Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought 1498581447, 9781498581448

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Somatic Desire

Somatic Desire Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought Edited by Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Chapter 10: All quotations from Marcel Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time, ed. Christopher Prendergast, 6 vols. (London: Penguin Classics: 2003), © Penguin Books Ltd., are reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. The French text of Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) is © Éditions Gallimard, and all quotations from Proust are reproduced by permission of Éditions Gallimard. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 978-1-4985-8144-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 978-1-4985-8145-5 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney Section I: Somatic Desire 1 Desire as the Individuation of Need: A Phenomenological Proposal in Dialogue with Barbaras and Husserl Andrea Staiti 2 Lateralization and Leaning: Somatic Desire as a Model for Supple Wisdom Brian Treanor 3 The Recovery of the Flesh in Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty Richard Kearney 4 Ricœur on the Body: A Response to Richard Kearney Gonçalo Marcelo Section II: The Body in Love and Sickness 5 Embrace and Differentiation: A Phenomenology of Eros Emmanuel Falque and Richard Kearney 6 Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body Emmanuel Falque 7 Dying to Desire: Soma, Sema, Sarx, and Sex John Panteleimon Manoussakis

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Section III: The Inscribed Body 8 Anxiety, Melancholy, Shrapnel: Contribution to a Phenomenology of Desire Richard Rojcewicz 9 The Poetics of Lack and the Problem of Ground in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger Christopher Yates 10 From the Writing of Desire to the Desire of Writing: Reflections on Proust Miguel de Beistegui 11 Miracle Alphonso Lingis

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Conclusion Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney

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Index

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About the Authors/Editors

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Introduction Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney

This is my body. This: right here, this carnality in and through which I know the world, for sensing and feeling across the gaps of flesh and world is also knowing. Is: yes, really, a collection of drives and desires is my body, for desire seeks incarnation, and no ontology is complete that ignores this truth. My: the body is mine and indeed is myself, for though I am other than myself, the self is fundamentally embodied even in its otherness. Body: perhaps the most puzzling word in this short phrase, for at times the body seems strikingly and painfully alien—and yet there is nothing so close to me as my body; it is ownmost. This is my body: a declarative statement, an offer made to another (or received, or both), an expression of wonderment, even an implied question, for to name the body is to name a mystery. What, in truth, is this that we so often take for granted, to the point of assuming that it is negligible? What is this in and through which we exist in the world, yet which seems also to disrupt our relation to the world when it becomes the locus of suffering? For contemporary philosophers of the body who wrestle with these questions, it is not a matter of trying, à la Descartes, to prove that the body exists. It is impossible to prove the body, not because its existence is doubtful, but because it is prior to proof. Seeking to prove what is right in front of one’s nose may be foolish; seeking to prove one’s nose is more foolish still and is the mark not of a properly cautious cogito but of severely disordered thought. We must instead listen to the body, to its pulsating drives and desires that, in their seeming chaos, challenge our very understanding of meaning and sense. At the beginning of his seminars, Paul Ricœur would ask his students, “D’où parlez-vous? Where do you speak from?” When grappling with this question, we must remember that each of us speaks from a body and that the vii

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body itself speaks. Language is not the product of a free-floating intellect but already takes place at the level of embodied desire. Indeed, the carnal language of touch is our first language, our first means of communicating with others and with the world. The infant, whose very name comes from the Latin infans, “without speech,” is in reality already speaking—though not in the manner Western philosophy has privileged—when she reaches out her arms to her parents or clutches the one holding her more tightly. Even the child in the womb, drawing nourishment from the mother, is already speaking the language of the flesh. The body and its language are so fundamental that Descartes himself, even when he concluded that he could escape universal doubt only by taking the isolated cogito as the foundation of all knowledge, defined “[a] thinking thing” as “[a] thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and senses.” 1 Doubting his body, he yet could not doubt that he was not only an intellect but was also a sensing being. Thus the body demands our attention even when we least expect it: in the midst of the meditations of one of the philosophers most notorious for disregarding our carnal existence, the body, via the senses, haunts Descartes’ analysis in a way we can recognize even if he could not. And yet we should hesitate to criticize too quickly the philosophers who emphasized the intellect at the expense of the body (the so-called “Platonist,” rationalist, and idealist traditions in particular), lest we falsely imagine that today, at last, we have fully fathomed the body and its significance. If that which is right in front of one’s nose is all too easy to miss, it is hardly surprising that studying our noses should prove a challenging endeavor. Indeed, although in contemporary continental philosophy it has become something of a commonplace to blithely assert that Western metaphysics tends to separate the person from the body, we all too often stop there without deeply probing the complexities of corporeality and desire. The suggestion that the phenomenological tradition tends to neglect the experience of alienation from desire and the body remains a novel one. Phenomenology has, by and large, preserved a dichotomy between being at home and being alienated: thus either I am absolutely at home in my body or I am absolutely alienated from my body because it is not me at all, and the latter viewpoint is seen as an unfortunate hangover from Cartesianism. In reality, however, as the essays that compose this volume make clear, we are both at home in and alienated from embodied desire, and philosophers must grapple with both aspects of our existence in the world. Continental philosophers have already done much to challenge binary oppositions, and this volume sets out a new challenge: we must now also question the dichotomy between being at home and being alienated. Alterity is not simply something out there, separate from myself; rather, it penetrates me through and through, even in my corporeal experience. Philosophers have tended to recognize that we can be strangers

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to ourselves without acknowledging that this observation extends even to our embodied life. My body is both my own and other; I am other than myself and therefore other than my body. In short, our contributors all ask what it means for human beings to be embodied as desiring creatures—and, perhaps still more piercingly, what it means for a philosopher to be embodied. As they take up this challenge via phenomenology, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of literature, they question the orthodoxies not only of Western metaphysics but even of the phenomenological tradition itself. We miss much that has philosophical import when we exclude the somatic aspects of human life, and it is therefore the philosopher’s duty now to rediscover the meaning inherent in desire, emotion, and passion—without letting the biases of any tradition determine in advance the meaning that reveals itself in embodied desire. We cannot, however, afford to neglect the rich resources that the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions already bring to bear on the questions of desire and the body. Our first section, “Somatic Desire: Uncovering Corporeality in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics,” presents critical readings and develops extensions of little-discussed aspects of valuable work in these traditions, with an especial but not exclusive focus on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricœur. Andrea Staiti’s “Desire as the Individuation of Need: A Phenomenological Proposal in Dialogue with Barbaras and Husserl” seeks to redress the neglect of desire in phenomenology and shows that recently published works by Husserl provide an account of the relation between desire and individuality. Although Renaud Barbaras, the only recent phenomenologist to center desire in his work, explicates the crucial contrast between desire and need, it is Husserl who demonstrates that desire emerges from need when the subject in her embodied individuality is affected by the individual essence of an object. Thus phenomenology itself, from its very beginnings, has much to teach us about desire. Brian Treanor’s “Lateralization and Leaning: Somatic Desire as a Model for Supple Wisdom” places hermeneutics in dialogue with the work of Michel Serres in order to explore the embodied, desiring individual’s relation to the surrounding environment. Treanor further develops carnal hermeneutics—an approach that was first introduced by Richard Kearney and Treanor himself 2 and that attends to the flesh as the medium by which we know the world—by showing that when we consider bodily experiences of nature, we are reminded that materiality and embodiment are not prisons but rather are our proper milieu. The body’s ability to adapt to natural conditions even exemplifies the hermeneutic flexibility that we need if we are to avoid rigidity and decay. Richard Kearney, like Treanor, furthers the project of carnal hermeneutics in his chapter, “The Recovery of the Flesh in Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty.”

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Kearney shows that while neither Ricœur nor Merleau-Ponty has the full story—Ricœur needs a greater carnal element, Merleau-Ponty a greater textual one—reading them together enables carnal hermeneutics to discover the flesh as the locus in which radical, transcendent otherness is revealed. Far from isolating her in her ipseity, the individual’s body opens her to the world and to others. Responding to Kearney’s arguments in “Ricœur on the Body: A Response to Richard Kearney,” Gonçalo Marcelo shows that there are points in Ricœur’s philosophy other than those Kearney favors that could be meaningful for carnal hermeneutics. Marcelo also proposes a fruitful pathway for future studies: a carnal hermeneutical reading of political movements and struggles for recognition. Desire and the body condition even our political life—as indeed they must if otherness is revealed in the flesh, however surprising the connection between politics and embodied desire might at first appear. Continuing this exploration of how the sense of the body reveals itself in all facets of our lives, the second section, “The Body in Love and Sickness,” probes two experiences that might seem quite different—erotic love and illness—but that in fact prove to be profoundly related. “Embrace and Differentiation: A Phenomenology of Eros,” a conversation between Emmanuel Falque and Richard Kearney, puts carnal hermeneutics into dialogue with Falque’s exploration, via phenomenology, of experiences that would often be considered strictly theological—here, the Eucharist and marriage as sacrament. Discussing eros, agape, and the relation between them, he and Kearney wrestle with the questions of how fidelity is inscribed in the body itself and of what it means to sacralize the body. In this conversation with Kearney, Falque briefly mentions his notion of the spread body (le corps épandu); now the following chapter, “Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body,” presents it at length for the first time in English. 3 Falque shows that between the extended body of Descartes and the lived body of phenomenology (especially in the work of Husserl), the spread body is the body in pain and sickness, the body on the operating table, the organic body that does become an object for the one living in it. Exploring not only the sense of the body but also the non-sense of the body, Falque emphasizes both the terrible reality of pain and the stubborn, bodily desire for life that suffering and illness do not destroy. And he finds sanctity in the suffering body as in the body given to another in eros. In “Dying to Desire: Soma, Sema, Sarx, and Sex,” John Panteleimon Manoussakis emphasizes still further the relation between eros and sickness: the desiring body is precisely a sick body. Through an analysis of Socrates’ desire (in the Phaedrus) for the scroll that is Phaedrus’ symbolic body and (in the Charmides) for Charmides’ body of flesh, Manoussakis shows that this desire to strip the body of its clothes to see the naked flesh becomes a

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desire to strip off the body—becomes, ultimately, the desire of death, of Thanatos. Desire and death are indissociable, for desire is directed toward the body (soma) as grave (sēma). Manoussakis makes clear that myth and literature as well as philosophy testify to this intimate relation between death and desire, and the four authors in our concluding section, “The Inscribed Body: Text and the Afterlife of the Flesh,” all join literature and philosophy to examine further what the fundamental experiences of love, sexuality, alienation, and death reveal about embodied desire. In “Anxiety, Melancholy, Shrapnel: Contribution to a Phenomenology of Desire,” Richard Rojcewicz turns to Shakespeare’s Hamlet to elucidate Heidegger’s notion of anxiety and Merleau-Ponty’s study of disrupted relations to the world (as exemplified in the case of Schn.). Hamlet’s melancholy, he argues, corresponds to Heidegger’s anxiety, and only desire, in the form of his love for Ophelia, brings Hamlet to action—or, in phenomenological terms, to an intentionality directed toward the world as world. In short, it is embodied desire that constitutes our world. In “The Poetics of Lack and the Problem of Ground in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger,” Christopher Yates interrogates the constitution of our being-in-theworld with an eye to the self-deceptive tendencies lying at the heart of that being-in-the-world. Hamsun’s novel, about a young writer whom starvation leads to a desperate and unrelenting madness, asks why and how the dissolution of the autonomous self draws us into an abyssal experience of desire from which it seems that the only self-deception could save us. Hamsun, read with Heidegger and Schelling, shows us the dangers and illusions to which desire and the body fall prey as we seek to escape alienation. Miguel de Beistegui’s “From the Writing of Desire to the Desire of Writing” reads Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to analyze the problems of alienation and unhappiness, and he concludes that desire cannot be conceived of as negative or as opposed to enjoyment. Writing, he proposes, becomes the movement through which the author’s self is dissolved and another, impersonal life forms. When the writer crosses that threshold, life reaches its highest expression, and this life’s desire is enjoyment itself; it is not merely desire with a view to enjoyment. It might appear that absence is necessarily negative, yet it is out of the absence of the lover, and ultimately of oneself, that true, positive enjoyment comes. In the final chapter, “Miracle,” Alphonso Lingis, via a discussion of several of Jean Genet’s novels, also shows how that which is or seems to be negative—the brutish, the ugly, the repulsive—is also beautiful. For the miracle of love to occur, Genet must love even the corpse and the murderer of his beloved. The body, as hideous and disgusting as it can be, is not alien to desire, for desire arises and reaches its apogee in the midst of filth and horror. Isolating desire from the body—rejecting the body as unworthy, failing to

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realize that what is unworthy must also and especially be loved—will only serve to drain love and desire of their force. And desire and the body have a way of escaping all the neat and proper confines into which we might wish we could fit them. Precisely because embodied desire thus resists our confines and our categories, this book is a conversation, not a presentation of a new orthodoxy. It is thus our hope that these essays will open the way for further dialogue that will continue to radically rethink our understanding of embodied desire. Rather than falling, as it so often has in the past, into the trap of easy answers that oversimplify the human experience of the world, philosophers must remember that we are both at home in our bodies and desires and alienated from them at the same time. The desire to flee the body forgets that we are at home, yet the desire to be simply identical with one’s body forgets that we are other than ourselves. Either is a form of self-deception. Desire may at times seem to struggle against embodiment, but it is necessarily embodied. Moreover, though at times both our bodies and our desires may appear opposed to our happiness, we and our world would be nothing without them— and, fortunately, enjoyment may be possible all the same. NOTES 1. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 19. Translation modified. Emphasis added. 2. See Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 3. The spread body was first proposed in Emmanuel Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), but it was not laid out in detail until “Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Carnal Hermeneutics. Edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume 2. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Falque, Emmanuel. The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist. Translated by George Hughes. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Section I

Somatic Desire Uncovering Corporeality in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics Christine Rojcewicz

This volume calls for a critical reexamination of classical phenomenological and hermeneutical texts by way of a return to a philosophy of somatic desire. But one cannot do so properly without asking first why there is a call for a return to this topic. Why must the body and the flesh not simply be dismissed by philosophers? Surely such topics would be better addressed by anatomists or biologists. What, if anything, is of philosophical worth in the recovery of the experience of somatic desire? If we do indeed posit that we could learn from a philosophy of embodiment, then we must also be careful to look for instances in which philosophers have overlooked desire, passion, eros, corporeality, and the flesh. Often even twentieth-century phenomenologists and hermeneuts have been accused of giving the primacy only to logos, consciousness, subjectivity, and the mind. Is this interpretation, however, accurate? Shall we put phenomenology and hermeneutics aside and dismiss them as useless, conventional, and outdated? The chapters in this volume, and the first section in particular, answer firmly in the negative. Instead, they argue that attention to corporeality and desire is already present within classical phenomenology and hermeneutics. Thus, the philosophy that we in this volume are calling for is not foreign to that tradition. Rather, it takes into account the same thinkers, experiences, and concepts, but it does so in a new way and out of a different posture. This

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first section comprises another reading of the same texts, not a foreign and unconnected new invention. The volume is therefore truly a return to corporeality, not the beginning of a new philosophy of corporeality. This is especially exemplified in the first section of the volume. Later sections in this volume certainly do traverse the limits of classical phenomenology and hermeneutics, but in this section, they take center stage. Andrea Staiti uncovers a phenomenology of desire that is present already in Husserl in the newly published (2013) Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. While Husserl did not write frequently or systematically about desire and the body, Staiti here pieces together a robust and discrete phenomenology of desire in Husserl. Brian Treanor addresses the hermeneutical approach through the work of Michel Serres and shows how desire is just as primordial and elemental as need. Desire also exceeds mere appetite because, as Treanor shows, it shapes the way we come to understand and value the world in which we live. In Richard Kearney’s piece we find a discussion that bridges the notions of text and body in Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, and in his response, Gonçalo Marcelo supplements Kearney’s argument by turning back to Ricoeur to argue that a hermeneutics of one’s embodiment and desires can also serve as the foundation for one’s identity in and through a political community. The authors in this section take up familiar yet not hackneyed themes in new ways and show that the philosophical import of somatic desire needs merely to be recalled and brought to the fore. Kearney traces this theme all the way back to Aristote’s De Anima, in which the sense of touch plays a pivotal role in the constitution of the soul. These chapters accomplish the important task of offering a groundwork upon which the entire volume stands. Staiti defines desire over against need, Treanor, through a discussion of handedness, navigates the divide, or lack thereof, between the body and the mind, and Kearney and Marcelo address the limitations of non-corporeal thinking. Thus, in this first section, each chapter remains wholeheartedly faithful to phenomenology and hermeneutics but brings to bear upon these topics a new perspective or attitude that opens up for us an original and groundbreaking philosophy of somatic desire.

