[-empyre-] Re: love, sacrifice, and the eternal return
Harun Thomas
ThomasH at daytonastate.edu
Wed Oct 29 07:30:23 EST 2008
sdv,
Some definitions and concepts are dying, but others remain in tact.
(See Obama's run for presidency.)
You are hitting precisely upon the concept--the universal, though
Butler warns us that claims of the universal or universality may not be
sufficiently universal. I think Nic recuperates a fissure in this thread
when he speaks of gnosis as "an espirit, a spiritus, that breath of
life, or vital principle enacting existence in all bioorganisms." I also
find Yvonne's post instructive, insofar as she offers a connection
between agape and the Chinese word for love, enacting the sort of
translation work that Spivak urges as critical. Dominic Pettman’s
invocation of Agamben points us also toward universality, in some sense,
not only with respect to the quodlibet, but also in the exemplar—one
may recall immediately in Agamben’s text the Tiananmen Square
protestor. I wonder if one might see any relevance in Barthes’ punctum
in relation to not only the Whatever, but also love . . . to be pricked
or wounded, perhaps in the pincer movement that Simon attributes to
Deleuze and Guattari.
-hkt-
>>> "sdv at krokodile.co.uk" <sdv at krokodile.co.uk> 10/19/2008 5:36 AM >>>
Harun
"Where does love begin/end/come into being, geographically speaking?"
Geographically speaking ? mean ?
What can love and "geographically speaking" mean in a world, where the
old definitions and concepts founded on geography, race are dying
faster
than the humans who might once have been associated to this concept. (I
am thinking especially of deceased scientific concepts such as the
"English Race" but also of Africans, Americans and so on, these
geographical concepts have no validity left). Given this what can
geographically speaking mean ? And since I'd imagined that 'love' is
as close to a universal as any concept describing an actual human and
non-human might be, perhaps my difficulty and interest in this
"geographically speaking" which must suggest that some humans in some
geographies, don't love.... but where ?
sdv
Harun Thomas wrote:
> Friends,
>
> I offer a spectral conversation and an afterthought:
>
> NRIII: . . . 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?
>
> OW: 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. . . . Is the logic of sacrifice bound up with
eternal
> return?
>
> sdv: Why in Owen Ware's brief note is Barthes quoted and not (for
> example) Kristeva's
> much more interesting book 'Tales of Love', why that particular set
of
> discourses?
>
> NRIII: 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...?
>
> YM: Love and sacrifice are intimately intertwined throughout
history.
> Or should we say surrender rather? But, what is sacrificed or what
is
> surrendered to? . . . As soon as language returns, we fall into its
> violence, and the violence and hence the I need to be sacrificed, if
we
> want to surrender to the affirmative 'love' [you].
>
> HKT: If there is an aporetic circumstance of human existence, is it
> possible that this circumstance is preceded by a more originary
aporia
> that leads us back/forward to/ward the doubling of affirmation, the
> inevitability of repetition, and terms such as exclusion and excess?
I
> began a few humble, rudimentary reflections of our discussion a few
days
> ago while visiting Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, as it
were,
> where I visited family and friends. In an effort not only to escape
my
> propensity for reinscription, but also to acknowledge my come-lately
> entrance into this discussion, I ask: Have we already discounted,
> pre-empted, or foregrounded an ethics of exception (Lacan), a
politics
> of love and friendship (Arendt), the rule of law (starting with
> Aristotle), or the birth of the subject through the discourses
emerging
> out of subaltern studies? I ask an even more naïve question, one that
I
> cannot resist: Where does love begin/end/come into being,
geographically
> speaking?
>
>
>
>
>
>>>> Yvonne Martinsson <yvonne at freewheelin.nu> 10/13/2008 3:35 AM >>>
>>>>
> Owen et al,
>
> Love and sacrifice are intimately intertwined throughout history. Or
> should we say surrender rather? But, what is sacrificed or what is
> surrendered to?
>
> In a Lover's Disourse Barthes says he wants to say 'I love you' in
> Spanish - te quiero - because the subject is dropped in Spanish
> syntax. And even more preferably, he would like a language that drops
>
> the object as well. The subject - object sacrificed, excluded,
> eradicated, the word 'love' becomes affirmative. In love 'I' don't
> exist - which is very contrary to contemporary culture of taking
> control, getting in charge etc that situates us in the violence of
> language, control issues and so forth.
>
> Barthes also says he wants the lover to be a 'mute object'.
> Interestingly enough he calls the lover an object here in the
> discourse of love. A case in point for the 'tyranny of language'? As
> soon as language returns, we fall into its violence, and the violence
>
> and hence the I need to be sacrificed, if we want to surrender to the
>
> affirmative 'love' [you].
>
>
> Yvonne
>
> ====================================================
>
> http://freewheelin.nu
>
> ====================================================
>
>
>
> 13 okt 2008 kl. 03.00 skrev empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au:
>
>
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>> Today's Topics:
>>
>> 1. Re: love, sacrifice and the eternal return (Nicholas Ruiz
III)
>>
>> Från: Nicholas Ruiz III <editor at intertheory.org>
>> Datum: söndag 12 okt 2008 15.34.13 GMT+02:00
>> Till: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>> Ämne: Re: [-empyre-] love, sacrifice and the eternal return
>> Svara till: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
>>
>>
>> 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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>>>>>
>>>>>
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>
>
> Dr. Harun Karim Thomas
> Assistant Professor
> School of Humanities and Communication
> Daytona State College
>
> _______________________________________________
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