortation: “Every effort is a crime, because every gesture is a dead dream.”3 The cogency of this sentence is difficult to ignore and, as Soares himself realized, equally difficult to follow through on. The following efforts are, then, criminal in inception, and can be redeemed only by their preservative (loving) properties. The hope (that accursed and futile accompaniment to all non-accidental creation – our disillusion waiting in the wings) is that Soares’s dead dream can here be resurrected – its hawking, bug-eyed corpse no doubt every bit as disconsolate as Schopenhauer’s grave-dwellers stirred spitting from their slumber – and then once again dispatched with no grimace added to its twice-dead lineaments. SELF: LOVE AS AUTOPHAGY

To love is to leave untouched: untouched as both expression of intangibility and withdrawal from alteration. Love cannot change its object without destroying it. But one cannot change what cannot first be captured, and love’s true object always eludes our every grasping facility, for it is impervious, and its seeming destruction (over various instantiations) only ever love’s own implosion. Love’s true object is a “placid abyss,” 4 the uncertain variant colouration of a moon’s insolvable light. Love and love’s objects are unseen and unknown: we see/know only the manifestations of our inability to see/know, and it is not worthwhile to construct complaint or remorse from this, for we

3 Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin Books, 2002), 263. 4 Pessoa (2002), 136.

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may see and know its “outskirts,”5 and just as virgins who stifle their inclinations to put love into action may see love clearer than love’s most rampant purveyor, we too might find love’s essence residing in the very condition of its veiled disincarnation. The subtractions are not exhausted outside the person; they are as virulent internally as they are externally, a curtailment of self being considered a prerequisite to any hope of preserving love’s purity. A comparable devouring of prurient selfhood can be found in M. K. Gandhi. Explaining the divestment of the person required by ahimsa, he expresses these requirements without equivocation: “to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachment and repulsion. […] I must reduce myself to zero.”6 In order to avoid doing violence to love’s objects, one must do violence to oneself instead.

To be removed from love, to pretend it truthfully at a safe distance, is not to dream of love – and such is Soares’s predilection for caution that he issues an emphatic warning: “Let’s not even love in our minds” 7 – but to dream a mind dreaming of love, and to dream that mind static, chaste, lamenting and unreal, to dream a mind imprisoned eternally in the inanimate imaginings of love. By avoiding the inherent precariousness of love in this way we might expect such a lover, preserved by his rationale of timidity,8 to be capable of successfully maintaining a self that would otherwise have been surrendered. After all, it is “running real risks… [that] disturbs and depersonalises,”9 not dreaming the dreamt risks of fictions. But love, it seems, cannot so easily be extricated from its terminal appointment, for love in its purest state is death, and these layers of distance and conjecture are themselves tools of purification. The impossibility and falsity of love’s objects are perfectly suited to the unrealisable desire which love names, that of desiring to possess the sensation of possession, and while this desire, such as it is, may be free of the perils of humiliation associated with more worldly manifestations, it is nevertheless itself an acquiescence, a relinquishing

5 Pessoa (2002), 235. 6 M. K. Gandhi, ‘Truth and Ahimsa’, in Peter Singer (ed.), Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1994), 220. 7 Pessoa (2002), 244. 8 Preserved in something resembling a Cioranian state of “enthusiasm”. See E. M. Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair (University of Chicago Press 1996), 77-78. 9 Pessoa (2002), 73.


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of self to non-existence. To renounce the self in this way – as votive offering to the abstract other of love as dreamt dreaming – is to ordain one’s own death, is to sacrifice the self to a state of possession (a possession that possesses in turn its possessor) in which there is nothing possessed and no possessor, and by so doing cease to be.

What, then, of this love that risks nothing? We might be tempted to conceive of Soares’s layered firmaments of dreaming as little more than the high-minded pusillanimous mewling of one who is all too aware that anyone who takes his pursuit of love into the world “will, in so far as he conceives it to be missing, feel pain.”10 A love in which there is never anything to go missing can never make threat of absence. But this is not to be thought of as a situation structured in degrees: his retreat is not, for instance, the one we find in the soma-saturated society of Brave New World, where “the greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much.”11 It is not a timorous recoil from the harrowing consequences of love’s physicality, but simply a rejection of the inherent contradiction in love having any kind of genuine physicality. There are times when Soares is hard to distinguish from Rimbaud’s “very young man” from the beginning of ‘Deserts of Love’, a young man of terminal reticence who had not “loved women – although passionate! – [for] his soul and his heart and all his strength were trained in strange, sad errors.” 12 Similarly, Soares’s own explorations of love are symptomatic of a wider epistemological affliction: how in finding the truth of things as they are accessible to him he finds only himself (as an accessed means of distortion), while those things that are always sought after, the concrete abstractions which by their very nature defy life, inevitably presage a state of death, a state in which the forfeiture of the self is enacted to preserve the sincerity of the incommunicable, and the sad sanctity of the perpetually erroneous. Thus evidencing how a commentary on love is just one of several ongoing and unresolved (qua unresolvable) epistemological and ontological commentaries, which (regardless of their object) always lead Soares to (and sometimes even progress from) some form of self-annihilation.

10 Benedict de Spinoza, Works of Spinoza: Volume II (Dover Publications, 1955), 154-5. 11 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Grafton Books, 1977), 190. 12 Rimbaud, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (The University of Chicago Press, 1966), 287.

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To understand love is to at once realize that nothing is, or can ever be, worthy of it. For love’s true object is itself a nothing. It is as crass and misguided to love a cup as it is a person, so if one is to love at all, one would be advised to love what is at hand, what can be relied upon, what serves the purposes of one’s dreams. Mutuality is not necessary; in fact it’s a scourge, as is life itself.13 Love’s purity (as objectless and impredicative) demands that one first dispose of life and other. Such maximal essentialism is not, of course, the preserve of Soares alone. The tradition is rich, the mythology its own keepsake. In his essay on The Lady of the Camellias, Roland Barthes pinpoints this “bourgeois” isolationism in Armand, whose concept of love “is segregative…, that of the owner who carries off his prey; an internalized love, which acknowledges the existence of the world only intermittently and always with a feeling of frustration, as if the world were never anything but the threat of some theft.”14 But here the feared theft is not a removal, an extraction, but an addition, a poisoning, or a branding as one might steal cattle. The world can only steal what’s inside if what’s inside is nothing and what’s there to be stolen is that very emptiness: the world, then, steals by occupying, a squatter in a house left deliberately and vitally empty. Armand’s love, like Soares’, without flesh to perish, is immutable and without end; both vampires draining the invisible blood of essence, their desire, with the world’s objects as mere oblation, will always be “by definition a murder of the other.”15

You can love only the pictures of love, its imagery, its phrases, the bloodless trinkets of its mythology. To know love is to sanctify it with impossibility and absurdity, to know that even that veiled contact is foreign and begets a foreign self: “We do not possess our sensations, and through them we cannot possess ourselves.” 16 Although love is possession, such possession is impossible. The approximations of possession are ludicrous and abject, eating without

13 ‘Friendship’ is the term that we might most readily associate with love soured by life and mutuality: “of the love of lifeless objects we do not use the word ‘friendship’; for it is not mutual love” in Aristotle, ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ in The Complete Works of Aristotle, (ed.) Jonathan Barnes, Volume 2 (Princeton University Press, 1984), 1826. 14 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Vintage Books, 1993), 103. 15 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Vintage Books, 1993), 104. 16 Pessoa (2002), 301.


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digesting, digesting without first eating: the awkward nestling of magnets, the chronic bulimia of the soul, the autophagic compromise of love’s ideal.

Only love allows us to see (or plant, our fingers caked in our own mud) the self that resides within others.

Love is torment, its devices cast in oblivion. Love is a craving for something that even the imagination cannot deliver. It is the purity of longing, the perfect chastity of the eternally unconsummated (The words ‘chaste’ and ‘chastity’ both deriving from the Latin adjective castus meaning ‘pure’) – the dream of some unencounterable other.17 From the mouth of Diotima via Socrates via Aristodemus, we are told how Love (as spirit not god) truly is: “as the son of Resource and Need, it has been his fate to be always needy; nor is he delicate and lovely as most of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless”18

The impersonality that Soares envisages for his refinement of love is, in certain respects, not so far removed from love’s carnal origins, the perpetuation of which he so thoroughly admonishes. A reminder, in case we needed one, of his impeccable Realism, for Soares’s dreams are not the dreams of a blinkered romantic, but the dreams of a Realist who at once recognizes his bloodless reconstructions as being both insignificant and unsatisfactory, while also realizing that the alternative demands that we sleep so that the world may live. Soares knows that freedom, beauty, and the impossible are not in the world, but in how one escapes it. He claims that “love is a sexual instinct,” but is quick to qualify this by pointing out that “it’s not with sexual instinct that we love but with the conjecture of some other feeling. And that conjecture is already some other feeling.”19 Love’s genesis is in impersonality, for instincts are always impersonal, and it is in impersonality that it culminates. The transitory state is, however, speculative, and so no longer entirely

17 “Unlike love in possession of that which was / To be possessed and is. But this cannot / Possess. It is desire, set deep in the eye, / Behind all actual seeing, in the actual scene, / In the street, in a room, on a carpet or a wall, / Always in emptiness that would be filled, / In denial that cannot contain its blood / A porcelain, as yet in the bats thereof.” Wallace Stevens, ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 467. 18 Plato, ‘Symposium’, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1989), 555. 19 Pessoa (2002), 66.

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impersonal, the emotional import of love being a creative extrapolation. But once created Soares no longer finds himself there. The construction excludes self. He experiences love most intensely as an awareness of a feeling of love, rather than as one who merely feels it, thereby dissolving any clear notion of the personal entity that loves. In order to feel, feelings must be disowned; only this way can they remain honest – an honesty precluding all moral encumbrance.20 He loses himself “not like the river flowing into the sea for which it was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide,” a locus of impassive awareness extruded from the flow through an imagined analysis21 of sensations from which it has successfully disembarked, “its stranded water never returning to the ocean but merely sinking into the sand.”22

The perfect objects of love are, like those staples of Soares’s trance-like animatism, those stain-glass figures or Oriental men and women painted on porcelain, made not born, and made, ordinarily, as receptacles of intimacy, exemplars of a purist and devotional spirit. It comes as no surprise, then, that Soares should make the following disclosure: “Like Shelley, 23 I loved Antigone before time was; temporal loves were flat to my taste, all reminding me of what I’d lost.”24 But this feat, this dismissal of flesh, is not enough. To love a fiction made to be loved is not to stretch for the impossible. Soares, like some poet lover of the Middle Ages for whom, as Bertrand Russell points out, “it had become impossible to feel any poetic

20 The dangers of which Kant extolled at length: “For love out of inclination cannot be commanded; but kindness done from duty – although no inclination impels us, and even although natural and unconquerable disinclination stands in our way – is practical, and not pathological, love, residing in the will and not in the propensions of feeling, in principles of action and not of melting compassion; and it is this practical love alone which can be an object of command.” in Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, in The Moral Law, trans. H. J. Paton (Routledge, 1991), 65. 21 “Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.” Pessoa (2002), 111. 22 Pessoa (2002), 137. 23 Referencing a letter to John Gisborne, in which Shelley writes: “Some of us have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (London: Edward Moxon, 1845), 335. 24 Pessoa (2002), 141.


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sentiment towards a lady unless she was regarded as unattainable,”25 is all too comfortable with this aseptic connection, finding its rewards all too possible. His solution lies in establishing love for the most despicable of fictional female characters: “No greater romantic adventure exists than to have loved Lady Macbeth with true and directly felt love. After a love like that, what can one do but take a rest, not loving anyone in the real world?” 26 A more venal and murderous repository for love could not easily be found, so to love such a fiction, a fiction created to incite loathing, is an emotional exploit undoubtedly worthy of his talents as dreamer and purveyor of disembodied eroticism. But as Soares makes clear, there is no love that is not love for self and is not also pity for that same self – a sandwiching of self that epitomizes wisdom, whether our focus is the external world or the world of oneiric objects – and so Soares’s passionate entanglement with Lady Macbeth is, to delineate in more detail, ardour attached to his successful conceptualization of impossible love and the self-sympathy requisite to it. 27 In perfect accordance with the template laid down by Plato, she becomes “a

25 Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (Routledge, 1991), 49. Russell goes

on to explain how “nobler spirits of the Middle Ages thought ill of this terrestrial life; … [and of how] pure joy was to them only possible in ecstatic contemplation of a kind that seemed to them free from all sexual alloy.” (Russell 1991, 50). 26 Pessoa (2002), 290-1. 27 The self-serving core to this anfractuous and insulated artifice can be seen here as a way in which to dissolve the boundaries of selves and the divisive conditions in which they’re realized, a detail brought to the fore in the following passage by Deleuze and Guattari: “it would be an error to interpret courtly love in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of transcendence. The renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its infinite regress, testifies on the contrary to an achieved state in which desire no longer lacks anything but fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence. Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to "find themselves" in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the most artificial, are reterritorializations. […] The field of immanence is not internal to the self, but neither does it come from an external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute Outside that knows no Selves because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in which they have fused.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 156.

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mirror in which he beholds himself,”28 his condition, his failure, and the ascendancy he forges from that failure.

Because the dreamer is invisible to others, despite them taking his skin to be their own, he will often, in return, see them as internally barren, clockwork aggregations of flesh alive to the world and all its clumsy impositions while dead to their own – now atrophied – selves. The true (long-subjugated) self of the dreamer, although rarely encountered even by the most skilled practitioner of dreams, is instantly recognized as both genuine and unsustainable. It is a void. The dreamer encounters reality within himself, feeling in a state of revelation that his “soul is a real entity.”29 Waking from life into the reality and the lacuna of his soul, the world is made instantaneously remote, an alien land inhospitable to real persons. This is the self that can be everything because it is nothing, simultaneously everything and nothing, the non-relational entity indifferent to the world and the dreamer’s lesser selves: the dreamer’s true being, the empty variable, the placeholder, the transcendental self, the self spark. Soares tells of his revelation: “To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word.” 30 After the flash has abated, the dreamer returns to being (embodying) the dreams of that real self, that nothing that can be all things, and that dreamt self in turn, once the flash is over, finds anchor in the fictitious non-existence of a worldly sleeping self, the self that knows no other home but the unconsciousness of the world.31 The deepest self comes to us like a vacant apparition, like another person’s emptiness, derailing thought, intelligence, speech, inducing inertia and sleep: “And now I’m sleepy, because I think – I don’t know why – that the meaning of it all is to sleep.”32 The meaning of it all is the return. The meaning becomes the failure to understand it or to sustain it. All its subsequent sense is encapsulated by this impotence, and one sleeps in one’s enthrallment of it. If indeed great men exist in

28 Plato, ‘Phaedrus’, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1989), 501. 29 Pessoa (2002), 40. 30 Pessoa (2002), 40. 31 Heidegger’s Being and Time must then qualify as the world’s longest treatise on slumber. 32 Pessoa (2002), 41.


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this state their whole lives, as Soares tells us, then there can be no real mystery surrounding why he neglects to give their names. Soares’s fleeting ekstasis haunts him, and experiencing the ghost of himself – his true self – leaves him with an irresistible desire for a time when “our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.” 33 According to Sartre’s phenomenological systemizations surrounding the void at the centre of our being, “[w]e find ourselves … in the presence of two human ekstases: the ekstasis which throws us into being-in-itself and the ekstasis which engages us in non-being.”34 But Soares, in the face of being and non-being wants for neither: rather, he concocts a third path, the self existing outside of both. In short, he has the self that eludes him reflect the absurd incomprehensibility of the experience. 35 Once again he is thinking with his feelings,36 and whereas for thinkers such as Schopenhauer, for whom heart and head make the person but it is always the latter

33 Pessoa (2002), 45. 34 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (Methuen, 1984), 44. 35 Here we have not so much a Humean honest bewilderment (as we see expressed in the appendix to A Treatise of Human Nature) but rather a bewilderment of honesty, the paradoxes and impenetrable perplexities of conscious experience. Soares writes in earnest: “I’m never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me.” (Pessoa, 2002: 161) This is none other than the metaphysical subject revealing its nothingness, the Wittgensteinian eye that does not see itself (see Wittgenstein, 1974: 57), and is to be distinguished from the self that eats into his outwardly-directed consciousness, the scourge of any (sublimely futile) attempt to aestheticise the world: “I see the way I saw, but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing, and that is enough to darken the sun, to make the green of the trees old, and to wilt the flowers before they open.” (Pessoa, 2002: 329) 36 It is important to note that this homogeneity of thought and feeling is among the most prominent points of contact between Soares and Pessoa-as-himself, expressed most clearly by the latter in the lines: “In me what feels is always / Thinking.” (Pessoa, 2006: 284) This proximity led Pessoa to the realization that Soares was not truly autarchic, and so only a “semi-heteronym”, a maimed and depleted version of that most adhesive of selves. Pessoa’s inability to cleave Soares from his derivation is connected to this inability to separate thought and feeling: what Soares “thinks depends on what he feels” (Pessoa, 2002: 475), and what he feels depends on Pessoa, and whatever Pessoa feels is, he confesses, felt solely in order that he may write (in a style he shares with Soares) that he felt it, making any separation one that would have Pessoa existing as his own amputee.

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that is “secondary” or “derived,” with Soares (especially in the work that is closest to Pessoa himself) they invariably merge. Comparisons with Sartre will help codify Soares’s poetic musings, the eloquence of Soares’s lyrical philosophy coming alive in the contrarieties. It is possible to attribute a tripartite theory of the self to Soares, comprising the unconscious worldly self of life, meditating on its detail, the self that is dreamt and itself dreams a world for itself, and the self that is missing, absent from the world and impervious to it. These demarcations fit more or less neatly with Sartre’s three ekstases (three stances on the for-itself, as the inevitable dispersion of human being-in-itself): the first ekstasis involves the realization of existence, the “leaping out” of grounded (worldly) consciousness, the realization of nothingness as the reason for the found disparity between worldly consciousness (living), and awareness of existence as brute human fact (knowing); 37 the second involves the failure of justification: a further fracturing, as that which seeks to know and actualize the initial awareness encounters its own difference; while the third has the other emerging as subject, but one that cannot be known as subject, as a subject would know itself. But Soares, with no interest in uniting these perspectives (subjects), turns away from synthesis, from the one transcendent ego, and instead accepts (welcomes) the proliferation of such egos that arrive in their wake. For Soares, modes of awareness invariably spawn selves, or levels of dreaming each with a dreamer. Like Sartre, he does not posit the reality of selves,38 but instead sees selves as imaginary devices, through which we can transcend Reality, the reality in which the self is a nothing.

Our adjectives mostly fail to touch the world as it is; they do not chart the skin, but dress it. But this is not a mistake, an error to be corrected; it’s a freedom, a playground replete with bountiful spawning materials. It is for this reason that the deepest self must be an impredicative, unanalysable gap – the something of nothing – “no more than the ray of sunlight that shines and isolates from the soil the pile of dung that’s the body.” 39 Instead of a reductionist or eliminativist reading of the self, we get an exploitative one, a rigorous celebration of the diverse possibilities of consciousness. Soares

37 Soares tells of how his “normal, everyday self-awareness had intermingled with the abyss.” Pessoa (2002), 95. 38 In Sartre’s 1936 essay, The Transcendence of the Ego, we see him set upon Husserl’s positing of the transcendental reality of the ego. 39 Pessoa (2002), 58.


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nurtures the internal remoteness achieved when consciousness turns in on itself; he nourishes the phenomenological state of being somehow host to your own self, as opposed to embodying it, and from this groundwork he starts to build.

At times Soares feels himself becoming that abyssal eye staring out from nowhere and acknowledging the knotted materials of the self, as one might acknowledge the presence of a tumour, or some foreign growth squirming in the rat-infested back alleys of a tale once told about your life and your role inside it. He sees the human soul’s unconscious filth, sees it “is a madhouse of the grotesque. […] a well, but a sinister well full of murky echoes and inhabited by abhorrent creatures, slimy non-beings, lifeless slugs, the snot of subjectivity.”40 So what does he do with these grotesqueries of the soul once they’ve been disinterred? He takes them on holiday: they are transformed into “huge heads of non-existent monsters,” “Oriental dragons from the abyss,”41 and finally the hollow stratagems of the city, resignation, and Destiny.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein claims that “What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’. / The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world – not a part of it.” 42 Soares captures the exact same revelation, saying “We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. […] The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.”43 And then even more succinctly: “I’m lost if I find myself.” 44 This constitutes the birth of Soares as dreamer, for this unity of self and world is a convening of two nothings: the self that cannot be mine (cannot be anything for me) and the world itself abyssal in constituting the everything of the absentee self. The challenge is laid out thus: “Everything is us, and we are everything, but what good is this, if everything is nothing.”45

40 Pessoa (2002), 208. 41 Pessoa (2002), 209-10. 42 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (Routledge, 1974), 58. 43 Pessoa (2002), 112. 44 Pessoa (2002), 209. 45 Pessoa (2002), 149.

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That “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”46 is something that Soares accepts – he is, after all, the “selfsame prose” he writes – but when he accepts this, it is not merely as some rationally punitive stricture, but as a provocation, an ontological ultimatum.