Chapter One

Desire as the Individuation of Need A Phenomenological Proposal in Dialogue with Barbaras and Husserl Andrea Staiti

INTRODUCTION Desire is strangely neglected in classical phenomenology. Although there is arguably no phenomenon that is more characteristically human, we hardly find explicit, let alone systematic, treatments of desire among the thinkers usually associated with the phenomenological tradition. Recent blendings of phenomenology and psychoanalysis have provided some counterbalance, 1 but by and large it is psychoanalysis that provides the conceptual framework employed to explore desire and other conative phenomena, with phenomenology playing the ancillary role of refining and clarifying psychoanalytical notions. 2 It seems that when they have to address desire, phenomenologists tend to draw on philosophical resources that are alien to their tradition, be it psychoanalysis or, as has often been the case among French phenomenologists, Hegelian philosophy. Needless to say, there is nothing wrong with philosophical and interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, but what I would like to do in the present paper is explore desire from within phenomenology in the original, Husserlian sense to see if and how it can enhance our understanding of this supremely complex and even enigmatic phenomenon. In order to do so, however, I will not start with Husserl but with the work of the only phenomenologist who, in recent years, has placed desire right at the heart of his own work: Renaud Barbaras. Barbaras does not approach desire from psychoanalysis or Hegelian self-consciousness but from the classical problem of perception, which leads him to argue that the subject of phenome3

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nology is best characterized as life and that the phenomenon that governs life qua movement is desire. I will argue that Barbaras hits on a genuine phenomenological distinction when he sharply contrasts desire and need. According to Barbaras, the latter is rooted in our biology and can be fulfilled, while the former is inherently insatiable, and it correlates with the world as such; however, by locating desire beneath the structure of intentionality, as it were, and at a fundamental-ontological level that, in Barbaras’ construal, transcends all first-person consciousness, desire is rendered unrecognizable by phenomenological standards, or so I will argue. It is, by Barbaras’ own admission, desire without a desirer and without a desired object. I then argue that it is important to re-embody desire and re-focus the phenomenological description of desire in a way that is less concerned with fundamental ontology and more adherent to our concrete experience. Barbaras’ contrast of desire and need, which I find fundamentally correct, ought to be redefined in a framework that allows to show how something like desire emerges from biologically grounded need and what this emergence amounts to. In order to do that I will turn to Husserl and present some of his (admittedly scattered and by no means conclusive) reflections on desire in the recently published manuscripts on the Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie (Husserliana XLII) dealing with drives and conation more generally. I will then proceed to sketch out the contrast between desire and need in the following terms: desire is the individuation of need, that is, it is a need that has been transfigured by the affective experience of a thing’s (or situation’s, or person’s) individual essence. Needs are always inherently generic. They correlate with things (or situations, or people) considered merely as instances of their respective genus. When we are affected by a thing’s individual essence (the radically individual “something” that makes the thing unique) in a way that resonates with our own individual essence, we no longer encounter it as the correlate of a need but of desire. So, to simplify, I can need food when I’m hungry but I can only desire that particular ratatouille that I used to love as a child. 3 On my construal, the insatiability of desire is not due to its being correlated with a non-object that is constitutively receding (the world on Barbaras’ construal) but rather to its being correlated with a dimension of things that is inexhaustible precisely because it is radically individual. RENAUD BARBARAS ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE AND DESIRE The bulk of Renaud Barbaras’ work is devoted to what he calls a “phenomenology of life.” In this section I will offer a brief sketch of Barbaras’ phenomenology of life relying primarily on a set of articles that have been published in English in recent years (“Life and Perceptual Intentionality” in

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2003; “Life, Movement, and Desire” in 2008; “The Phenomenology of Life” in 2012). In so doing, I am aware of not doing justice to the complexity of Barbaras’ philosophy, but this is not my purpose. Readers who are interested in getting the full picture are best advised to tackle his book-length study Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie, 4 which would deserve a thorough discussion of its own. Barbaras takes his cue from Husserl’s key insight that there is a thoroughgoing correlation between subjectivity and objectivity. He argues that “[i]t is, however, necessary to examine the consequences of this discovery in terms of the status of the terms in relation—in terms of the Being of consciousness and the Being of the world.” 5 According to Barbaras, this amounts to asking about the relationship between being and appearing, provided that appearing is phenomenologically recognized as essential to being. But by characterizing being in these terms, Barbaras argues, we necessarily have to thematize (1) transcendence as the irreducibility of being to its appearance and (2) how consciousness can be simultaneously the subject to whom the world (as the whole of being) appears and a part or component of the world. Husserl’s famous distinction between transcendental and empirical consciousness will not do, because it will leave us with a dualistic understanding of the subject that does not take seriously consciousness’ belonging to the world. There is an asymmetrical relation between consciousness and world, in which the world depends on consciousness but the reverse does not hold or is undertheorized. But then, Barbaras asks, “how can we think the subject in such a way that insofar as it phenomenalizes the world, it can only be conceived as belonging to the world?” 6 The concept of life lends itself for this purpose. Barbaras correctly recognizes that life is a ubiquitous and central notion in phenomenology, beginning with Husserl and Heidegger, 7 but he points out that the use of this term is often metaphorical and un-clarified, mostly because there is no explicit discussion of the legitimacy of the use of “life” to characterize a dimension of subjectivity that is meant to lie beyond biology and psychophysics. Barbaras credits Hans Jonas 8 with having first developed something like a phenomenology of life by thematizing living beings as such, that is, prior to any naturalistic or biological interpretation and pointing out that the phenomenon of metabolism constitutes the ground for life’s orientation toward exteriority. A living being is constitutively oriented outward (which can be seen as pre-figuring intentionality) because it is incomplete and needs external sources of nourishment in order to preserve its own existence. Need is, for Jonas, the fundamental phenomenon that defines life. For precisely the same reason, life is essentially movement in a sense that is more original than spatial displacement. Life moves in order to fulfill its vital needs, and in so doing, it encounters entities in the world. This characterization of life, however, is deemed insufficient. According to Barbaras, it does not account for

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the openness of perceptual experience as a genuine experience of transcendence: “the orientation towards exteriority is previously determined by the vital needs in such a way that it does not disclose a genuine transcendence, but only a vital environment.” 9 It is desire, rather than need, that governs the movement of life: “Desire defines the very essence of the living being,” 10 it “exactly describes the mode of being of the living being as long as it manifests itself through a fundamental mobility.” 11 How does desire differ from vital need, and why is it necessary to consider desire, rather than need, as the essence of the living being? The reason is that we have to identify a phenomenon that accounts for the openness and constant mobility of life, that is, a phenomenon that does not tie life to a contingent vital environment and that would bring life to a halt every time fulfillment occurs. Barbaras explains: “I employ the term ‘desire’ in a very specific sense and as different from need. Unlike need, desire cannot be fulfilled; thus, the presence of what is desired does not fulfill desire but intensifies it; or better, in desire there is no difference between fulfillment and frustration.” 12 Why is that? According to Barbaras, while singular Erlebnisse within the stream of experience are correlated to this or that singular object or state, which can be more or less perfectly given, Leben itself correlates with no object or entity but rather with the world as such, which, strictly speaking, cannot be experienced as such: “The World is that to which life relates and that at which life is aimed, while it remains, however, unpresentable.” 13 Desire is the mode in which life relates to the world as its specific “object,” and the fact that the world is never given is the reason why desire is insatiable and keeps life going, as it were: “The subject can only make something appear insofar as it is capable of relating to the transcendence of the world that hides itself, or better, slips away, in the appearance of the object. The correlation between desire and the world is the truth of the relation between consciousness and object.” 14 This brief sketch must suffice. Barbaras’ narrative about the fundamentality of desire progresses into more speculative territory, which, by his own admission, is “more ontological than phenomenological,” 15 so we do not need to follow him for the purpose of the present paper, which is concerned with a phenomenology of desire. Accordingly, the next step will be to evaluate Barbaras’ characterization of desire by purely phenomenological standards. In other words, we need to ask whether his approach to and description of desire is a good description of our experience of desire. CRITICAL ASPECTS OF BARBARAS’ CONSTRUAL OF DESIRE AND NEED Much of Barbaras’ approach to life and desire is predicated upon two assumptions that hinge on his interpretation of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

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The first assumption is that intentionality is a phenomenon requiring a foundation in some deeper structure or dimension. This is because intentionality presents us with a transcendental correlation of subject and object that is allegedly dualistic, and dualisms need to be overcome. Barbaras is adamant that his approach is “resolutely [. . .] monis[tic],” 16 but nowhere does he provide an argument as to why we should prefer monism to dualism 17 or, to be more precise, transcendental correlation. The second assumption, which goes hand in hand with the first, is the view that the world is, strictly speaking, not given or experienced and that the only mode of “givenness” we can attribute to the world is a kind of subtraction or movement of withdrawal, which ultimately makes the world a nothing or negation within the dynamics of manifestation or givenness. To start with the second assumption, we must ask, is it a good description of the world to say that there is no experience of it and its only mode of givenness consists in its withdrawal? Here is how Husserl states, in unambiguous terms, his position on this important issue: Kant insists that the world is not an object of possible experience, whereas we continually speak in all seriousness of the world precisely as the all-inclusive object of an experience expanded and to be expanded all-inclusively. I cannot acknowledge the Kantian proposition, no matter how the concept of experience is formed, if it is to remain serviceable. For us, real single things are experienced, but the world is also experienced; and the two are even inseparable. 18

Of course, the specific mode of experience of the world remains to be described, and the important question is which description is the most accurate: is the experience of the world an experience of withdrawal and therefore of a fundamentally un-available dimension? Husserl describes the experience of the world in terms of horizons that are continuously expanding in correlation with our egoic acts, rather than a withdrawal. 19 True, we do not experience the world as an entity in its own right that appears in the same sense in which this or that individual thing appears. In this sense, the world is not a thing and experience of the world is inseparable, as Husserl points out in the above quote, from the experience of things. But does this fact authorize us to play with notions such as negation, withdrawal, hiding, slipping away, and unpresentability, as Barbaras does, to describe our experience of the world? I believe it does not. First of all, in order for the experiences evoked by these notions to have intuitive fulfillment, they presuppose some kind of direct givenness that subsequently subsides or slips away. In order for something to withdraw from something else or slip away, it has to be there in the first place, and in order for something to be deemed unpresentable, we need to have some kind of presentation of it in the first place, otherwise the adjective “unpresentable” would have nothing to attach to and remain hanging in mid-

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air. One could intimate that the whole point of these “negative” notions is precisely that they urge us to make the effort to think about the world as the withdrawal of something that was never there in the first place, or some kind of radical unpresentability that attaches to no definite foregoing presentation. But this would amount to a material absurdity in the Husserlian sense of the phrase; that is, it would be like intimating us to think about a color that is not spread over a surface, a non-perspectival perception or a four-sided triangle. The phenomenologically valuable insight that goes along with what I call “negative” characterizations of our experience of the world is that they call our attention to something that eludes us about the world and that is not reducible to the sum-total of the things that we experience. But this irreducibility is better (that is, more intuitively) described as the experience of horizons that we haven’t yet explored, and perhaps we will never explore. But they are nonetheless given in the same perceptual and intuitive context in which individual things of experience are given, rather than hinting at a hidden and mysterious dimension that escapes all givenness, or whose givenness consists just in its withdrawal. Therefore, it is not Husserl’s word against Barbaras’. The kind of description of the world’s givenness offered by Barbaras that justifies his movement away from the intentional relation between consciousness and object and toward “life” as the “truth” of that relation turns out to be a less-than-optimal description of the world, whose guiding insight can be reappropriated from within a Husserlian description but without having to accept the material absurdity that descriptions of the world’s givenness as pure withdrawal manifestly entail. Turning now to the first assumption, that is, that intentionality must be grounded in some deeper structure in which all dualisms are dissolved, let us ask the following question: what happens if we decouple desire from the general structure of intentionality and locate it at a fundamental-ontological level that exceeds all transcendental correlation? Here is how Barbaras continues his description of desire: “Everything occurs as if desire had no object, not in the sense of not desiring anything but rather because it is oriented towards that which transcends all objects; while we may say that it always aims at something, we must also add that nothing can fulfill it.” 20 Furthermore: “properly speaking, desire or desiring does not have an object: its object is nothing other than itself, or rather the Being of the desirer.” 21 In a purely Hegelian fashion, 22 lacking a definite object in which it can find fulfillment, desire falls back upon itself, that is, it is not the member of a twopoled relation but rather an entirely self-sustaining and self-referential phenomenon. But if the “Being of the desirer” is defined exclusively in terms of a lack, what exactly does desire fall back upon once we have realized that it doesn’t have an object? A pure “lack” is, strictly speaking, nothing, that is, it is not even lack of something (this would amount to an intentional relation, which Barbaras has left behind in his search for a more fundamental dimen-

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sion) but lack, full stop. So, here is what happens once we decouple desire from intentionality: on Barbaras’ account, desire turns out not have an object and not to have a subject, either. It is desire without a desired object and without a desirer. But what justifies the use of the word “desire” to characterize a phenomenon of this kind? Barbaras locates desire at such a fundamental level that it becomes unrecognizable as desire by phenomenological (that is, descriptive, intuitive, life-worldly) standards. Steven Crowell is therefore right in arguing that Barbaras “offers a non-phenomenological concept of desire.” 23 According to Crowell, this non-phenomenological concept of desire turns out to be unsuitable even for the very task for which it was originally introduced, namely, grounding intentionality. 24 I do not intend to follow this line of criticism but rather offer an alternative phenomenological framework to describe desire. In a philosophy that aspires to be phenomenological, I contend, one should not begin with a set agenda (such as overcoming dualisms or finding some dimension that is more fundamental than intentionality) but should simply ask what are the best possible descriptions of the phenomena under scrutiny. If a description becomes unrecognizable as a description of the phenomenon from which the analysis took its departure, then it should be replaced with a better description. To conclude this section, let me point out one final difficulty in Barbaras’ analysis, which will provide a clue for our reframing of desire with the aid of Husserl in subsequent sections. Despite his effort to overcome residual forms of dualism in phenomenology, Barbaras does not free himself from all dualisms. A closer scrutiny of his analysis reveals a profound, unbridgeable dualism between need and desire. Need as a biologically determined phenomenon is the very opposite of desire. Whereas need is tied to a vital environment and can be fulfilled when the corresponding object is present, desire is infinitely open to transcendence and cannot, in principle, be fulfilled. Even if we reject Barbaras’ relocation of desire at a fundamental-ontological level beneath intentionality and reframe desire as a phenomenon that is “always already ours, in the sense that it is transcendentally defined,” 25 that is, as the experience of a human desirer within the (transcendental) framework of intentionality, there is some prima facie plausibility to Barbaras’ sharp distinction of desire and need. While both phenomena are conative in nature, there is something about desire that is well described by notions such as insatiability and lack of (straightforward) fulfillment, such that we can very well agree with Barbaras that “the presence of what is desired does not fulfill desire but intensifies it,” 26 even if we insist that from this description it does not necessarily follow that “in desire there is no difference between fulfillment and frustration.” 27 Consider erotic desire: we can all agree that the presence of what is desired does not fulfill but intensifies erotic desire, but, pace Barbaras, there is a world of difference between fulfillment and frustration, as anyone who has ever been rejected can readily testify!

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Need is either fulfilled, and then it rests, or it is not, while desire implies a much more complex interplay of fulfillment and lack thereof. This seems to be a genuine phenomenological insight that we can borrow from Barbaras’ characterization of desire, even if we refuse to counterpose desire and need by locating them at two fundamentally different levels of being. By contrast, if we look at both desire and need as two intentional phenomena in a transcendental framework, that is, as experiences of a subject, we can also raise a question that would be utterly impossible to ask from within Barbaras’ framework. How does desire emerge from need? Given the evident affinity between the two phenomena and their fundamental meaning for the movement of life, and given the fact that need seems to be more simple and more widely spread across living beings than desire, is there a way to think about desire as a complexification of need or, as I will argue below, a transfiguration of need that happens as a consequence of a particular experience? In short, it seems that a proper phenomenology of desire must compare and contrast desire with other fundamental conative phenomena and, in particular, with need as a “genealogically” antecedent form of conation that is presupposed and, in a sense, transformed by desire. Before I do that, let me first dwell a bit further on what it means to recontextualize desire in a phenomenological framework and then turn to Husserl for some helpful suggestions about how to describe desire in contrast with vital need. RELOCATING DESIRE IN AN INDIVIDUATED BODY Let us reframe our analysis starting from the following statement, which summarizes our criticism of Barbaras: desire is always the experience of a desirer toward a desired thing, situation, or person. It will then be necessary to unearth the kind of intentionality that governs desire, and in order to do so it will be helpful to compare and contrast desire with need, as a more “rudimentary” conative phenomenon, from which desire arguably emerges. Moreover, to say that desire is always the experience of a desirer calls for a specification of what the desirer is like. It is important to point out that the desirer I have in mind is not an immaterial soul temporarily trapped in a material body but a thoroughly embodied being, whose desires are bodily occurrences as much as they are psychological or spiritual. Desire is not first and foremost a movement of the soul that occasionally affects the body and compels it to move in a certain way. Rather, desire is rooted in our bodily existence, it manifests itself in bodily comportments (blushing, sweating, salivating, etc.); it emerges from and returns to a living body. The philosophical tradition, starting with Plato, has often distinguished desires in terms of their object. “Somatic” or “bodily” desire refers to things

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like food, shelter, or sex, while “psychological” desire, that is, desire of the soul, refers to immaterial things like another soul, knowledge, or virtue. 28 A phenomenological approach to desire should resist this distinction and point out that all desires, regardless of their object, are somatic and manifest themselves through bodily occurrences. Consider the experience of reading a good book and being distracted by some other commitment, like running errands. While you run the errands, there is a kind of impatience to return to your previous activity that “pervades” your experience as bodily agent. The “intellectual” desire to return to your reading manifests itself bodily, for instance, as you find yourself walking faster than usual to return home as quickly as possible. Moreover, the living body that characterizes the subject of desire is not just the physiological body with its “standard” anatomic makeup, as defined by the biology of homo sapiens. A desirer is a bodily being whose body is marked by an irreducible individuality. The metaphysics of individuation does not help much in defining the notion of individuality at stake here. A desirer’s individual body is not a stock of standard physiological properties and functions that merely happen to be instantiated in some particular spatiotemporal venue. It is a body whose individuality is a constant achievement, that is, it is the result of a unique history that is recorded in the body. The desirer as a bodily being constantly individuates herself through her desires, whose traces and manifestations can be “read off” the desirer’s body, as it were. Consider the deep furrows in the sage’s brow, the skinny figure of the ascetic, the glutton’s belly, or the sad look in the inconsolable eyes of the heartbroken. The body here is not just the mediator between a soul and the world around her. It is itself the “stuff” that desires have shaped over time; desires do not just “move it,” they are one with it. Therefore, we desire with the body, and our body bears traces of our desires. Our body displays us as desirers in our unique individuality, which, in turn, is constantly shaped and reshaped as our desiring life unfolds. It is very important to keep in mind this notion of the individuality of the body because I will argue shortly that desire can be distinguished phenomenologically from need precisely in terms of its directedness to something that affects us as individuals, thereby summoning our own individuality. Common sense and the philosophical tradition suggest that the experience of an individual is simpler than the experience of something general. From a phenomenological point of view this is incorrect and the reverse is true. The simpler conative experience, which I will define as need, is the experience of the general, and the more complex conative experience is the experience of the individual, which I will define as desire. This, of course, does not mean that in need we experience universalia of sorts but rather that need encounters entities in the world as generic, that is, merely as instances of a certain class, which are apt to grant us satisfaction. In need, I encounter a piece of

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meat generically as food: the piece of meat does not become salient in its individuality. By contrast, in desire I am affected and moved by the individuality of a certain thing, which brings out and awakens my own individuality. In order to help articulate more fully this view of desire in the last section of this paper, let me first turn to Husserl, whose reflections on desire and need set the stage for the kind of distinction I have in mind. HUSSERL ON DESIRE AND NEED The Husserlian scholarship of the past two decades has shown that the founder of phenomenology was by no means the intellectualist thinker that many of his critics made him out to be. Husserl was deeply interested in agency and conative phenomena more generally, and later in life he even described his project as “the carrying out of a universal voluntarism.” 29 The recent publication of Husserl’s manuscripts on drive and instincts in the Husserliana volume on the Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie (Hua 42) has shed further light on Husserl’s important contribution to this issue. In the context of the present paper I cannot even begin to do justice to the complexity and richness of Husserl’s analyses, so I will selectively focus on just a few texts that are germane to our discussion. The most important aspect of Husserl’s later approach to conative phenomena, in the context of his so-called genetic phenomenology, is that he traces conation back to the deepest and most rudimentary layer of subjective life, namely, the hyletic stratum. The difference between hyle and morphe was introduced in the first book of Ideas as the twofold structure of a noesis, that is, an intentional act intending some transcendent object. Hyle is the sensory material that morphe apprehends and thereby endows with intentional meaning. The apprehension of hyle through morphe construes the hyletic material as the manifestation of some consciousness-transcendent object or property. The descriptions in Ideas I (Hua 3) seem to suggest that hyle has no intentional meaning whatsoever and only receives it through intentional apprehension (morphe). Husserl’s later genetic phenomenology partially corrects this view and interprets the hyletic stratum as itself shot through, as it were, with forms of intentionality. The intentionality at work in the hyletic stratum is not directed toward some transcendent object. It is a form of “tendency” (Tendenz) that creates synthetic connections among the rudimentary sensory materials of hyle and organizes them in pre-objective unities that are ready for objectual apprehension. Moreover, and most importantly for our purposes, the hyletic stratum is an originally conative dimension. It is not made of inert “stuff” that neutrally lends itself to various forms of apprehension, but it is affectively laden from the ground up.

