My readings this week on desire delved into the relationship of desire to language and poetry, which have been recent fascinations of mine due to my studies of Paul Ricoeur. In poetry, or metaphor, there is an inherent excess of meaning through which language develops or gains new meanings. In a metaphor, or poetry, one thing both is and is not the other thing which the predicate equates it with. Categories are broken when one says, “That red color is really loud,” or, “The homely tree dipped its head before the commanding sun.” No metaphor can be adequately paraphrased to capture 100% of the meaning that it contains, and in the creation of that new meaning, there is a violence or destruction that occurs within language. Thus, one can say that “Language is an opening, a space of sacrifice and excess, a space where a destructive fusion occurs—a theater or altar at which meaning and signification are made and become their own victims” (LaFountain 29).

LaFountain, in an essay on Bataille, makes a connection between the tendencies of language and desire, identifying the poetic point of desire in the erotic. Desire is excessive, wanting what is beyond use, something that pushes against limitations in revolt to reach ecstasy, reaching ultimately for death. Why death? It is only in death that “we rid ourselves of satisfaction and steep ourselves in the free accidental play of desire” (LaFountain 28). Desire does not seek satisfaction but wishes to prolong desiring, for that is what it is to be human. As far as I can understand it, it is only in death that can one cease to seek and find satisfactions. The fulfillment of desires, paradigmatically noted in the orgasm, are thus termed as “little deaths,” where satisfaction is momentarily past and one can return to seeking excess. LaFountain says, “To be whole, to experience existence, is to seek excess, to lose oneself in it, to be tortured by its rapturous overflow” (28).

The erotic fulfillment of desire in orgasm is a moment of total communication, where there is a “continuity” or unity between people is reached (30). Even as the metaphor bridges two worlds and destroys language in the new unity, so eroticism leads to a unity that destroys the social. That is, the unity between persons is an excess—it has no use and is a space outside of laws; it cannot be understood. As LaFountain quotes Bataille, “I approach poetry: but only to miss it” (33). It cannot be defined as it rages in linguistic convulsions that involves the whole. “And just as the body of writing is forced into a frenzy that disrupts its coherence, so too do the bodies of ‘I’ and ‘we’ disappear [...] into an abyss, united beyond any fusion they could ever say or use” (33). That is, both bodies disappear in the total unity or solidarity (36). The significance of each individual, as an individual, is destroyed or ruptured as new meaning is created in the excessive fusion.

Thus, one should not limit their conception of communication to the word. Communication extends beyond the textual or spoken word. Bodies, gestures, and the very existence of things is bound up in communication. Desire, as it is erotic and intentional, leads to communication, albeit communication in a nonverbal form. Emotions and feelings are thus intimately connected to the word or traditionally rational domain in the body. Recognizing Bataille’s understanding of desire presents a more holistic picture of humanity that does not subdivide emotions off from the rational mind.

A reader of this post wrote to ask me what I have against “how to write” books, and Strunk & White in particular. Over at The Anti-moderate, I answered.

• Over at the wonderful Faith and Theology blog, Kim Fabricius considers Obama and the Poverty of Niebuhrian Ethics, and then Glen Stassen re-consider’s Obama’s Nobel Speech Prize, with special reference to the under-discussed notion of just peace.
• John Hobbins has an excellent post about Myth in the Bible.
• Simon Ravenscroft points out that when it comes to capitalism’s production of corporations too-big-to-fail, we shouldn’t be surprised.
• Mamos offers us a summary of his take on Haiti, replete with the vigor of his always-on-the-ground activism (the flavor of his blog which keeps me coming back).
• And, of course, don’t forget The Anti-moderate’s grand opening. RSS subscriptions are half price for the whole week!

You knew it had to happen. The moment I decided to make TVA a group blog, my endemic capitalist disease of diversification was coming down the pike.