And the other (psychological) self is a fiction: “It’s only the self who no longer believes and is now an adult, with a soul that remembers and weeps – only this self is fiction and confusion, anguish and the grave.”47 This self (this objectified person48) is the fiction that the world configures, the self lived into obscurity by the blind processes of its own brute reflexivity. And to realize that there is no destination, that where we’ve been is as unknown and distant as where we’re going, arrives as partial remedy to this state of lost transparency. The dreamer’s prescription is to have as much expectation for, and make as much demand on, the past as on the future, to be deliberately aimless – time’s own magniloquent vagrant – not to simply become one of the world’s clumsy fictions, devoid of identity and “so scattered,”49 but to found one’s being in the very impossibility of being anything other than yourself, i.e. to found your being in what you cannot be, forging an escape from materials that confine (and define) you. Evidence that this experiment is even in operation is scant and fragile and pervaded with logical perversity, as when Soares happens on the “absurd remembrance of [his] future death.” 50 The real world demands artifice of its sleepwalkers, revealing itself most fruitfully when bent out of shape. Bending to fit the world we mimic how the world sees us, not how the world is.

If we consider the exposition of Zeus’ bisection of man found in Plato’s ‘Symposium’, of how those eight-limbed, two-headed men, women and hermaphrodites of myth were cleaved like pieces of fruit, we can begin to see how it is that love came to be seen as some corrective for lost unity, naming the condition which leaves “each half with a desperate yearning for the other, … [wanting] for nothing

46 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (Routledge, 1974), 56. 47 Pessoa (2002), 129. 48 This is the person of the psychological theorist, the indeterminate aggregate of psychological properties to which the self is reduced by John Locke, David Hume, Derek Parfit, Sidney Shoemaker, et al. 49 Pessoa (2002), 55. 50 Pessoa (2002), 68.


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better than to be rolled into one.” 51 Soares internalizes this myth, describing a state which seeks to rectify division within the self, to close the distance not between human beings but between two estranged segments of the same self, “Siamese twins that aren’t attached.”52 UNREALITY: LOVE AS DREAMING

The world is a dead reality, a weightless husk, its dreamable resources sucked out like the guts of some pillaged insect.

Consciousness forces a state of being: act one’s dreams and dream one’s acts. But therein lies a danger: to dream the life that others merely live is to invest yourself in your surroundings, both the animate and the inanimate, having them exist only partially on your terms, leaving the way clear that they may walk away at any time and take parts of you with them. (What’s more, the inevitable disclosures of falsity become a source of disgust, for only pure dreams can enchant, “those which have no relation to reality nor even any point of contact with it.”)53 The consequence of dreaming life is that “Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us.” 54 Every loss, however insignificant to our state of active dreaming, or to our intellect in which it might barely register, becomes a mortification, a partial amputation of the soul. For else why would Soares cry “My God, my God, the office boy left today”?55

You can no more own the objects of love than you can own your dreams. To be skilled at dreaming is to realize a state in which your dreams can own you. And to be owned by a dream is to submit to the plot-less presence of the dead man. Similarly, to submit to the ownership of love is to avoid all of its narrative manifestations, in which its objects possess nothing but love’s ephemera (sensations of the perpetually thwarted possession of its objects), relinquishing all love’s worldly accoutrements, so that there may be something left to act as possessor: love is the unpossessable possessor of its own potentiality. By transcending the boundaries of the internal self, love

51 Plato, ‘Symposium’, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1989), 543. 52 Pessoa (2002), 20. 53 Pessoa (2002), 460. 54 Pessoa (2002), 241. 55 Pessoa (2002), 241.

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realises its own dilution, for as it is lived (exteriorised) into something else it becomes estranged from the pretence on which its existence depends, an imagining both estranged and depleted – a lesser dream, tangible and lost. If sex is the “accident” 56 of love, then the masturbator expresses, in his very abjectness,57 the unfortunate truth (as disclosure of essential pretence) of this aleatoric conjunction. “Let us remain eternally like a male figure in one stained-glass window opposite a female figure in another stained-glass window,”58 for there is no other way for us to non-destructively realise (from réaliser to “make real”) love’s immanent potential as self-sustained dream. These selfsame conditions for love’s realization, as being necessarily static and outside of time, are revealed to Jorge Luis Borges’ Javier Otárola at the close of ‘Ulrikke’: “Like sand, time sifted away. Ancient in the dimness flowed love, and for the first and last time, I possessed the image of Ulrikke.”59

Understanding is inimical to love and to self. In something resembling an extreme take on Stendhal’s aphorism on happiness, in which description becomes diminishment, we see that to understand one must first butcher oneself and then that which one seeks to understand. Love, in contradistinction, leaves no fingerprint, its aristocratic non-touch a hovering hand doubly displaced in dream.

To suffer in love is to want it to be more than it is, to be all at once flesh and idea. Worldly (undreamed) love is a template for suffering. Love is so important to us, enjoys such exalted preeminence in human life, because we imagine it to be all that we want from it. This is how it is able to transcend and enslave us. Having reconstructed our meaningfulness as human beings from an impossible desire, we set about trying to find its objects, and that all objects fall short is no detriment to the love that attaches itself to them, quite the opposite – their loss is love’s gain. “Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent. That is

56 Fernando Pessoa, A Little Less Than the Entire Universe: selected poems, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin Books, 2006), 351. 57 The plight of those nine grinding bachelors (“malic molds”) in Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass, all sharing “the same useless expression” Pessoa (2002), 289. 58 Pessoa (2002), 289. 59 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin Press, 1999) 422.


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why we can love the saint but cannot love God”60 – although, we can safely love the idea of God.

Love demands distance and intangibility from its objects, so a wise deployment reserves attention for one’s dreams of love or, more precisely, one’s dreaming of the dreamt love of fictional lovers. Only this way can we hope to dissect the emotion of the idea, without mistaking the idea for flesh. Goethe’s Eduard was a precise enough lover to make this distinction when it came to Ottilie: “Sometimes she does something that offends the pure idea I have of her, and it is only then I know how much I love her, because I am then distressed beyond all power of description.”61 Love cannot survive our knowing it or its objects, the latter of which do not really exist: it is the dream of a dream, the dream of a dream that can’t be dreamt. As Soares would put it, “‘I want you only to dream of you.’”62 But even the imagination destroys (possibilities) as it builds, so the formula of the dream requires the perpetual immanence of the impossible; if “there’s always at least one dimension missing in the inward space that harbours these hapless realities,” 63 then it’s for good reason. The desire for this dimensional deficiency to be healed is to want for love to be nursed to death, to be fortified to the point of extirpation.64 The reality we seek for those creatures of our dreams is, then, an empty and self-defeating vanity.65 To want the substance of your dreams to mimic that of the world is to will the creation of essentially antithetical beings, a need grounded in the knowledge that “[t]he more a man differs from me, the more real he seems, for he depends that much less on my subjectivity.”66 Here resides the dilemma of

60 Pessoa (2002), 65. 61 Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1971), 146. 62 Pessoa (2002), 101. 63 Pessoa (2002), 90. 64 Not unlike the sad accounts concerning those released from Nazi concentration camps who, on liberation, ate themselves to death. Love is a form of starvation, and so requires a thin gruel, the almost figmental substance of Bengal famine mix. 65 A reality captured in exquisite detail by Wallace Stevens: “This image, this love, I compose myself / Of these. In these, I come forth outwardly. / In these, I wear a vital cleanliness, / Not as in air, bright-blue-resembling air, / But as in the powerful mirror of my wish and will.” in Wallace Stevens, ‘Poem with Rhythms’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 245-6. 66 Pessoa (2002), 70.

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love: the desire to possess when possession is inimical to the desire. That which I love must be mine and not mine: mine so that love is not torture, and not mine so that we can share in the discursive pleasures of propriety, pleasures known to Samuel Beckett’s Mr Hackett who, of certain seats, “knew they were not his, … [though] he thought of them as his. He knew they were not his, because they pleased him.”67 We want for the absent dimensions of our dreams to be merely hidden, just as the machinations of self-awareness instinctively lead us to suppose that what seems like our own absence is really a mere instance of the search obscuring what it seeks to find. We want what we cannot see and what cannot be seen to be implied by what we can and do see, and yet this implication, should it come, would transform illusion into reality, when the goal for the dreamer is to realize that reality and illusion are codependents and that it is this very codependence that makes not only an internalization of the universe possible, but an internalization of every universe, including the infinite and incomplete, universes whose internal contradictions imply something beyond reality, something transcendent rather than transcendental. But the toll on the self imposed by these Aleph-like internalizations can be considerable: “How much I die if I feel for everything!”68

Like the retired librarian in Borges’ ‘The Book of Sand’, a man slowly consumed by the infinite book that has come into his possession, Soares is acutely aware that those that live life do so unconsciously, that life is best lived unconscious of itself and reinforced with spurious limitations. Consciousness exists in defiance of life; to live consciously is to regard life as one would an alien costume tailored to the shape of men, but lacking any safe points of entry. To be conscious is to know feeling (or feel knowing) at a distance, to always maintain a scholarly reserve and perplexity even towards that which would appear most intimate.

When the dreaming of our waking life (that life discernible from lived dreaming because it is peopled with tangible occupants) is disrupted by non-routine elements, it becomes critically compromised. For when dreaming this life, we live the hypotheses and imaginings of these real people – we regret their absence while they are still present, mourn their deaths while they still breathe, witness mutations of character while they remain unchanged – so that

67 Samuel Beckett, Watt (Grove Press, 1953), 7. 68 Pessoa (2002), 93.


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if such things should really happen, our pre-emptive dreams of them appear disfigured by comparative association. The futures we have constructed for the people around us, futures in which those people are placed, insulated by the dreamer’s despotic enchantment, have a reality that has claim to a certain level of solidity, as too do their present-day selves as visited from the dreamer’s future reminiscences, a solidity which is impaired (desecrated even) by the crude and unexpected vacillations of reality. The dreamer demands that life obey a certain formulaic continuity, that those people that have been transmogrified into symbols remain unaltered, that one’s future recollections of them are not falsified by reality. To live this way is to no longer be one self but two, (“two abysses”): the self that dreams, lost in its attentiveness to the world and the banality of its detail, and the dreamt self reporting back from the vantages of imagination. They are the remote exhibits of a bisected unity, an omphaloskepsis continually swallowed and disgorged by its umbilici.

To act in one’s dreams is to maintain an internal state of flux, to move on before having found a place to settle – in short, to play out the futile insanity of real life to much greater effect. Played out because the anchor of the real is never truly lost, even if its impressions elude all recollection, and to greater effect because the range is inexhaustible, the self which lives it infinite (bearing the marks of its extrication), and the pattern of its weave all “intervals,” all “nothing,” the purest possibilities of the absurd (of its divinity), the confused – a finely delineated oblivion. To attempt (even on a minimal scale) to mimic these conditions externally is to suffocate the infinite self, its lungs ill-formed to breathe the oppressive air of finitude: “The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves.”69

The internal contradictions that starve the dreamer (of satisfaction) are the same contradictions that have him grow fat (on the nobility of disappointment). The dreamer cannot believe in success; the boundless possibilities consume all sense of it. Everywhere is nowhere. But therein lies an approximation of success, for to know your defeat intimately is to be victorious. He moves amongst “the flagless army fighting a hopeless war,”70 and while he and this unaffiliated martial horde share the same vanquishment, he has other wars to continue losing, and losing gloriously and with the

69 Pessoa (2002), 27. 70 Pessoa (2002), 59.

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necessity of his defeat providing fanfare. To be aware that you’re what’s left of something that’s never been anything more, is to be spared the vision of the pernicious and phantom-like augmentations of desire. The dreamer doesn’t try to reach the end (the completion, or use) of anything, his own self least of all. Here lies meaning, sense, dignity: “Since we can’t extract beauty from life, let’s at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life.”71 The only perfection open to us lies in our failure to attain it.

The proficient dreamer never loses sight of the phenomenon of dreaming, or through how many conduits his reverie is being filtered. He dreams “without illusions,” 72 for he is aware that his entire consciousness bears the mark of the dream, be it the internal dream of others’ internal dreams, or the dream of the world, soured by its proximity to claims of truth. It is for this reason that “[e]very dream is the same dream, for they’re all dreams” 73 (just as every unconsciousness is the same unconsciousness “diversified among different faces and bodies”).74

Soares has no desire to socialize the self (such as we see in late Sartre, for example), to meld ego with man. Man is a fetid potion, “a monstrous and vile animal created in the chaos of dreams, out of desires’ soggy crusts, out of sensations’ chewed-up leftovers.”75 The paganistic “cult of humanity” is grounded in the misguided premise that man is a legitimate replacement for God. Though makers of reality, we do not, as individuals, choose the manner in which it is made. If our dreams were to be made real – by which we mean encounterable in the way the world is encounterable, to be inside it as much as it is inside us – they would be made fact, and the facts would then overwhelm both dream and dreamer. If realities were to become Realities, then the dreamer would be altered as a result, altered into a god. This extra dimension, if added, would render the dream external (for the supplementary dimension must come from outside these realities), see them subsumed into the world; the dreamer would start to dream realities as he dreams the world, unconsciously. You would live (worldly) in your dream and thereby destroy the dreaming self. For these realities to gain this extra dimension the

71 Pessoa (2002), 261. 72 Pessoa (2002), 61. 73 Pessoa (2002), 60. 74 Pessoa (2002), 70. 75 Pessoa (2002), 63.


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dreamer would have to disappear, all distance (that distance that creates nearness) lost. The reality would be yours, in a way that the world never is, its independence (for there must be independence. How else could you meet the friends you’ve dreamed of as distinct from dreaming such a meeting?) additional rather than inherent, but it would amount to a fundamental limitation of possibilities, namely one’s presence as absentee. As when the dreamer returns to the world, the focus would inevitably shift from acting one’s dreams to dreaming one’s acts.

Love is not for living but observing, as a form of self-awareness: the self that dies daily to the world and the dreaming self each watch the other fail, the former in disillusionment and the latter in artificiality. But the latter, at least, need never lose the object of his love, for he realizes that he has created it, and should it become threadbare can make it again.

To reform reality in the intellect, to tell of the images of one’s dreams in a voice nobody will hear: this is how to survive the world and its dismal ministry. Life does not permit its flock to dream, for once the world has colonized all internal space, there’s nothing else left to dream and no one left to dream it.

The dreamer does not sacrifice his intelligence, his reason, for the sake of the dream. He unites them; he makes dreaming a response to truth and not its replacement. He accepts, like Wittgenstein, that there are no genuine problems of existence – “When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. / The riddle does not exist. / If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it”76 – that a logical approach to the world rids us of the necessity of answers, for the world itself poses no questions, but yet he remains speculative, choosing to detail this non-existent riddle and set up home in its absence.

The dreamer’s riddle (the riddle that sustains him, for “How everything wearies when it is defined!”)77 is the very lacuna left by the riddle of existence which does not exist. His task is not the framing of answers to impossible questions, or even, for the most part, framing impossible questions, but rather framing the very impossibility of certain questions, maddening in their ghostliness, their vague specificity, their uncertain certainty. He senses the

76 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (Routledge, 1974), 73. 77 Pessoa (2002), 138.

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questions, senses their non-existence as one would sense the missing. His words construct the impossibility of construction; they are the blueprints not for impossible buildings, but the impossibility of building, thereby constructing a template for impossibility itself, for the necessity of nothingness.

And once again Soares’s comments on the comingling of thought and feeling are provided illustration, for it is as a consequence of their fusion that one can be aware of the strictures of logic while at the same time breaking them.

The first task is to overcome what is instead of what can be. This is the initial flight of the dreamer, in which he anatomizes “the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.”78 The second, more fundamental, flight turns its attention on the necessary limitations of that first flight i.e. the substance of the nothing of undreamability.

Even loves manufactured in dreams must pass. How else could we dream their allotted nostalgia? Love is an exercise; why else would we willfully replace its objects? “I can change my sweetheart and she’ll always be the same.” 79 To love this way is to love indifferently, to experience a paradox of feeling that is the apex of thought-feeling.

In real life man trails behind himself, all the while imagining that he is the one with his head over his shoulder. In the life of dreams the straggler and the vanguard are indistinguishable, united by the dream. Each must surrender to the other in order for the dreamer to be formed. Division implies navigation, and the true dreamer does not navigate his dream, he becomes his dream and each performs the other. Pace Paul Valéry, knowing oneself is not foreseeing oneself and so playing the part of oneself, but foreseeing nothing and thereby locating oneself in the pathless landscape of the dream.

Love provides but one service to the dreamer: the increased fondness for what is absent. This fondness drives imagination, animating the dreamer, and when succumbed to without reservation can absent reality itself.

78 Pessoa (2002), 133. 79 Pessoa (2002), 403.


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MELTING: LOVE AS DEATH The deceased man of action was always “what Death would

make of him.”80 The deceased man of dreams was always what he would make of Death.

The idea of love, like the idea of death, is frozen, eternal and unoccupied, sensation without the ephemeral trappings of its cause, or its even needing a cause.

There is nothing you can construct in the exterior world which does not first involve you destroying an element of yourself, and the exterior world contains nothing – no cause, no love, no discovery – worthy of a man’s internal annihilation – not that there is especial calamity in the latter. To exteriorize is to submit to cowardice, to submit to the reassuring untruth of reality’s concrete independence. Soares gives us a way out, a way of protecting the internal from the external:

The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world’s facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.81

This carapace is the actualization of a consciousness, a protective filter maintaining verisimilitude to nothing but awareness itself, and thereby constituting a retreat from the numerous “metaphysical mistake[s] of matter,”82 internalizing them. This is Soares tiring of truth, as weary from conflict with the world’s persistence he eradicates all factful concerns, reducing them to an absent-minded dereliction of self.83 And yet he claims to “remember only external things”84 and to furnish his dreams, thus upping their intensity, with

80 Pessoa (2002), 407. 81 Pessoa (2002), 94. 82 Pessoa (2002), 96. 83 Soares’s burden is that of the philosopher, for as Nietzsche observes, the “philosopher recuperates differently and with different means: he recuperates, e.g., with nihilism. Belief that there is no truth at all, the nihilistic belief, is a great relaxation for one who, as a warrior of knowledge, is ceaselessly fighting ugly truths. For truth is ugly.” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1967), 325. 84 Pessoa (2002), 183.

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the rewards of a scrutiny turned outward, with things prose-filtered and yet inescapably visual and spatially ordered. Externalizing impressions is a way to locate them, to have them exist, to establish them as encounterable and so too ourselves as that which encounters, and much rather that than a false name fixed to the collected fragments of an unowned dream.

Love makes but one demand for incarnation, that its promise remain a threat. Seeking love’s fulfilment among the objects of the world, seeking therein its vertex and conclusion, is a betrayal of the inherent chastity of loving-as-possession. There is no possession but the dream, a dream itself devoid of possessing. The loving dream, the idea of that loved, is the limit of the lover’s claim to ownership, and one does not even own one’s dreams. Meticulous attention on the outside should always be a prerequisite for a subsequent act of internalisation: the sexual impulse is a reversal of this. The sexualisation of love is a relinquishment of possibility, and a debasement of the dreamer’s singularity, an immolation that Schopenhauer tells us “is the life of the species, asserting its precedence over that of individuals.” 85 When Soares declares that “[l]ife should be a dream that spurns confrontations,”86 it is this kind of banal skirmish to which he is referring, the anguished dueling that occurs when the narrator (of dreams) is narrated (by life). To place love in the world importunes an adjectival prefix, such as we see in the phrases, sexual love, and motherly love, and also in Hegel’s somewhat pleonastic clarification: “Active love – for love does that does not act has no existence.”87 Soares would say that active love, by existing, is not love, but rather what is fashioned from love’s residual scraps once it’s been obliterated by activity. Action is never other than a destructive force, “a disease of thought, a cancer of the imagination. […And just as] God, becoming man, cannot help but end in martyrdom,” 88 love’s descent into the meat of unclaimed bodies cannot help but end in surrender and eventual death, 89

85 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Volume 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 602. 86 Pessoa (2002), 145. 87 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977), 255; my emphasis. 88 Pessoa (2002), 272. 89 The fate of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, whose post-coital subjugation and suicide provides perfect illustration of the annihilative vigour of corporeal passion.


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consciousness abandoned to the inert flesh of the other. And yet there is no escape in essentialism either, for love’s fastigium is not free of death but riddled with a brand of abstract necrosis, a state in which we are “chaste like dead lips, pure like dreamed bodies, and resigned to being this way, like mad nuns.”90 And it does not end with love, for all interaction with others is a corruption of possibilities, a truncation of internal infinitudes: “To associate is to die.” 91 Social existence involves crediting others with a level of reality that immediately confines and marginalizes the self, and that part of us that extends into this realm becomes necrotized tissue.92

If love is to be suffered, then it should be suffered only as a possibility for sensation – a sensation of possibility. It is this nympholeptic sterility that conveys permanence, a sterility that while frequently associated with the moral implications of chastity, is concerned with neither the virtue of oneself or others:93 “Women are a good source of dreams. Don’t ever touch them.”94 Not even with the prosthetic hands used to touch life. In summation, Soares’s dictum can be seen as a reversal of one half of the Schopenhauerian distinction that couples life with permanence: where for Schopenhauer “it is his immortal part [the will to life] that longs for her;”95 for Soares it is his immortal (or permanent/infinite)96 part as

90 Pessoa (2002), 289. 91 Pessoa (2002), 184. 92 Mark Seltzer details the potential destructiveness of socialization in his study on serial killers, in which he painstakingly explores “the manner in which serial violence is bound up with what might be described as the

quickening of an experience of generality within: a psychasthenic yielding to generality, to affections with something stereotypical about them, to something statistical in our loves. Serial violence, in short, cannot be separated from experiences of a radical failure in self-difference.” (Mark

Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (Routledge, 1998), 144.) 93 Like Pausanias’ divine lover (as relayed by Aristodemus), Soares advocates a state in which we may “become one with what will never fade.” (Plato 1989, 537), but unlike Pausanias he has no interest in this lover’s moral status, or the viciousness or otherwise of his counterpart, the earthly lover, who lusts only after gratifications of the flesh. 94 Pessoa (2002), 351. 95 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Volume 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 559.