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Husserl’s exploration of the conative dimension at the hyletic level is guided by an overarching notion of instinct. Instincts can be connected to Urbedürfnisse, 30 that is, fundamental biological needs such as food and shelter, or to needs that have been acquired over the course of life, such as the need to go out for a walk after a long work day, 31 or to play the piano. 32 The characteristic feature of instinctive intentionality for Husserl is that it is not directed toward something that is already intended and determined in advance. 33 Instincts do have intentionality and therefore some kind of underlying presentation giving them a definite direction, but they do not rest on a fully clear and fulfilled consciousness of what they are striving toward. Their intentionality is grounded in an obscure and un-differentiated presentation, 34 which only gains clarity and differentiation as the instinctive intention is progressively fulfilled. By contrast the intentionality of desire (Begierde or Wunsch) is characterized by its being “explicitly directed,” 35 that is, by being directed toward something determined from the start, regardless of the level of clarity or obscurity of the corresponding presentation. Husserl’s terminology here is not very precise. “Desire” (Begierde) is often used interchangeably with something like “wish” (Wunsch), and even the distinction between desire and instinct or drive is often blurred. The only place where he seems to be more explicitly concerned with terminological distinctions is a long footnote where he attempts to chart the territory of conation in the following terms: Perhaps it is good to understand the concept of desire [Begierde] as genus with the distinctions a) instinctive drive [instinktiver Trieb], b) wish [Wunsch], this latter being “ideomotoric.” Thus, drive [Trieb] is “directed” towards the “pleasurable.” But then “drive” is not identical with tendency, tending intention, as it is present in thought-intentions [Denkintentionen], in doxic intentions, which, for sure, can be essentially intertwined with practical intentions, but are not themselves practical. [. . .] Naturally tendency and drive have a common genus, which would have to be designated as “tendency,” and then tendencies would be presentational tendencies and valuational tendencies. Thus, desire [Begierde] would not be a genus on equal footing with presentation [Vorstellung]. 36

Husserl’s attempted taxonomy would thus look like this:

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Figure 1.1. Husserl’s taxonomy of desire

On this terminological account, the distinction we are trying to focus on for the purpose of this paper would be that between instinktiver Trieb and Wunsch, which I render as “wish” in this particular context in order to maintain a distinction from Begierde, which is traditionally rendered as “desire.” As a matter of fact, however, Wunsch can be also rendered as “desire” with Begierde designating more something like a “craving.” Moreover, the terminological distinction between Begierde as the upper genus of conative phenomena in the practical sphere and Wunsch as the species of conations that are explicitly directed is not upheld in Husserl’s analysis, and oftentimes he simply uses Begierde to designate the phenomenon at issue. 37 Regardless of the terminological choices, what matters here is the distinction between two different modes of intentionality, namely, the intentionality of instinctive drive, where the intentional object is not given in advance as the object of a determined presentation, and the intentionality of desire, which intends its object “explicitly,” as per the previous quote. Given that instinctive drive is always the expression of a need (be it fundamental or acquired), we can then talk about the intentionality of need vis-à-vis the intentionality of desire, in order to maintain the parallelism with Barbaras’ treatment of these topics. Fleshing out in further detail the intentionality of need, Husserl provides a set of examples that are designed to show that the defining feature of need, which goes hand in hand with the indeterminacy of its object, is its generality or, to mark the distinction with logical generality, generic-ness. For instance, Husserl talks about the “generic hunger, the generic-ness of the drive, which is prior to all particularity.” 38 Husserl’s point here comes very close to Max Scheler’s conception of instinct in his philosophical anthropology. Scheler argues that instinct is only reactive for “such typical and recurring situations that are useful for the relevant species as such, but not for the particular experience of the living being concerned.” 39 When a need unleashes a purely instinctive movement, the object that is “sought after” by the instinct is

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merely an instance of the category of objects that can satisfy the need. This generality, however, can be “developed” or “unfolded” and thereby receive articulation in more specific and differentiated kinds: Unfolding [Ausbildung] of generality as general horizon: hunger directed towards “any” food of multifarious forms, which can be known or still unknown, but nonetheless akin [to the forms we know]—which is what in our cultural sphere we understand under “dishes” etc. Unfolding of the individual objectoriented direction, the instinctive direction toward a particular dish: hunger for cake, bread, thirst “for” wine, etc. 40

But is the kind of experience that “unfolds,” that is, explores the details of an instinctual horizon, thereby differentiating and specifying the generality of the originally “intended” object, still the experience of instinctive directedness? Are we still operating in the mode of instinct, only with a more particular thing or situation as the correlate of our striving? This is how Husserl describes the phenomenological structure of need as categorially distinct from desire in the manuscripts we are presently exploring: The particular flavor can be valuable in itself, it may or may not be connected to satiety. I can be hungry and, through a dish having this particular flavor, I become sated. I like this flavor and I find it valuable in itself. I can also have a desire for this flavor, but I am sated. If I eat the dish, it satisfies the desire, but without satiety, or in the mode of unpleasant surfeit, which, then, is annoying. The desire for a particular dish is not an instinct. It is determinate desiring. 41

Let us focus on the distinction adumbrated by these passages. Need triggers an instinctive drive toward a generic object, which promises to provide satiety. The object is intended obscurely and in an un-differentiated manner; it only becomes progressively clear as the experience of fulfillment starts to differentiate its content. Desire is not an instinct, that is, it is not triggered by mere need and does not have the same intentional structure. In desire the object is encountered in its particular, individual value. There is no straightforward connection between desire and the kind of emptiness craving satiety that characterizes need. As Husserl points out, you can find yourself desiring to enjoy a certain flavor even if you are not, strictly speaking, hungry, such that the biological underpinnings of the need for nourishment cannot be at the origin of that desire. Thus, contrary to some of Husserl’s formulations, desire is not merely an “evolution” of need, in which the generality of the object of need is replaced by the particularity of an individual thing. Rather, in desire we encounter something different from the correlate of need, and in this encounter we become the protagonists of a dynamic which cannot be described in terms of satiety at the end of a process of simple fulfillment.

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In the next and final section I want to sketch out a phenomenological description of the contrast between desire and need that takes its cue from Husserl, but it ultimately stakes out a more radical claim about the experience that underlies the transition from the sphere of need to the sphere of desire. DESIRE AS THE INDIVIDUATION OF NEED Husserl’s analyses have highlighted a contrast between desire and need. Need is directed toward a generic object, while desire is directed toward a particular object, that is, an object whose individuality has become salient as such. In desire, the object’s individuality has been recognized as “valuable in itself.” 42 We could express this insight by saying that in desire the original need has been “transfigured” by the experience of the individual qua individual, that is, in its unrepeatable value. Desire can be interpreted as the individuation of need, not merely in the sense that a certain need has occurred in a particular spatiotemporal venue, but rather in the sense that need has become something different, whose correlate is no longer a generic object, but an object in its individuality. We must now ask: what is it that creates the conditions for the emergence of desire from need? That is, what is it about the object that creates the conditions for its becoming salient in its individuality? It is well known that phenomenology in its Husserlian formulation is a doctrine of essences or eidetic science. When we think of an eidetic science we have in mind a discipline like geometry or formal ontology, that is, a systematic body of knowledge that investigates generic essences, be they material (such as space and its configurations) or formal (such as the a priori relations pertaining to objects in general). 43 Phenomenology is famously defined as an eidetic science of transcendentally reduced consciousness, that is, a science that investigates the generic essences of consciousness after suspending all naturalistic prejudices via the epoché and reduction. As a science, phenomenology is not interested in this or that particular experience with its particular object-correlate but in the essence of experience as such. While being primarily interested in the study of generic essences for scientific purposes, Husserl and early phenomenologists such as Edith Stein, Max Scheler, and Alexander Pfänder also recognized the dimension of individual essences, that is, the total, unrepeatable stock of predicables that makes an individual what it is. My claim is that the emergence of desire from need is mediated by the experience of being affected by an object’s individual essence. In order to substantiate this claim, let me flesh out a bit more the notion of individual essence that is at stake in phenomenology. 44

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Here is how Jitendranath Mohanty summarizes Husserl’s concept of individual essence: “Consider the entire what or So-Sein of Socrates, including the most specific of the properties he has, then think away his actual existence; what we have then is the total content of the idea of Socrates, his own essence [. . .]. Husserl seems to have held the view that the entire content, the entire what of a real individual can be regarded as an essence, and that what we thereby abstract from is the mere existence.” 45 Mohanty’s reading is confirmed by recently published manuscripts on eidetics, where Husserl explicitly recognizes his double (and potentially equivocal) use of Wesen to indicate both the generic essence and the individual essence of an object. 46 Importantly, while each of the properties characterizing Socrates could be instantiated elsewhere, that is, as an “ingredient” making up the individuality of another person, the total stock of properties is arguably unique, that is, it is instantiated uniquely in the person of Socrates as such, regardless of whether we think of Socrates as walking down to the Piraeus or as tele-transported to twenty-first-century Manhattan. Socrates’ individual essence is more than just the sum-total of its properties considered as an aggregate. It is the unique whole formed by the properties in their interrelation. While Husserl does not further elaborate on his notion of individuelles Wesen, Edith Stein devotes much of Finite and Eternal Being, her magnum opus written in the late 1930s and published posthumously in 1951, describing and defending a notion of individual essence that resonates with Scotus’ haecceitas. And she, like Scotus, refuses to understand individuality in Aristotelian/Thomistic terms merely as the instantiation of a generic essence (such as, say, “human being”) in a contingent matter. In a passage which is worth quoting in full, Stein writes: “Socrates” means what Socrates is, and this what—just as “human being” and “living being”—can be separated from the definition of the what of this man and grasped in [its] purity—as essential what. [. . .] Socrates goes and Socrates speaks; he chats with a craftsman or refutes a famous sophist: All of these are “expressions of his essence.” Going, speaking, chatting—these all have a universal meaning that is everywhere fulfilled wherever a human being does something of the same kind. But how Socrates does it is like no one else. His whole doing and allowing is such as “he himself” is. Because of this we can also say that it is the expression of his such being [Soseins]. But this such being has then another meaning than that of a trait of the essence or the totality of its traits. It is something simple that is repeated in each trait, that makes the whole essence and each trait into something unique, so that the friendliness or goodness of Socrates is different from that of another human being—not only one other—although the same essentiality is realized here and there. The whole that is such unfolds itself in the individual traits and in the life of this man. It is his individual essence. 47

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Note that Stein is more radical than Husserl. For her, the unique whole formed by all the properties and traits making up an individual being is governed by “something simple that is repeated in each trait,” as she writes in the quote above. It is not just the uniqueness of the whole that defines an object’s individual essence but a further principle of individuation that shines through each property and the whole formed by all the properties taken together. Socrates’ friendliness is not just generic friendliness receiving a mark of individuality by its unrepeatable interconnection with (generic) intelligence, (generic) sense of humor, etc. in the individual at issue, but a friendliness that is from the very beginning Socrates’ own friendliness, that is, a friendliness manifesting Socrates’ individual essence. While Stein only discusses individual essences with regard to human beings 48 there seems to be no reason not to extend the notion of individual essences to non-human animals and even things and situations. As in Husserl’s example from the previous section, a particular meal or dish can be seen as instantiating an individual essence, which can be interpreted as either the total stock of its ingredients in their unique interconnection (à la Husserl) or something simple that comes to manifestation in each of the dish’s flavor components (à la Stein). On this account, the flavor of parsley in chimichurri sauce manifests a different individual essence than the flavor of parsley in Tabbouleh salad. We could also talk in similar terms about the individual essence of a landscape or a situation, as for instance, Alexander Pfänder does in his posthumous book Philosophie der Lebensziele, where he goes as far as to argue that the contemplation of individual essences in the world can be considered as one of the distinctively human life-goals. 49 This characterization of individual essences should suffice for the purpose of this chapter. If we build upon the Husserlian insight that there is a difference between (instinctive) need and desire revolving around the generic-ness and the individuality of its object correlate, then we can describe the emergence of desire from mere need in terms of the experience of being affected by an object’s individual essence. While in need what affects us of the object is the general property or array of properties that promise satiety in accordance with the need at issue, in desire we are affected by what makes the object individual and shines through (to reiterate Stein’s insight) each of those properties. In desire, the object does not promise satiety, it promises itself in its uniqueness. Let us consider some examples to elucidate this distinction. Consider the difference between mere sexual need (sometimes negatively characterized as lust) and erotic desire. The former can be satiated by any sexual partner while the latter enflames us with passion directed toward a particular and absolutely irreplaceable person. Sexual need is at rest after the sexual act, while erotic desire is only amplified in the continuing presence of the desired person, as Barbaras pointed out. To turn to Husserl’s example with food, hunger as the need for nourishment can be satiated by

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any kind of food. If I find myself filled with desire for a particular dish that I used to love as a child and never ate again since, nothing but that particular dish will do. I could travel many miles to taste that dish again, perhaps only to find that the flavor that obscurely stirred my desire is lost forever together with my youth. The need for shelter can be accommodated in many ways, but the homesickness and nostalgia that fill me when I think about the place where I used to live as a child are directed toward something individual and irreplaceable. In all these cases the individual essence of the thing, situation, or person at issue has affected the subject in such a way that the generality of need has receded to make room for a new kind of experience, to which we have (deliberately!) decided to restrict the notion of desire. Note that this view does not necessarily commit us to any strong metaphysical thesis about personal (or situational, or “objectual”) identity. To say that a person has an individual essence, for instance, does not necessarily commit us to the view that that individual essence stays the same throughout her life. A person’s individual essence at t1 could get lost forever at t2, say, in the wake of a traumatic experience, or imperceptibly morph into a very different individual essence, that makes the “new” person unrecognizable. Think about a mother’s desire to be once again in the presence of her child’s individual essence as a toddler when she has turned into a rebellious teenager and that individual essence is likely gone forever. But consider also the cases where a mother is still able to glimpse her baby’s individual essence (or components of it) in the rebellious teenager, or when she experiences with relief the change in individual essence as her child matures from a rebellious teenager to a responsible adult. The appeal to individual essence as crucially involved in the phenomenon of desire also provides an alternative explanation to desire’s characteristic insatiability. Recall Barbaras’ contrast between the satiability of need and the insatiability of desire. His account of this contrast revolves around the idea that the correlate of desire is a world that is constitutively withdrawing, a view that we already criticized in an earlier section of this paper. On the account proposed here, the insatiability of desire is the correlate of the inexhaustibility of individual essences. While encountering an object as the instance of a generic essence creates the conditions for fulfillment in accordance with the general structure of the essence at stake, when the same object becomes salient in its individuality, the inexhaustible wealth of its properties gets a grip on us in such a way that no particular experience or enjoyment of the object can be conclusive. To use a Husserlian category, the affective experience of an object’s individual essence binds us to its internal horizon, which henceforth becomes the horizon of an infinite conation. To conclude, let us remark that the account of desire just offered allows us to reconsider the question about the desirer’s being, which Barbaras’

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account reduced to a lack or nothingness. By contrast, a being who is capable of desires over and above needs is a being who is receptive for the individual essence of things because it is itself a radically individual being, that is, a being whose unique history in its temporal and embodied thickness is at stake in each of its volitions. We do not desire out of nothing, as it were, but rather out of what Husserl and other early phenomenologists called a “personal core,” 50 that is, a kernel of individuality that underlies the structure of our personality and governs the otherwise unintelligible manifestations of our selves. Being affected by individual essences and being elevated from the dimension of need to the dimension of desire both reveals and constitutes us as persons. It illuminates what Max Scheler called our ordo amoris, when he wrote: Whoever grasps the ordo amoris of a man, has hold of man himself. He possesses him as moral subject—what crystal form is to crystal itself. He sees into this man as far as one can see into one’s fellow. Behind the empirical multifold and complexity he sees the ever simply flowing basic contours of man, and this, rather than knowledge or will, deserves to qualify as the core of man as a spiritual being. He possesses in his spiritual make-up the original source that secretly spawns all that issues from man. And even more, it is the primordial determinant of that which incessantly places itself around him—in space his moral world, in time his fate, i.e., to become the quintessence of the possible that can happen to him and only to him. 51

We could conclude that the personal core of a human being comes to light in the experience of being affected by an object’s individual essence, such that a person’s ordo amoris is at the same time and inevitably an ordo desiderii. CONCLUSION To conclude, let us recapitulate the arguments of this paper. After examining Renaud Barbaras’ construal of the distinction between need and desire, we criticized it for being unphenomenological, that is, for making our concrete experience of desiring unrecognizable. We proposed an alternative interpretation, according to which desire is the individuation of need. If we consider need to be a biologically determined phenomenon, whose correlates are objects qua instances of their genera, desire can be described as emerging from need when an object becomes salient in its individuality. This happens when the object’s individual essence affects the subject, thereby transfiguring need into desire. This experience also reveals the being of the subject of desire: a temporal and embodied subject whose radical individuality is both revealed and constituted by its desires.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Sara Heinämaa and Mirja Hartimo, as well as all the participants in a seminar held at the University of Helsinki where I received valuable feedback on an earlier version of this chapter. NOTES 1. Rudolf Bernet, Force—Pulsion—Désir. Une autre philosophie de la psychanalyse (Paris: Vrin, 2013) and Diether Lohmar and Jagna Brudzinska, Founding Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically: Phenomenological Theory of Subjectivity and the Psychoanalytic Experience (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012). 2. Tellingly, there is no chapter devoted to desire in Lohmar and Brudzinska’s book, and while it features prominently in the title, desire is discussed much less extensively than other conative phenomena in Bernet’s book. 3. As is the case in every genuine phenomenological description, I am not claiming that my analysis somehow discovers the true meaning of the words “desire” and “need.” Rather, I am attempting to fix the inherently vague meaning of these words in everyday speech by connecting them to two distinct experiences. As long as the experiences in question are identifiable in their distinction, there can be a certain degree of freedom in the use of terminology. The reason why I chose to fix my terminology in this particular way is because I find it apt to be contrasted to the position I set out to criticize and possibly replace. 4. Renaud Barbaras, Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie, (Paris: Vrin, 2008). 5. Renaud Barbaras, “The Phenomenology of Life: Desire as the Being of the Subject,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 95. 6. Ibid., 96. 7. Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance, trans. Paul Milan (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 9–10. In Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life (Cambridge University Press, 2014), I have argued that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology should be interpreted in the context of Lebensphilosophie and that the characterization of the transcendental dimension as a life is key to a correct understanding of phenomenology in its historical context. 8. Renaud Barbaras, “Life and Perceptual Intentionality,” Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 161–62 and Barbaras, “Life, Movement, and Desire,” Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008): 9. 9. Barbaras, “Life and Perceptual Intentionality,” 163. 10. Barbaras, “Life, Movement, and Desire,” 14. 11. Ibid. 12. Barbaras, “Life and Perceptual Intentionality,” 165. 13. Barbaras, “Life, Movement, and Desire,” 15. 14. Barbaras, “The Phenomenology of Life,” 100. 15. Ibid., 101. 16. Ibid. 17. Incidentally, this would be an important argument to find in Merleau-Ponty, too, whose entire philosophy is based on the imperative that dualisms are to be overcome. 18. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology (Nijhoff: The Hague, 1976), 71. 19. Edmund Husserl, Die Lebenswelt: Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937), Husserliana. Vol. XXXIX (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 3. Henceforth Hua 39. 20. Barbaras, “The Phenomenology of Life,” 100. 21. Ibid., 102.