I love the way TVA is working out — the balance between things like Kenny’s post about the politics of the RC-Anglican thing, Joel’s musing about apocalyptic movies, and Matt’s investigations of desire. But I do find that I’m holding myself back in order not to swamp the awesomeness of my fellow contributors with my usual prolix stream of consciousness. Consequently, I am going to to remove the more diverse, personal, and frequent parts of my posting to a NEW BLOG. I will of course continue to participate here, but more as one of the group than as the babbling leader.

In short, keep lovin’ on TVA, but if you’re a longtime reader you will want to add The Anti-moderate now as well, where I will continue to let loose with my usual velocity and frequency, reserving TVA for lengthier/meatier disquisitions.

I am now in possession of the unabridged version of Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. Incidentally, I read in the preface that he refused to write an introduction to the partial version that we have in the Dordt Library — he wrote that,

I cannot alter the fact that I see the whole affair [the whole book] with a certain amount of head-shaking. I have looked at the book again recently and am more than ever convinced that the whole is indeed a fragment — but, as a fragment, nevertheless a unity, in which the two chief parts (Background and History) form unities. The reasons which have moved you to present this united fragment in still more fragments, you will have to explain to the English reader yourself: I cannot, because I just do not understand it.

The Dordt version of the book did not include this letter.

At any rate, in the prefatory essay “The Task of a History of Modern Protestant Theology” Barth lays out his own ideas of the proper method for history of theology.

At Dordt, there is one professor who likes to say “theologians should not be left in charge of writing their own history.” Barth addresses the concern that fuels this quip head-on:

We hear the voices of the ancients in order to give an answer by our own attitude and decision. But we do that for or against ourselves, not for or against them. With our own personal decisions we cannot associate judgments upon our forefathers, whether it is a case of pronouncing canonizations or settling accounts and carrying out funerals. . . . An explicit judgment, the feeling that for better or for worse we can be ‘finished’ with this or that, always means the closing of a door that ought to remain open, the silencing of a voice that ought to continue to speak, and that is not only to our detriment, but also to the detriment of the Church.

A bit later he continues this theme:

History writing cannot be a proclamation of judgment. In that case, it would seem that prophetic inspiration warranted us to presuppose not only that our age could be right, but that it was right. We shall do well not to claim this possibility too hastily or too often. It is appropriate for us to leave on one side what the Son of Man will do in his future, namely, to divide the good from the evil. . . . The condition for a legitimate concern with the theology of the past is rather that we should escape again from the unavoidable intoxication of the moment of our own theological recognition as quickly as possible and with the utmost speed meet up again with our fathers, with those whose voices we think that we have heard often enough before.

It remains to be seen how well Barth carried this project out himself.

Because I am one who frequently bemoans the lack of rhetorical education, readers may well imagine that I adore moments of national public focus on rhetorical events. These moments tend to be Presidential speeches — the only rhetorical events of enough interest to actually supersede (gasp) regular programming. (Incidentally, that, for me, is the overriding value of rhetorical events — they disrupt regular programming, turning the “viewing public” into the court of auditors, before whom the rhetors compete via the sublimely democratic agon of the speech.) So, basically, I dig State of the Union addresses and the ensuing commentary on TV, radio, and in print.

In these events, the canons from which presidents draw their allusions point to what texts, exactly, presidents believe unite the nation. These texts tend to be the speeches of past presidents and the American metanarrative of history. I wonder why more topical allusions are so sparse? It seems to me that the real textual soul of the American public lives on HBO and The New York Times Best-seller List, in the blogosphere and on iTunes. But our rhetorical events imply that all of this is perpetually relegated to the social, while the political contains only a narrative of American history that bespeak our national virtues. Admittedly, presidential speeches are highly ritualized occasions. For a president to ignore the responsibilities of allusion to the formal history cultically presumed on these occasions would be a sort of violation of his role, a transgression of his office. But is it wrong of me to wish that when our presidents address the past year of American political life their words could be enriched by a larger view of the life than the mythic political-formal one?