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the rejection of life (the will to anti-life) that longs (or ideally provides witness to such longing) for her (as a representation). This sense of there being an underlying aim is also present in Alfred North Whitehead, who saw love for one’s child or one’s spouse as the exemplification of a feeling concerned with a desired consonance somehow made manifest in loved objects. This love, he claimed, “involves deep feeling of an aim in the Universe, winning such triumph as is possible to it.”97 Soares would be unable to see any triumphs worth winning. This is the vulgarity of purpose infiltrating the sublime uselessness of love, as if the search and the silence were wanting, weren’t themselves everything. Where Whitehead finds an implication of discord and division, Soares finds the opportunity for synthesis.98 The conflict lies with “the principles of the generality of harmony, and of the importance of the individual. The first means ‘order’, and the second means ‘love’. Between the two there is a suggestion of opposition. For ‘order’ is impersonal; and ‘love’, above all things, is personal.”99 The trick is to experience the personal from a distance, and thereby establish order. There is an inescapable universality to the personal, and it is this that can be observed dispassionately. It is that aspect of the personal that we consider peculiar to ourselves that allows us to relish the structures of love on a level considered intimate. In this way love and harmony become inseparable. It is only by surrendering love to particular objects that the ideal is forfeited.100 This proposed experience of love is objectless, and so fraught with none of the deleterious consequences so often associated with love’s worldly actualization. But although free of the

96 Although Soares is clear that nothing about human life is infinite, the dream, though it may be only momentarily embodied, is not itself asphyxiated by limitations of time. 97 Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1939), 373. 98 Something we also find in Cioran: “Irrationality resides over the birth of love. The sensation of melting is also present, for love is a form of intimate communion and nothing expresses it better than the subjective impression of melting, the falling away of all barriers of individuation. Isn’t love specificity and universality all at once?” in E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 84. 99 Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1939), 376. 100 Like Platonic forms the objects of love must remain “free from all alloy” (Plato 1989, 497).


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raw anxieties of love’s frontline, the death of the self remains inevitable. For by turning love into an anti-prosopopoeial conglomerate of abstractions, ideally experienced as a uniquely concerted sensation, Soares makes a simulacrum of the self at every level. There is no room for the self when sensation has been purified to this degree. It’s the Cartesian corrective applied to sensation: there is sensation. Georges Bataille, recognising the deep connection between the physical entrapment of love and the abdication of self, writes: “I said that I regarded eroticism as the disequilibrium in which the being consciously calls his own existence in question. In one sense, the being loses himself deliberately, but then the subject is identified with the object losing his identity.”101 In Soares’s idealized picture of love, free of the disequilibrium of eroticism, the subject makes a quandary of its existence not through identification with the body, but through having no available repository for identification whatsoever.

If Soares ever managed to encapsulate his – and so Pessoa’s – entire project in a single sentence, then he does so here: “I’ve externalized myself on the inside.” 102 What we see with Schopenhauer’s and Whitehead’s picture of love, which is to name but two for those with like-minded approaches are legion, is the exact opposite, for they understand the lover as someone who internalizes himself on the outside.

The spiritualized transfiguration of two bodies into one brought on by an individual’s craven rapport with another, in Soares’s hands becomes a mechanism of intimate self-viewing, the sensation of love facilitating a (Cioranian) “melting” of self-watched and self-watching. But to fuse is to annihilate by contamination. To love is to seek destruction and impurity. To desire the effects of love is to desire a distinctly Empedoclean integration.103 Identity, or at the least one’s sense of being a something that dreams, a something in dreams, a something that some disclosure of scientific truth could possibly make

101 Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Colin MacCabe (Penguin Books, 2001), 31. 102 Pessoa (2002), 254. 103 According to Empedocles, Love was the amalgam of the cosmic cycle – the agency that brought about the coalescence of the four roots (earth, air, fire and water) into a uniform sphere – and Strife the agency that sowed discord through that love-formed sphere, once again estranging its elements. But Love cannot retain the integrity of each root, as running “through one another, they become different in aspect.” The natural world is formed in this way, via the integrative betrayal of each of its constituent parts.

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nothing, always comes at the expense of others. To relate to others on any level is to have them partake in the composition of your existence, to have their remote paws help put you together. All action assumes company, (a necroid promiscuity of the soul) making the one who acts porous. To act is to recoil from the self, diluting it with alterity, entombing the freedom of nothingness inside the dirt of the world.

Physical love is a contagion (for Bataille “an impersonal growth”) and sterility a partial containment. Soares asks us to pray that his hypothetical wife be sterile and never more than hypothetical. Sexual reproduction is the forging (knocking up) of violent materials, the manufacture of weaponry for a war that your children will fight for you, a war you can longer see a point in winning, a war that exists only so that there may be soldiers to fight it, war as a reason for parturition. The self-annihilations of love do not mimic suicide, they mimic life; present even in the midst of sterility, they involve the destruction of what cannot be found, the mutilation of uninhabitable bodies: “Only to kill what never was is lofty, perverse and absurd.”104 If, as Bataille tells us, the human corpse is a “tormenting object,” the object a prophecy of the viewer’s own violent destiny, then human offspring, delivered into the world or preempted by infertility, represents the death of a dream, the snuffing out of possibility, of all opportunity for perfect surrender or love as death – a corpse-less death. A love in which both parties surrender completely to the other is not possible, but if it were each would lay their personality out on the mortuary slab: “The greatest love is therefore death.” 105 All attempts to act out this surrender are failures that work toward death106 only to document its impossibility, so that if, as Bataille also realized, “the urge towards love, pushed to its limit, is an urge toward death,”107 then it is the urge toward a dream of death, a death made our own now fading, a death found impossible, leaving us staring

104 Pessoa (2002), 288. 105 Pessoa (2002), 449. 106 “I FAINT, I perish with my love! I grow / Frail as a cloud whose [splendours] pale / Under the evening’s ever-changing glow: / I die like mist upon the gale, / And like a wave under the calm I fail.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Fragment XXXIII’, in The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Edward Moxon, 1870), 577. 107 Bataille (2001), 42.


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down at the vacated corpse of ourselves as it ridicules our dreams for it. VOID: LOVE AS IMPOSSIBILITY If all man’s words are marginalia on blank sheets of paper, then man can only make or unmake the suppositions of his existence.108 There can be no true path for that which exists only by hypothesis. The only way for such a contrivance to live according to its (unnatural) nature is through an escalation of such pathways, ignoring the constraints of possibility forged – through misadventures in identification – along the way. Only recognition of the necessity of failure can go towards redeeming the efforts made, wherein failure once again makes its mark. The success of mystery comes at the expense of a solid footing from which to dream, so expediting the collapse of abstraction as possible recourse. From what do we abstract? The universality of Soares’s self-professed ignorance is rewarded with the wisdom of his awareness of it; with the dejection of one who’d temporarily submitted to a hope he knew to be false, he writes, “I’ll never write a page that sheds light on me or that sheds light on anything.”109 If we can speak of Soares having a moment of triumph, this is it. For what better way to nurture absurdity than by constructing the most elaborate strategies of illumination for that which no darkness could ever hide? (This is what it means to be “spiritualized in Night.”)110 It is within these strategies, this endless and sightless lucubration, that he discovers the possibility for integrity: “I’ve always felt that virtue lay in obtaining what was out of one’s reach […] in achieving something impossible, something absurd, in overcoming – like an obstacle – the world’s very reality.” 111 (His Realist credentials are once again in evidence: to consider such a project of overcoming to be impossible and absurd one must first have accepted the concrete independence of that which one seeks to overcome, thereby accepting the limitations – only to

108 One way of approaching this partitioning of man’s control is to see it in terms of Wilfred Sellars’ distinction between man’s manifest self-image and man’s scientific self-image: only the former can be made or unmade, the latter if it is not to unmake the former must remain (to the persons it threatens) a blank page. See Wilfred Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Harvard University Press, 1997). 109 Pessoa (2002), 134. 110 Pessoa (2002), 192. 111 Pessoa (2002), 130.

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then discard them in the service of the impossible – that such an acceptance implies.)112 Clarity, that impossibility of all impossibilities, and one dreamt possible so that we may have a reason to fail.

Whitehead states that “In the extreme of love […] all personal desire is transferred to the thing loved, as a desire for its perfection.”113 The thing loved, that whose perfection is desired, is, for Soares, none other than the incarnate love’s impossible telos – which is itself transformed by the abstract telos found in that very impossibility.

Soares, despite his deep-rooted abhorrence of persons of this type, is often almost indistinguishable from the ascetics and mystics of Christianity and Buddhism, those that “long for what they don’t know.”114 The blank page is the unyielding human nothing of the scientifically-present world. The mystics “have emptied themselves of the world’s nothingness,”115 and so too does Soares. How could he fail to admire those who shun the world in favour of mystery and meditative voyage? However, what he cannot embrace about this mystic life is its prescribed loss of whim. He cannot couch his project in quagmires of belief, nor can he regiment his feelings with theoretical manacles. Instead he chooses to create a monasticism of faithless dreams.

The text must not simply remain open, something some slim aperture of inexplicitness would realize, but must be splayed to the point where it cannot even contain itself. This is what it means to be

112 A stance comparable to that which Nick Land finds in the relation between fiction and theory in Bataille: “One might say that at the level of writing theory is a constricted species of fiction, in the same way that the actual constricts possibility (but what matters is the impossible).” Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (Routledge, 1992), 131. There’s also a striking resemblance to the nameless man (the ‘somebody’ the ‘you’) in Borges’ ‘A Weary Man’s Utopia’, who sounds as if he was schooled by Soares himself: “No one cares about facts anymore. They are mere points of departure for speculation and exercises in creativity. In school we are taught Doubt, and the Art of Forgetting— especially forgetting all that is personal and local.” Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin Press, 1999). 462 113 Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1939), 372. 114 Pessoa (2002), 147. 115 Pessoa (2002), 147.


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alert to one’s willed self-ignorance, mindful of our turning as we turn away, as we strive “[t]o consciously not know ourselves – that’s the way!” 116 To rewrite what was never written, to give presence to absence and absence to presence, to cultivate the ludic solemnity of a child, to pummel solid rock into the very form of indeterminacy, these are the things required of the fertile dreamer of selves. “We weary of thinking to arrive at a conclusion,”117 and we weary of our emptiness to arrive at ourselves.

Close and sustained scrutiny always reveals an illusion, and in the end even the possibility of illusion reveals itself as illusory.

Soares returns to himself after months spent happy and erased in the dead sleep of life, and embarks upon a bout of nerve-philosophy in which he synthesizes with a blowfly. The experiment is almost Cronenbergian in conception, and the full horror of his altered embodiment felt with an excruciatingly carnal detail. In a revelation worthy of Gregor Samsa, he finds himself present to the hideous fusion: “I was a fly when I compared myself to one. And I felt I had a flyish soul, slept flyishly and was flyishly withdrawn. And what’s more horrifying is that I felt, at the same time, like myself.”118 All of a sudden becoming reacquainted with the futility of his former absence in life, he transmogrifies his recaptured presence into an imagined presence known, but not felt, to be impossible.119

The nothing (a vacuum) with one view: one’s own self spread like tar across the possibility of seeing. Nothing remains for me to see, because I’ve seen the way I see and the way I will see. Anything I could see has been seen by my seeing that transparency of seeing.

When the sensation of love is at its purest it is possible for one to love excrement, but to translate this love into an impetus, to absorb and be absorbed by excrement, is to forget that the service of love is to create the distance from which such things can be loved. Only a madman can love the shit he’s drowning in.

116 Pessoa (2002), 133. 117 Pessoa (2002), 206. 118 Pessoa (2002), 281. 119 An impossibility that Thomas Nagel would later detail in his seminal paper, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Philosophical Review, LXXXIII (October, 1974).

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Love is (and should remain) a prayer at the altar (the arse-end)120 of the impossible. Gary J. Shipley is the author of Theoretical Animals (BlazeVOX) and co-author of Necrology (Paraphilia). He has published papers in various philosophy journals. He also has work that has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Black Herald, Gargoyle, New Dead Families, le Zaporogue, elimae, > kill author, and others. He is on the editorial board of the arts journal SCRIPT.

120 Of which, as Dolmancé informs us, there is none more divine. See The Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom.


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ON NOT LOVING EVERYONE: COMMENTS ON

JEAN-LUC NANCY’S “L’AMOUR EN ÉCLATS

[SHATTERED LOVE]”

Mathew Abbott

And for what, except for you, do I feel love? 1 The essay begins with a warning and a series of questions:

The thinking of love, so ancient, so abundant and diverse in its forms and in its modulations, asks for an extreme reticence [retenue] as soon as it is solicited. It is a question of modesty, perhaps, but it is also a question of exhaustion: has not everything been said on the subject of love? Every excess and every exactitude? Has not the impossibility of speaking about love been as violently recognized as has been the experience of love itself as the true source of the possibility of speaking in general? We know the words of love to be inexhaustible, but as to speaking about love, could we perhaps be exhausted?2

Much depends on the first sentence of the next paragraph, which functions as a potential rejoinder and answer to this warning and these questions: “It might well be appropriate that a discourse on love – supposing that it still has something to say – be at the same time a communication of love, a letter, a missive” (82; 225f). The possibility of speaking about love has been placed in question by the sheer volume of texts that purport to do just that (it is a paradox worth reflecting on: the fact that something appears to be everywhere means

1 Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” 380. 2 Nancy, “Shattered Love,” 82; “L’amour en éclats,” 225 (citations henceforth given in the text; translations are from Garbus and Sawhney unless a foot-note indicates otherwise).

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it might be nowhere). Yet exhaustion can be alleviated with a change in trajectory: if one cannot speak about love, then one can still speak in it (for ‘[w]e know the words of love to be inexhaustible’). That Nancy’s essay presents as a treatise on love therefore shows there is reflexivity here. This may be more than an essay on love. It may also be a declaration of it. Indeed, if it is what it presents itself as, then it has to be.

The claims are being made in the conditional (‘It might well be appropriate . . .’ [Et sans doute il conviendrait . . . ]), but this is not because of modesty (rhetorical or otherwise). As Nancy writes: “[T]he words of love, as is well known, sparsely, miserably repeat their one declaration, which is always the same, always already suspected of lacking love because it declares it” (82; 226f). A declaration of love has a very particular and ambiguous epistemological status. It is perhaps more problematic even than the kinds of reports more usually associated with the skeptical threats of the problem of other minds: if it is true that when “I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me,”3 then in love things are complicated. Here one can be mistaken in attributing the predicate ‘in love’ to oneself (Romeo and Rosaline); here it is not meaningless to say, ‘I know I am in love’ (‘How?’ ‘I just know’); here the intensity of an affective display can itself cast doubt on what we might presume (or hope) it is intended to convey (sometimes the louder you shout it, the hollower you sound). Wittgenstein again: “Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test, pain not. One does not say: that was not true pain, or it would not have faded so quickly.”4 It is not that love cannot be proven save through exceptional actions (gifts, sonnets, extravagant marriage proposals, etc.), but rather that this ‘being put to the test’ is crucial to it, and persists with it at all times; there is no way of proving it once and for all, and so the task it sets is continual. As a thought experiment, imagine it were possible to use neuroimaging to determine the intensity of feeling a subject has for a certain person. Even if one could ‘prove’ scientifically that a particular man or woman arouses extreme desire and/or affection in the subject, then would this be sufficient to prove love? Are such feelings even necessary to love? Could we not, in certain circumstances, legitimately speak of it in their absence? Nancy’s essay will try to

3 Wittgenstein, Investigations, §223. 4 Wittgenstein, Zettel, §504 (translation modified).

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show that this problem – the fact that love cannot be proven or guaranteed – is actually a condition of its possibility. As Catherine Kellogg puts it in a piece on Nancy’s thought: “[I]t is the very inability to guarantee love – the very ephemerality of the experience of loving – that calls forth the promise of love in the first place.”5

Nancy’s essay turns on this epistemological particularity, which makes it rather singular. For the text does not just make a claim about love. It makes a claim about being in the light of love. The argument is transcendental. To get ahead of ourselves, it says: if there is love (and there is: I have declared it), then being is finite. Nancy’s essay declares love in order to comment on it, and demonstrates that, because there is love, being is in a certain way. Yet that declaration is epistemologically ambiguous, because love is not the kind of thing that can be definitively proven or achieved (demonstrating it – showing it, sustaining it – is an ongoing task). As such, Nancy’s is a singular kind of transcendental argument. It is a transcendental argument in which one of the lemmas is a promise. We will come back to this, for it is arguably the heart of the essay. It shows us something important about Nancy’s ontology.

Let’s return to the text as it develops. In the next paragraphs, Nancy invokes once again the reticence required for thinking love, but cautions against the idea that it stems the fact that it would be “indiscreet to deflower love” (83; 226f). It is not that to write or speak of love entails crudeness or a lack of propriety; it does not mean debasing something that should really be treated with respectful or sacred silence. For love has already been marked in art and literature by an “unrestrained and brazen exploitation” [exploitation débridée ou éhontée] (83; 226f); and this shamelessness, along with the resultant difficulty of moralising about or sermonising on love, are inherent to what it is: “charity and pleasure, emotion and pornography, the neighbor and the infant, the love of lovers and the love of God, fraternal love and the love of art, the kiss, passion, friendship” (83; 226 – 7f). There is no use pretending otherwise: love gets around. Nancy: “To think love would thus demand a boundless generosity toward all these possibilities, and it is this generosity that would command reticence: the generosity not to choose between loves, not to privilege, not to hierarchize, not to exclude” (83; 227f). The last thing love needs is to be arranged taxonomically and valued accordingly, such that certain of its manifestations are taken to be

5 Kellogg, “Love and Communism,” 345.

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higher or truer instantiations of its essential principle: if we want to understand love, then it would be a mistake to attempt to distinguish between loves on the grounds of how authentic, ethical, painful, dangerous, healthy, passionate, trite, spiritual, erotic, fidelitous, sentimental, possessive, romantic, exploitative, narcissistic, or happy they are. Rather, the extreme multiplicity and “indefinite abundance” (83; 227f) that marks love is its essential principle.6 The reticence love calls for, then, is demanded by the “boundless generosity” (83; 227f) one needs in order to think it:

Love in its singularity, when grasped absolutely, is itself perhaps nothing but the indefinite abundance of all possible loves, and an abandonment to their dissemination, indeed to the disorder of these bursts. The thinking of love should learn to yield to this abandon: to receive the prodigality, the collisions, and the contradictions of love, without submitting them to an order that they essentially defy (83; 227f).7

At this point, the reflexivity that is so crucial to this essay is pushed further. Nancy indicates that the “generous reticence” required here “would be no different from the exercise of thought itself” (83; 227f): thought, insofar as it “rejects abstraction and conceptualization,” insofar as it refuses to “produce the operators of a knowledge” (83 – 4; 227f), is a practice of openness to something that exceeds it. For Nancy, as for the later Heidegger, thought does not master its object; rather, it “undergoes an experience, and lets the experience inscribe itself” (84; 227f). This ‘letting’ [laisse] is important: like Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, it links the practice of thought with acceptance and

6 Nancy writes: “[Love] is not in any one of its shatters, or it is always on the way to not being there. Its unity, or its truth as love, consists only in this proliferation, in this indefinite luxuriance of its essence – and this essence itself at once gives itself and flees itself in the crossing of this profusion. Pure love refuses orgasm, the seducer laughs at adoration – blind to the fact that they each pass through the other, even though neither stops in the other... [L]ove is not ‘polymorphous,’ and it does not take on a series of disguises. It does not withhold its identity behind its shatters: it is itself the eruption of their multiplicity, it is itself their multiplication in one single act of love, it is the trembling of emotion in a brothel, and the distress of a desire within fra-ternity” (102; 256f). 7 Translation slightly modified.


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receptivity. Yet Nancy goes perhaps further than Heidegger in asserting that thought, which “does not lay claim to a particular register of thinking” but rather “invites us to thinking as such” (84; 227f), is love. As he writes: “It is the love for that which reaches experience; that is to say, for that aspect of being that gives itself to be welcomed” (84; 227f). Thinking love requires generosity, receptivity, and openness to something in excess of the thinker – which is to say it requires love.