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22. Pippin’s Hegel on Self-Consciousness Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit offers a thorough interpretation of Hegel on desire, which I cannot provide here. 23. Steven Crowell, “Transcendental Life,” in Phenomenology and the Transcendental, ed. Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Timo Miettinen (London/New York: Routledge, 2015), 43. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Barbaras, “Life and Perceptual Intentionality,” 165. 27. Ibid. 28. For an instructive discussion of desire in Plato’s philosophy see Wolsdorf’s Trials of Reason: Plato and the Crafting of Philosophy, (Oxford University Press, 2008), 29–85. Specifically, I have borrowed the distinction between somatic and psychological desire from Wolsdorf’s book, page 67. 29. Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink (Nijhoff: The Hague, 1976), 61. 30. Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), Husserliana XLII, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 69. Henceforth Hua 42. 31. Ibid., 96. 32. Ibid., 84. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 85. 35. Ibid., 87. 36. Ibid. 37. See for instance ibid., footnote 1, pg. 89. 38. Ibid., 94. 39. Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 12–13. 40. Hua 42, 95. 41. Ibid., 86. 42. Ibid. 43. I have dealt more in depth with material and formal essences in the context of Husserl’s theory of science in my article “Wissenschaftstheorie.” Andrea Staiti, “Wissenschaftstheorie,” in Husserl-Handbuch. Leben—Werk—Wirkung, ed. Sebastian Luft, et al., (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2017), 173–178. 44. For a more extensive treatment individual essence see my article “Lotze and Husserl on First and Second Generality.” Andrea Staiti, “Lotze and Husserl on First and Second Generality,” in Discipline Filosofiche 26/1 (2016), 47–66. For a helpful discussion of Husserl’s concept of the individual see Majolino’s article “Individuum and Region of Being. On the Unifying Principle of Husserl’s ‘Headless’ Ontology.” Claudio Majolino, “Individuum and Region of Being,” in Commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I., ed. Andrea Staiti (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2015), 33–50. 45. Jitendranath Mohanty, Phenomenology: Between Essentialism and Transcendental Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 7. 46. Edmund Husserl, Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1935), Husserliana XLI (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 149–50. Henceforth Hua 41. 47. Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies Publications, 2002), 156–57. 48. Sarah Borden Sharkey, Thine Own Self. Individuality in Edith Stein’s Later Writings, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 2. 49. Alexander Pfänder, Philosophie der Lebensziele (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1948), 53. 50. Hua 42, 377. 51. Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Studies (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 98.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Barbaras, Renaud. Desire and Distance, trans. Paul Milan (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 9–10. ———. “Life and Perceptual Intentionality.” Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 157–66. ———. “Life, Movement, and Desire.” Research in Phenomenology 38 (2008): 3–17. ———. Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie. Paris: Vrin, 2008. ———. “The Phenomenology of Life: Desire as the Being of the Subject.” In The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology. Edited by Dan Zahavi. Oxford University Press, 2012. 94–114. Bernet, Rudolf. Force—Pulsion—Désir. Une autre philosophie de la psychanalyse. Paris: Vrin, 2013. Borden Sharkey, Sarah. Thine Own Self. Individuality in Edith Stein’s Later Writings. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Cairns, Dorion. Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Nijhoff: The Hague, 1976. Crowell, Steven. “Transcendental Life.” In Phenomenology and the Transcendental. Edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Timo Miettinen. London/New York: Routledge, 2015. 21–48. Husserl, Edmund. Phenomenological Psychology. Nijhoff: The Hague, 1976. ———. Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937). Husserliana. Vol. XXXIX. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008. ———. Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der eidetischen Variation. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1935), Husserliana XLI. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012. ———. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), Husserliana XLII. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Lohmar, Diether, and Jagna Brudzinska. Founding Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically: Phenomenological Theory of Subjectivity and the Psychoanalytic Experience. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012. Majolino, Claudio. “Individuum and Region of Being. On the Unifying Principle of Husserl’s ‘Headless’ Ontology.” In Commentary on Husserl’s “Ideas I.” Edited by Andrea Staiti. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2015. 33–50. Mohanty, Jitendranath. Phenomenology: Between Essentialism and Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997. Pfänder, Alexander. Philosophie der Lebensziele. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1948. Pippin, Robert. Hegel on Self-Consciousness Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Scheler, Max. Selected Philosophical Studies. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992. ———. The Human Place in the Cosmos. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008. Staiti, Andrea. Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ———. “Lotze and Husserl on First and Second Generality.” Discipline Filosofiche 26/1 (2016): 47–66. ———. “Wissenschaftstheorie.” In Husserl-Handbuch. Leben—Werk—Wirkung. Edited by Sebastian Luft and Maren Wehrle. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2017. 173–78. Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies Publications, 2002. Wolsdorf, David. Trials of Reason: Plato and the Crafting of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Chapter Two

Lateralization and Leaning Somatic Desire as a Model for Supple Wisdom Brian Treanor

“Somatic desire” seems to be a relatively straightforward topic, something with which we are all, by virtue of our embodied subjectivity, intimately familiar, and something about which a great deal has already been thought and said. What could be more commonplace? What more well-known and appreciated? Think of how much of our day-to-day experience revolves around satisfying somatic desires: sleeping, eating, drinking, adjusting our bodies to our environment or our environment to our bodies, and so on. Is there any experience more universally shared than the pleasure we take in the satisfaction of bodily desires? 1 But, as is often the case, our familiarity with the topic conceals as much as it reveals, for we experience somatic desire through the lens of cultural history as well as carnal embodiment. And because of this, when we reflect on the body and its desires in light of received wisdom, it is all too easy to fall back, unreflectively, on accounts that view the body and its desires as fundamentally problematic—things to be challenged and overcome, or at least reined in and mastered by a supposedly more reliable pure and disembodied intellect. How easily we equate the desire for comfort or leisure with sloth. How unreflectively we link the enjoyment of food and drink to gluttony. How quickly we reduce the pleasure of intimacy to lust. It should be no surprise that the next step is to denigrate the body itself. Not only our desires and their satisfactions but our sensuous engagement with the world itself comes to be viewed as fundamentally misleading, like a malfunctioning compass that leads us away from our proper goals or a distraction that keeps us from attending to more significant matters. The body becomes a prison in which a 25

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person—essentially a disembodied self, soul, or mind—is confined and debased. 2 But is this view justified? Or is it the result of attending to a narrow range of bodily desire, often focusing on food, drink, sex, and similar sensual pleasures, and often as indulged in excess that, if not entirely uncommon, risks distorting the subject matter by exaggeration? If we pause and reflect, is it not equally obvious—both commonly understood and experienced—that somatic desire takes a variety of forms, with different degrees of urgency and intensity, and with different objects and different goals? What if we step back, pause for a moment before assuming too quickly that somatic desire is a problem to be overcome? What might be revealed? Ultimately I want to suggest that a full accounting of somatic desire reveals a number of surprises, several of which run counter to our most deeply held assumptions about the body and its orientation; but that will not be the focus of this chapter. Somatic desire is both deeper (in the sense that it is constitutive of our experience at the most elemental level) and broader (in the sense of its scope and the objects at which it aims) than we generally suppose; but it makes sense that we establish the former before exploring the latter. That is to say, before enumerating or investigating the various unanticipated objects of bodily desire, it must be shown that there are deeper-seated forms of “desire” than our cravings for food, drink, sex, and similar goods. There are alternative ways of thinking about “what the body wants,” other ways in which the body is inclined toward things. THE BODY IS A PRISM The fear that we could be misled by the body already suggests, indeed assumes, that the body and its desires are a significant influence on our experience and understanding of the world. To assert that the body directs, or misdirects, our attention and distorts our understanding presupposes that the body shapes that understanding. And this means that the body itself is a certain kind of hermeneutic lens. This is not to claim that hermeneutics has something to say about bodily experience, that the body is a subject for hermeneutic analysis, which is both true and trivial. Rather, this is to assert that the body teaches us something important about hermeneutics. On the standard account, hermeneutics is conceived in terms of reading and interpreting texts. This is true even in a post-Heideggerian idiom in which “reading” and “texts” are metaphorical rather than literal. Early articulations of hermeneutics, developing out of biblical exegesis and literary critique, focused on techniques for interpreting specific texts; and, later, Schleiermacher and Dilthey attempted to describe interpretation as such. But the major revolution in philosophical hermeneutics came when Heidegger,

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Gadamer, Ricœur, and others expanded the scope of hermeneutics beyond literal texts. Now we understand interpretation not just as something we do, but something we are; and the “texts” we “read” include personal identity, the world (Lebenswelt), traditions, cultures, and similar phenomena. But if hermeneutics teaches us anything, it is that every perspective reveals some things and conceals others and colors that which it does reveal by revealing it “as” something—in this case, as a “text” to be “read.” When we think of interpretation in this way, we tend to emphasize the ways in which the world is constructed at the expense of the ways in which the world is given; and we tend to ignore or deemphasize experiences of material reality, carnal embodiment, and similar themes. This, in turn, invites predictable criticisms that hermeneutics is an exercise in fabrication, a kind of clandestine idealism. But the bedrock hermeneutic insight is not that reality is a text, or even a “text,” but rather that we find ourselves always already in the world, and that the world shapes our perception, experience, and understanding of it. There is no “view from nowhere,” no way we can experience things without a perspective from which we experience; and every perspective is partial. If, however, that is the case, then there seems to be no prima facie reason to conclude that we ought to think of the hermeneutic horizons that frame our world solely or even primarily in textual terms. Perhaps there are different metaphors for hermeneutics, alternative ways in which we might understand the core hermeneutic insight that there is no innocent eye unshaped by the perspective—linguistic, cultural, temporal, but also carnal and material— from which one views, experiences, understands, and knows. What might be revealed when we cease to think of hermeneutics as exclusively textual or linguistic and consider the role of perspective, orientation, directionality, flow, and other alternative frameworks? What opens up when we begin to think of and articulate a hermeneutics beyond the metaphor of the text? In developing such an expanded view of hermeneutics, we can first find allies among philosophers who influence or are influenced by hermeneutics and who do address the carnal body or the material world. Tellingly, many of these thinkers tend to self-identify as phenomenologists rather than hermeneuts (for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ed Casey). In addition, we can draw on thinkers outside the traditions of phenomenology and hermeneutics whose work can be read and developed as friendly to it. People who, as outsiders, can provoke hermeneutics with alternative views and that will help it to grow and develop. One thinker helpful in this regard, and particularly in the case of somatic desire, is the French philosopher Michel Serres. 3 This is the case in spite of the fact that Serres levels several harsh attacks against philosophies of language, among which we must include all hermeneutics based on the metaphor of the text. His concern is that we often ignore or minimize the difference between what he calls “hard” reality (le dur) and

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“soft” reality (le doux). The latter is the name for reality as we describe, interpret, or modify it; this reality always, in some way, reflects us—in it, “man is the measure of all things.” But there is an underlying reality we too often overlook or minimize, a reality that actively resists “softening,” a reality that we cannot, or cannot completely, bend to accommodate us but to which we must accommodate ourselves. This is hard reality: given rather than constructed, imposed rather than proposed, dictated rather than democratic. The point is not to assert a dualism between hard reality and soft reality but to alert us to the fact that we can, if we are not careful, wind up with a view that “transforms the world into coloured pictures, into paintings hanging on walls, changes the landscape into tapestry, the city into abstract compositions. Its function is to replace the sun with heaters and the world with icons. The sound of the wind with gentle words.” 4 However, despite these concerns, Serres’ thought exhibits some remarkable parallels with a hermeneutics more broadly conceived. His own project unfolds as a multi-decade engagement with “Hermes” (Hermes giving us hermēneuein, interpretation), angels, and other figures of transportation, transition, and translation as part of an epistemological project seeking to demonstrate how communication happens across seemingly divergent modes of knowing. Such an approach results in a large number of potential points of contact between Serres’ work and a hermeneutics “beyond the metaphor of the text”; but in terms of somatic desire one of his most promising and hermeneutically significant insights is that reality, including the body, is inclined at the deepest and most fundamental level. How shall we characterize the relationship between the body and experience? Serres describes the body as a “pre-position: precondition for every position and preparing for them all.” 5 This definition is both telling in terms of his affinity for something like hermeneutics—pre-position, preposition— and ironic given that I am asserting that his particular brand of hermeneutics pushes us beyond the metaphor of the text. But, consider, what does a preposition do? It governs or expresses the relationship between nouns or between nouns and other elements in a sentence. And so, playing on this textual metaphor, we can say that the “preposition” of the body is something that governs and expresses our relationship to other facts or meanings. Embodiment is, as it were, a first position—analogous in many ways to a first principle—a point from which all our experiencing happens and which informs and shapes all that experience: perceiving, understanding, thinking, valuing, imagining. It is for this reason that, in The Five Senses, Serres rehearses so many versions of the old empiricist adage nihil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu (“there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses”). 6 Bracketing for the moment the standard debates between rationalism and empiricism, we can appropriate this claim by giving it a hermeneutic twist: the body polishes, shapes, and bends the hermeneutic lenses

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through which we see and experience the world. Thus, we could also say that embodiment constitutes a certain set of predispositions. Our bodies are not passive or submissive, mere vehicles to carry our minds from place to place, protecting them and providing them with sustenance. Bodies themselves have orientations, preferences, desires. Needless to say, such fundamental inclinations or orientations are not innocent with respect to the types of experiences we have, the ways in which we understand them, and, consequently, the value we assign to them. The body, pace Plato, is not a prison-house in which the soul is incarcerated; it is the prism through which the world opens up for us. BODILY INCLINATIONS Somatic desire includes, to be sure, our sensuous longings or cravings; but it is not reducible to them. It also includes somatic orientations and inclinations that direct or lead us in ways less obvious to conscious thought but, nevertheless, profoundly significant in terms of shaping our hermeneutic horizons. Here we will be well-served by steering clear of examples having to deal with preferences, in type or amount, related to food, drink, and similar objects, since these are both highly culturally contingent and at least somewhat volitional. We should, rather, look toward desires more unambiguously rooted in carnal embodiment and less influenced by environment or culture, to the inclinations and orientations seated in our muscles and bones, in our “nerve endings, organs, and sensations.” 7 One instructive example can be found in Serres’ The Troubadour of Knowledge (Le Tiers Instruit), in which he describes his experience of handedness, the bodily orientation of having a marked preference for a dominant hand, which can be employed more capably and precisely than the nondominant hand. 8 While it is true that handedness seems to have both genetic and environmental causes, the early development of this preference—prior to two years of age—makes it an excellent example of “authentic” somatic orientation, relatively uninfluenced by social cultivation. Standard wisdom has it that people are either right-handed, left-handed, or, very rarely, ambidextrous. However, for the most part, we do not think about the ways in which these orientations might shape our engagement with reality at a deep level. I would wager that the average reader has a number of fairly close friends or associates whose handedness is unknown. We may know a person’s political affiliation, position on various social issues, religion, and cultural heritage but remain ignorant of her carnal lateralization. Why? Because we think political inclinations matter but bodily inclinations do not. We are the heirs to a philosophical tradition that associates the body with unreliability and falsehood, and the soul or mind with reliability and