Plato’s Phaedrus pictures a philosophy of love and the soul which, besides its characteristic queerness, contains many fascinating links to contemporary philosophy. One point in particular that I am struggling to understand, however, is the assertion that the beloved sees himself in his lover. What Plato means by that, I am not sure. I quote the preceding passage in full:

And as this intimacy continues and the lover comes near and touches the beloved in the gymnasia and in their general intercourse, then the fountain of that stream which Zeus, when he was in love with Ganymede, called ‘desire’ flows copiously upon the lover; and some of it flows into him, and some, when he is filled, overflows outside; and just as the wind or an echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns whence it came, so the stream of beauty passes back into the beautiful one through the eyes, the natural inlet to the soul, where it reanimates the passages of the feathers, waters them and makes the feather begin to grow, filling the soul of the loved one with love. So he is in love, but he knows not with whom; he does not understand his own condition and cannot explain it; like on who has caught a disease of the eyes from another, he can give no reason for it; he sees himself in his lover as in a mirror, but is not conscious of the fact [emphasis mine]. (255c-d)

At first thought, I am drawn to reflect on Levinas’s critique of modern ethics. Levinas says the modern ethic treats the other only insofar as the other is the same as one’s self. Thus, moral action towards others is still ultimately selfish. Is Plato saying that the love of another is merely the love of one’s self that somehow appears in the other? I don’t think so because the love of the lover is a genuine attraction to the beloved—the lover loves because he sees something beautiful in the other. The desire and love of the lover overwhelms the beloved and causes him to love in return, although he apparently may not see anything beautiful in the lover.

This strain of thought connects to Freud and Lacan, on whom I am only beginning a semester of study. Plato says the desire of the lover fills the beloved and, essentially, is adopted by the beloved. The desire of the lover becomes the desire of the beloved. In his little book, How to Read Lacan, Zizek points out this same theme in the movie 21 Grams, where a dying man declares his love to a widow that barely knows him. She confesses the next time they meet that now she can’t stop thinking about him, and although she tells him that he is ridiculous to profess such love, she ends up falling for him (44-45). What caused her to fall for him? Zizek turns to Lacan’s philosophy, pointing out that the man’s profession of love is a performative act (i.e. one that accomplishes the state of affairs in their pronouncement); that is, the man’s profession of love is a symbolic trust and engagement through which one not only obliges himself to the other but also obliges the other to treat one’s self in a particular way. Zizek explains:

When I tell someone ‘You are my master!’ I oblige myself to treat him in a certain way and, in the same move, I oblige him to treat me in a certain way. Lacan’s point is that we need this recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and only in so far as the other whom we confront is not only my mirror-double, someone like me, but also the elusive absolute Other who ultimately remains an unfathomable mystery. (45)

The Other, as it is used here, is not simply the individual person with whom one interacts but the “big Other,” the Other of the symbolic order or unwritten rules of society. I do not wish to attempt to fully explain the Other now because I do not feel that I have an adequate understanding of it, but Zizek provides some basic hints at what Lacan means by the Other. The symbolic order of the Other comes out of a gift or offering that establishing a link between the giver and the receiver. The content of the gift is not important but what the gift symbolizes:

Everyone who is in love knows this: a present to the beloved, if it is to symbolize my love, should be useless, superfluous in its very abundance—only as such, with its use-value suspended, can it symbolize my love. Human communication is characterized by an irreducible reflexivity: every act of communication simultaneously symbolizes the fact of communication. (12)

To give another example, if two friends are competing for a job position and one wins, the proper thing for the winner to do (in order to preserve the friendship) is to offer to withdraw, and the proper thing for the other to do is to reject the offer (Zizek 13). Neither is necessarily conscious of this social norm, but each wishes to do the proper thing. There is therefore a “free” compulsion to do what is right. The situation is the same between the lovers that Socrates describes in the dialogue: the beloved feels that it is right to respond to the lover in such a way, unconscious of the symbolic rectitude of that fact. If the beloved rejects the lover, or if the losing competitor accepts the friend’s offer to withdraw, the social link or substance is destroyed (Zizek 13).