So there is a double reflexivity at work in this essay. Not only does it have to declare love in order to think it, but this thinking must itself be carried out as love. This heady confluence of practice and theory can help explain some of the formal characteristics of the piece which, if we are to believe its claims, will actually need to performatively enact them. Given its repeated insistence on the multiplicitous nature of love, then, it is appropriate that it achieves this through a variety of means: its refusal to find in any of the various figures of love that it traces a paradigmatic image of it;8 its collapse in its postscript into a strange Blanchotian dialogue (which indicates once again that a text on love might also have to be a communication of it) 9 ; its insistence, and this is inherent in the contradictory movements of the text as its argument develops, that the nature of its object is such that any full possession of it would actually represent its loss; 10 its reliance on quotations from and references to an eclectic range of philosophical and literary sources (a formal technique that recalls Benjamin’s Passagenwerk). The text is not

8 Nancy writes: “. . . love’s ultimate paradox, untenable and nevertheless inevitable, is that its law lets itself be represented simultaneously by figures like Tristan and Isolde, Don Juan, or Baucis and Philemon – and that these figures are neither the types of a genre nor the metaphors of a unique reality, but rather so many bursts [éclats] of love, which reflect love in its entirety each time without ever imprisoning it or holding it back” (101; 254f). 9 See 108 – 9; 267-8f. 10 Nancy writes: “There is not one philosophy that has escaped this double constraint. In each, love occupies place that is at once evident and dissimulat-ed (as, in Descartes, between the theory of union and that of admiration), or embarrassed and decisive (as, in Kant, in the theory of sublime reason), or essential and subordinate (as, in Hegel, in the theory of the State). At the cost of these contradictions and evasions, love consistently finds the place that it cannot not have, but it only finds it at this cost. What we would have to un-derstand is why this place is essential for it, and why it is essential to pay this price” (86; 230f).

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only a philosophical treatise on love, but also an attempt at a kind of multiplicitous exposure of it; like love itself, Nancy’s essay “offers finitude in its truth; it is finitude’s dazzling presentation” (99; 251f). This ultra-reflexivity – which requires of the essay this intertwining of content and form, of philosophical claims and their enactment – is part of what makes it beguiling.

None of this entails that the affects we associate with love are necessarily appropriate to thought. It is not that to think in Nancy’s sense of the term requires any particular feeling(s) of the thinker, whether they are taken either as a condition for, or simple epiphenomenon of, thinking. Love is not a feeling. Rather it is a simultaneous opening and obliging of the self: an opening of the self to something that exceeds it and an obliging of the self to that excess. To say that thinking is love, then, is not to expound any kind of irrationalism (such that, for instance, thinking would necessarily mean being intoxicated, giddy, exalted, etc.). As Nancy puts it: “To say that ‘thinking is love’ does not mean that love can be understood as a response to the question of thinking – and certainly not in the manner of a sentimental response, in the direction of a unifying, effusive, or orgiastic doctrine of thinking” (84; 228f). Instead, the obligation appropriate to love is also appropriate to thought. It is not exactly an ‘ethical’ obligation, at least in the mainstream philosophical sense of the term (after all, it is possible to be in love and to be ‘unethical’; indeed it is possible to be in love and to be evil – and sometimes love provokes it).11 It is an obligation in the etymological sense of the word, which derives from the Latin ligāre, meaning ‘to bind’ (think of our ‘ligature,’ or the speculative etymology of the term ‘religion’ as that which binds the human to the divine). Love/thought ties one to what one loves/thinks. As Nancy writes: “[I]t is necessary to say that ‘thinking is love’ is a difficult, severe thought that promises rigor rather than effusion” (84; 228f). Love/thought asks something of the lover/thinker; to engage in it is to be tested. Nancy’s is not a sentimental or flabbily relativistic thinking.

11 Nancy writes: “(It is perhaps that – a hypothesis that I leave open here – in love and in hate, but according to a regime other than that of Freudian am-bivalence, there would not be a reversal from hate to love, but in hate I would be traversed by the love of another whom I deny in his alterity. Ulti-mately, I would be traversed by this negation. This would be the limit of love, but still its black glimmer. Perverse acts of violence, or the cold rage to annihilate, are not hate)” (102; 255 – 6f).


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Implicit in this Heideggerian turn toward the category of ‘thought’ is a claim about philosophy. It is not quite that philosophy is opposed to thought. It is that it is possible to carry on something that resembles philosophy in the absence of thought; that philosophy can be (and has been) tempted to forgo thinking. It does so to the extent that it is an expression of the will to mastery. Philosophy doesn’t think when it refuses the receptivity and risk inherent in thought, when it fails to maintain itself in relation to an excess, when it tries to reduce everything to knowledge.12 Yet philosophy is not always or essentially the will to mastery. Indeed philosophy’s name points to this ambiguity: if it is the love of wisdom, it is not the arrival at wisdom, nor is it the knowledge of it. Nancy: “The intimate connivance between love and thinking is present in our very origins: the word ‘philosophy’ betrays it. Whatever its legendary inventor might have meant by it, ‘philosophy,’ in spite of everything – and perhaps in spite of all philosophies – means this: love of thinking, since thinking is love” (84; 227-8f). The double aspect of philosophy invoked here is crucial: philosophy is love, but only perhaps in spite of philosophies. If the practice of philosophy results in a ‘worldview,’ or a reasoned commitment to a set of theses (about mind, meaning, metaphysics, morals, or whatever), then philosophy doesn’t think; if however philosophy admits its obligation toward what exceeds knowledge, then perhaps it can be worthy of what we call it. Love/thought is foundational for, yet always in danger of being denied by, philosophy.

The Symposium is paradigmatic here. On the one hand, the work “signifies first that for Plato the exposition of philosophy . . . is not possible without the presentation of philosophic love” (85; 229f). Generously welcoming “all the different kinds of love,” the work presents the Eros proper to philosophy not “with the mastery of a triumphant doctrine” but rather “in a state of deprivation and

12 Descartes provides an image of this: “[O]pening the thorax of a young live rabbit and displacing the ribs so that the heart and trunk of the aorta are exposed, I then tied the aorta with a thread at a certain distance from the heart, and separated it from everything adhering to it, so that there could be no suspicion that any blood or spirit could flow into it from anywhere but the heart; then with a scalpel I made an incision between the heart and the liga-ture, and I saw with the greatest clarity [manifestissime] blood leaving in a spurt through the incision when the heart was extending, while, when it was con-tracted, the blood did not flow” (quoted in Grene, “The Heart and Blood,” 328).

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weakness, which allows the experience of the limit, where thought takes place, to be recognized” (85; 229-30f); in this text, Plato “touches the limits” and presents his thought with a “reticence [retenue] not always present elsewhere” (85; 230f). 13 On the other hand, however, “the Symposium also exercises a mastery over love” (85; 229f): it introduces “choices of philosophical knowledge” and a “truth regarding love” that “assigns its experience and hierarchizes its moments” (85; 230f). So the work takes away with one hand what it gives with the other; it deigns to open its discourse to the multiplicity of love, but recoils from that multiplicity, “substituting the impatience and conatus of desire for its joyous abandon” (85-6; 230f): “[I]n Plato, thinking will have said and will have failed to say that it is love – or to explain what this means” (86; 230f). This ambivalence, here displayed in one of philosophy’s foundational texts, marks the tradition’s inheritance of love. Philosophy needs it, but fails again and again to display the generous reticence it demands. As Nancy writes: “If thinking is love, that would mean (insofar as thinking is confused with philosophy) that thinking misses its own essence – that it misses by essence its own essence” (91; 237f).

This immanent critique of the tradition of philosophy, in which the discourse appears as engaged in a flirtation with mastery and security that would, if consummated, represent the denial of its own condition of possibility, places Nancy’s essay firmly in the post-Heideggerian tradition of the critique of metaphysics. Nancy, we might say, here reads the Heideggerian history of (the forgetting of) being in terms of a “missed rendezvous” (91; 238f) between philosophy and love. As Linnell Secomb points out, it reminds in particular of Levinas, whose own work can be understood as an attempt at opening philosophy to an experience of difference and exposure that had been haunting it all along. “Nancy’s loving philosophy,” Secomb writes, “is indebted in part, and perhaps most of all, to Levinas – a debt, a gift, a legacy that Nancy lovingly announces through an exposition of Levinas and an exposure of his own thought to that of Levinas.” 14 But of course, Levinas’s own relation to Heidegger was nothing if not ambivalent, and Nancy’s own post-Heideggerian reception of Levinas returns the ambivalent favour. First we should note that Nancy’s evocation of Levinas in this essay (which takes place in an extended parenthetical remark) itself begins

13 Translations modified. 14 Secomb, “Amorous Politics,” 452.


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with a sort of warning: “I will be even less explicit with Levinas than with Heidegger” (104; 260f). Secomb takes this as a kind of discretion (“in a Derridean ethical manner he does not return the gift – through eulogy, or dutiful discipleship, for example – and instead disseminates the gift of Levinasian ethics”)15, arguing that Nancy’s engagement with Levinas is “both a critique and a further elaboration.”16 Yet the critique runs deeper than Secomb seems to acknowledge – and the ‘elaboration,’ if it is that, is one that calls into question a crucial aspect of Levinas’s philosophy. As Secomb recognises, what Nancy finds problematic in Levinas is the tendency toward teleology on display in his works in relation to love, which allows him to hierarchise loves according to the kind of taxonomic procedure Nancy wants to criticise (Nancy speaks of the “the oriented sequence” that Levinas, “in a rather classical manner,” sets up between “fecundity, filiation, and fraternity” (105; 260f)). What we need to recognise, however, is that the teleology at work in Levinas (or at least, in the Levinas of the early works, up to and including Totality and Infinity), is the flipside to his sequential phenomenology, which traces the experience of the self as it moves from the clutches of the pure fact of being, understood as a totality without content (the anonymous il y a),17 toward the other. For Levinas, subjectivity begins in the impersonal and moves toward ethical experience. As he says at the outset of Time and the Other, “it is toward a pluralism that does not merge into unity that I should like to make my way and, if this can be dared, break with Parmenides.”18 Or

15 Secomb, “Amorous Politics,” 452. 16 Secomb, “Amorous Politics,” 452. 17 Toward the beginning of Time and the Other, Levinas provides a useful thought experiment to explain the concept of the il y a [there is]: “Let us imag-ine all things, beings and persons, returning to nothingness. What remains after this imaginary destruction of everything is not something, but the fact that there is [il y a]. The absence of everything returns as a presence, as the place where the bottom has dropped out of everything, an atmospheric densi-ty, a plenitude of the void, or the murmur of silence. There is, after this de-struction of things and beings, the impersonal ‘field of forces’ of existing. There is something that is neither subject nor substantive. The fact of existing imposes itself when there is no longer anything. And it is anonymous: there is neither anyone nor anything that takes this existence upon itself. It is im-personal like ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is hot.’ Existing returns no matter with what negation one dismisses it. There is, as the irremissibility of pure existing” (Levinas, Time and the Other, 46-47). 18 Levinas, Time and the Other, 42 (my emphasis).

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as he puts it in Totality and Infinity: “[W]e can proceed from the experience of totality back to a situation where totality breaks up, a situation that conditions the totality itself.” 19 Crucially, the whole analysis is predicated upon an equation between being as such and an impersonal, anonymous force that must be evaded for the sake of the other. And this is precisely what Nancy will challenge in Levinas, both in his rather subtle parenthetical note, and implicitly but consistently in the essay at large:

[I]n the es gibt (“it gives [itself]”) of Being, one can see everything except “generality.” There is the “each time,” an-archic . . . occurrence of a singular existing. There is no existing without existents, and there is no “existing” by itself, no concept – it does not give itself – but there is always being, precise and hard, the theft of generality. Being is at stake there, it is in shatters [en éclats], offered dazzling, multiplied, shrill and singular, hard and cut across: its being is there . . . This takes place before the face and signification. Or rather, this takes place on another level: at the heart of being (105; 261f).20

Nancy is alluding here to Levinas’s essay Existence and Existents; the argument is intended to call its foundational concept – that of the il y a, or the pure fact of being without beings – into question. Nancy’s ontology is geared from the outset toward a thinking (loving?) of being in which this image of a radically impersonal being-in-general is undermined in its very ground. Levinas’s teleology of love is problematic not just because it misses the essentially multiplicitous nature of its object, then, but also because missing this multiplicity means missing what love has to show about being. Love shows us that what takes place before ‘the face and signification’ is not the brute totality of a there is (which Levinas will figure in terms of a “condemnation to being”),21 but rather a there is that is always already plural: “[B]eing-with takes place only according to the occurrence of being, or its posing into shatters [éclats]. And the crossing – the coming-and-going, the comings-and-goings of love – is constitutive of that occurrence” (105; 261f). The multiplicity proper to love is

19 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 24. 20 Translation modified. 21 Levinas, Existence and Existents, 24.


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nothing other than the multiplicity of being itself. As it is exposed, love exposes being as shattered.

It would be wrong to take this talk of ‘shattering’ (a necessarily imperfect rendering of the French éclater, which possesses further connotations of bursting, brilliance, shining, and sparking) to imply that being is whole before being broken in the experience of love, that love’s shattering shatters a totality. Rather, this shattering has to be understood as originary: being is always already shattered; to put it a little awkwardly, we might say that the shard precedes the break. This is how Nancy avoids the Levinasian problematic of phenomenologically demonstrating how multiplicity enters into a self-contained, irremissibly monolithic being (and thus also the basic problem associated with this: that the multiplicity he establishes remains haunted by that monolith).22 In another work, Nancy writes: “That which, for itself, depends on nothing is an absolute. That which nothing completes in itself is a fragment. Being or existence is an absolute fragment.”23 The fragments or shards in play here are not pieces of some larger puzzle; rather they are absolutely fragmentary, and do not refer back to some prior whole. Being’s multiplicity is not the result of its lacking unity; it is absolute in its plurality, completely incomplete. Existence is ‘infinitely finite.’ 24 Nancy wants to undermine the idea of pure presence that runs through the early Levinas; he invokes love in order to show (or rather, to promise) that being is never a brute totality.

He argues something similar of the self. In love, the self finds itself to be broken, shattered, and intruded into. If I return to myself in the experience of love (and importantly, Nancy does not deny that love involves a kind of self-return or self-appropriation),25 then “I return broken: I come back to myself, or I come out of it, broken [brisé]” (96; 247f). If I am in love, then I lose my self (I lose my self possession); if I am in love, then I find myself, but I find myself to be mortal, finite, and exposed to something that exceeds me. In love I

22 See Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing, 89 – 93. 23 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 152. 24 See Nancy, The Sense of the World, 29 – 33. 25 Nancy writes: “Love frustrates the simple opposition between economy and noneconomy. Love is precisely – when it is, when it is the act of a singu-lar being, of a body, of a heart, of a thinking – that which brings an end to the dichotomy between the love in which I lose myself without reserve and the love in which I recuperate myself, to the opposition between gift and property” (96; 246f).

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find myself to have lost myself. As Kellogg puts it, “What the other (who we love) presents to us, Nancy argues, is the fact of her existence, which is to say, a being whose mortality and finiteness, calls us to know our own.”26 Love is only possible (if it is possible – this is only a promise, after all) between finite, mortal creatures. This is to say that immortals could not love each other (this is perhaps part of what our literary, cinematic, and popular cultural traditions evoke with their images of the vampire: all desire, no love – and condemned to the continual torture of that). 27 We could say that lovers share their finitude, as long as this ‘sharing’ in understood in an appropriately rigorous way: not as the ‘sharing’ of feelings or experiences, as certain debased contemporary discourses would have it, but the sharing of an exposure to something excessive, absolutely inappropriable (and of course, as lovers know, there is pain in this). Some of the most beautiful passages of Nancy’s essay are dedicated to a description of how love exposes the self’s finitude to itself, and to the other:

[T]he break is a break in his self-possession as subject; it is, essentially, an interruption of the process of relating oneself to oneself outside of oneself. From then on, I is constituted broken. As soon as there is love, the slightest act of love, the slightest spark, there is this ontological fissure that cuts

26 Kellogg, “Love and Communism,” 344. 27 This pits Nancy against Alain Badiou, who analyses love in terms of the Subject’s (or rather Subjects’) fidelity to the event of love; a move that, as he makes clear in his Ethics, renders the loving Subject immortal in a certain im-portant sense. As Badiou writes: “The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters Man’s identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal to which circumstances may expose him. And we know that every human being is capable of being this immortal - unpredicta-bly, be it in circumstances great or small, for truths important or secondary. In each case, subjectivation is immortal, and makes Man. Beyond this there is only a biological species, a ‘biped without feathers’, whose charms are not obvious” (Badiou, Ethics, 12). While the ethic of fidelity that Badiou con-structs displays certain similarities with Nancy’s idea of love as kind of ongo-ing promise without guarantee, the distinction here is clear: Badiou’s ‘Subject’ is marked by its having been able to rise above the everyday, ordinary, finite world of mortals. For Nancy, on the other hand, love can only happen to a finite self, and only exists because being as such is finite.


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across and that disconnects the elements of the subject-proper – the fibers of its heart. One hour of love is enough, one kiss alone, provided that it is out of love – and can there, in truth, be any other kind? Can one do it without love, without being broken into, even if only slightly? (96; 247f)

The temporal progression implied here, however, is something of an analytical fiction. Just as with being, it is not that love breaks the unity of the self, or shatters it, or intrudes upon it: rather, it reveals the self as always already broken, multiplicitious, shattered. As Nancy acknowledges (a few paragraphs later, in parentheses): “[T]he heart is not broken, in the sense that it does not exist before the break . . . it is the break itself that makes the heart” (99; 250f). What I love is the other’s impropriety, the fact that it does not have a hold on itself. But it is not as though my love renders the other finite in this way. Rather, it reveals it as such. Or still more accurately, it reveals me as such as it reveals the other as such, and one for the other in a kind of mutual astonishment.

Nancy unifies these two claims – the claim about being, and the claim about the heart of the self – via a striking image/metaphor, the precise status of which is rather enigmatic:

Again it is necessary that being have a heart, or still more rigorously, that being be a heart. “The heart of being” means nothing but the being of being, that by virtue of which it is being. To suppose that “the being of being,” or “the essence of being,” is an expression endowed with meaning, it would be necessary to suppose that the essence of being is something like a heart – that is to say: that which alone is capable of love (88; 234f).28

How are we to take the claim that it is necessary that being be a heart? It would be uncharitable to simply regard this as a poetic flourish on Nancy’s part, as a ‘literary’ device, affectation, or simple attempt at

28 How striking that this comes from a philosopher who, five years after the publication of the essay, would have his own heart transplanted. What an uncanny confirmation of the lack of self-possession that Nancy posits as es-sential to (the heart of) being!

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ornamentation: if this is a metaphor, then it should be more than ‘just’ a metaphor. We need to take it seriously; but how? Here it is worth acknowledging that Nancy’s statement here is made in the subjunctive [que l'être soit un coeur – his emphasis]. It indicates that we are returning to the theme of the promise.

For Nancy, ‘I love you’ is the most authentic name for love itself. It is not simply a constative statement, in that it doesn’t just pick out a fact about the world (say the presence in me of certain strong feelings). Rather it also does something: it is itself an event, not just a description of one. But neither (to continue in this Austinian register) is it a standard performative. While saying ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ is clearly an action – namely, the act of pronouncing – the status of ‘I love you’ is more ambiguous. Does saying it mean doing it in this case? What, besides sincerity, are the felicity conditions of this performative? At issue is the nature of the ‘act’ in question – is it really something that happens once, like the pronouncement of marriage? If I say ‘I pronounce you man and wife,’ and the power really is invested in me, then you become man and wife; if I say ‘I love you,’ then do I really love you? Even if I am sincere, I can still be wrong. There are other ways of loving besides saying ‘I love you,’ yet one cannot pronounce except by pronouncing. ‘I love you,’ then, is a singular kind of statement, one that seems to exist in a zone of indistinction between the constative and the performative. For Nancy, it is a sort of promise, and one of a particular sort. It is a promise on which I am, in a certain fundamental sense, unable to fully make good (for what would constitute its having been kept?). “The promise,” Nancy writes, “neither describes nor prescribes nor performs. It does nothing and thus is always in vain. But it lets a law appear, the law of the given word: that this must be” (100; 253f). A lack of guarantee thus marks the promise of love: “The promise must be kept, and nonetheless love is not the promise plus the keeping of the promise. It cannot be subjected in this way to verification, to justification, and to accumulation . . . Perhaps unlike all other promises, one must keep only the promise itself: not its ‘contents’ (‘love’), but its utterance (‘I love you’)” (100; 253f).29

29 Nancy has returned to this in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, where he reads the promise without guarantee essential to love in terms of the “Christian category of faith” (152): “What I am saying here would be perfectly suitable to our modern definition of faithfulness in love. It is precise-ly that, for us – faithfulness in love, if we conceive of faithfulness as distinct


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This can explain why Nancy turns to the subjunctive in his claim about being: to say that it is necessary that being be a heart is not the same as saying that it necessarily is a heart. It’s not that being is a heart, but that it has to be. To say that it is necessary that being be a heart is to promise that being is singular and exposed, that it is not the brute generality that horrifies Levinas, but rather a plurality that exceeds our attempts at mastering it. If being is a heart, then it is because of a groundlessness at its heart, the fact that it exposes itself as depending on no law, no foundation. The lack of guarantee that defines love is essential to being as such. Nancy:

What appears in [the light of love], at once excessive and impeccable, what is offered like a belly, like a kissed mouth, is the singular being insofar as it is this ‘self’ that is neither a subject nor an individual nor a communal being, but that – she or he – which cuts across, that which arrives and departs. The singular being affirms even better its absolute singularity, which it offers only in passing, which it brings about immediately in the crossing. What is offered through the singular being – through you or me, across this relation that is only cut across – is the singularity of being, which is to say: that being itself, ‘being’ taken absolutely, is absolutely singular (108; 265f).