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truth. And we are heirs to a hermeneutic tradition that thinks of interpretation in terms of “reading” a “text” rather than “facing” or “being oriented” in a particular direction, “inclining” to one side or another, or “acting” and “moving” one’s body a distinctive way. We think of one’s language as constitutive of one’s worldview and identity but of one’s handedness as an insignificant and accidental detail. Statistically the reader of this chapter is highly likely to be right-handed, and largely ignorant of the experience of his or her left-handed fellows. But ask any left-hander about left-handed prejudices and you are likely to hear examples that run the gamut from the right-handed orientation of desks in our lecture halls to the alignment of myriad technologies and even, taking on normative tones, to the very language we use to describe our world. The French gauche means both “left” and “lacking in grace”; while droit means right, but also means “honest” or “decent” and connotes cleverness and skill, as in “adroit.” The Latin sinister means “left” as well as “wrong” and “perverse.” Similar linguistic prejudices exist in many other languages. And imagine the challenge of being left-handed in the several cultures in which the right and left hands are themselves associated with pollution and uncleanliness due to cultural roles in bodily hygiene. 9 Even these, however, are relatively trivial examples, because most of them are highly culturally contingent. Nevertheless, while our lateralization rarely rises to the level of conscious awareness unless a left-handed colleague expresses frustration with a right-handed desk, or a coach is considering the benefits of placing a lefthanded or left-footed player into a particular position on the field, our carnal orientation to the world has dramatic hermeneutic consequences. Before suggesting why this is the case, let me offer one telling example. In surfing and all other “board sports,” people exhibit the same lateralization we have been considering: they either ride “regular” footed, with their right foot on the rear of the board or—once again exhibiting normative tones—“goofy” footed, with their left foot on the rear of the board. Thus, one’s stance dictates whether she faces right or left as the board moves forward, which affects whether oncoming terrain will meet her “frontside” or “backside.” Additionally, surfers recognize a variety of ways in which ocean waves are formed as they reach land. At beach breaks the wave forms over a sand bottom, which can shift shape and location over time, changing the wave. Reef breaks form over rock or coral, which does not shift in the manner that sand does. Finally, point breaks may occur over sand or rock bottoms, but are located where a headland juts out into the sea, so that waves break along the coast rather than perpendicular to it. The relative lack of variability in reef and point breaks—where differences result from swell direction and strength but not changing topography—makes them somewhat more predictable. This is especially true with respect to whether an area produces “rights,” in which the wave breaks from left to right when seen

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facing the shore from the water, or “lefts.” And, here, the lateralization of the surfer comes into contact with the lateralization of the world. While I am right-handed, I am a goofy-footed board-rider; and this has important consequences. 10 When I surf a “left” breaking wave, surfing with my left foot on the rear of my board, I do so facing the wave; and when I surf a “right” breaking wave, I do so with my back to the wave. In southern California, where I live and where I have done most of my surfing, there are more opportunities to find consistent right-breaking waves than left-breaking waves; but, aesthetically and experientially, there is something special about surfing a wave “frontside,” while facing the wave itself. Consequently, I place particular value on areas which produce consistently good lefts, among them a break called “Zeros” near the Ventura county line. This is because I actually experience the world differently than I would if I surfed regularfooted; my bodily alignment or orientation “fits” the material alignment of the world in a particular way. I interface and interact differently with the wave, the sea, the coast, the sunset, the sky, the horizon. And, more importantly, as a consequence of this orientation, I value parts of the world differently. What and how we experience shapes not only what and how we understand but also what and how we appreciate, respect, value, and love. 11 At Zeros my lateralization shapes my orientation toward the horizon in both a literal and metaphorical-philosophical sense and in a manner that cannot be denied. This experience is not contingent in the manner of my gustatory preferences, which would have been substantially different had I been born and raised in Kenya or China rather than California, or even had I been raised vegan, for example, in California. It is not even contingent in the manner of my comfort or discomfort with a particular style of desk or other fabricated object, which could have been constructed differently. In the case of Zeros the hard reality of my carnal embodiment is interacting with the hard reality of the world; and hard reality is distinguished by, among other things, its resistance to human manipulation—it demands that we adapt ourselves to it rather than modifying it to conform to our needs or wants. As Nietzsche reminds us, “our most sacred convictions, the unchanging elements in our supreme values, are judgments of our muscles.” 12 I am lateralized: right-handed, goofy-footed. The world—hard reality (le dur)—is curved, folded, oriented, directional. 13 Reality is not flat or smooth; it leans. 14 It is inclined (not smooth, level, or uniform) and inclined (not disinclined, not without preference or direction). To be a left-hander is to experience the world in a left-handed manner, which means not experiencing it in a right-handed manner. But if left- and right-handed experiences are distinct and only partially overlapping, then both left-handers and right-handers are, in some sense, incomplete: they experience and know the world through the “lens” of their dominant side or, better, while “leaning” or “inclining” toward their dominant side. In herme-

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neutic language, we might say that both the left- and the right-hander come with particular hermeneutic prejudices (Vorurteil), standpoints or orientations that form the horizons of their experience and which inform the ways in which they understand the world. But the goal is not ambidexterity. Instead, Serres draws our attention to a particular form of mixed handedness that, while not uncommon, is generally overlooked in superficial taxonomies: the “completed left-hander.” This is Serres’ term for people who, like himself, were born with a natural lefthanded orientation but who, because of cultural preference or prejudice, were forced to adopt a right-handed mode of being. This, we should note, does not contradict what we have said about handedness being relatively resistant to social construction, for the socialization of the left-hander to a right-handed way of being does not, and cannot, rub out her left-handedness. She does not become a right-handed person, but rather a completed left-hander. Moreover, to be a completed left-hander is not to be ambidextrous, a person who uses right and left hands with equal facility, indifferently, as if handedness and orientation do not matter. Rather, it is someone who bridges or traverses these two orientations in a particular way, both at ease and not at ease with each. Where the ambidextrous person effaces difference by experiencing both perspectives interchangeably, the completed left-hander actually experiences two different kinds of orientation: left-handed and right-handed. She may grow to experience a certain sort of cross-dominance, as when a lefthanded person is forced to develop as a right-handed writer and allowed to retain her left-handed throwing arm; but the point is that she experiences, to some degree, both left-handed orientation and right-handed orientation, not an indifferent ambidextrous orientation. SAVOIR FAIRE: THE CAPABLE AND DUCTILE Lest we forget, handedness is not only a literal concern, something that might affect my choice of surf breaks on a winter morning; it is a metaphor (a nontextual metaphor) for how we know the world. It is true that the body has its own kind of wisdom, a way of “knowing” other than that of reason, logic, and language. 15 Here, however, I want to make a different, complementary point: that somatic desire and the wisdom associated with it can be understood as a model for wisdom simpliciter. If it seems odd to suggest that the body might “have reasons that reason cannot know”—might have its own mode of knowledge and its own kind of wisdom, which in some cases surpass or better that of the mind—perhaps it is not unrelated to the context in which almost all contemporary philosophy is pursued. Academia is, after all, the “life of the mind.” And if a person’s mode of living tends toward the intellectual and cerebral rather than the

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carnal and physical, and if her thinking tends toward the abstract rather than the concrete, we should not be surprised that her interests, foci, questions, and conclusions will tend to reflect those facts. But the academic mode of life is not a universal constant—far from it. Indeed, the ways in which the average academic experiences and inhabits her body are quite unusual compared to the vast majority of her contemporaries, and more or less unheard of if we consider historical bodies going back toward the dawn of human culture. Whence then the priority of solitary, seated (that is, inactive) reflection in a stove-heated room—or at a desk before a glowing computer screen? Why such a strident emphasis on the weaknesses, limitations, and errors of the body? When philosophers focus so relentlessly on the ways in which the body distracts or deceives us, on the ways in which the body limits us, on the myriad types of bodily weakness, “whose body are they talking about”? 16 Emerson reminds us that an excessive bookishness can distort our perception of the world: “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books.” 17 Emerson’s friend Thoreau— though well read by any standard, and a passionate advocate of reading great books well—took this caution to heart, insisting on a “practical education” in which students would not “play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end.” 18 If we only look at, or if we overstate, bodily fallibility, we miss bodily capability; if we only consider bodily limitations, we miss bodily powers. A more expansive view of the body suggests that a hermeneutics built on the metaphor of the body should be characterized in terms of capability and flexibility rather than, or in addition to, deficiency and intractability. 19 And it reminds us that wisdom, in addition to having a kind of stability and security, is fundamentally creative, improvisational, and adaptive. For his part, Serres prefers to define the body in terms of capability and potentiality rather than fallibility or limitation. 20 “We believe the body to be real and concrete when it is frozen into the program of a single set of positions [e.g., the prison-house of the soul]; so, we create the mind as the universal set of all programs [i.e., that which is truly capable,]; but the human body can be defined, precisely and simply, as capable of every possible metamorphosis; if it doesn’t execute them to perfection, it knows how to imitate or simulate them.” 21 The body is capable of much more than the seated academic suspects. And Serres criticizes any rigidly fixed or overlyfacile “geometric” view of embodiment that would lock the body into a single mode, expression, posture, or “preposition”; he favors a view of the

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body as supple, ductile, capable of myriad metamorphoses, myriad postures and (pre)positions. 22 It is not difficult to see the sapiential rewards of such a view of embodiment as a model for hermeneutics. Consider “completed left-handedness,” in which a person learns, through ascesis, to adapt to a new orientation. The example should prompt us to consider the degree to which we are each wedded to a single way of viewing the world, a single perspective or mode of knowing, as well as the possibilities for learning, with effort, to see and to experience the world differently. The goal for each of us is to become a completed left-hander, or a completed right-hander, to experience the world otherwise, from a new orientation, and to recognize our mixed origins and mixed orientations. Serres speaks of such persons as chimeras, sphinxes, harlequins, and hermaphrodites; he contrasts them to unliving “statues,” a pejorative metaphor and image that runs through many of his works and which indicates a way of being that is fixed, immobile, dead to the diversity of the world. The former are vital, living bodies: open to possibility, to difference, to otherness, poised like an athlete or alert animal, looking to each direction (or, at least, many directions) on the horizon. The latter are ossified, static, immobile, lifeless. Our aim should not be a stable balance that considers things like some disembodied computer program observing the world dispassionately. Certainly distance and disinterest have their role in our quest for knowledge, and even for wisdom; it should not be denied. But ours is a human wisdom, and we ought not to suppose that it should take a form that rejects our embodiment and its inclinations—spiritual, emotional, and physical. Our goal is not a hermeneutic ambidexterity that fails to distinguish left from right precisely because it seeks a point of indifferent, static immobility between them. This would both efface difference as well as fall into the myopic dogmatism of a single, fixed perspective or position. The goal is, rather, what Serres calls an “unstable equilibrium” that traverses, moves across, engages, and experiences both the left and right. 23 Life, experience, understanding, and wisdom are not static, but rather in a constant state of movement within apparent fixity, like a tightrope walker. To the casual observer her balance appears to be a model of stability; but her balance is predicated on movements, adjustments, and corrections that, while often small enough to be imperceptible to the spectator, are essential to her activity. Her movement forward, indeed her very life, are predicated not upon rigid immobility but rather on an unstable equilibrium of movement-within-stability that is, in fact, a kind of “metastability.” 24 It is not static equipoise that keeps her from plunging to her left or right; it is the constant movement and adjustment to the particularities of the context or situation: changes in the wind, the slack and play of the cord underfoot, differences in the weather and temperature, the position of the

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sun, and so forth—to say nothing of the variability in her bodily rhythms, receptivity, and readiness from day to day. Similarly the goals of truth and wisdom are ill-served by a leaner or knower who is too rigid or inflexible, someone unwilling or unable to consider alternative perspectives or new data, someone who is closed to new experience. Although such a person may rest easily in the comfort of a single, unchanging view of things, she is not a model for human wisdom. We should, rather, strive to become skilled epistemic athletes whose “immobility” (that is, knowledge, conviction) masks countless tensions and microadjustments (that is, questions, critiques, reinterpretations, imaginings, considerations of alternatives), someone open to new experience, new information, ready to react or to move in any direction required. 25 The center of gravity for such an athlete is not, in fact, a single point but rather an interaction between multiple co-influencing nodes, like the lines of gravity from a star, multiple planets, and other celestial objects co-influencing each other in a solar system—multiple centers, multiple relations. She is a knower who considers multiple points of view and the conversations between them as part of an open-ended quest for wisdom. Such a person is what Serres calls a “third instructed” (le tiers instruit) or “troubadour.” Le tiers instruit exhibits a kind of hermeneutic virtuosity; she interprets and translates, moves between perspectives, orientations, sides, directions, and disciplines as she experiences and interprets the world. The knowledge of the third instructed is always living and breathing, undergoing transformations, moving. 26 In contrast, those statues who are not completed left- or right-handers are “condemned to analysis” 27 because, locked into a single orientation, they carve up the world in only one way. Inhabiting, or moving through, unstable equilibria entails risk. The tightrope walker risks falling—injury or death—traversing the gap. The ductile hermeneut also risks “death”: an inversion of her perspective or orientation that destroys her world, the erosion or destruction of truths that make up her identity, and the temptation to nihilism or relativism that either can bring about. 28 However, this risk is necessary if we are to change, grow, evolve, develop: “No one, nothing in the world, has ever changed without just managing not to fall. All evolution and learning require passing through the third place [that is, unstable equilibrium].” 29 Not surprisingly, this is difficult. The immobile stability of statues is easy and requires no effort; it is easy to stop moving and developing, to rest, to die. It is easy to stop questioning, stop thinking. In contrast, the stability of the troubadour, the stability of movement that creates an unstable equilibrium, requires constant effort. 30 Entropy seeks to move every system to its lowest energy state: ossification, immobility, death. Resisting entropy—preserving ductility, remaining mobile, living—requires energy. Here again the body teaches us well. Resisting for a time the second law of thermodynam-

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ics—that inexorable entropic pressure toward stasis—the body can, through a mysterious power, “thwart these laws of statics [. . .] progress made in training, the second wind, being in the zone, the explosion of life, adaptation, the contented well-being beyond pain, virtue itself [. . .].” 31 It requires that, as virtuous knowers, we resist the temptation to rest easily in a singular perspective, posture, or pre-position, enjoying the comfort of an echo chamber that only reaffirms well-worn truths and interpretations. Serres speaks of two types of metamorphoses, which suggest to me two ways of proceeding hermeneutically. The first, desirable type of metamorphosis is “protean.” Here the body—or, hermeneutically, one’s perspective or orientation—lends itself “to every possible transformation, and because of this capability, [is] almost infinitely supple.” 32 This type of metamorphosis underlies our myths, fables, and fairy tales; it represents a “pedagogy of the possible.” 33 But all too often we succumb to a second type of metamorphosis, which destroys the freedom and adventurousness of the first by transforming a person into a single thing: “specialized, totemized, stuffed and preserved, according to one’s destiny, the passions of one’s character, the imbecility of one’s corporatism or one’s vices [. . .].” 34 Serres compares this stiffening to, among other things, a “polished insect in its chitin,” which brings to mind Heinlein’s well-known list of human capability and adaptability: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” 35 A good cardiologist, finish carpenter, or probate lawyer is a specialist, and there are important reasons why we need such individuals. But a good human being is a generalist: an all-arounder, a jackof-all-trades, a traveler, an explorer, an adventurer in life. Although we praise the former as experts, the various specializations often correspond to professions; they identify cogs in a machine, myrmidons in the army of capitalism. And although we often dismiss the generalist as an amateur, this supposed slight hides the highest compliment—the recognition that something is pursued not for gain but out of love (amateur, from amare, to love), needing no compensation. REHABILITATING SOMATIC DESIRE Much remains to be said about the body and its desires and inclinations, especially regarding the objects or aims of these inclinations, which are significantly more diverse than we generally suppose. 36 Here, however, our concern was with establishing the way in which bodily desire or inclination

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exceeds mere appetite, shaping our hermeneutic horizons at the most elemental level, informing our experience—and therefore our understanding and valuing—of the world. The body, like all reality, leans: “Direction traverses the immensity of the sky, enters the box of details, rides on the arrow of time. Then it passes into the shellfish, levogyres, destrogyres, to the crustaceans that display a large claw next to the smaller one, heterocercal in that regard, then to all bodies, to ours, our eyes, the flanges of our nostrils, the cowlick [. . .] direction traverses our bodies [. . .].” 37 The leaning of the body—its lateralization, its inclinations, its rhythms—is most evident when the body is in use, in the motion of unstable equilibrium. “We think ourselves straight and stiff, kingly bearing, queenly carriage [. . .]. But no! We pitch and roll, little boats floating without submersion, on rough seas [. . .].” 38 We were made, as Tennyson has it, to “shine in use,” not to “rust unburnished.” It matters little whether the sedentary impulse is that of an academic hunched over books in a dim library carrel or a couch-potato binge-watching television; neither is a good position from which to reflect on embodiment. “The body is not a passive receptor . . . it exercises, trains, it can’t help itself. It loves movement, goes looking for it, rejoices on becoming active, jumps, runs or dances, only knows itself, immediately and without language, in and through its passionate energy. It discovers its existence when its muscles are on fire, when it is out of breath—at the limits of exhaustion.” 39 We understand the body qua body best when it is being natural: living, in motion, in use, at work and play, not displaced, disrupted, dismembered for analysis. When we do so, we discover that the body is not simply a problem or a distraction or a burden, though it can be those things; it is also our first and sometimes best window into the world, one of the most fundamental of our hermeneutic prisms. And, far from being an enemy of wisdom, properly understood the body can be a model for hermeneutic flexibility and virtuosity. NOTES 1. Perhaps birth or death are more “universal”; but “I” am not present to either my birth or my death in the way that I am present to my bodily desires. 2. Plato, Phaedo, in Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981), 98, Stephanus 62b. Elsewhere, Plato accuses the body of dragging the soul away from truth (79c) and of contaminating the soul (81b, 84a, etc.). Plato’s account is more nuanced elsewhere, including in the Republic and Timeaus, but it remains the case that his is a generally critical view of the body. 3. What follows should be considered an engagement with and development of Serres rather than an exegesis or summary of his work, insofar as Serres does not consider himself to be within the hermeneutic tradition as it is traditionally understood. His own work tills other fields. Nevertheless, I do not think I am doing him injustice by bringing him into dialogue with hermeneutics, or in characterizing his work as “hermeneutic” in the broader sense I am advocating.