Although this explanation of Plato is perhaps anachronistic or imprecise, it is the best suggestion or explanation that I can find for understanding the reflection of the beloved’s self in the lover. I am not wholly convinced by the connection I have tried to make here, but the possibility of the link is nevertheless fascinating to me.

Interlibrary loan finally came through with the real version of the Barth book, so I can resume commenting on that tomorrow, but in the meantime I felt like reading something associated with my historiography class and took up my Prof on the throw-away suggestion Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Eric Auerbach.  What exactly is the genre of this book? Something like philosophical-comparative-philology? At any rate, while I suspend judgment on its value as a commentary on the texts it deals with, I already admire it as an extremely thought-provoking and entertaining experiment in its own right.

Here’s my favorite moment from the first chapter. Auerbach makes his point with a lot of flair:

So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them — Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles — appear to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast! — between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord’s jealousy, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen to be examples.

Isn’t the little detail about Abishag the Shunnamite classic?

I have experienced far, far too many writing courses. When I was homeschooled for a while in high-school, I read dozens of books on How to Write — How to Write Essays, How to Write Stories, How to Write Poetry. I read Zinsser’s book on non-fiction, Gardner’s book on fiction, and Williams’s book on style. I read anthologies of the remarks of famous writers on the writing process. I read advice from Samuel Johnson, Cicero, Edgar Allen Poe, and John Updike. I even read textbooks like Watts’s American Rhetoric. And of course I read that book by Strunk and White which has had such a ridiculously hegemonic influence.

You see, I wanted to be a writer.

I could have spent my time better. Robert Louis Stevenson, in an essay called “A College Magazine,” offered advice that would have gotten me out of the How to Write books and sent me much farther on the way to rhetorical mastery. Here’s his advice:

Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts.

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.  .  .  . That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats’s; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear someone cry out: But this is not the way to be original! It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality.  .  .  . Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man’s ability) able to do it.

Once I really got hold of this practice — playing the “sedulous ape” — everything changed. While hardly approximating the general with his legions of words that Stevenson describes in the last sentence above, I am at least fluent enough to make myself understood and I am aware of how much higher I have yet to aim in my own writing.

But I keep having to learn this lesson over again. Inevitably, after I left highschool and came to college, I was forced to attempt new kinds of writing. It may surprise you to hear it if you’ve never considered it — but the historical essay is an entirely different form than the essay of literary criticism, the personal narrative than the book summary, the scholarship essay than the rigorous philosophical argumentation paper. What books (and teachers) on How to Write insist is that there are formulae that they have abstracted, forms of organization, necessary elements of style. But frankly these formulae a dead ends most of the time. The ancient study of rhetoric got it right — rhetoric is for the most part the analysis of texts, improvement of one’s own literary abilities depend more on imitation. In other words, the formal study of rhetoric (as, say, Augustine practiced it) was a magnifying glass on imitation, allowing the student to imitate details he would otherwise have overlooked. Alas, I haven’t encountered genuine rhetorical analysis even in literature classes… But what I have discovered is that each new step in my education has required new forms of writing; therefore, new models and new bouts of imitation. For example, just last semester it dawned on me that I needed to actually learn to write decent historical papers (or historical portions of papers), so I found myself some models and wrote the next few papers in close imitation (not of content, but of form). Just this last week I rediscovered this trick with the novel I am writing this semester.

Resolution: to immediately find models and learn by imitation when I encounter a new form of discourse, rather than waiting until my own inadequacy reminds me of the technique.

• First, don’t miss our own Joel Veldkamp’s reflections on The Book of Eli.
• For those completely unexposed to it, might be good to consider another perspective on Haiti, and a follow-up.
• Should we preserve the dichotomy, history vs. myth?
• An amusing map.
• Garry Kasparov (that’s right, that Kasparov) on the fascinating subject of Chess Masters and the Computer.