The claim that it is necessary that being be a heart folds Nancy’s claim about being into his claim about the self. Both are thus posited as simultaneously singular and plural, the ‘that it is’ of each cutting across the other. Astonishment at my lover, and astonishment with her; astonishment at being, and astonishment with it – and all these astonishments bound up together, impossible to tell apart. This positing of the self/being as a heart is a promising, and its lack of

from the simple observation of conjugal law or of a moral or ethical law out-side the conjugal institution. This is even, perhaps, what we mean more pro-foundly by love, if love is primarily related to faithfulness, and if it is not that which overcomes its own failings but rather that which entrusts itself to what appears to it as insufficiency... This is why the true correlate of Christian faith is not an object but a word... our amorous faith is entirely Christian, since, as faithfulness, it entrusts itself to the word of other, to the word that says ‘I love you,’ or doesn’t event say it” (153).

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guarantee is essential (one can’t be astonished by the appearance of a link a causal chain).

What love shows – if it exists – is that there is something in being that is more than being. It exposes excess at and as the heart of it. And there is no demonstrating it outside of a love/thought whose condition of possibility is this very lack of epistemic assurance, this impossibility of definitive demonstration. If love exists, then it is because being is (infinitely) finite, but we cannot show or be finally justified in our (true) belief that it exists. To love/think is to testify to the existence of something withdrawn from knowledge, to maintain oneself in relation to an excess that, from the perspective of certain discourses, is properly invisible. Indeed to Nancy’s list – “sexology, marriage counseling, newsstand novels, and moral edification” (102; 257f) – we might add evolutionary psychology, and perhaps ‘romance’ reality television: the first unsentimentally refusing the distinction between love and desire, reading love as the simple expression of desires inherited as the result of adaptive processes; the second sentimentalising them both, reading them as the expression of some private, unique, confessing, entertaining self. Both miss love, because both reduce it to the existence or non-existence of a certain state of affairs. They miss the groundlessness that is essential to it, and because of it.

Missing love in this way, these discourses miss the only possible site of community. This is not because love is the principle or ground of community (such that our being-together would necessarily be a kind of loving). It is because love and community share a condition of possibility in the groundlessness of being. In “The Inoperative Community,” which is the title essay from the collection of English translations in which “Shattered Love” also appears, Nancy uses the concept of désoeuvrement [inoperativity] to get at this groundlessness. It is useful to understand it as a response to Bataille, who is Nancy’s key interlocutor in this essay because of his lifelong obsession with tracing a mode of exposure that would be irreducible to intersubjectivity, relations of exchange, and every form of sociality; Nancy finds in Bataille an ally in the struggle to locate “a place of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion, and thereby beyond such wasting away of liberty, of speech, or of simple happiness as comes about whenever these become subjugated to the exclusive order of privatization.”30 At the

30 “The Inoperative Community,” 1.


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same time, however, Nancy discovers a certain limit to Bataille’s thinking here, a certain tendency to oppose to society an immanentist figure of communal fusion thought in terms of the attainment or production of common being. For Nancy, Bataille was tempted by a nostalgic image of community – understood according to an image of ecstatic union, an orgiastic being-together – as something that we have lost in modernity (thus he remains stuck opposing Gesellschaft with Gemeinschaft – something that Nancy, despite his commitment to thinking community, obstinately refuses).31 This would be the source of his “fascination with fascism” (which is itself a “grotesque or abject resurgence of an obsession with communion”).32 And because of the link between the project of communal fusion and death (“political or collective enterprises dominated by a will to absolute immanence,” writes Nancy, “have as their truth the truth of death”),33 it would also be the source of his being “haunted . . . by the idea that a human sacrifice should seal the destiny of the secret community of Acéphale.”34 The difference between community and communion is fundamental here; for Nancy, the latter is a violent and dangerous parody of the former. But of course Bataille, the thinker who “for a long time . . . had represented archaic societies, their sacred structures, the glory of military and royal societies, the nobility of feudalism, as bygone and fascinating forms of a successful intimacy of being-in-common with itself,” eventually “came to understand the

31 For Nancy, it is not that in capitalist modernity relations of exchange and domination uprooted and destroyed a previously existing community. What existed before the rise of capital was something else entirely, something for which “have no name or concept” (11). Nancy writes: “Community has not taken place, or rather, if it is indeed certain that humanity has known (or still knows, outside of the industrial world) social ties quite different from those familiar to us, community has never taken place along the lines of our projects of it according to these different social forms. It did not take place for the Guayaqui Indians, it did not take place in an age of huts; nor did it take place in the Hegelian “spirit of a people” or in the Christian agape. No Gesellschaft has come along to help the State, industry, and capital dissolve a prior Ge-meinschaft... community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us – question, waiting, event, imperative – in the wake of society” (11). 32 “The Inoperative Community,” 16-17. 33 “The Inoperative Community,” 12. 34 “The Inoperative Community,” 16-17.

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ridiculous nature of all nostalgia for communion.” 35 It is this ambivalence that interests Nancy, the way Bataille wavered on the edge of a concept of community that would resist both the “problematics of sociality or intersubjectivity” 36 and the image of community as fusion, community understood as a “work of death.”37 This is what Nancy means when he writes that “what he thus had to think at his limit is what he leaves for us to think in our turn.” 38 Bataille’s thinking is crucial for Nancy because it splits on the very distinction that he wants to clarify; despite its nostalgic tendencies, it testifies to “the dissolution, the dislocation . . . the unsurpassable conflagration of community”39 that marks our time. This, then, is the significance of the concept of désoeuvrement. The capitalist spectacle, we might say, refuses the worklessness at the heart of community (and indeed, sets us to work as it does so), privatising the experience of finitude such that it simply collapses into senselessness. On the other hand, the nostalgic, orgiastic reduction of community that tempted Bataille is meant above all to make a work of death, to make death “the work of common life” and grant it a total sense. Nancy goes on: “And it is this absurdity, which is at bottom an excess of meaning, an absolute concentration of the will to meaning, that must have dictated Bataille’s withdrawal from communitarian enterprises.” 40 Thus for Nancy Bataille’s eventual renunciation of the nostalgia that marked his obsession with community must have stemmed from the acknowledgment that community is workless in an essential sense; that community is precisely that which resists all our attempts at setting life and death to work in the constitution of shared meaning. This follows from Nancy’s decision to think from out of a proper confrontation with the finitude of being: it is in the openness of being, its lack of grounding in any substantial or metaphysical principle, that we experience the mutual exposure that is community. If the spectacle is blind to this openness, obscuring it behind the ideological metaphysics of the private individual, then fascism rages to close it.

35 “The Inoperative Community,” 17. 36 “The Inoperative Community,” 14 37 “The Inoperative Community,” 17. 38 “The Inoperative Community,” 25. 39 “The Inoperative Community,” 1. 40 “The Inoperative Community,” 17.


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Crucial for us is how the image of communion that haunted Bataille was entwined with an image of love. And of course, Bataille thought love in terms of absolute loss and expenditure, as a limit experience that lacerates the self and exposes it to an outside that it cannot accommodate. Thus community emerges in his thought as dependent “on the sharing of nocturnal terrors and the kind of ecstatic spasms that are spread by death.”41 As he put it in his final address to the Collège de Sociologie in July 1939:

The sacrificial laceration that opens the festival is a liberating laceration. The individual who participates in loss is obscurely aware that this loss engenders the community that supports him. But a desirable woman is necessary to he who makes love, and it is not always easy to know if he makes love in order to be united with her, or if he uses her because of his need to make love. In the same way, it is difficult to know to what extent the community is but the favorable occasion for a festival and a sacrifice, or to what extent the festival and the sacrifice bear witness to the love individuals give to the community.42

Thinking community according to the image of lovers means subjecting them both to a logic of sacrifice. Love becomes a work of death, taking death as its very paradigm (“love,” Bataille writes, “expresses a need for sacrifice: each unity much lose itself in some other, which exceeds it”),43 and community appears as constituted on the basis of a sacrificial laceration that bears more than a passing resemblance to “sexual laceration.”44 Bataille effects a collapse of the

41 Bataille, “Nietzschean Chronicle” 208; Nancy quotes this passage without comment in “The Inoperative Community” (34). 42 Bataille, “The College of Sociology,” 251. 43 Bataille, “The College of Sociology,” 250. 44 Bataille, “The College of Sociology,” 251. Nancy identifies a similar logic at work in the figure of suiciding lovers: “The joint suicide is one of the mythi-co-literary figures of this logic of communion in immanence. Faced with this figure, one cannot tell which – the communion or the love – serves as a mod-el for the other in death. In reality, with the immanence of the two lovers, death accomplishes the infinite reciprocity of two agencies: impassioned love conceived on the basis of Christian communion, and community thought according to the principle of love” (“The Inoperative Community,” 12).

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conceptual distinctions between love/community and death/sacrifice; all are fused together in the orgiastic image of communion. Compare this with the following from Nancy:

Properly speaking, there is no laceration of the singular being: there is no open cut in which the inside would get lost in the outside (which would presuppose an initial “inside,” an interiority). The laceration that, for Bataille, is exemplary, the woman’s “breach,” is ultimately not a laceration to the outside. (While the obsession with the breach in Bataille’s text indeed indicates something of the unbearable extremity at which communication comes into play, it also betrays an involuntarily metaphysical reference to an order of interiority and immanence, and to a condition involving the passage of one being into an other, rather than the passage of one through the exposed limit of the other.)45

The difference is subtle but absolutely essential. For Nancy, Bataille was (involuntarily) metaphysical to the extent that he was wedded to the opposition between interiority and exteriority (such that, for instance, lovers would be engaged in an absolute desire to sacrifice the former for the latter). This is the significance of the breach, the laceration, and the wound in Bataille’s thinking: for him, these are points of entry and openness, points at which the integrity of the self is threatened with the dissolution that fascinated him. For Nancy, on the other hand, exteriority goes all the way down:46 as we saw, it is not that love breaks into the self, violating its integrity; rather it reveals it as always already broken. Nancy’s thought of love retains from

45 “The Inoperative Community,” 30. 46 As Nancy writes in an essay included in the artist’s book released with Phillip Warnell’s film Outlandish: “The body doesn’t contain anything, neither a spirit that couldn’t be contained nor an interiority specific to the body, since the body itself is nothing but the multiply folded surface of the ex-position or ek-sistence that it is . . . All the way down to its guts, in its muscle fiber and through its irrigation channels, the body exposes itself, it exposes to the out-side the inside that keeps escaping always farther away, farther down the abyss that it is” (Nancy’s “Strange Foreign Bodies,” 18). Perhaps this is the significance of the central image of Warnell’s film: a live octopus in a tank of water positioned at the stern of a boat in choppy seas.


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Bataille the sense that it exposes a certain ‘unbearable extremity,’ but jettisons his sacrificial metaphysics of the void. This is what he means when he writes: “[t]here is nothing behind singularity.”47 Nancy thus refuses the idea, still at work in Bataille, that lovers are “lost in a convulsion that binds them together,”48 that in the act of love there is a dissolution and reconstitution, an overcoming of a prior separation. As he writes: “In love, there is melee without assimilation or laceration. There is body one in each other and one to each other without incorporation or decorporation. Love is the melee of two bodies that would avoid all the traps of one.”49 Retrieving love from the sacrificial register in this way, Nancy is able to extract it from the paradigm of death. This, in turn, allows for a thought of community that would not therefore be reducible to the metaphysics of communion. Love is not the principle of community; it is another modality of the exposure of the finitude that is shared in community. And what is shared is not the void but groundlessness: the pure gratuity of a world without principle.

Given Bataille’s fierce atheism, it is perhaps ironic that Nancy links the project of communal fusion that tempted him with Christianity, arguing that the fascist project represented a “convulsion of Christianity,”50 and claiming that “the true consciousness of the loss of community is Christian . . . communion takes place, in its principle as in its ends, at the heart of the mystical body of Christ.”51 But of course, this should not surprise us, because the Eucharist is obviously the exemplary model for understanding community according to a logic of love that would always already be a logic of sacrifice: community as incorporation, as participation in a single body. In that sense, Nancy’s project can be understood as intervening into the metaphysics of Christianity so as to release something from it (which is to say that he was engaged in the deconstruction of Christianity well before Dis-Enclosure). This will underline the significance of the thought of love available in “L’amour en éclats,” which turns more than once to the philosophical question raised by the Christian equation between God and love (Nancy argues, for

47 “The Inoperative Community,” 27. 48 “College of Sociology,” 250. 49 “Strange Foreign Bodies, 17-18 (translation modified). 50 “The Inoperative Community,” 17. 51 “The Inoperative Community,” 10.

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instance, that “God is love” provides the model for “thinking is love” (86; 228f)). If it is true that I can only love that which is finite, then it follows that the very idea of a universal love for ‘everyone’ is incoherent. If there is any sense in the command to love one’s neighbor, then, it will consist in the fact that the neighbor resists becoming a representative of abstract ‘humanity.’52 Similarly, if there is a love for being, it will be because there is no such thing as ‘everything,’ because being does not exist except here and here.53 In the terms of Nancy’s essay, it will be because the essence of being is “something like a heart – that is to say: that which alone is capable of love” (88; 234f).

Love’s uncertain light shows being not as a brute totality, but exposes it as singular and plural, completely incomplete. I cannot love being in general, and I cannot love everyone. But perhaps – there is no guaranteeing it – I can love this being, this one.

52 Slavoj Žižek argues that the realisation of universal love is plagued by ex-ceptions for this very reason (see “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 182-3). 53 This finitude arguably also forms the (erotic) condition of the possibility of commentary. Commentary is a mode (or shard) of love because it exposes the finitude of a text in exposing the real infinity of the task that it sets for itself: the fact that one can never completely fill the margin. The text always, as Zarathustra proclaims of all great loves, wants more. Of course, that there is always more to say means not only that one can never say enough (as the pseudo-poet proclaims when he bemoans the inadequacy of language in the face of his beloved), but also that one cannot say everything: just as I can only love because I can’t love everyone, I can only write because I can’t write everything.


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REFERENCES Badiou, Alain. Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001). Bataille, Georges. “Nietzschean Chronicle,” trans. Allan Stoekl et al,

in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 202-212.

Bataille, Georges. “The College of Sociology,” trans. Allan Stoekl et al, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, 246- 253.

Critchley, Simon. Very Little... Almost Nothing (London: Routledge, 2004).

Grene, Marjorie. “The Heart and Blood: Descartes, Plemp, and Harvey,” in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of Rene Descartes, ed. Voss, S. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 324-336.

Kellogg, Catherine. “Love and Communism: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Shattered Community,” Law and Critique (16: 3, 2005), 339-355.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press), 1978.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987).

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquense University Press, 1969).

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “L’amour en éclats,” in Une pensée finie (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 225-267.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Shattered Love,” trans. Lisa Garbus and Simona Sawhney in The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 82-109.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bergo, Malefant, and Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Strange Foreign Bodies” in Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies, trans. Daniela Hurezanu (London: Calverts, 2010), 17-24.

Secomb, Linnell. “Amorous Politics: Between Derrida and Nancy,” in Social Semiotics (16: 3, 2006), 449-460.

Stevens, Wallace. “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 380-408.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2001).

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Zettel, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

Žižek, Slavoj “Neighbors and Other Monsters: a Plea for Ethical Violence,” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 134-190.

Mathew Abbott lives in Queanbeyan, Australia. He completed his PhD in philosophy at the University of Sydney, where he wrote on the question of political ontology, particularly in relation to Heidegger and Agamben. He researches phenomenology, aesthetics, and political theory; he teaches philosophy, poetry, film, and politics. His first collection is forthcoming with Australian Poetry.


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THE GRACE OF HERMENEUTICS

Michael Edward Moore The grace of hermeneutics suggests an experience of plenitude in the depths of reading. The following essay examines some remarkable episodes of reading in the Book of Acts, the Life of St. Anthony, and the Confessions of St. Augustine. Part One considers the art of interpretation and the role of the spirit, while Part Two takes up the theme of Kairos and absolute time. At the outset, however, I wish to reflect on the permanence of things, especially in connection with the letters and words in books. PROLOGUE: NOTHING CEASES TO BE The Orkney poet George Mackay Brown once said that he had “a deep-rooted belief that what has once existed can never die: not even the frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet stone.”1 Brown’s poetry became an attempt to accommodate this omnipresent and enduring character of being, especially in its frailest presence. A volume of poetry would become an effort to realize the world in a book. Books participate in what Emmanuel Levinas referred to as “being without nothingness,” a fullness or plenitude of being. Among other implications, the permanence of being, in Levinas’s view, means that a suicide cannot expunge his own being as

1 Maggie Fergusson, George Mackay Brown, The Life (London: John Murray, 2006), p.289. I already discussed these lines in a different context: “An Historian’s Notes for a Miloszan Humanism,” The Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 (2007): 191-216. Note that this notion is also found in the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz. It is perhaps comparable to the emanation theory of neoplatonism (outpouring or unfolding): Pauliina Remes, Neoplatonism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 45-46. This is certainly true of 14th century neoplatonism: being as an idea of God. See Stefan Swiezawski, Histoire de la philosophie européenne au XVe siècle, trans. Henry Rollet and Mariusz Prokopowicz (Paris: Beauchesne, 1990), p.228.

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he hopes.2 Through the letters in books we often become aware of the continued existence of ancient people and realities. It is as though we were rowing on a foggy lake, hearing birds and smelling flowers, but not quite finding the shore. Those ancient realities are right beside us, but in a secondary condition. Secondariness is the form of the world offered by books and letters.3 Reading is an act of divination that stirs up the realities hidden in the letters in books.4 The reader actualizes what is lurking there, or as Husserl noted, we have to reactivate the past in order for it to be available to us in the present.5 Hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, therefore involves careful reading and research, in conjunction with contemplation.6 For Hugh of St. Victor, the beautiful things of nature, which he calls the book of this world, in all their beauty, are not themselves the destination, but the subject of learning and a platform for something higher, a return to them in the purity of thought. This research, which ranges from the pages of nature to the pages of written books, can then serve as the foundation for “the heights of

2 “But first I want to stress at greater length the consequences of this conception of the there is. It consists in promoting a notion of being without nothingness, which leaves no hole and permits no escape.” Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p.50. 3 On the principle of secondariness: Jean-Pierre Sonnet, S.J., “La Bible et l’Europe: une patrie herméneutique, in Nouvelle revue théologique 130 (2008), 177-193. 4 This explains the “ancient newness” of commentaries on the Bible: Emmanuel Levinas, “The Strings and the Wood: On the Jewish Reading of the Bible,” in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University, 1994), p.127. 5 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 1976), p.92. On Husserl: Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown: Wesleyan University, 1984), p.73. 6 “For historical interpretation, copious notes are requisite,” August Boeckh, On Interpretation and Criticism, trans. John Paul Pritchard (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1968), p.86. Boeckh’s perspective is similar to other notable historians of his age, such as Droysen, who also considered research to be a fundamental and exhaustive demand, our ability to understand the writings of the past being possible because it is congenial to our minds.

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contemplation.”7 In a similar vein, the poet Mallarmé argued that books are spiritual instruments, observing that “through the act of reading, a solitary tacit concert is performed for the spirit.” Mallarmé’s cult of letters and books is indeed theological. The book is in the fullest sense a spiritual instrument, and it is the reader who reveals the depths of the text, bringing it to light.8

Friedrich Schleiermacher viewed divination as a basic procedure of hermeneutics: by means of it, a causeway extends from our own individuality to far-off souls of the past, making it possible to interpret their works. Everyone is here with us, including the dead.9 If we pose the thesis: no historical research without hermeneutics, then we are also saying: no historical research without divination. Czeslaw Milosz often described such actualizations of the past in his poetry: as he wrote in “Bells in Winter,” long-ago scenes and people will emerge from the past “as long as I perform the rite and sway the censer and the smoke of my words rises here. As long as I intone: Memento etiam, Domine.”10 Their being has taken up residence in the letters of a book, and therefore the poem (a reading of the poem) seems to have liturgical

7 Cf. Hugh’s commentary on John: Franklin T. Harkins, Reading and the Work of Restoration. History and Scripture in the Theology of Hugh of St Victor (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2009), p.82. 8 Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book as a Spiritual Instrument,” in: Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Harvard: Belknap, 2007), p. 228. According to Wolfgang Iser, likewise the reader “causes the text to reveal its potential multiplicity of connections.” See “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” in: New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974). pp.125-147. On Mallarmé’s theological approach to the book, see the interesting discussion in Moshe Idel, Absorbing Perfections: Kaballah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University, 2002), pp.76-77. 9 “The divinatory is based on the assumption that each person is not only a unique individual in his own right, but that he has a receptivity to the uniqueness of every other person . . . divination is aroused by comparison with oneself.” F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics. The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Ducke and Jack Forstmann (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), p.150. 10 Czeslaw Milosz, “Bells in Winter,” in Bells in Winter, trans. the author and Lillian Valee (New York: Ecco Press, 1980), p.70. In another poem, Milosz wrote: “I would like everyone to know...that what is most their own is imperishable, / And persists like the things they touch, now seen by me beyond time’s border: her comb, her tube of cream and her lipstick / On an extramundane table.” From “Elegy for Y. Z.,” in Unattainable Earth, trans. by the author and Robert Hass (New York: Ecco Press, 1986), p.99.