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4. Michel Serres, The Five Senses, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 146. Some of Serres’ criticisms are misplaced or overstated as applied to hermeneutics and phenomenology, which are not, in fact, modes of clandestine idealism in a Berkeleyan spirit. Nevertheless, his insistence that academic philosophy, including hermeneutics and phenomenology, tends to emphasize the linguistic over the material and carnal is hard to deny. 5. Michel Serres, Variations on the Body, trans. Randolph Burks (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2011), 148. Also see ibid., 112. 6. The phrase comes from Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q.2 a.3 arg.19, who was working from Aristotle’s De Anima, Book III, ch. 4; but it came to be seen as a kind of slogan for empiricism. See, for example, John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch.1, §2. 7. Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 46. 8. Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1997). Other examples of the orientation of the carnal body to the material world include things like our various bodily rhythms (ultradian, circadian, infradian). 9. And the differences experienced by left-handers are not all purely cultural. Various studies suggest left-handed persons, statistically, have somewhat different health profiles (some positive, others negative) and different psychological profiles. 10. I should confess, given the centrality of this example to this paper, that while I have surfed on and off for thirty years, I am for the most part a very occasional and thoroughly mediocre surfer. I enjoy surfing immensely; but my passions, including those focused on the active body and the natural world, generally lie elsewhere. 11. Here I am careful to say “shapes” rather than “determines.” 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 173, §314. 13. Consider the topography of the Earth and the way it inclines us in certain directions rather than others: we avoid ascending steep gradients when possible, follow the natural contours of slopes, circumnavigate bogs and marshes, settle along rivers or on coasts, and so forth. When terrain directs us, or opens itself to us, in ways that are not neutral, it actively shapes our experience of the world. 14. Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, 14. Needless to say, here I am speaking of physical, material reality—the orientation and make-up of my carnal body, the folds and contours of hard matter—rather than reality as I understand it or as I interpret it poetically. Here again, while operating within the bounds of a hermeneutics more broadly conceived (that is, beyond the metaphor of the text), Serres’ categories of the hard (le dur) and soft (le doux) are useful. 15. See my “Vitality: Carnal, Seraphic Bodies,” The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 25, no. 1 (July 2017): 200–220. 16. Serres, Variations on the Body, 37. Emphasis mine. There are exceptions, of course, to the generalization that academics are caught in the life of the mind to the exclusion of the life of the active body. For example, Barbara Gail Montaro, author of Thought in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), was formerly a professional ballerina, and Bill Ramsey, a philosopher at UNLV, is also an expert sport climber. No doubt there are many others unknown to me, academic philosophers who are profoundly connected to the experience of embodiment, who exercise, use, and take joy in their active bodies, but who live, in George Eliot’s sense, “hidden” lives. Additionally, there are minority voices within the academy which treat embodiment in a less derogatory manner (Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Serres, et al.). Nevertheless, it seems a commonplace bordering on a truism that many academic philosophers are living the “life of the mind” in a way that embodies the very Platonic or Cartesian dualism and idolization of disembodied rationality that they claim to have overcome in their philosophies. 17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 57. 18. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 51. Emphasis mine. With his criticisms of the division of labor—scholars write while carpenters

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build and farmers sow—as a system that “deprives us of experience,” and his own experiment in “living deliberately” and more self-sufficiently at Walden Pond, Thoreau clearly advocates a mode of living that embraces the full range of opportunities life affords us: intellectual reflection, poetry, and meditation, yes, but also physical labor, bodily exertion, self-powered locomotion (consider his exhortation to “saunter” in the masterful Walking), adventure. 19. A second point suggested by a reconsideration of the body and its desires would be that the body, as I’ve hinted above, far from distracting us from reality, is committed to it. This is true even when, and perhaps because, reality is hard (that is, intractable and, at times, unpleasant). The argument for this embodied commitment to reality is not possible here. However, the dynamic tension between (1) a commitment to epistemic flexibility or adaptability, which might suggest a kind of radical suspicion of particular claims or assertions about the real, and (2) a commitment to realism, which includes a willingness to trust our perception of the real and so undermines the suspicion of the first commitment, points toward (3) another lesson gleaned from a hermeneutics based on the metaphor of the body: that is, the need to keep the first and second points in dynamic tension. This seems not far from the hermeneutic model advocated by Paul Ricœur, which is characterized by the interplay between suspicion and affirmation, critique and conviction. 20. Evoking, in a way, Paul Ricœur’s account of l’homme capable. See, for example, Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 21. Serres, Variations on the Body, 148. Serres insists that the body is also of the “modal order,” blurring traditional distinctions between form and substance. 22. This is not to reject the importance of mathematics or geometry to an understanding of embodiment but rather to ensure that we do not put the cart before the horse. The mathematical or geometric body presupposes the lived, sensuous body. “The petites perceptions [of the body] don’t apply the new calculus [developed by Leibniz] to the body, the new calculus arises from them” (Ibid., 145). The same is true of Thales discovering truths about geometric proportionality at the foot of the Great Pyramid. “Do you want to invent mathematics? Consult your body [. . .].” (Ibid., 146). 23. Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, 12, 23, 43, and elsewhere. 24. See Serres, Variations on the Body, 45, 139, and elsewhere. 25. Ibid., 23–25. 26. Ibid., 24–25. 27. Ibid., 16. 28. See, for example, Kearney, Anatheism. This is why Paul Ricœur rightly insists that the hermeneutics of suspicion must be balanced with a hermeneutics of affirmation to remain virtuous. 29. Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, 12. 30. Serres, Variations on the Body, 45. 31. Ibid., 46–47. 32. Ibid., 53. The “almost” is essential here. No body is capable of every transformation; and no hermeneutic should be open to anything. 33. Ibid., 53. 34. Ibid., 54. 35. Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1973), 248. 36. To my mind, one of the most intriguing implications of a full account of bodily desire is that the body, far from turning us from reality, actually seeks contact with it. The body wants reality. Desires it. Loves it. When we considered the significance of the lateralization of the body, the most telling examples came from instances in which the leaning of the body intersects with the leaning of reality. Unlike other, soft (le doux) engagements with reality, the prism of the body is inescapably connected to our experience of hard reality (le dur): reality that is ineluctable; reality as it gives itself or imposes itself rather than reality as we take it up and reflect on it, discuss it, or modify it; reality that demands assent rather than opinion (cf. Serres, Variations, 34). This engagement with hard reality tempers excessive hermeneutic skepticism and inclines us to a realism that cannot be dismissed with a simple gesture toward the “natural attitude.” Henry David Thoreau expresses a similar desire for “contact” with “reality,” most notably in various passages of Walden and in his famous account of his ascent

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of Mount Ktaadn. Indeed, one might argue that “the hard” (Serres) shares a poetic kinship to “the wild” (Thoreau) as a kind of near-synonym. 37. Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, 14. 38. Serres, Variations on the Body, 118. 39. Serres, The Five Senses, 314.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In Emerson: Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983. Heinlein, Robert. Time Enough for Love. New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1973. Kearney, Richard. Anatheism: Returning to God After God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Montaro, Barbara Gail. Thought in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House, 1967. Plato. Phaedo. In Five Dialogues. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981. Ricœur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Serres, Michel. The Five Senses. Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. London: Continuum, 2008. ———. The Troubadour of Knowledge. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. ———. Variations on the Body, trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2011. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Treanor, Brian. “Vitality: Carnal, Seraphic Bodies.” The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 25, no. 1 (July 2017): 200–220.

Chapter Three

The Recovery of the Flesh in Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty Richard Kearney

In this essay I propose to bring Paul Ricœur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty into a conversation about the question of “flesh.” Such an exchange never took place during their lifetimes, but I will argue that, ultimately, neither thinker has the full story, and each supplements the other—Ricœur’s more “textual” approach and Merleau-Ponty’s more “carnal” perspective. My wager is that both can be crossed, retrospectively, to deepen and broaden what I would call a shared project of carnal hermeneutics. The basic idea of carnal hermeneutics dates back to Aristotle, who maintains in the De Anima that flesh (sarx) is not an organ but a medium (metaxu). 1 In a dense and difficult passage that has been greatly neglected for two thousand years, Aristotle goes on to say that the primary sensation of flesh is touch, the most primordial of all the senses. Touch is the most philosophical sense, he insists, for it is always already interpreting—an assertion that, of course, flies straight in the face of Platonism. Right from the start, sensible differences—for example, between smooth and hard, hot and cold—are already a way of experiencing the world in terms of values and qualities, projects and possibilities. But just as the hermeneutics of touch constitutes our world, it is at the same time passively exposed to it. Touch works both ways—all touching is also a being touched. Tactile action is passion in a bilateral reversible process. The most philosophical person, concludes Aristotle, is precisely the one who is the most vulnerable, sensitive, discerning—because that person is most in touch with the world being touched. My purpose here is not to rehearse the debate between the hapto-centric Aristotle and the opto-centric Plato; 2 rather, I will turn to the modern pheno41

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menological retrieval of Aristotle’s insight—though this retrieval was more implicit than explicit. For example, Husserl mentions Aristotle only once in Ideas II, when he famously discusses the phenomenon of “double sensation,” 3 and Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur hardly mention him at all. In fact, Merleau-Ponty famously said, upon being told that practically everything he wrote in The Visible and the Invisible was anticipated by Aristotle, “Je suis peu aristotélicien” (“I am not much of an Aristotelian”). He simply had not read much Aristotle, in line with the post-Scholastic nature of most secular philosophy in French national universities after the Revolution. In any case, my aim is to show how Merleau-Ponty and Ricœur develop a phenomenology and a hermeneutics of the flesh that argues that there is a mode of sensibility that is prior to cognitive intelligence. It is a mode of intelligence, but it is savvy, which precedes savoir and sapientia. There is a primordial basic savvy, or tact, to which even our colloquial language bears witness when we say that someone has tact or taste; to be in touch with things is to relate intelligently to the world and to people in the world. That is the ordinary-language level of the sort of insight I am trying to develop in carnal hermeneutics. MERLEAU-PONTY’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE FLESH In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty takes on what he views as a dualism, a residual Cartesianism, in Sartre. For Sartre, the body touching and the body touched belong to “two incommunicable levels,” 4 whereas Merleau-Ponty insists that they are profoundly co-implicated in the flesh (la chair). Later, in The Visible and the Invisible, he defines the flesh as a “chiasm” between me and the world, a reversible crossing that precedes all divisions between subject and object. Flesh is the common chain or bridge of both subject and object and of all reversible perceptions: seeing/being seen, touching/being touched, hearing/being heard, etc. Reexamining Husserl’s “intertwining” (Verflechtung), Merleau-Ponty rediscovers flesh as a mutual interweaving between perceiving and perceived. To say that the body is a seer is to say that it is visible; to say that the body touches is to say that it is tangible. But moreover, it is also to say that the body is both visible and tangible. Whereas Husserl spoke only of reversibility within each sense, Merleau-Ponty extends reversibility across them all. The tangible crosses with the visible and vice versa, and this multilateral reversibility extends even to language itself: the I who speaks words is the I spoken in words. Sensation and language are isomorphic and also transmorphic. Radically, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a chiasmus of language and perception, referring to “the same fundamental phenomenon of reversibility which sustains both the mute perception and the speech.” 5

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In short, flesh is the cradle of both perception and the word. Thus, without naming Aristotle, Merleau-Ponty rehabilitates the ancient Aristotelian insights that the flesh is a medium, not merely an organ, and that all senses involve touch. And whereas the De Anima was still largely psychological, Merleau-Ponty brings these insights to an ontological level, arguing that flesh is both what makes the world appear (as touching-speaking) and what belongs to the world (as touched-spoken). I do not start as an isolated body opposed to another consciousness (à la Descartes or Sartre); on the contrary, I exist in my body precisely because I am already operating within and from the flesh of the world. I speak because I am spoken to and through; I touch because I am in touch with the world. Flesh is the twofold ontological texture—feeling and felt—that provides the underlying unity between, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, the becoming-body of my senses and the becoming-world of my body. As such, the chiasm of flesh cannot be reduced to any of the dichotomies beloved of metaphysics—form and matter, soul and substance, consciousness and object—for it is rather to be understood as an ontological “element” in which we always already find ourselves. When one swims and breathes, one is not sure where one’s body ends and the water or air begins; in the same way, the ontological relation of one’s body to the world is a reversible elemental co-participation. This analysis also enables Merleau-Ponty to resolve the transcendental problem of intersubjectivity, which troubled philosophers from Descartes to Sartre, for “it is not I who sees, nor the other who sees, because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us.” 6 Here he brings a new ontological dimension to Husserl’s insight into the implications of double sensation for “empathy,” further developed by Edith Stein and Max Scheler. Contra Derrida, who charges Merleau-Ponty with “haptocentric closure,” 7 in which reversibility becomes a sort of fusion and sameness, I maintain that MerleauPonty is fully aware that the chiasmic relation between the self and the other always has a gap (écart). Indeed, the chiasm is a sensation and a sensibility through gaps, through differences, and in this Merleau-Ponty has far more in common with Derrida than Derrida admits. An Ontology of Desire Let us now return to Phenomenology of Perception to consider the chapter “The Body in Its Sexual Being,” in which Merleau-Ponty specifically addresses the concept of desire and affirms that incarnation, as eros, must be understood not just biologically but ontologically. Thereby he provides phenomenological substance to Freud’s distinction, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, between the basic drives, eros and thanatos. Merleau-Ponty discusses an “erotic perception” that has a specific “significance,” not as a cogito aiming at a cogitatum, but as an existential body aiming at another body in

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the world. 8 Citing the example of Schneider, a patient deficient in touch and vision and incapable of living in the world in a sexual or emotional way, Merleau-Ponty explains that Schneider’s inability to read life through touch coincides with his sexual indifference. His sexual impairment is also an impairment of action and cognition. Schneider is suffering from an existential sickness. Psychoanalysis has already shown that libido is not a mere instinct and that all erotic acts, even the most basic, have meaning. Sexuality is not just genital but is an intentional, pre-conscious way of experiencing the world. Eros, according to Merleau-Ponty, is directed toward the subject’s whole life. He thus expands the notion of sexuality, revealing it to be both physiological and ontological. Sexuality must be thought accordingly as a distinct sign and symptom of our full existence, much as Gestalt psychology has shown that “the smallest sensory datum is never presented in any other way than integrated into a configuration and already patterned.” 9 At the level of the senses nothing exists in isolation, but only in differential relation to the other in parts and wholes. There is no dualism: biological existence and human existence are synchronized all the way down. To live the body (leben) is already to live this or that particular kind of world (erleben). Eating, breathing, loving are already forms of ontological expression that mark out each living person’s singular style of existence. This is not spiritualism or naturalism. The body does not indicate an inner mind as a house number might indicate a home. The body signifies meaning because it is that meaning. If I lose my voice (aphasia), it is not because I am withholding speech but because I cannot speak. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “The girl does not cease to speak, she ‘loses’ her voice as one loses a memory.” 10 Or losing a gift from a friend after falling out with that friend signifies a general relationship of loss, of falling out, and finding it again upon reconciling with the friend signifies a general reconciliation, a re-finding. Both are part of one’s general ontological way or style of being. They are linked together in a single existential sensibility of losing and forgetting; carnal signs are both signifier and signified. Relating this to other cases of mental illness, such as anorexia or pithiatism, Merleau-Ponty illustrates how bodily symptoms are not simply a matter of biochemistry or of conscious manipulation but are rather an expression of carnal being. Cures are often a matter of the senses, not of the will or of consciousness. As he explains, [P]sychological medicine does not act on the patient by making him know the origin of his illness: sometimes a touch of the hand puts a stop to the spasms and restores to the patient his speech [. . .] the patient would not accept the meaning of his disturbances as revealed to him without the personal relationship formed with the doctor, or without the confidence and friendship felt towards him, and the change of existence resulting from this friendship. Nei-

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ther symptom nor cure is worked out at the level of objective or positing consciousness, but below that level. 11

Therapy thus involves a “conversion” through the body-subject in tactful contact with other body-subjects. This is the Asclepian approach to healing rather than the Hippocratic approach to curing—not that the two have to be rigidly separated. The doctor who has the healing touch is someone who is tactful in his or her relation to the suffering body of the patient. Because it is our flesh that exposes us to others, even its closure in itself is never a given; just as in sleep we are never completely asleep, nor are we ever completely sick in illness. Flesh is the possibility of a coexistence with other human beings. Merleau-Ponty therefore defines healing as a reopening of self to others through the body, a turning from thanatos (the death drive of closure) to eros (the life drive of communion). One could speak here of a connaissance (knowledge) that is knowledge precisely insofar as it is a co-naissance (co-birth) with the other. Our bodily existence, because it inaugurates our primary “consonance with the world,” always remains our first line of both resistance and openness to others. In the body, existence finds its originary sense. Expression does not exist apart from the body, and the body does not exist apart from expression. What Merleau-Ponty calls the “incarnate significance” of the flesh is the “central phenomenon” of which the two poles of the traditional body/mind dichotomy are mere abstract derivatives. Flesh and existence presuppose each other—indeed, are each other, flesh as “solidified existence” and existence as “perpetual incarnation.” 12 Together they constitute what MerleauPonty names the “woven fabric” of “inter-communication.” 13 Returning to his guiding theme of eros, Merleau-Ponty concludes that “desire and love” are neither “bundles of instincts” governed by natural law nor strategies of some willful, Cartesian mind but rather are carnal interplays where the self “opens out upon another” in an exposure to alterity that is the beginning of our existence, both physical and metaphysical. Indeed, he goes so far as to assert that “sexuality is co-extensive with life,” comparing it to a particular “atmosphere” or “haze” that hides itself even as it provides the secret means through which we see the world. This point calls to mind Aristotle’s notion of the flesh as a means or medium (metaxu) of which we are not aware: as with the blind spot of the eye, we do not see it but see because of it. Eros hides itself—which is perhaps one reason Freud says is unconscious. Eros and thanatos are not biological: you will never find them in a blood test, yet the blood flows according to the two drives; they are not, as it were, parachuted in ex cathedra. Located in flesh, eros spreads forth like a transpersonal “color” or “sound” between self and other. Merleau-Ponty coins the term “interfusion” to describe this mutual mediation where “existence permeates sexuality and vice versa.” 14 No explanation for eros can

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reduce it to anything other than itself because it is already other than itself: it is a perpetual crossing over between inner and outer, nature and freedom, sameness and difference. Diacritical Perception Before moving on to Ricœur, let us consider Merleau-Ponty’s 1953 Collège de France lecture course, Le Monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, in which he provides a fascinating account of what he terms “diacritical perception,” a new mode of expressive sensibility involving the crossing of sensation and language. Borrowing from Saussure’s notion that words only signify by virtue of their differences from other words, Merleau-Ponty contends that meanings are never given as isolated terms but always as parts of a mobile interaction of signs involving intervals and absences, folds and gaps. And going well beyond Saussure and the structuralists, Merleau-Ponty makes the radical claim that this is not simply a function of language but is the very structure of perception itself: in its nascent state, perception is diacritical (a term that comes from the phrase “diacritical signs”), and so it is structured like language. In the beginning is hermeneutics, which means logic not as logos but as savvy, sensation, sensibility. As Merleau-Ponty puts it in a crucial note, “Diacritical notion of the perceptual sign. This is the idea that we can perceive differences without terms, gaps with regard to a level (of meaning) which is not itself an object—the only way to give perception a consciousness worthy of itself and which does not alter the perceived into an object, into the signification of an isolating or reflexive attitude.” 15 In a subsequent note (entitled “diacritical perception”), he takes the example of reading another’s face: “to perceive a physiognomy, an expression, is always to deploy diacritical signs, in the same manner as one realizes an expressive gesticulation with one’s body. Here each (perceptual) sign has the unique virtue of differentiating from others, and these differences which appear for the onlooker or are used by the speaking subject are not defined by the terms between which they occur but rather define these in the first place.” 16 This logic of diacritical perception is wholly alien to the classical assertion that difference presupposes sameness. On the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty, the identity of terms emerges only in the tension of their differences. Diacritical reading is a reading across gaps, before things are separated into identity. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty speaks of a realm of “pre-identity” and deploys the term “infra-thing” in contradistinction to the old notion of discrete objective substances. Infra-things are quasi-things that exist in this realm of savvy, of tact, prior to the division into subjective and objective things. And it is in the primary diacritical realm that we discriminate prereflectively between parts and wholes across difference.

