[-empyre-] love, sacrifice and the eternal return

[Nicholas Ruiz III]

hmmm...a possibly interesting relation,
perhaps...love, sacrifice and the eternal return? i
suppose that depends upon how one renders such a
concept as the eternal return, no?  Whose eternal
return are you referring to...there are many...?

NRIII


--- "Owen J. Ware" <owen.ware at utoronto.ca> wrote:

> Nicholas,
> 
> Let me try to address your first question about the
> 'superfecundity'  
> of love.  There's something of a paradox here.  On
> the one hand, there  
> is what we might call the 'tyranny of love' as a
> force of speech or  
> signification that, as you put it, 'assaults' us
> from every direction.  
>   This is the threat I see Barthes struggling with:
> the threat of love  
> becoming cliches.  For Barthe, love-cliches are a
> symptom of a deeper  
> exclusion, perhaps the exclusion of an excess that
> animates love and  
> its discourse.  The other half of the puzzle is that
> it doesn't seem  
> there is anything else to love than its repetition. 
> So the force of  
> repetition in love, the condition of possibility for
> love becoming  
> banal, common-place, dead, is also the condition of
> possibility for  
> its life and affirmation.
> 
> In my article, this is what I identify as the
> "Nietzschean" quality of  
> love discourse.  For Barthes, it is the fact that "I
> love you" must  
> also somehow mean "Let us begin again."  It must
> always be the  
> affirmation of a repetition--not, however, the
> repetition of the same,  
> but the repetition of the different.  This, then,
> would mean that love  
> (as a discourse) has no 'content', unless we want to
> define that  
> content in terms of an eternal return.  Perhaps this
> connects to your  
> other questions.  Is the logic of sacrifice bound up
> with eternal  
> return?
> 
> 
> -Owen.
> 
> Quoting Nicholas Ruiz III <editor at intertheory.org>:
> 
> > The signs of love are ubiquitous...we are
> assaulted by
> > 'love'...it's superfecundity...perhaps this,
> alone, is
> > its content?  Or else, we might ask, why hasn't it
> > already disappeared, like, some might say, God?
> >
> > The love of exclusion by sacrifice, a sort of
> > scapegoating, can be traced at least as far back
> as
> > the ideology of ancient near east...via the
> scapegoat
> > sacrifice, where the love or desire for a certain
> > outcome is ensured by sending an animal off to its
> > destruction, or of course, more directly, by
> bleeding
> > an animal or human sacrifice.
> >
> > Considering some theses that posit 'love' as
> tainted
> > with exclusivity of a religious variety (e.g.
> Girard's
> > 'Violence and the Sacred,' Bataille's 'The Cruel
> > Practice of Art' or Nirenberg's 'The Politics of
> Love
> > and its Enemies' Critical Inquiry, V.33, No.3,
> 2007)
> > that is, love generates enemies by exclusion; the
> > loved excludes the unloved...we might ask: does
> love
> > render solely an aporetic circumstance of human
> > existence?
> >
> > NRIII
> >
> >
> >> forwarded by our guest contributor, Owen Ware:
> >>
> >> "Once a discourse is thus driven by its own
> momentum
> >> into the backwater of the 'unreal', exiled from
> all
> >> gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the
> >> site,
> >> however exiguous, of an affirmation."
> >>
> >> - Roland Barthes, A Lover?s Discourse
> >>
> >> Thirty years after Barthes wrote these words, we
> >> must
> >> ask: Can theory carry out this task of
> affirmation
> >> today?  What conceptual resources are now
> available
> >> to
> >> bring love and its discourse back from exile?
> >> The resources are multiple: we can speak of the
> >> experience of love (phenomenology), its
> performative
> >> forces (speech-act theory), its tensions in
> ethics
> >> and
> >> politics (feminism, Marxism, deconstruction).
> >> But how do these resources become a site of
> >> affirmation?  That is the question - and perhaps
> the
> >> task - of thinking through the various
> >> meanings, practices, and performances of love.
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> 
> 
> 
> 
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