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and divinatory force. The character of these beings from the past is no doubt different from “the originals” – they have become invisible and spiritualized. The classical scholar may only meet with a “second Horace,” despite the real presence of Horace in a book – especially during the time of contemplation and reading. The ghostly Horace may seem to be less spontaneous or talkative. However, the text still demands answers to its questions, and if we are “sensitive to the text’s alterity” to follow the argument of Hans-Georg Gadamer, it may even shake us out of our situated sleep, and challenge us to our core. 11 Divination and interpretation thus become a dialogue of author and reader, an intimate communication in an extra-mundane space. “When I read, my skull becomes a crystal.”12 PART ONE: DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE READING? I begin with a mysterious episode from the Book of Acts. Obedient to the command of an angel, Philip the Deacon walked along a road through the wilderness between Jerusalem and Gaza. There he met an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official, riding in a chariot, who was reading from the prophet Isaiah. Philip asked him “Do you understand what you are reading?” – this is the hermeneutical question par excellence. The Ethiopian was reading a difficult text from Isaiah: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter” (Isa 53.7). Here, in what Childs calls “the most contested chapter in the Old Testament,” Isaiah intones the destiny of the suffering servant, evidently a vicarious figure of Israel, expressing the pain of Israel in the period of Isaiah’s preaching, the Babylonian Exile.13 But Philip explained that the real meaning was otherwise: that the suffering servant was none other than Jesus, and that the entire work of Isaiah announced Christ and his history. For Christians the question of biblical interpretation became: how to understand the books of the Hebrew Bible as Christian

11 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (2d ed., rev. London: Continuum, 2004), p.271. 12 Christian Bobin, Carnet du soleil (Castellare-di-Casinca: Éditions Lettres Vives, 2011), p.24. 13 In chapter 53 we have to do with Second Isaiah, or deutero-Isaiah, who wrote after the fall of Jerusalem in 587. Brevard Childs, Isaiah; Old Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001). On the general period of Second Isaiah’s utterances, see p.289; on the hermeneutical problem of chapter 53, see p.410. Childs suggests that this chapter almost defeats the possibility of a contained exposition.


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scripture? Christian typology could discern the messianic figure of Christ behind the surface of Israel’s history, and this was joined to an eschatological sense that the end of history had been initiated.14 Isaiah in particular was the object of intense Christian scrutiny and interpretation. For Luke, as for other early Christians, Isaiah was nothing other than an ancient prophecy about Christ.15 Many of the sayings attributed to Jesus contain echoes and quotations from Isaiah, and it even seems that the events of his life were understood by the Gospel authors in light of Isaiah.16 Jesus himself interpreted Isaiah in the synagogue, unrolling the scroll to where it says: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (Isa 61.1).17 He commented: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4.16-21).18 Commentary and the Spirit came together in this hermeneutical drama, with its profound secondariness. How strangely the new seems to have the ability to initiate something older, as if the fabric of time has been reversed.19 Philip the Deacon explained the Christian meaning of Isaiah to the eunuch, who, seeing a body of water nearby, asked at once to be baptized. When the two men got up from the water, behold, Philip had vanished: the Holy Spirit had “snatched [him] away.” Philip suddenly “found himself at Azotus” (Acts 3.26-40). It seems that Philip, in his commerce with angels and the Holy Ghost, had become a kind of aerial spirit. Luke, the author of Acts, thus totally identified Philip with the art of interpretation. As an angelic mediator, Philip could convey the meaning of written words, fly across the wilderness, appear and disappear like the very Hermes of hermeneutics.20

14 Julio Trebolle Barrera, The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p.492. 15 Isaiah plays a special role in Luke: Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders, Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke-Acts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp.14-25. 16 John F.A. Sawyer, The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.21-41. 17 Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture, pp.22-23. 18 This is a case of the principle that Scripture comments on Scripture, the contextus remotus. 19 I am grateful here for the suggestions and comments of Nicola Masciandaro. 20 On Hermes / hermeneutics: Werner G. Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (New York: Crossroad, 1991), p.1; the origin of the term is hermeneia, having to do with Hermes (Boeckh, On Interpretation, p.47).

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The prophecies of Isaiah convey a sense of historical gloom and elevate the notion of Divine Sovereignty. 21 The roaring sea, the seraphim, the millstones and veils of Isaiah now turned even stranger and more powerful. Pulled from the dry old husk of their traditional sense, the ancient words of Isaiah suddenly flashed brightly in the reader’s mind. The prophecies have come to pass in an unexpected way. Similar effects of renewal and transformation-through-commentary were known and highly regarded in Jewish exegesis as well, the intensive search for meaning and appreciation for secondariness. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet describes the art of rabbinical commentary: “beyond time, as if time did not exist, a text is reread and updated.”22 Scholem likewise points to the unending search for significance in the Torah on the part of the Sages, and that indeed “the gates of exegesis were never shut.” 23 Philip’s Christian interpretation of Isaiah combined a radically new reading with an act of divination. The story of Philip and the Ethiopian is about the transforming power of a basic text (we might call it an Urtext) now understood for the first time – for only when it is truly understood can the written word shake the reader to his core. Correct interpretation of an Urtext does not simply decode, but induces a change in the reader, bringing her to a crisis, to the edge of a precipice. 24 This is a moment of

21 Sandra M. Schneiders The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as a Sacred Scripture (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), p.125. See further E. W. Heaton, A Short Introduction to the Old Testament Prophets (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), pp.91-100; still valuable is Otto Eissfeldt, The Old Testament, An Introduction, trans. Peter R. Ackroyd (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp.303-346. 22 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present, trans. David Ames Curtis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p.15. On timelessness in the rabbinical stance as such: Jacob Neusner, Rabbinic Judaism: The Theological System, Boston: Brill, 2002), pp.107-110. 23 Gershom Scholem, “A New Spiritual Perspective on the Exegesis of Primary Sources,” in: On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, edited by Abraham Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), p.72. 24 It is sometimes suggested that we can begin our episodic encounter with a text by adopting a certain method or approach, or by asking certain questions: see Schneiders, Revelatory Text, pp.111-113. This would make the impact of the encounter into the outcome of a properly selected technique or procedure.


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inspiration: inhaling the Spirit wafting from the pages and letters.25 The interpretation of Isaiah becomes a cold breath of pneuma, the Spirit emanating from and explaining the words that it inhabits. For Luke, following the portrait in the Old Testament, the Spirit of God was at the same time the divine word – and a divine breath or wind, a numinous force.26 The ability to interpret Scripture was a prophetic capacity. Reading the Old Testament in the spirit of the New Testament led naturally to analogical methods of interpretation. Analogical reading was the gift of Alexandria, where this hermeneutical style was refined by pagans, Jews and Christians. Alexandrian reading unfolded meanings from the text without reference to author or historical milieu. The historical and the litteral were not held in high esteem. You could say that the Alexandrians abolished distance in favor of appropriated meanings.27 This became the most favored kind of reading throughout the patristic and medieval period. And of course it provided the design for a Christian structure of time that saw Judaism as worn out and done for. PART TWO: KAIROS – TIME OF THE TEXT & TIME OF THE READER Not long ago I watched a hawk in an oak tree outside my study as it broke off large, twisted branches, weighed and judged them, then ponderously flew off with them to build a nest. I wondered what made this the time to build a nest? The hawk’s actions seemed to take place in absolute time. Such intensified moments are what the New

25 Inhaling: this is suggested by a passage in Ambrose: “Aperite igitur aures et bonum odorem uitae aeternae inhalatum uobis munere sacramentorum carpite” – “open your ears and inhale the good odor of eternal life wafted to you from the gift of the sacraments.” Ambrose, De mysteriis, I.3, in Ambroise de Milan, Des sacrements, des mystères, ed. Bernard Botte; Sources chretiennes, 25 (Paris: Cerf, 1950), p.108. According to Congar, the breath of God “hovers over a creation that God brings about by speaking – through his Word”; in the Gospel of John, Jesus says “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (Jn 6:63). See Yves Congar, The Word and the Spirit, trans. David Smith (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1986), pp. 15 and 17. 26 The most significant study of this question is still G.W.H. Lampe, “The Holy Spirit in the Writings of St. Luke,” in Studies in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot, edited by D. E. Nineham (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), pp.159-200; see p.160. “I will pour out my Spirit,” says Jesus. According to Luke, the Spirit was “poured out” or “came down” over the apostles and the early Church. Evans and Sanders, Luke and Scripture, p.32. 27 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, p.44.

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Testament calls “the fullness of time,” kairos, the critical moment, or the right time. 28 This is why historians and prophets could understand the signs of the times, and foresee the approaching end of history, when all things would be made new (Rv 21.5). In the course of historical criticism, we distinguish between the time of the text and the time of the reader. The time of the text consists of its historical moment, with all the ramifications of influence and audience: the historical context of the author’s world. For it seems that “the era in which an author lives, his development, his involvements . . . constitute his ‘sphere’.”29 This is true, even if historical criticism must be aware of its limitations.30 The time of the reader is more open-ended. Possible readers might live in any time and place. On occasion, the time of the text and the time of the reader can both take the form of absolute time. A work can be written under the pressure of messianic time, in a mood of crisis, which can correspond to the crisis (kairos) of the reader.31 In Milan, Augustine once listened to Ambrose discuss the methods of reading Scripture. Ambrose explained to his students that many passages in the Bible appear to be absurd, but only so long as they were read only at the level of the literal meaning. “As if he were most carefully enunciating a principle of exegesis,” Ambrose recited: ‘The letter kills, the spirit gives life’ (2 Cor. 3:6). “Those texts which, taken literally, seemed to contain perverse teachings he would expound spiritually, removing the mystical veil.” 32 And indeed, Ambrose’s odd little work De Mysteriis provided this type of clarification, showing the meaning of the liturgy (rationem edere), with allegorical interpretations of the Biblical lections including Isaiah. 33

28 Xavier Léon-Dufour, Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. Terrence Prendergast (San Francisco: 1983), pp.404-405. 29 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics, p.118. 30 “It is not the key that opens all of the locked chambers. There are proofs that see further.” Gershom Scholem, “What Others Rejected: Kabbalah and Historical Criticism,” in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time and Other Essays, ed. Avraham Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), p.79. 31 Amos Funkenstein, “Gershom Scholem: Charisma, Kairos, and the Messianic Dialectic,” in: History and Meaning 4 (1992), 123-140. 32 Confessions, 6.4.6. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.94. 33 Ambroise de Milan, Des Sacrements, des mystères, ed. Dernard Bott, Sources chrétiennes (Paris: Cerf, 1950), p.30.


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But Ambrose’s theory of interpretation left Augustine a little cold: after all, Augustine was a professional rhetorician. “Fearing a precipitate plunge, I kept my heart from giving any assent.”34 For Augustine that moment only came later, when he was living with his friends in Cassiciacum. Now when Augustine began his cultured retreat and meditations at Cassiciacum, he was already familiar with the heroic stories of the desert monks, and in particular knew about St. Antony. 35 St. Antony’s retreat to the desert had been set in motion by a text he heard being read one day in church: “Go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Mt. 19:21). Not long afterward Antony also heard the text: “Do not be anxious about tomorrow” from the Sermon on the Mount.36 Antony only heard the lections, not reading the Bible for himself, because in Athanasius’s portrait, Antony was a rustic hermit and illiterate.37 For his part, spending his days reading in Cassiciacum, Augustine’s heart was already poised, when he heard the mysterious childlike voice, either male or female, telling him to “pick up and read, pick up and read.”38 Giving heed to the voice, Augustine took up the Epistle of Paul to the Romans and read “Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Mt. 19:21). In relation to the conversion of St. Antony, this was a carefully recorded instance of secondariness. Augustine’s conversion represented a choice in life, and a movement from hearing to reading.39 After reading the passage, Augustine made the ultimate gesture of the reader: “I inserted my

34 Augustine, Confessions, 6.4.6. See comments in Raymond Studzinski, Reading to Live. The Evolving Practice of Lectio Divina (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2009), p.80. 35 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, A Biography (Berkeley: University of California, 1969), pp.113-114. 36 Athanasius, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980), pp.31-32. 37 As Samuel Rubenson amply demonstrates, Antony’s illiteracy was a deliberate fiction of Athanasius. Samuel Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), p.134. 38 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), VIII.xii (29), pp.152-153. 39 “For I had heard how Antony happened to be present at the gospel reading, and took it as an admonition addressed to himself.” Augustine, Confessions, VIII.xii (29), p.153.

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finger or some other mark in the book and closed it.”40 An absolute moment had arrived in the time of the reader. Soon afterward Augustine was baptized in the mysteries as celebrated by Ambrose in Milan, and now his feelings were quite different: “I wept at the beauty of Your hymns and canticles, and . . . tears ran from my eyes, and I was happy in them.”41 In my own case, a phase of kairos coincided with discovering Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, and I would like to dedicate this essay to his spirit, which still emanates from those pages.42 Michael Edward Moore is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Iowa. His book A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and the Rise of Frankish Kingship, 300-850, will appear shortly with Catholic University of America Press. Recently he has undertaken research at the Max-Planck-Institut für europaeische Rechtsgeschichte, in Frankfurt, Germany, and in the Long Room Library at Trinity College, Dublin. He has published a number of articles on medieval and modern topics, and on the connections between modern and medieval.

40 Augustine, Confessions, VIII.xii (30), p.153. 41 Brown, Augustine, p.126; on Milanese liturgy, see p.124. 42 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Arnold I. Davidson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995).


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TEARSONG: VALENTINE VISCONTI’S INVERTED STOICISM

Anna Kłosowska

When her husband Louis of Orléans was assassinated on the orders of the duke of Burgundy John the Fearless in 1407, Valentine Visconti adopted the emblem of a chantepleure (fountain; literally, tearsong) with a devise “Rien ne m’est plus, Plus ne m’est riens,” or, in Mid-American translation, “that’s it, folks. I don’t care.”1 It is a well-wrought devise, symmetrical in its oxymoric equation between more (plus) and nothing (rien). The Latin version is a perfect palindrome: “Nil mihi praetera, praetera mihi nihil”: there’s nothing more for me. Nothing is, from now on. She died scarcely more than a year later, in 1408.2

1 I owe a debt to Eileen Joy for “tearsong,” the translation of chantepleure; to Nicola Masciandaro for the idea of “inverted Stoicism” and other suggestions, here and in “Beyond the Sphere: A Dialogic Commentary on the Ultimate Sonneto of Dante’s Vita Nuova,” Glossator 1 (Fall 2009): 47-80; and to Jean-Marie Fritz, for first mentioning to me chantepleure, see: Jean-Marie Fritz, Paysages Sonores du Moyen Age: Versant Epistémologique. Paris: Champion, 2000, and his Le discours du fou au Moyen Age, Paris: PUF, 1992. See also: Emanuele Tesauro, L’idée de la parfaite devise, trans. Florence Vuilleumier, Paris: Belles Lettres, 1992, and Michel Zink, “Un paradoxe courtois: le chant et la plainte,” in: Literary aspects of courtly culture: Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature . . ., ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994, 69-83. See also John Cherry, “La chantepleure: Symbol of Mourning,” in: Signs and symbols. Proceedings of the 2006 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. John Cherry and Ann Payne, Shaun Tyas: 2009, 143-9. See also the exhibit catalogue, Louis d’Orléans et Valentine Visconti: mécénat politique autour de 1400, ed. Thierry Crépi-Leblond, Blois: Château et musée de Blois, 2004, and Ursula Baumeister and Marie-Pierre Lafitte, Des livres et des rois: la bibiothèque royale de Blois, Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1992. 2 Among contemporary historians describing this episode are Jean Juvenal des Oursins, Histoire de Charles VI, roi de France, ed. Louis-Gabriel Michaud

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There is enough material here to make up a romantic episode that started the civil war between the Burgundians (and the English) versus the Armagnacs (partisans of the Orléans family; Valentine’s eldest son Charles, the poet, married Bonne d’Armagnac), protracting the Hundred Years War to its full 114 years and resulting, among others, in the burning of Jeanne d’Arc, whom the Burgundians captured and turned over to the English. From the nineteenth century to today, Valentine’s devise is seen as an “expression of faithful love for her dead husband [that] became of great symbolic importance in a time when dynastic marriages of convenience were the norm among the nobility, and it was imitated and remembered for generations.”3 Love and longing were one side of the coin; perversity and politics were another. Valentine’s husband’s legend is that of an insatiable and queer philanderer, blamed for capturing the attentions of the queen, while Valentine was close to the king. The rivalry between Louis d’Orléans and the Burgundians was political and fuelled by such developments as the fact that, between 1405 and 1407, he directed the war against England, Burgundy’s main trade partner, but

and Jean-Joseph-François Poujoulat, Paris: Editeur du commentaire analytique du code civil, 1836 (Nouvelle Collection des Mémoires pour servir l’histoire de France depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe), vol. II, pp. 445, 447-8, as well as Michel Pintoin (religieux de St-Denis), Chronique de Charles V, and Jean Froissart. See Bernard Guénée, Un meurtre, une société: l’assassinat du duc d’Orléans, 23 novembre 1407, Paris: Gallimard 1992, 185, 202-210, and Guénée, L’Opinion publique à la fin du Moyen Age d’après la ‘Chronique de Charles VI’ du Religieux de St-Denis, Paris: Perrin, 2002, 59-60, 96-7. See also Alfred Coville, “Les derniers jours de Valentine Visconti, duchesse d’Orléans (23 novembre 1407-4 décembre 1408,” in: Institut de France. Séance publique annuelle des cinq Académies du vendredi 25 octobre 1929 présidée par M. Louis Mangin, Président de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris: Firmin Didot 1929, 35-50. 3 Peter Woetmann Christoffersen, The Copenhagen Chansonnier and the related ‘Loire Valley’ Chansonniers, Copenhagen: Alden, 2001, accessible online (<http://chansonniers.pwch.dk/CH/CH029.html>). Woetmann cites Enid McLeod, Charles of Orléans, Prince and Poet, New York, 1969, p. 50. For the sources on this use of chantepleure, Woetmann refers to Howard Mayer Brown, Music in the French Secular Theater, 1400-1550, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963, 164-6. As Woetmann notes, chantepleure is used in modern French in the sense of a bouse, tap or auger, for instance inserted into a wine barrel allowing to drain it. Woetmann notes the word chantepleure is given this definiton in 1694 Dictionnaire de l’academie française, and that there exist numerous modern derivatives related to the wine business.

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these pages of Michael Camille best convey the contradictions and lurid appeal of his legend:

a strange mixture of piety and perversity. . . Louis certainly shared [Charles V’s] love of parchment, and yet he was notorious. . . as being a lover of other kinds of flesh. . . . always plotting to take power from his uncles, the dukes of Berry and Burgundy. While he had been crucial in restoring to power his father’s old advisors, men of humble birth, nicknamed the ‘Marmousets’ – the same word used to describe the crouching Atlases that seem to carry the weight of stones in Gothic buildings. . . his own hold on power was similarly simulachral rather than real. His fortunes took a downturn in 1392 with his brother’s [Charles VI] first attack of insanity and the ascendancy of his uncle Philippe, duke of Burgundy, as regent. . . although his real power was eroded, he seemed to have plunged into its spectacular simulation in artifice. Christine de Pizan described him as a gabbling pseudo-intellectual. . . At the same time as he kept a private cell in the austere common dormitory of the Convent of the Célestins, whose evangelical eremitic order was much patronized by the royal family and where he heard up to six masses a day, he is recorded as buying twelve barrels of Damascus rosewater from a Parisian merchant. In the year he paid Remiet one hundred sols for gilding done in his royal chapel at the Célestins he paid a fool, “master Pierre d’Aragon,” the far greater sum of ten gold crowns merely for “pulling faces.” His collection of jewels outshone even that of his uncle the Duke of Berry, but according to his enemies this included magical rings that were used to fascinate. . . the unsuspecting victims of his lust.4

As in a kaleidoscope, the figures of Louis and Valentina are rearranged beyond recognition, leaving undeniable facts – adoption of the emblem – to the fictional context of its Petrarchan and other poetic antecedents. Petrarch’s rain of tears in Remedies and Canzoniere, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remedy of Fortune, Eustache Deschamps,

4 Michael Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 68-70.

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Chaucer and Lydgate are, paradoxically, more familiar to us than the historical figures. I will look at both the remote and the recent echoes of symbols chosen by Valentine – the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on one hand, and the nineteenth on the other – to show how the legend of Valentine’s loving mourning came to be, and what work it was doing. It will be a recuperative, but also a somewhat suspicious reading. My intention is to uncover a forgotten but vibrant tradition that was constitutive of nineteenth-century passion for medieval stories. My suspicious reading will show how medievalism, or “modern” (as opposed to neo-classical) history fit in with political, catholic, and heterosexual preoccupations. I will also look at Valentine’s emblem in the period following her. Whether a free-floating symbol or anchored to Valentina, the emblems of her mourning – the tearsong, the devise – are moving. That is the recuperative part of my commentary. I. PLUS NE M’EST RIEN Valentine’s signal expression of grief reverberates since the medieval period, not the least because her son is the important poet Charles d’Orléans (1394-1465), and because his son, in turn, became Louis XII, king of France. From the point of view of the English literary canon, it is noteworthy that both Charles and his entourage, including his younger brother the Duke d’Angoulême and his third wife Marie de Clèves, were instrumental in introducing English poets and Chaucer to France, having commissioned, respectively, a copy of the Canterbury Tales and a treatment of Troilus and Criseyda, the Roman de Troille.5 Valentine herself patronized Deschamps, a contemporary and admirer of Chaucer. Valentine is the daughter of Galeazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, also known for his book commissions. Among those who remembered Valentine’s emblem and the devise are the French sixteenth century author Brantôme, and the episode he describes was also incorporated into the encyclopedic histories of France from the 17th and 18th centuries, the sort of commonplace, frequently copied and republished mid-market reference book that ensured the survival throughout that period of a narrative about

5 Le roman de Troyle, vol. 2. Louis de Beauveau, Giovanni Boccaccio, Gabriel Bianciotto, Rouen: Université de Rouen, 1994: “au haut du fo1 du mss, sur une demi-page, un dessin a la plume représente deux chantepleures, vases distillant des larmes,” p. 53.