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Our most basic carnal sensations may, therefore, be said to be structured diacritically insofar as they are structured like the phonetic differentiations of language. They are not language but are prior to language; if anything, language is derived from this primordial realm. To compare carnal sensation to linguistic structure in this way is not to reduce the latter to the former (naturalism), nor to reduce the former to the latter (structuralism). Nature does not make the body any more than it makes phonetic systems. Perception of figure is not simultaneously perception of ground but rather is “imperception”: the sensing of the invisible in and through the visible. Or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it in the language of Gestalt psychology, it is “consciousness of the figure without knowledge of the ground (fond).” 17 Thus we may say that diacritical perception witnesses the birth of expression against an unformed background, as a meaning that begins and rebegins, an awakening that takes the form of a figure that is prefigured and refigured again and again. Hence the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor of modulation: “Consider sensation itself, the act of sensing [le sentir], as the intervening of a figure on a fond. Modulation. As a sound modulates silence. As a color modulates an open space by varying it. Every sign is diacritical.” 18 And he adds, “This is Valéry’s idea.” 19 Like Husserl describing time-consciousness or Aristotle describing flesh, Merleau-Ponty resorts to poetics. Certainly he turns to psychology, but also he takes the notion of modulation from Valéry, of co-naissance from Claudel, of involuntary memory from Proust, of natality from Bachelard. Just as Freud and Plato looked to myth when trying to figure out eros, Merleau-Ponty turns to poets and painters (Cézanne is an important figure for him as well). It important to remember here that diacritical conscious interpretation is not a matter of voluntarist intervention, as Sartre would maintain. It is not a question of reading into something but of reading from something. We are solicited by the flesh of the world before we read ourselves back into it. Carnal attention is as much reception as creation. It precedes and exceeds transcendental idealism. And it is for this reason that Merleau-Ponty insists that the solicitation of our body schema functions symbolically, obliquely, indirectly, like a sexual or ontological surprise. Diacritical sensation, across distances, comes not just from us but from another person or thing. MerleauPonty again cites Valéry: “A man is nothing so long as nothing draws from him effects and productions which surprise him.” 20 But to be surprised one must be ready to receive, open to solicitation and seduction from the world. For Merleau-Ponty, every sense has its own symbolique, every organ its own imaginaire, from sexual expression even to the act of eating. Fantasy, imagination, and symbolizing are going on from the moment of the child’s first cry. Already, from the start, there is hermeneutics, the hermeneutics of Argos, not of Hermes—but perhaps the two are not really so far apart. Hermes comes from above with ineffable messages; Argos comes from below, the

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dog who with his hermeneutic flair recognizes Odysseus when he returns. Sensation is expression, and expression is sensation. Flesh is word, and word is flesh. RICŒUR’S HERMENEUTICS OF FLESH AND TEXT Let us now turn to Ricœur, who in the 1950s also developed a phenomenology of flesh inspired by Husserl. But although this early phenomenology was developing in the direction of a diagnostics carnal signification—in tandem with Merleau-Ponty, whom Ricœur does not, however, cite—Ricœur took the “linguistic turn” in the 1960s and departed from this seminal phenomenology of embodiment to concentrate more exclusively on a hermeneutics of the text. There are, nonetheless, some fascinating reflections in Ricœur’s later works, notably Oneself as Another (1990), that attempt to restart a dialogue between his initial phenomenology of the flesh and his later hermeneutics of language. The Early Phenomenology and the Textual Turn I will briefly address his early phenomenology of the body in Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950) and will then concentrate on his last study of flesh in Oneself as Another, published shortly before his death. The three particularly relevant sections of Freedom and Nature are “Motivation and the Corporeal Involuntary,” “Bodily Spontaneity,” and “Life: Structure, Genesis, Birth.” What interests him in this work is the “incarnate cogito.” Like all French phenomenologists, he is battling with Descartes. What, he asks, is the corps propre (proper body), announced by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty? Starting with the phenomenon of “affectivity,” he notes that “[t]o feel is still to think” [sentir est encore penser]. 21 Carnal affectivity is thus a mediating sensation between our flesh-and-blood existence on the one hand and the thinking order of interpretation, evaluation, and understanding on the other. So he is already starting from a Cartesian model and asking how the two sides come together, but when he goes on to do the phenomenology, he discovers that what he calls the flesh is already thinking in the sense of discerning, evaluating. His diagnostics of the lived body begins with an analysis of need. Need, of course, is often thought of (in Levinas, for instance) as an object, as something that can be satisfied, as biological or natural, in contrast to desire, which is on the ontological level. Ricœur replies that in fact there is already a hermeneutics, an interpretation, at work in need. He explains, “No longer is consciousness a symptom of the object-body, but rather the object-body is an indication of a personal body [corps propre] in which the Cogito shares as its very existence.” 22 Affectivity and thought are thus connected from the outset

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by a tie of mutual inherence and adherence. The two bodies (inner and outer, Leib and Körper) are not separate relations but are two ways of “reading” the same flesh—externally (as nature) and internally (as incarnation). Need thus cannot simply be placed on the side of nature, or the external, and reduced, naturalistically, to a mere reflex sensation transmitting an organic defect in the form of a motor reaction. Need expresses itself in terms of pleasure with motivating values and tendencies that are not imposed by consciousness or reason but are already present in the most basic relations. As he puts it, “it is [. . .] an action towards. . . .”—“not a re-action but a pre-action [. . .].” 23 In other words, need reveals me not as mechanism of stimulus-response but as “a life gaping as appetition for the other.” 24 To have needs is not to be determined by them; we are continually discerning between needs and prereflectively evaluating when best to realize or suspend them: “It is because the impetus of need is not an automatic reflex that it can become a motive which inclines without compelling and that there are men who prefer to die of hunger than betray their friends.” 25 Human beings have the ability to choose between hunger and something else. Think, for example, of Gandhi choosing his hunger strike over food. That we have this freedom means that our sensations and appetites are already a savvy of life, a savoir-faire. As Ricœur states, “Through need, values emerge without my having posited them in my act-generating role: bread is good, wine is good. Before I will it, a value already appeals to me solely because I exist in flesh; it is already a reality in the world, a reality which reveals itself to me through the lack [. . .].” 26 In short, evaluation is already going on at the most basic level. Values are meaningless unless they touch me; thus ethics itself requires the mediation of flesh. In this way, though he does not yet use the word “hermeneutics,” the early Ricœur’s corporeal diagnostics already offers a sort of proto-hermeneutics of flesh to which he will not return for sixty years. With his “textual turn” of the 1960s, Ricœur turns from a diagnostics of the body to a hermeneutics of the text. But there is one very interesting essay that he published in 1964, “Wonder, Eroticism, and Enigma,” in which the question of eros comes back. Strikingly, in this particular essay he opposes eros to language. He criticizes what he calls the “immediacy” of the “flesh to flesh” relationship, contrasting it with the “mediations” of language and interpretation. Stated simply: “Sexuality de-mediatizes language; it is eros not logos.” 27 To come back to Derrida’s critique of Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur suspects eros of haptic closure. For him, eros is something that “mobilizes language” only insofar as “it crosses it, jostles it, sublimates it, stupefies it, pulverizes it into a murmur.” 28 In a way, flesh to flesh relationships, erotic relationships, are mad. Eros does not conform to either an ethic of marriage or a technique of sexual behavior. It is mythical. Of course, Ricœur is for eros, not against it, but he does not now enter into a hermeneutics of it. Ultimately, two beings in eros have no idea what they are doing, what they

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want, what they are looking for, what they are finding. If you ask what the meaning of the drive even is, you will not find an answer. Eros participates in a network of powers whose cosmic connections we have forgotten. The closest we can get to the “truth of sexuality” is through indirect reading of ancient texts and myths. Like a lost Atlantis sunk within us long ago, it has left sexuality as its “flotsam.” 29 Hence the enigma of eros. The meaning of this submerged, dislocated universe is no longer available to us in terms of immediate participation, and the hermeneutics of texts can take us to eros only indirectly, via mediation—which is not going to help anyone when embracing another. In this essay, there is for Ricœur a near-apartheid between the hermeneutics of the text and the lived experience of eros. The Return to the Flesh This particular dualism of logos and eros is, I argue, overcome in Oneself as Another (1990), which is essentially a return to the phenomenology of the body of the 1950s, but now in terms of hermeneutics. In the final chapter, he defines flesh as “the mediator between self and a world which is taken in accordance with its various degrees of foreignness.” 30 As such, it reveals a certain lived passivity where the body, in the deepest intimacy of flesh, is exposed to otherness. Husserl and Levinas are his two main interlocutors in this text, and Ricœur is, in sum, proposing that the flesh can mediate between the immanence of Husserl’s Leib and the transcendence of Levinas’ face. The dialectic of passivity-otherness that he identifies in the experience of the flesh signals the enigma of one’s own body. To say it phenomenologically (as Ricœur does), how can we fully experience the human body if it is not at once “a body among others” (Körper) and “my own” lived body (Leib)? We need both, according to Ricœur. We need to understand how we can experience the intimacy of the body from within, as Leib, and also to understand it in terms of the externality of the world, as Körper. Here Ricœur makes the striking point that it is not, as we might expect, in Heidegger, with his existential phenomenology, that we discover the greatest ontology of the flesh. 31 Heidegger’s Dasein has no body, no sexuality. It is rather Husserl who offers the “most promising sketch of the flesh that would mark the inscription of hermeneutical phenomenology in an ontology of otherness.” 32 In the Cartesian Meditations—written ten years after Ideas II— Husserl had argued that in order to constitute a “foreign” subjectivity, one must formulate the idea of “ownness”—namely, flesh in its difference with respect to the external body (of others seen by me or of myself seen by others). Flesh opens up a realm of Leibhaft (immediately embodied givenness), excluding all objective properties. It is the pole of reference of all bodies belonging to this immanent nature of ownness. And it is by pairing one flesh with another that we derive the notion of an alter ego. But here we

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return to the deeper paradox: flesh as a paradigm of otherness. Flesh is what is both most radically mine and most radically other, what is closest to me and furthest from me at the same time. This enigma of far/near is revealed most concretely, once again, as touch. Commenting on Husserl, Ricœur explains that as the center of pathos, our flesh’s “aptitude for feeling is revealed most characteristically in the sense of touch.” 33 In this Husserl and Ricœur are (at least implicitly) going back to Aristotle. Flesh precedes and grounds both the “I can” and the “I want”; it precedes even the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary. As Ricœur explains, “flesh is the place of all the passive syntheses on which the active syntheses are constructed, the latter alone deserving to be called works (Leistungen); the flesh is the matter (hule) in resonance with all that can be said to be hule in every object perceived, apprehended. In short, it is the origin of all ‘alteration of ownness.’” 34 Ricœur concludes accordingly that flesh is the support for selfhood’s own “proper” otherness. For even if the otherness of the stranger could be derived from my sphere of ownness—as Husserl suggests—the otherness of the flesh would still precede it. 35 The otherness of the other is preceded by otherness of my flesh. Otherness appears most strikingly precisely in its uncanny intimacy: it is so buried within us that it appears to us as foreign and scares us, even horrifies us—but it is actually our own otherness. We are strangers to ourselves. Ricœur therefore departs from Husserl when the latter seeks to derive the objective world from the primordial space of immediacy that he calls the flesh, for such an attempt ignores that flesh is not just mine but is equally a body among other bodies—both Leib and Körper at once. To make flesh part of the world (mondanéiser), one has to be not simply oneself but oneself as another—a self with others, a body with others. And it follows that the otherness of others as “foreign” relates not only to the otherness of my flesh (that I am) but also exists prior to any reduction to ownness. Here one recalls Freud’s notion that eros blindsides us by coming from within, from behind, and from outside us—the first trauma. In phenomenology too, it comes from the depths of our own uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit), our own inwardness, our own flesh—and yet also from the otherness of the other person, whom I will never know fully and who will never know me fully. The flesh can appear in the world as a body among bodies only to the degree that I am already an other among others, a self-with-another “in the apprehension of a common nature, woven out of the network of intersubjectivity— itself founding selfhood in its own way.” 36 Ricœur concludes this intricate analysis by observing that although Husserl recognized the primordiality of subjective flesh and the necessity of intersubjective language, he could not reconcile the two. He remarks, “It is because Husserl thought of the other than me only as another me, and never of the self as another, that he has no answer to the paradox summed up in the

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question: how am I to understand that my flesh is also a body.” 37 In short, Husserl could not adequately account for both the flesh’s intimacy to itself (in the absolute immediacy of immanence) and its opening onto the world (through the mediation of others). He had a carnal phenomenology but lacked a carnal hermeneutics—and only the latter, Ricœur suggests, can provide a full account of the ontological relationship between flesh and world. Ricœur criticizes Levinas for the error opposite Husserl’s: traversing flesh too quickly toward alterity. According to Levinas, the face of the other is a trace, not flesh, and, observes Ricœur, “[n]o middle ground, no between, is secured to lessen the utter dissymmetry between the Same and the Other.” 38 Flesh for Levinas is in the realm of the sensible, which for him is related to the feminine, the obscure, the pre-hermeneutic in every sense of the word, not to the face. Levinas, says Ricœur, needs Husserl in order to become more enfleshed. The face of the other needs language and touch. The face cannot be only the discarnate voice of the master that solicits and commands us; it must also come to us through sensibility. To be clear, Ricœur is not antiLevinas; he is trying to bring Levinas and Husserl together and is grappling with the question of how to have both radical alterity and the flesh as givenness. He sees a half-open door in both Husserl and Levinas—and true to his chosen role as hermeneutic mediator, he tries to push the door open and find a middle way. CONCLUSION: BRINGING RICŒUR AND MERLEAU-PONTY TOGETHER What, then, does this analysis of Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty mean for the hermeneutic relationships between self and other? It means first that the other who is a stranger is also a counterpart who, like me, can say “I.” To quote Oneself as Another again, the transfer of sense shows how “she thinks” signifies “she says in her heart: I think,” and at the same time it reveals the inverse movement of “she thinks and feels in a way that I can never think or feel.” 39 I am called by the other who comes to me in a way that I cannot fully assimilate or reduce to my immanence. I can respond only by “reading” his or her transcendence in immanence, across distance and difference. Ricœur in fact speaks of a hermeneutic interpreting of the body by the body that precedes the work of “inference” through formal linguistic signs. This is where he seeks to go deeper than Husserl and Levinas. He refers to such inference as a primal “relation of indication in which the interpretation is made immediately, much as the reading of symptoms.” And the “style” of confirmation to which this reading of indication belongs involves “neither primordial intuition nor discursive inference.” 40 It entails rather a special

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grammar of what I call carnal hermeneutics across distance, gaps, and differences. Carnal hermeneutics as diacritical hermeneutics. But if there is a language of the body, a language of sense and sensibility, of savvy and tact, what language are we talking about? One not only of words, writing, and texts but also of sensing and touching. One not only of intellectual understanding but also of tangible orientation. Thus does the simplest phenomenon of touch lead to the most complex of philosophies—for the simplest is the most complex and remains the most enigmatic. In posing such questions, Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty open doors where hermeneutics and phenomenology may cross at the swing door of the flesh. There remains, of course, much work to be done, and neither MerleauPonty nor Ricœur has the final word. Ricœur took Levinas and Husserl as interlocutors to see what they were missing, and in this essay I have endeavored to do the same with Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty. The phenomenology of flesh sketched out by Ricœur in his early work Freedom and Nature is never more than that—a sketch, a promissory note which the rest of his hermeneutic work does not fully realize. One is required to flesh out, as it were, the embryonic bones of a phenomenology of carnality that one finds there, especially in the retrospective light of the final “Tenth Study” of Oneself as Another. Had Ricœur engaged in a more active dialogue with Merleau-Ponty, he would delivered on the promise of his early phenomenology of embodiment far sooner and far more adequately. Even in Oneself as Another, he offers only a proto-hermeneutics of the flesh, not a full hermeneutics. For all the potential, text still ultimately trumps flesh. Or as Ricœur himself humorously confessed: “Je suis un obsédé textuel” (“I am a text maniac”). His hermeneutics of the text always needs more flesh. As for Merleau-Ponty, he might have been well advised to take a more hermeneutic turn by tempering his phenomenology of radical embodiment with greater layers of textual refinement and reference—stemming the temptation, on his part, to become an obsédé charnel (a carnal maniac)! In short, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of flesh needs more hermeneutics, more text. And here I am inclined to admit that Derrida has a point in Le Toucher when he suggests that the phenomenon of “double sensation”—where the hand touches the hand—runs the risk of a certain haptocentric circularity and closure. It is true that Merleau-Ponty speaks constantly of gaps (écarts)—but they are always gaps inscribed within the flesh of the world, invaginations rather than separations. There is, in the first and final analysis, a fundamental and undeconstructable immanence in Merleau-Ponty (even more than in Deleuze) that needs to be further opened to transcendence and otherness. On the other hand, I would suggest that Ricœur, who has a certain Protestant (and post-Hegelian) suspicion of immanence as fusion and immediacy, needs to delve deeper into the phenomenon of the flesh. If the flesh is a lost Atlantis to which we cannot return directly, as Ricœur insists in his “Wonder, Eroticism,

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and Enigma,” we may find ourselves condemned to many long detours! Hermeneutic circles through infinitely receding texts, modern and ancient. To put it simply: if Ricœur needs to be more carnalized, Merleau-Ponty needs to be more textualized. Although they lived in the same city at the same time in history and read many of the same authors and books, they never really engaged each other’s work in their own lifetime. I have sought here to sketch out the possibility and desirability of such a dialogue. NOTES 1. See Aristotle, De Anima, trans. J.A. Smith (London: Clarendon, 1931), 2, 428. 2. See Jacques Derrida’s treatment of the haptic versus optic debate in On Touching. Platonic optocentrism dominated the history of Western metaphysics up to Husserl and phenomenology, with few exceptions. See my “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 15–56. 3. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 176. 4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 304. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1979), 155. 6. Ibid., 142. 7. See “Tangents III” in Jacques Derrida, On Touching, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 156–57. 9. Ibid., 159. 10. Ibid., 161. 11. Ibid., 163. 12. Ibid., 166. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 109. 15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, ed. Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert (Geneva: Métis Presses, 2011), 203–4. 16. Ibid., 211. 17. Ibid., 204. 18. Ibid., 206. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 205. 21. Paul Ricœur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohák (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 86. 22. Ibid., 87–88. 23. Ibid., 91. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 93. 26. Ibid. 27. Paul Ricœur, “Wonder, Eroticism, and Enigma,” in Sexuality and the Sacred, ed. James Nelson and Sandra Longfellow (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1994), 141. 28. Ibid., 141. 29. Ibid.