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French medieval history that we can call a national legend, with recognizable, repetitive elements.

The heyday of the popularity of Valentine is the nineteenth century. She is known to all the notable Romantic French writers and to the group of painters (professional and amateur) who flourished between 1802 and 1820, under the rubric of the “troubadours.” Among the writers who mention Valentine we find Chateaubriand, a royalist and author of Le Génie du christianisme (1802).6 The novelist and essayist Stendhal mentions a tableau of Valentine with her devise shown in the Salon of 1812, only to complain that grieving Valentine has unlikely rosy cheeks – but, as we will see, other critics reproached the troubadour school for its token “realism” and depiction of the Middle Ages via the predictable stereotype of emaciated bodies.7 The poet Alphonse de Lamartine appropriates Valentine’s devise in a private letter.8 Alfred de Musset quotes it in his play Faustine.9 As for the painters, apparently, Fleury François Richard’s (1777-1852) famous tableau of Valentine was inspired by his visit to the Musée des monuments français, in the 1790s, located in the former convent of the Petits Augustins in Paris, where he saw Valentine’s tomb.10 Shown in the Salon of 1802, the painting inspired a trend. Soon, Parisian artists, including Fleury Richard and his fellow students from the workshop of Louis David, traded their usual sketching sessions of the antiquities in the Louvre for visits to Petits Augustins, where Romanesque and Gothic architectural fragments were assembled when the property of the Church was nationalized during the

6 François-René de Chateaubriand, Oeuvres Complètes de M. le vicomte de Chateubriand, vol 16: Mélanges littéraires, Paris: Lefèvre, 1831, p. 355, an essay first published as “Sur l’histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne de M. de Barante,” 1824-5. 7 Stendhal, Histoire de la peinture en Italie, vol. 1, Paris: Didot, 1817, p. 245. 8 Correspondance d’Alphonse de Lamartine, Deuxième série (1807-1829), ed. Christian Croisille and Marie-Renée Morin, Paris: Champion, 2007, p. 275. 9 Alfred de Musset, Oeuvres posthumes, Paris: Charpentier, 1866, p. 176. 10 He is sometimes called Fleury or Richard or Richard Fleury. Valentine Visconti, Duchess of Orléans, ca. 1802 (Hermitage, St. Petersburg; a copy exists in Rueil-Malmaison, musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau). Specific information about paintings in French collections in this essay is based on the Joconda database of French museum collections, http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/joconde/fr/pres.htm.

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Revolution.11 Fleury became the favorite painter of the empress Josephine Bonaparte, and was written up by Mme de Staël. His success and his medieval inspirations continued in the Salon of 1804, where he presented three medieval and Renaissance-inspired paintings, including Francis the 1st and the queen of Navarre, and [king] Charles Writing his Adieux to [his mistress] Agnès Sorel (Massonaud 35). The troubadour enthusiasm continued until the 1820s, when the independence war in Greece (1821-32) and a new regime in France turned the attention again to Antiquity. Not everyone loved the trend. A critic describes Dominique Ingres’s Roger delivering Angelica (1819) as “a composition of inexplicable bizarrerie” and adds: “the new troubadours try as they might: a verse, a line is enough to unveil the artifice and destroy the illusion” (Massonaud 88).12 The new vogue of painting “modern” (i.e., medieval) history was classified as middlebrow, genre anecdotique, or genre painting, as opposed to highbrow historical painting inspired by Antiquity. Genre divisions were institutionally entrenched in French academic painting and determined market value and reputation; as a genre painter, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin could never aspire to be an elite painter like, later, Jacques-Louis David, or to have a similarly large école, although Chardin’s contemporary reputation among artists and influence on later movements are perhaps unequaled. What fuelled troubadour painters’ popularity, in spite of their middle-brow affiliation, was the relation between Medieval fantasies and visits to Petits Augustins, and politics and religion. David’s student, painter and critic Etienne-Jean Delécluze (1781-1863), makes it clear in a book that was partly an apologia for David in early the 1800s, that the newly acquired interest in the French Middle Ages was related to the transition from the Republic to the Empire. A connection between Napoleon and Charlemagne (and the Middle Ages more generally) legitimated the founder of a new French dynasty:

11 Dominique Massonaud, Le nu moderne au salon (1799-1853): revue de presse, Grenoble: Ellmud, 2005, pp. 35, citing as her source for the exodus of David’s studio from the Louvre to the Petits Augustins, Etienne-Jean Delécluze, Louis David: son école et son temps, Paris: Didier, 1855. 12 Massonaud is citing C. P. Landon, “Salon de 1819,” in Annales du Musé et de l’Ecole moderne des Beaux-Arts, Paris: Imprimerie des Annales du Musée, 1819. [BnF Tolbiac, V-24753].


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The story [histoire] of Charlemagne and his warriors, bandied about in public to bring the minds back to monarchist customs, when Bonaparte wished to pass from the dignity of the consul to that of the emperor, was not without influence on the reaction, which became apparent at that time, against the severe mode of painting adopted by David; and in fact, beginning at that time in particular, in 1803, chivalric ideas and subjects drawn from modern history having returned to fashion, a number of artists abandoned the museum of Antiquities in the Louvre to frequent the Petits Augustins.13

In David’s studio, Fleury Richard stood out as a pieux (believer). At the time when he joined David’s atelier, in the late 1780s-90s, not only was religion abolished, it was also unpopular, a state of affairs that lasted from the Revolution until Napoleon reopened churches (Delécluze 78-9). As Delécluze notes, in the 1790s, Christianity and the Bible was regarded as one of three “new” inspirations, the other two being Homer and Ossian (Delécluze 77).

The episode of 1407-08 defined Valentine for the nineteenth century and made her into a figure familiar enough that she is identified in cameo roles, as in Charles Marie Bouton’s (1781-1853; also a student of David) The Madness of Charles VI, or View of the 14th c. Room in the Musée des Monuments français (Salon of 1817). Bouton shows Charles at the tomb of his father, with Valentine in the background, ordering courtiers away.14 In addition to the Fleury Richard, an important and often imitated painting of Valentine in mourning is an 1822 tableau by Marie-Philippe Coupin de la Couperie (1771-1851), Valentine Visconti at the Tomb of Louis d’Orléans, or the Incarnation of Mourning (Blois, Musée des Beaux-Arts).

13 “L’histoire de Charlemagne et de ses preux, à laquelle on a donné du retentissemement dans le public pour ramener les esprits aux habitudes monarchiques, quand Bonaparte voulut passer de la dignité de consul à celle de l’empereur, ne fut pas sans influence sur la réaction qui de déclara alors contre le mode sévère de peinture que David avait adopté; et en effet, c’est particulièrement à compter de cette époque, 1803, que les idées chevalresques et les sujets tirés de l’histoire moderne ayant été remis en vogue, un certain nombre d’artistes abandonnèrent le musée des Antiques du Louvre pour fréquenter celui des Petits-Augustins” (Delécluze 242). 14 Now in Musée de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse. With Louis Daguerre, Bouton is the creator of first dioramas (1822).

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But the interest in Valentine survived the 1820s and the heyday of the troubadours, and even intensified. That was obviously due to the patronage of Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, “the citizen king” (“July monarchy,” 1830-48), head of the “modern” Orléans family that begun when Louis XIII gave his brother the title of the Duke d’Orléans in 1623. Louis-Philippe’s father supported the French Revolution and adopted the name of Philippe Egalité, while Louis-Philippe joined the Jacobin party, but neither that nor his military success on behalf of the new Republic saved the family from the decimation of the Terror (1793-4). When he came to power, Louis-Philippe was a generous sponsor and, much like Napoleon, saw art as a means to legitimate his rule. Among his numerous commissions related to Valentine are a copy of her portrait for the historical museum at Versailles (1834),15 and Alexandre-Marie Colin’s Valentine of Milan Asks for Justice for the Assassination of the Duke of Orléans, November 1407 (1836), commissioned for the Apollo gallery in the Louvre (shown in the Salon of 1837).16 Thus, both the origins and the prolonged interest in Valentine were enmeshed in politics and religion, and skewed towards the Empire, catholicism, and later, the Orléans monarchy.

Novelists Honoré de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas both capitalized on and helped sustain the interest in Valentine and her time. Dumas’s successful Isabeau of Bavaria or the Rule of Charles VI (1835) is part of his “Valois cycle” of historical novels that also includes the Queen Margot.17 Twelve years earlier, young Balzac’s

15 Léon de Lestang-Parade (1810-87), Valentine of Milan, Duchess of Orléans, a copy of a painting in the chateau of Beauregard; now in Versailles, MV 3048, INV 6222, LP 964. 16 Musée de Versailles, MV 7235; INV 3300; LP 2578. A sketch of Colin’s painting is in Versailles’ Musée Lambinet, no. 78.4.7 (formerly in the Bibliothèque de Versailles). To the list of sketches and copies we can also add: Jean-Claude_Auguste Fauchery, engraving after Richard, 1831 (see Emile Bellier de la Chavignerie and Louis Auvray, Dictionnaire général des artistes français. . ., vol. 1, Paris: Renouard, 1882-85, pp. 275, 535). 17 A book review of 1903 mentions that treatments of Isabeau de Bavière are infrequent since Dumas, and mentions as small exceptions Leroux de Lincy’s Les femmes illustres de l’ancienne france (1854) and Vallet de Viriville’s Isabeau de Bavière (1859), as well as Fromental Halévy’s opera Charles VI (1843); it does not include the character of Valentine, but would have contributed to the interest in the period, and by extension, in Valentine. See Alfred Coville, review of M. Thibaut, Isabeau de Bavière, reine de France. La Jeunesse, 1370-1405,


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(1799-1850) novel La dernière fée (1823) popularized the romantic (and frankly, creepy) legend of Odette de Champdivers as Charles VI’s selfless mistress chosen by his unfaithful wife Isabeau de Bavière in 1407, the year of the assassination of the duke of Orléans. Odette is represented as a rival to sulking Valentine in a painting so campy it sets a sort of record for the genre, Anna Borrel’s Valentine de Milan and Odette de Champ-Divers (1837), exhibited in the Salon of 1838. Other treatments represent the king and his mistress, as in the painting by Eugène Delacroix (1796-1875; ca. 1825) and sculptures by Jean Pierre Victor Huguenin (1802-60) from ca. 1836.18 The political was also sexual. We have already seen that ca. 1800 royalist, catholic heterosexual medievalism, perhaps as pious as Fleury Richard’s, is pitted against homoerotic neoclassicism of the majority of David’s students, whom Delécluze recalls swimming in the Seine, “as distinctive by the elegance of their bearing and the agility of their movements, as by their faces. The students of painting schools were distinguished among others, and in David’s studio there were many young men, remarkably beautiful and agile. David took advantage at the same time of this bounty and of their willingness,” as they both collaborated and posed, “combing their hair, tying their shoe, or presenting a crowns of flowers” (228-9) in the openly homoerotic Leonidas at Thermopylae, a tableau that Napoleon repeatedly

in: Le Moyen Age: revue d’histoire et de philologie,, 1903, p. 450-4, at p. 450. Dumas’s Valentine consoles Charles VI from the infidelities of his wife and other intrigues. Isabeau de Bavière is listed as one of Dumas’s most popular novels with the Three Musqueteers (1844) and the Count of Monte Cristo (1845), in Edwin Emerson and Maurice Magnus, A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year, vol. 3, New York: Ciller and Son, 1901, p. 1516. Halévy’s opera was very popular. Its first Paris staging run to 61 performances in six seasons, ending in 1849. It was in the repertoire at the New Orleans opera from 1846 to 1874, and was revived there in the 1880s and 90s. What shortened its popularity in France (but not in New Orleans) was its anti-English historical libretto. 18 Huguenin’s sculpture was shown in the Salon of 1836 (plaster model) and 1839 (marble sculpture). The plaster model is in the Musée de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse (no. 860.1), and plaster casts of the finished marble in the musée des Beaux-Arts in Angers (MBA 55 J 1881S) as well as in a dozen other locations (Joconde lists Cambrai, Niort, Perpignan, Bar-le-Duc, Orléans, Toulon, Moulins, Laval, Laon, Condom, Clermont-Ferrand). For the Delacroix painting, see Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981, p. 96, and the Heritage Auction Galleries catalog, November 9, 2006, Dallas, TX, p. 24070.

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couldn’t “get” (Delécluze 227-39). In the end, David let himself be seduced by Napoleon and left his Leonidas project behind to paint his new hero: “David’s conversion to the monarchy was . . . so complete and, we can even say, so sincere that he himself did not realize it” (Delécluze 234), as he adopted both the ideas and the dress in his new, post-1800 incarnation. Aesthetic considerations in the press of the time can, and have been, interpreted as a sublimation or closeted references to politics as well as sex and sexual preferences and practices.19 It is in that context that we must position the troubadour trend as a locus of negotiation between “authenticity” and the canon of beauty. As in the citation above, “any little thing could upset the effect” of the immersion in the historical past: a phrase that, as I understand it, implies that present concerns encroach on the past so strongly that they emerge as primary, in spite of their being intended as “secondary” (“little thing”) to the historical “sense” (in French, sens means “sense” but also “orientation,” the ostensible topic) of the painting. For the unconvinced critic, the feeling of being immersed in the-past-in-and-of-itself is fleeting, it gives way to suspicion about what present and partisan concerns are given play in historical reconstruction, thus undermining the collective (“national”) consensus that art commands by its appeal to the senses and emotions. If Stendhal felt that the Valentine of the 1812 Salon was not gaunt enough, in 1827 a now-forgotten critic expresses dislike for the standard-issue, emaciated Medieval bodies of the troubadour trend that woefully displaced interest in Antiquity and the cult of the sculpted, naked body: “now, they make emaciated (étique) bodies as if emaciation was the normal state of the human constitution in the Middle Ages. They avoid painting the nude, because in general they don’t know how” (Massonaud, 115).20 Along with amateur copies of the troubadour paintings, the legend and portrayals of Valentine were widely circulated in popular historical books, such as François Guizot’s Histoire de France (1875). Historical truth oblige, in these illustrations she looks much older and

19 See Satish Padiyar, Chains, David, Canova, and the Public Hero in Post-Revolutionary France, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007. 20 The critic follows with descrying the “anti-classical” trend and Delacroix. The source cited by Massonaud is Augustin Jal, Esquisses, croquis, pochades, ou tout ce qu’on voudra, sur le Salon de 1827, Paris: Dupont, 1828 [BnF Tolbiac, microfilm M-6119].


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less appealing, and she is often cast on her deathbed surrounded by her children (Valentine as mother), a sadistic choice (it seems to me). This constitutes an obverse to the sexy supplicant image forged by the troubadour pictorial tradition (Valentine as lover). If we were to translate Valentine into a female character in Hitchcock, the Salon troubadour tradition portrays the tortured, blonde, young heroine, while the history books depict the unattractive, fast-talking, middle-aged female sidekick. Buoyed by consecutive restorations of monarchy and empire, medievalism and Valentine were a favorite subject for architecture and sculpture, including by Victor Huguenin in the Jardin de Luxembourg, part of the cycle of 20 sculptures by different authors representing “French queens and famous women,” commissioned by Louis-Philippe in 1843.21 The sculptures were shown at the 1847 and 1848 salons. Louis-Philippe also breathed new life into the ruins of the chateau of Pierrefonds, once Valentine’s domain. One of the duke d’Orléans important building projects, along with Blois, La Ferté-Milon and Coucy, Pierrefonds was sold as a Bien National in 1789, and then purchased by Napoleon in 1810. In a Romantic tradition, Louis-Philippe used the ruins of Pierrefonds as the backdrop of a wedding banquet for his daughter in 1832, and in 1848 the chateau was included in the list of historical monuments. With the change of the government and the establishment of the Second Empire by Louis-Napoléon (the nephew of the emperor), who visited the castle in 1850, came the extensive reconstruction of Pierrefonds (Fig. 1). A restoration/reinvention by Violet le Duc was conducted from 1857-66 and beyond, interrupted by the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, just as the interiors were supposed to be furnished with le Duc’s designs. The restoration, continued after le Duc’s death in 1878 by his son-in-law, included, among others, sculptures of Valentine and her husband by Gaudran, which were placed in the entrance to the chapel of the chateau.22

21 Huguenin also sculpted a group of Charles VI and Odinette de Champdivers, mentioned above. 22 Louis Grodecki, Le chateau de Pierrefonds, Paris: Caisse Nationale des Documents Historiques, 1957.

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Figure 1. Chateau of Pierrefonds. A. D. White Architectural Photographs, Cornell University Library Accession Number: 15/5/3090.01441. Courtesy of the Cornell University Library.

It is also instructive to trace the history of the sculptural source of that antiquarian romance: the tomb of Valentine Visconti that, as we have seen, was the initial inspiration for Fleury Richard’s Salon painting of Valentine, and by extension, for the birth of the troubadour style. The tomb that Fleury saw in the former convent of Petits Augustins was among other works of art rescued from destruction or reuse of former Church property for building materials following the Revolution, the Constitutional Assembly having decided, in 1789, to transfer the property of the Church to the Nation. It was not the original monument. Rather, it was commissioned ca. 1502 by the king Louis XII, to house the remains of his grandparents Valentine and Louis d’Orléans – replacing a previously destroyed tomb of Louis – as well as his father Charles and his uncle Philip. It was executed by Italian sculptors in a transitional Gothic and Renaissance style, for the church of the Célestins convent that Louis and the royalty favored (mentioned above). From there it was transported to the National Museum at the Petits Augustins, to end up at the abbey of St Denis – the burial church of the French dynasty – after 1817, the fall of the First Empire


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and the restoration of the monarchy.23 While other royal tombs were simply returned to St. Denis, this one was new to the location. Other monuments from Petits Augustins were replaced in their churches or transferred in the 1830s to the Louvre, Versailles, the cemetery Père Lachaise, and the Cluny medieval museum in Paris. Only some copies of famous sculptures were left in Petits Augustins buildings that now were to house the Art Academy. II. INVERTED STOICISM Having sketched the nineteenth century fortunes of Valentine, let us now look at her presence in the period following her life, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We will first turn from the devise and the narrative of her final year, to the image or emblem she associated with her mourning, the chantepleure. Like her devise, Valentine’s emblem, tearsong, is an oxymoric palindrome: what begins in singing ends in tears, as the morality plays and farces teach us.24 The object, chantepleure, evokes an intricately wrought miniature world of sweet and sorry allusions, like a nostalgic reading of Dante’s purgatory by Dan Remein: “this purgatory would not be purgative, it would be a moment of ease.”25 True to that insight, chantepleure is not only a purgatorial but also a pleasant object: a musical instrument, used for curing madness. A watering can (irrigium) is called chantepleure in French, and clepsydra in Greek, as a Renaissance French author Jean Coignet reminds us in a book title, Penitential irrigium, la chantepleure gallice vocatum, graece clepsydra (Paris, Mahieu, 1537). Thus, chantepleure is also a water clock and a hydraulic device, an artificial fountain that imitates the pleasures and sounds of a naturally bubbling spring. Chantepleure also means a song or dance, or both. In addition to the chantepleure, Valentine used tears and peacock’s feathers, also called regrets. Thus, in addition to tearsong, she surrounded her mourning with a tearcloth, larmier. Below (Fig. 2) is an example of a tent made from tearcloth, from the Dame à la licorne tapestries:

23 The sculptors are Michele d’Aria, Girolamo da Rovezzano, Doni de Battista Benti and Benedetto Grazzini, known as Benedetto da Rovezzano. 24 See Peter Woetmann Christoffersen, The Copenhagen Chansonnier and the related ‘Loire Valley’ Chansonniers, Copenhagen 2001, available online <http://chansonniers.pwch.dk/CH/CH029.html>. 25 Dan Remein, email, 2010.

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Figure 2. Dame à la licorne tapestry (Musée de Cluny, Paris)

Chantepleure also participated in medieval interest in mechanical devices, as in this example of a chalice with a miniature fountain by Villard de Honnecourt (center right):


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Figure 3. Villard de Honnecourt’s chantepleure (fountain). Carnet de Villard de Honnecourt (BnF ff 19093). Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Finally, chantepleure is associated with Venus, as in 15th c. jetons à la Vénus (Venus tokens), although the object schematically portrayed there is identified as either chantepleure or a firebrand, an interesting

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quasi-Petrarchan conflation of opposites that is, as I will show below, relevant to Valentine’s use of the emblem.26 Valentine’s chantepleure is an iconic instrument of remembrance, stopping time; as well as measuring time (water clock or clepsydra). Isidore of Seville says: “if man does not retain sounds in his memory, they perish, because they cannot be written.”27 Time can be measured, though, and identical sounds produced: chantepleure and other mechanical sound producing devices are an exception to Isidore’s rule. As an instrument that cures madness, Valentine’s chantepleure may also point to her close friend and cousin the king of France, plagued by frequent periods of homicidal madness; she was accused of causing that madness by sorcery, as well as extolled for assuaging it, as in the Romantic tradition (above).28 Alice Burry Palisser notes:

Valentine took for device the watering-pot (chantepleure) between two letters S, initials of Soucy [sorrow] and Soupir [sigh], with the motto “Rien ne m’est plus, Plus ne m’est riens” These two melancholy lines were repeated in every part of the rooms of the duchess, the walls of which were hung with black drapery semée of white tears . . . Her device is to be seen at Blois, and in the magnificent tomb raised to her memory by her grandson, Louis XII . . . It is of frequent occurrence as the device of the Duchess of Orleans in the inventories of the time: the entries document commissions for jewelry makers for chantepleure motif on a hat pin for

26 See photographs at <http://sites.google.com/site/lesjetonsdecomptes/jeton-a-la-venus>. The references cited on the website are Mitchiner, p. 265-273; De Beeldenaar, mai / juin 1981, pp 87-88. Perhaps the tokens may refer not only to Venus but also Flore? 27 Wallace M. Lindsay, ed. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, Book 3, chapters 15-23 (no pagination). Trans. William Strunk, Jr., and Oliver Strunk, revised by James McKinnon, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. 28 On the rumors concerning Valentine’s role in the king’s madness, see Alain Marchandisse, “Milan, Les Visconti, l’union de Valentine et de Louis d’Orléans,” in: Autour du XVe siècle: Journées d’étude en l’honneur d’Alberto Vàrvaro, ed. Paola Moreno and Giovanni Palumbo, Geneva: Droz, 2008, 92-9.


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Alof de Clèves, on a pair of garter buckles also decorated with enameled pansies and tears, all for the Duchess.29

But there is perhaps another, political reason for Valentine to adopt the chantepleure, as a commitment to remembering the assassination, especially given that later the son of the assassin, Philip the Good, adopted the flint and sparks as his emblem. These emblems were included in the decorations and outfits, and circulated widely to the whole household as New Year’s presents.30 Valentine’s husband begun by adopting knotty sticks (bâtons noueux) and the devise Je l’ennuie (I bother him; i.e., his rival to the throne John the Fearless). In return, John adopted the plane or rabot and the devise Je le tiens or, in Flemish, Ik houd (I got him), implying that he will plane off the knots on the stick, as in the collar decoration in this portrait (fig. 4):

29Alice Dryden Burry Palisser, “Historic Devices and Badges: Part III. The Visconti of Milan,” The Art-Journal, London, August 1, 1867, 181-2: “1455. Pour avoir faict une chaptepleure d’or, a la devise de ma dicte dame (La Duchesse d’Orléans), par elle donnée à MS Alof de Clèves, son frère pour porter une plume sur son chapeau (Inv. des Ducs de Bourgogne, no. 6, 732). 1455. A Jehan Lessayeur, orfèvre, pour avoir faict deux jartieres d’or pour Madame la Duchesse (d’Orléans) esmaillée à larmes et à pensées (ibid). 1455. Une chantepleure d’or à la devise de Madame (La Duchesse d’Orléans) pour porter une plume sur le chappeau (ibid, no. 6782)” (Burry Palisser 182). The note to this article on Chantepleure reads: “the chantepleure, or water-pot, was made of earthenware, about a foot high, the orifice at the top the size of a pea, and the bottom pierced with numerous small holes. Immersed in water, it quickly fills. If the opening at the top be then closed with the thumb, the vessel may be carried, and the water distributed in small or large quantities, as required” (Burry Palisser, 182). 30 On John the Fearless branding his étrennes gifts with his emblem, see Brigitte Buettner, “Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Courts, ca. 1400,” The Art Bulletin 83:4 (2001), 598-635, at 619.

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Figure 4. John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. 16th c., Versailles. Courtesy of the Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et Trianon.31 After the dramatic murder of John the Fearless in 1419, John’s successor Philip the Good took up the emblem of flint stone and sparks (fusil or briquet and pierre à feu, documented in 1421; fig. 5), and the devise ante quam flamma micet (strikes before the fire). The firebrand

31 Inventory number MV 4005 ; INV 9274 ; LP 5722.


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eventually became associated with Burgundy.32 The firebrand emblem is perhaps an antinomy of the Orléans chantepleure, which Charles d’Orléans and his family also adopted, following his mother. Another reason for that choice on the part of Philip is the resemblance between the firebrand and John the Fearless’s plane, which in turn opens the possibility that Valentine chose the chantepleure as a threat to John’s plane/firebrand.33

Figure 5. 15thc. chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece with the firebrand (E shape) and sparks motif. Photograph David Moniaux.

32 The duke also adopted the devise Aultre n’auray at his third marriage with Isabelle of Portugal in 1430. Bernard Bousmanne, “Item a Guillaume Wyelant aussi enlumineur”: Willen Vrelant: un aspect de l’enluminure dans les Pays-Bas Méridionaux sous le mécénat des ducs de Bourgogne Philippe le Bon et Charles le Téméraire, Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Turnhout: Brepols,1997, p. 172. See also: Pierre Cockshaw, Christiane van den Bergen-Pantens, Evencio Beltran, Ordre de la toison d’or de Philippe le Bon à Philippe le Bel. Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Turnhout: Brepols, 1996, p. 104. A popular biography of Philip the Good is Richard Vaughan, Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy, with a foreword by Graeme Small, Woodbridge: Boydel and Brewer, 2002 (repr. of the 1970 edition). 33 Adolphe Marlet, Eclaircissemements historiques et critiques sur le titre de France-Comte. . ., Beasnçon: Dodivers, 1863, 11-113.

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Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s use of chantepleure takes us away from the circulation of Valentine’s emblem in France, but research into English examples ca. 1400 echoes what Cerquiglini-Toulet finds about French literary tradition. Essentially, the question is the same as across the Channel: was tearsong an emblem of endless grief, a bottomless reservoir of tears; was it a poetic fountain, as Nicola Masciandaro suggests, a figure of “inverted Stoicism” or “moving freely between the extremes of passion” (on that, more below); or was it a more traditional Boethian figure of Stoical remedy against fortune? If we return to France to follow chantepleure, passed on from Valentine to her son Charles, we are not leaving the circle of acquaintances and texts drawn up by Maura Nolan in her discussion of Lydgate and Chaucer: Charles d’Orléans, Chaucer, his granddaughter Alice, Alice’s husband William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk (who, generously released by Charles’s half-brother the Bastard of Orléans, advocated the release of Charles against Lydgate’s patron Gloucester), and the courtly patrons who circulated Chaucer’s poetry and its translations, such as Charles’s younger brother John of Angoulême who accompanied Charles in exile in Britain and owned a copy of Canterbury Tales, or Charles’s third wife Marie de Clèves. As the new Duchess of Orléans, Marie de Clèves (1426-1487) adopts pensées (“thoughts,” or pansies, that share mnemonic virtues with forget-me-nots) as well as Valentine and Charles’s emblems of chantepleure and tears with their devise (“Rien ne m’est plus”). For example, a copy of the Roman de Troille by Pierre d’Amboise (that is, Troilus and Criseyda, with fifteen miniatures in grisaille) with that emblem has long been attributed to her, rather than to Valentine.34 Marie adopts her husband’s emblem of the chantepleure and the devise well before becoming a widow, likely with the intention to connect the present, impoverished duke and the château of Blois to a grand, rich, politically prominent past.35 Alof or Adolphe of Clèves, to whom Valentine gave the chantepleure hatpin in

34 Le roman de Troille, ms fr BnF 25528. Leopold Delisle mentions documents dating from 1455-57 listing chantepleure and the devise as Marie’s personal emblems; these seem to be the same documents as those listed by Burry Palisser, above, but she attributes them to Valentine. Delisle’s identification of Troille with Marie de Clèves is repeated in later scholarship. See Delisle, Le cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale, vol. 1, Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1868, 120-1. 35 R. de Maulde, “La mère de Louis XII, Marie de Clèves, Duchesse d’Orléans,” Revue Historique 36 (1988), pp. 81-199, at 86-88.


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1408 (the commission of this jewel is mentioned above), was Marie’s father. In the sixteenth century, we see echoes of Valentine’s chantepleure in Brantôme’s account of her in Femmes Illustres. Earlier, in the first half of the century, a poet and lady-in-waiting of Claude de France, Anne de Graville, also adopts the emblem, this time with the devise musas natura, lacrymas fortuna (Muses by nature, tears by fortune). Anne eloped and, for a short time, was disinherited by her father, the admiral Louis Malet de Graville.36 At the end of the 16th c., the widowed queen Louise de Lorraine used the emblem in her bedroom in Chenonceaux after the murder of king Henry III (1589):37

36 Maxime Brenier de Montmorand, Une femme poète du 16e siècle: Anne de Graville, sa famille, sa vie, son oeuvre, Paris: Picard, 1917, p. 101, mentions the use documented in: Paris, Bibliothèque de France, Cabinet des Estampes, collection Gaignières (Pc. 18, fol. 65), “a watercolor copy of a tapestry made in 1523 for Pierre de Balzac and Anne de Graville,” representing a French garden. On Anne de Graville, see Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, “Claude de France: In her Monther’s Likeness, a Queen with Symbolic Clout?”, in Cynthia J. Brown, ed., The Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne de Bretagne: negotiating Convention in Books and Documents, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010, pp. 123-146, at 128, and Catherine Müller, “Anne de Graville lectrice, pp. 231-41, as well as Henri Lamarque, “Autour d’Anne de Graville: Le débat de la ‘Dame sans sy’ et l’épitaphe de la poétesse,” in Mélanges sur la littérature de la Renaissance à la mémoire de V-L Saulnier, Geneva: Droz, 1984, pp. 603-11. Anne de Graville’s daughter, Jeanne de Balzac, married Claude d’Urfé in 1532, and her library was transferred to d’Urfé family manor in La Bastie. Claude was the grandfather of the novelist Honoré d’Urfé (see Mary Catharine MacMahon, Aesthetics and Art in the Astrée of Honoré d’Urfé, Washington: Catholic University of America, 1925, p. 6). See also: Anne Malet de Graville, Le beau romant de deux amans Palamon et Arcita et de la belle et sage Emilia, ed. Yves le Hir, Paris: PUF, 1965. 37 Louise multiplied Valentine’s double “S”, which flanked her chantepleure, with this devise: solem saepe seipsam solicitari suspirumque.

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Figure 6. Chateau of Chenonceaux, paneling in Louise de Lorraine’s bedroom, with the chantepleure motif. Copyright MFSG. Medieval chantepleure that, by the end of the sixteenth century, has fallen out of usage among gardeners, was retained in its symbolic sense. If we turn from the visual to the textual chantepleure, we enter the realm of literary rather than personal connections – although Lydgate (1370-1451), our main source, may be connected to the Orléans family through his association with his patron, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (from 1422), who constantly opposed the release of Charles of Orléans, prisoner at the English court for 25 years (1415-1440, captured at Agincourt). Nolan, in her article on the Ovidian roots of the rhetoric of “wo and gladness” in Lydgate, focuses on several references to chantepleure in Lydgate, especially in the Fall of Princes (ca. 1433).38 Lydgate also uses the word in his translation of

38 Maura Nolan, “Now wo, now gladnesse’: Ovidianism in the ‘Fall of Princes,’” ELH 71:3, 2004, 531-558. Among Lydgatian occurrences of chantepleure Nolan mentions Lydgate’s “The Servant of Cupyde Forsaken,” Troy Book, translation of Deguilleville, and laments (“A Complaint for My Lady of Gloucester and Holland), as well as Fall of the Princes, her focus, where the word occurs repeatedly: book 1, 6, and most ostensibly in the concluding stanza of the Fall (Nolan, 533).


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Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man.39 As a source for Lydgate, Nolan identifies Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite (“I fare as doth the song of Chaunte-pleure,/ For now I pleyne, and now I pleye,” ll. 533-4).40 Nolan notes that Robert Skeat and Lee Patterson misunderstood Chaucer’s use of the word chantepleure, which they mistook for a moralizing, penitential reference: who sings in this world will weep in the next. Instead, Nolan argues, Chaucer, followed by Lydgate in the 1430s, both clearly use the word in the sense of changeable emotions, coherent with common French usage, and particularly suitable to Ovid. The use of the word hinges on the difference between tragedy (in the moralizing sense) and elegy, the latter more germane to Ovid, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, who were no moralizers, according to Nolan (534). Lydgate’s chantepleure, “Sorwe meldid with gladnesse” (Fall of Princes, l. 2406), or “worldly blisse meynt with bittirnesse” (Fall of Princes, l. 2161), as Nolan shows, connotes “a secular, aestheticized vision of humanity in a contingent (here, magically comic) universe . . . without regard for ultimate punishments or rewards” (542). As Nolan remarks, Lydgate’s Ovidian stories differ from moralizing renditions by Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio in their Famous Women (543). Nolan identifies this with a trend for a non-moralizing – or a-historical, because a-causal and a-linear, and instead, aesthetic – reading of Ovid in England in the 1430s and later, already foreshadowed in Chaucer and Gower in the 1370s and 80s. She notes that Lydgate’s best known use occurs in the Troy Book where he described Trojan tragedians: “Now trist, now glad, now heavy and now light, / And face chaunged with a sodeyn sight, / so craftily thei koude hem transfigure, / conformyng hem to the chauntpleure, / now to synge and sodeinly to wepe” (Nolan n3, p. 555). As Masciandaro comments, this “non-moralized, open idea of contingent life” seems to configure a “weird and wonderfully inverted Stoicism,” where “instead of belonging to something above passions via ascesis, one moves freely between their opposites.”41

39 ELH, vol. 71, no. 3-4, p. 555, citing the standard Old French dictionary, Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue francaise. 40 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Minor Poems, ed. Walter W. Skeat, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888, p. 114. 41 Masciandaro, email, September 2011. On the presence of Stoicism in the Middle Ages (from Seneca and Cicero to Boethius and beyond), see Michel Spanneut, Permanence du Stoïcisme de Zenon à Malraux, Gembloux: Duculot,

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This “third term” interpretation by Masciandaro – neither moralizing nor neo-Stoical – can be related to Petrarch’s oxymoric vacillation between joy and tears, not in the morality play sense of paying with one extreme for another, but rather, as if a quilting point or tunnel opened in the fabric of the universe, and we could pass from joy to tears without sense and without transition. Masciandaro’s “third term” can also be related to Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet’s thinking on the non-binary nature of late medieval lyric. Cerquiglini-Toulet puts tearsong among the tierce or dialectic figures that characterize fourteenth century lyric.42 Against Eric Auerbach’s thesis about “feudal thought” as a binary, she evokes a series of third or intermediate terms: dorveille (waking sleep), nonchaloir (not-caring), melancholia (joyful sorrow), tearsong, associated with literary production or reflective mode.43 Against the debate paradigm (disputatio, psychomachia, battle, joust, carnivalesque reversal, or marriage, as in Martianus Capella’s De noctis Philologiae et Mercurii) rises

1973, and his Le stoïcisme des pères de l’Eglise de Clément de Roma à Clément d’Alexandrie, Paris: Seuil, 1957, 1969 (2nd ed.), and for the later patristic period, Marcia Colish, The Stoic Tradidtion from Antiquity to Early Middle Ages, Leiden: Brill, 1985; Gerard Verbeke, The Presence of Stoïcism in Medieval Thought, Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1983, and Verbeke, “L’influence du Stoïcisme sur la pensée médiévale en Occident,” in Actas del V Congreso de filosofia medieval, 2 vols, Madrid: Edit. Nacional, 1979, vol. 1, p. 95-109. More recently, see Letizia A. Panizza, “Stoic Psychotherapy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque Fortunae, in: Margaret J. Osler, ed., Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 39-66. In France, Abelard and Heloise are notable readers of Seneca and Cicero before the more general vogue for Cicero in the twelfth c. In the second half of the fourteenth century, there was a lot of interest in the Stoics in the courtly circles, following the translation projects undertaken by Charles V and others. Among these, the most prominent seem to be the translation of Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia by Simon de Hesdin (1375-84), completed in 1404 by Nicolas de Gonesse for Jean de Berry, the uncle of the duke of Orléans; the Distichs of Cato, with six translations ranging from the 12th to the 15th c.; and Laurent de Premierfait, mentioned by Nolan (above), who translated Cicero’s De senectute (1405) and De amicitia (1416). 42 Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, “Penser la littérature médiévale: par-delà le binarisme,” French Studies 64:1 (2009), pp. 1-12. 43 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, New York: Doubleday, 1957.


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the tradition of philosophical distinctions, associated with the poetics of dream visions or metamorphoses (Cerquiglini-Toulet, 9), and summarized by Charles d’Orléans: “Neither good nor evil, but in between” (Rondeau 286), or by Jean de Meung: “So it is with opposites/ One is the commentary on the other” (Ainsinc va de contreres choses/ Les unes sont des autres gloses, 21543-44; my emphasis) (Cerquiglini-Toulet, 3).44 This distinctive tradition is also associated with the preference for sequences of three or four terms over dyads (8-10). Purgatory is the invention that corresponds to it in theology, as Jacques le Goff has shown, and mise en abyme constitutes its acute literary figuration (Cerquiglini-Toulet, 3-4). Terms such as ambiguity and ambiguous, perplexity and perplexed appear in the fourteenth century and characterize certain authors (Christine de Pizan, Bersuire; 5). Instead of succession of opposites, we have both succession and simultaneity, a dialethea, for which Cerquiglini-Toulet lists multiple and stunning examples, an “orgy of ambiguity” (5-8). One word, she says, “reveals that double postulate. It demonstrates the creativity of language, the thought of language: the word chantepleure” (8; my emphasis). Tearsong can be both a “space open by the succession of the two parts – tear, song” and/or a “radical overlap”: “it’s the situation par excellence of those whom love makes into poets” (8). In turn, the reflection on limits, abuses, and dangers of disputatio forms the vast medieval tradition of meta-commentary on the nature and vicissitudes of commentary and gloss (10-12). Commentary “develops what the text wraps up: complicatio and explicatio” (10), establishes a conversation between texts; in a radical version of the same practice, in the later Middle Ages, the authors gloss their own words (Jean Froissart, Love Prison, among others; Cerquiglini-Toulet, 10). Our commentary belongs to the same order of desire as medieval commentary: “locus desperatus, crux both torment and excite the philologist” (11). Finally, medieval commentary and composition are one: “to compose for the form, by piece and by part, by citation and compilation; to compose for the meaning, by grafting, erasure, transformation, conversion; composer [to compromise] in every sense of the word, that is, to reconcile and to reconcile oneself” (12).

44 Charles d’Orléans, Ballades et Rondeaux, ed. Jean-Claude Mühlethaler, Paris: Librairie Générale française, 1992. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols, Paris: Champion, 1965-70, vol. 3.

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What will the twenty-first century remember of chantepleure? If Valentine places tearsong between Sorrow and Sighing, this essay places it between Love and Commentary. Masciandaro notes that, in Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, “Anelida endless circling lament” and her “living-suicidal inwardly Dido-ish traumatic remembrance” (“Myself I modre with my privy thoght,” l.291):

operate as an unfinishable self-iterative commentary. Here, the discourse and interpretive pondering of love must be brought to end, as life can only continue if the discourse becomes song: “Than ende I thus, sith I may do no more. / I yeve hit up for now and ever-more, / For I shal never eft putten in balaunce / My sekernes, ne lerne of love the lore. / But as the swan . . . So singe I here my destinee or chaunce” (Anelida and Arcite, ll. 342-8).45

Thus, tearsong is indeed an instrument that cures madness: the performance of tearsong opens a way out of the self-destructive loop where thoughts gnaw at the heart until nothing remains (“Myself I modre with my privy thoght,” conflating mordre, bite, gnaw; and modre, murder). The poetry of the device cures madness by nurturing beauty. To recall Cerquiglini-Toulet: tearsong, the word-emblem of dialectic imagination, is the thought of language: a show of the capacity of language to make new concepts, and a name for a promise of creativity. Anna Klosowska is Professor of French at Miami University, author of Queer Love in the Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2005) and editor of Madeleine de l’Aubespine, Selected Poems (Chicago, 2007) and Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts (UP Florida, 1998).

45 Masciandaro, email, September 2011.

Glossator publishes original commentaries, editions and translations of commentaries, and essays and articles relating to the theory and history of commentary, glossing, and marginalia. The journal aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work and to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection on the past, present, and future of this ancient genre of writing. By aligning itself, not with any particular discipline, but with a particular mode of production, Glossator gives expression to the fact that praxis founds theory.

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