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30. Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 318. 31. See ibid., 327–28 and note 34. 32. Ibid., 322. 33. Ibid., 324. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 326. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 338. 39. Ibid., 355. 40. Ibid., 336.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by J.A. Smith. London: Clarendon, 1931. Derrida, Jacques. On Touching. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le Monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. Edited by Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert. Geneva: Métis Presses, 2011. ———. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962. ———. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1979. Ricœur, Paul. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. “Wonder, Eroticism, and Enigma.” In Sexuality and the Sacred, edited by James Nelson and Sandra Longfellow. Louisville: John Knox Press, 1994. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

Chapter Four

Ricœur on the Body A Response to Richard Kearney Gonçalo Marcelo

This brief exercise is simultaneously a comment on Richard Kearney’s bold and overarching project of a carnal hermeneutics, a response to his reading of Paul Ricœur’s take on the body and “flesh” (including Ricœur’s tentative and never explicitly assumed “hermeneutics of the flesh”), and a modest attempt to indicate some additional possible pathways for the carnal hermeneutical project. My two main goals are (1) to expand Kearney’s reading of the topic of the body and of a possible “carnal hermeneutics” in Ricœur’s philosophy to show that this topic is present in works that Kearney does not mention in his chapter; and (2) to try to show that while Ricœur’s explorations of the aforementioned topic are tentative, the importance of embodiment was always in the backdrop of his philosophy, in spite of his textual turn of the 1960s–1980s. In the first section of this response, I recall some of the main guiding threads of Richard Kearney’s and Brian Treanor’s project of a “carnal hermeneutics,” putting it in the context of other developments in Kearney’s philosophy and stressing its importance. In the second section, I offer a reading of the role of the body and the flesh in Ricœur’s philosophy (including during his so-called “hermeneutical turn” of the 1960s–1980s) that is different than Kearney’s. Even though it is true that, as Kearney argues, the “textual turn” meant a closer attention to textual hermeneutics, I argue that even during this time, Ricœur kept recognizing that the “lived body” is important and that interpretation is deeply rooted in affectivity and flesh, and I put forward some examples of texts in which we can pinpoint these analyses. Last, in my conclusion, I propose that carnal hermeneuts further explore a topic in which Ricœur’s own research is cross-fertilized by contemporary 57

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neo-Hegelians and that is of the utmost importance for understanding some recent social and political movements, namely, recognition theory. “Embodied recognition” is, of course, not a totally unexplored topic, insofar as it is clear that there are pre-linguistic layers of recognition that are a sine qua non for the intersubjective fleshing out of subjectivity. This has been explored before, for instance by Axel Honneth in The Struggle for Recognition 1 and Reification. 2 But I suggest that a carnal hermeneutical perspective could be of great use to further unveil exactly how this takes place and what is at stake in these processes. RICŒUR IN RICHARD KEARNEY’S CARNAL HERMENEUTICS There are many strands of hermeneutics, as there are multiple approaches to the body, that range from the naturalistic and objectivistic depictions of the so-called “hard sciences” and their philosophical interpretations to phenomenological or artistic takes that privilege the first-person perspective. Why, then, should one feel the need to put forward a “carnal” version of hermeneutics, and what does this perspective bring about? In short, and following Richard Kearney’s and Brian Treanor’s lead in their introduction 3 to Carnal Hermeneutics, we must do so because interpreting meaning, the quintessential hermeneutical task, involves “sense” mediations that necessarily include a proto-linguistic layer of embodied sensibility, thus establishing an “extended hermeneutic arc.” 4 Grasping this inner connection between meaning and the body entails a double movement whereby: (1) hermeneutics is enlarged to encompass bodily expressions and affections as acts of interpretation; and (2) the wide array of philosophies of the body—such as the phenomenology of the body, the feminist hermeneutics of the body, neurocognitive or analytical perspectives on embodiment—is enriched by a new source of insights on what is constantly occurring in the endless activity of interpretation that takes place in our own bodies. In his essay “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” Kearney encapsulates this inner connection as follows: “Life is hermeneutic through and through. It goes all the way up and all the way down. From head to foot and back again.” 5 This recent development of Kearney’s philosophy is rooted in other aspects of his work. Indeed, the project of reading the flesh is complemented by a wager of interpreting the divine in anatheist fashion 6 and also an attempt to foster narrative healing through the exchange of stories. As I have argued elsewhere, 7 these three domains of Kearney’s work can hardly be understood separately, insofar as they are part of a single, albeit complex and far-reaching, project. This is a thought that is creative, rigorous, but also extremely rich in its sources and means of expression, often mixing narrative storytell-

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ing with conceptual clarification, and whose originality is a source of inspiration. Certainly, Richard Kearney is a profound interpreter of Paul Ricœur’s work, and he does not limit himself to repeating Ricœur; rather, he takes up some of Ricœur’s insights and further elaborates on them, probing their limits and blind spots in order to better explain the phenomena he is addressing. Accordingly, Kearney’s recovery of Ricœur in the context of his carnal hermeneutics is both sympathetic and critical. In short, he credits Ricœur’s diagnostics of the body and proto-hermeneutics of the flesh with being a source of inspiration, but he thinks that they need to be further articulated in order for a proper carnal hermeneutics to stem from them. I fully concur with this assessment. I would like, however, to point out that there are other points in Ricœur’s philosophy that could be meaningful for carnal hermeneutics. I thus transform Kearney’s three-step diagnostics of the question of the body in Ricœur into something more like a multipolar, scattered presence dispersed through many of his writings that does not, however, fully eliminate the main claims that were already present in Freedom and Nature. 8 Kearney’s diagnostics consist in identifying three main moments in Ricœur’s philosophy with different takes on the body and thus varying degrees of approximation toward a possible hermeneutics of the flesh. According to Kearney, Ricœur started with a phenomenology of the flesh inspired by Husserl in Freedom and Nature, then abandoned it upon undertaking his so-called linguistic turn in the 1960s, when he focused more heavily on the hermeneutics of signs, symbols, and texts, and eventually recovered it in 1990 in the last chapter of Oneself as Another. 9 Indeed, this last chapter of Oneself as Another recovered the phenomenology of the flesh in a more elaborate form by taking into account intersubjectivity, the ambiguous status of my own body as both Leib and Körper, and flesh as the host of a certain otherness (or, as Vinicio Busacchi puts it, my “inner stranger.”) 10 It is as if Ricœur had started from a first moment of naivety, asserting his faith in the signifying power of the body, before going through a moment of doubt corresponding to his overarching emphasis on language at the expense of the experience of the lived body, only to return to the body, not triumphally or as though it were a telos, but with better and renewed arguments. Ultimately, Ricœur’s phenomenology of flesh, from Freedom and Nature and the “proto-hermeneutics of the flesh” to Oneself as Another, are deemed to have been only sketched, not fully realized. I believe this is a sound assertion, and it is not surprising, given that in his philosophy, Ricœur always strove to open up new and promising paths with many different influences but did not always fully explore them. But it remains to be seen what exactly happened in Ricœur’s so-called “middle period,” the one that inaugurated the long hermeneutical detour through signs, symbols, and texts. Did the “poetic function” to be found in metaphors, narratives, and texts, taken as a whole,

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lead Ricœur to push aside the flesh, affectivity, or even the “stranger within”? THE BODY IN RICŒUR’S HERMENEUTICAL TURN: A FORGOTTEN TOPIC? What I would like to very respectfully challenge in this reading is the assumption that Ricœur’s so-called linguistic turn had in fact occulted his previous conclusions on the body. We can find an even more radicalized version of this reading, concerning not only the body but also reality itself, in some important works of contemporary phenomenology. For instance, Claude Romano, in his masterful At the Heart of Reason, has recently argued that Ricœurian hermeneutics does not sufficiently accommodate the prelinguistic layers of experience and that Ricœur is not capable of avoiding the temptation of linguistic idealism. As such, Ricœurian hermeneutics would remain encapsulated in language, ultimately incapable of grasping reality. Thus, in Romano’s reading, for Ricœur, the limits of the world would be the limits of language. 11 Now, Romano’s reading can be challenged simply by noting how, for Ricœur, language always refers back to reality and tries to expand it, as is the case in The Rule of Metaphor. 12 In that book, the goal is to show in what manner the poetic function of language, and mostly its metaphorical function, 13 leads to a type of reference that exceeds the everyday empirical reality that is at stake when we use a merely denotative function of language. The tension created by semantic impertinence is thus not an escape from reality but a way to disclose aspects of reality that would have remained veiled were it not for the poetic function fulfilled by metaphor. With this in mind, let us come back to the body, affectivity, and the hermeneutics of the flesh. I contend that there are a few loci in his “middle period” philosophy of the 1960s–1980s that show us this ongoing concern with linking meaning and embodiment. My first example will be Ricœur’s notion of a semantics of desire, taken from Freud and Philosophy; 14 the second will be his analysis of fragility and suffering, which is a thread directly connecting the two main phases of his philosophical anthropology (Fallible Man 15 in 1960 and Oneself as Another). Let us start with the semantics of desire. It is important to recall that the book on Freud was originally published in French in 1965. That book, together with the Symbolism of Evil in 1960, are in fact credited with having started Ricœur’s hermeneutical and linguistic turn. But it would be overlooking some of Ricœur’s main insights to suppose that the start of this turn meant he had forgotten his earlier lessons concerning embodied affectivity and even a proto-evaluation of the world and different phenomena within it.

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Indeed, Ricœur’s reading of Freud never takes meaning to be self-sufficient, and even the mediation of theory is only there to make explicit phenomena that are deeply rooted within our psyche and our bodily functioning. At the same time, this is not to say that Ricœur lets go of the first-person perspective that he had adopted earlier in his phenomenology of the body in Freedom and Nature. Indeed his critique of the naturalist and reductionist standpoint that he had already undertaken in that first phase of the 1950s is further developed in his debate with Jean-Pierre Changeux. 16 The traversal of psychoanalysis shows us, however, that the zones of opacity within ourselves and our consciousness actually run deeper than what the phenomenological standpoint took for granted. The energy at stake in those zones of opacity therefore bears a possibility of meaning within itself, even though it begs for an ars interpretandi in order to make it explicit. For Ricœur, the “semantics of desire” departs from desire itself. Desire is affectivity, of course, and desires sometimes “achieve speech,” other times “make speech fail,” and “themselves fail to speak.” 17 The semantics of desire thus means two things: that we are moved, attracted to, or repelled from something, and in that movement, we see that some sort of force or energy comes into play (which we can call drive, Trieb, if we want to follow Freud’s vocabulary), but also that the “brute” force of desire seeks an expression, though whether it succeeds or fails in doing so—whether it is “blocked” (to keep using the same metaphorical language game) or achieves meaning—is a different problem. But the tension between the two poles—a deep rooting in bodily forces that are within us but that also transcend the powers of our consciousness and our capacity to fully grasp them and master them in a transparent way—is, for Ricœur, following Freud, undeniable. In other words, the semantics of desire entails that “the energetics implies a hermeneutics and the hermeneutics discovers an energetics” 18—that is, that our own psychic life and our body, insofar as our consciousness is always embodied, are the locus of a conflict, a relation between forces, a certain tension that would certainly not be understandable without a hermeneutics; that there is a surplus of meaning in that tension that calls for an act of interpretation. In other words, the conflict, which is to be understood following Freud’s topographical model of the mind, is played out between drives and repression mechanisms, barely reaching consciousness or self-awareness, not reaching it at all or only in veiled form—for Freud, through dreams, semi-conscious gestures or “failed acts” and so forth. The point that must be emphasized here and that is important for the hermeneutics of the body that I am assessing is that the expression of desires (or their repression) is already indicative of pre-linguistic choices and interpretations. Desire needs to be interpreted and thus begs for an ars interpretandi, but the fact that there is desire to start with already emphasizes a pre-reflective mode of choice or interpretation that is close to what one might call a carnal hermeneutics—

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indeed, even though it is not necessarily expressed through the mediation of the senses (but it can be, insofar as the senses many times present us with the “subjects” or “objects” of desire), it still precedes and conditions them. In the part of his book on Freud that he entitled “Analytic,” 19 Ricœur systematically unveils some of the traits of this relation between force and meaning that is expressed in the semantics of desire. For instance, when analyzing Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, he highlights the “violence done to the meaning” 20 which is a result of the mechanisms of censorship and distortion. The “hidden” is not only masked; it is distorted. Substitution is also a trick. This is why at least this second, more elaborate form of interpretation is almost always a (strenuous) work, and why it must be indirect. He explicitly states that through the process of repression, the psychical apparatus “receives force and conflict.” 21 Ultimately, Ricœur concentrates on the concept of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz or simply Repräsentanz [ideational representative], 22 put forward in the discussion of Freud’s “Papers on Metapsychology.” According to Ricœur, this is the mechanism that provides a link between force and meaning, consciousness and the unconscious, “body and soul.” Because a purely economic (or energetic) standpoint makes no sense if totally separated from the representable and the sayable. But this hermeneutics of selfhood is stemming from the body and trying to make sense of it. As such, I believe we can see in it an example of Ricœur’s acknowledgment of the interpretive nature of embodiment in this period. My second example cuts across Ricœur’s work diachronically because I believe that, on the one hand, it points to a complex of phenomena that are closely intertwined and deserve to be mentioned together but, on the other hand, whose analyses resurface here and there throughout Ricœur’s work in a scattered manner: the analyses of fragility, affectivity, and suffering. As I already mentioned, desire is a form of affection and, in a way, Freud and Philosophy is an investigation thereof. Also, Freedom and Nature and the phenomenology of the body it puts forward elaborates on the several ways in which we are affected. But there are other developments that explore in a tentative manner—that is, one that is not fully developed—the way we are prone to negative affections precisely because we are constitutively fragile. Now, fragility and fallibility are overarching principles of Ricœur’s philosophical anthropology. Indeed, if we can say that the hermeneutic turn in his philosophy started in 1960 with The Symbolism of Evil 23 we also cannot overlook the fact that this book was published in tandem with Fallible Man, 24 which is an essay in fundamental philosophical anthropology. What is at stake there is the description of some context-independent traits of the human experience, with “fallibility” at the forefront. This is not Ricœur’s final word on the subject, insofar as Oneself as Another would eventually go beyond fallibility as the possibility of fault, and it would complement it with

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a more positive analysis of our fundamental capacities. But in both books fragility is emphasized, alongside its corollary: the human tendency (or perhaps the capacity) to suffer. Indeed, in Fallible Man Ricœur dedicates a whole chapter to “affective fragility,” 25 which proves the relevance of his work for affect theory. He asserts that feelings add a new dimension to the merely transcendental understanding of human reality. As in Freedom and Nature, he takes up a nonnaturalist reading of the body that does not reject its materiality but tries to conciliate it with the first-person perspective; his analysis of Eros [love], epithumia [desire], and most of all thumos [heart] are there to show us the primacy of vital desire and the way it must necessarily be taken into account, alongside logos, as the defining traits of human life. This vital aspect of Ricœur’s philosophy, or of his incomplete attempt to devise a philosophy of life, of course has its echoes in the Spinozist tones his work sometimes assumes, often invoking the primacy of the conatus, and it is present both in Oneself as Another 26 and Living Up to Death. 27 These two books can be understood in the context of Ricœur’s attempt to go beyond an emphasis on the death drive or on Heidegger’s being-towarddeath. For Ricœur, following Spinoza, cheerfulness, in spite of suffering, even suffering caused by the death of our dearest ones, is one of the main affections in life. This much is evident in “Up to Death: Mourning and Cheerfulness,” the first and main fragment of Living Up to Death. Ricœur refuses to imagine himself as a dying person (moribond) even when he is actually lying in bed in the final months of his life, afflicted by illness. But he states, “Still living, this is the important word,” because what is important is “the mobilization of the deepest resources of life to still affirm itself.” 28 And here one cannot but wonder if this affirmation of the conatus is not itself carnal, in that, faced with the impending likelihood of death, life (which is to say, the body) finds within itself the capacity to overcome itself (its suffering) and persist in its “effort to persevere in being.” 29 It is important to emphasize this meditation on suffering. Ricœur frequently described the capable human being as “the acting and suffering human being” (l’homme agissant et souffrant), as if to highlight the inextricability between agir and pâtir in all human endeavor. The lack of a typology notwithstanding, some elements of what he says about human suffering clearly point toward an intermingling between descriptive traits and a properly normative aspect: even though everyone suffers alone, there is some sort of shared experience of intersubjective solidarity that can come to the aid of the suffering person. In a small article originally published in 1992 and titled “La souffrance n’est pas la douleur” 30 (“Suffering is Not Pain”), Ricœur states that in suffering a paradox of intersubjective relations is unveiled: even though I cannot change places with the suffering person, he or she summons me to a fundamental solidarity. Moreover, this ethical summons to solidarity

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appears elsewhere in Ricœur’s work, for instance in the Course of Recognition. There he argues for mutuality instead of reciprocity in granting recognition and asserts that rather than asking for recognition, we should spontaneously grant it, be grateful when we receive it, and do no more than summon the other to recognize us too, always without forcing him or her to do so. I think we can argue that in this form of ethical summons, some sort of carnal hermeneutics of the body is also at play. It is the suffering body that asks for solidarity, and the recognizing body that asks for recognition; in these processes much is pre-reflective, and many interpretations certainly take place at a bodily level—which is why we can speak of “gestures of recognition” which are of the utmost symbolic relevance. Now, I do not want to offer a fully continuist reading of Ricœur, as if we could not find any discrepancies or inconsistencies in his thought (we can, as in every great philosopher). But these examples are here to suggest that he never really abandoned a diagnostics of the body at the expense of a purely linguistic approach, even though if we look closely enough, we will of course always find passages in some texts where this seems to be the case. I will now conclude by returning, in light of these passages, to the project of a carnal hermeneutics taken as such and offer some comments on one of its possible further paths. CONCLUSION: RECOGNITION, A FURTHER PATH FOR CARNAL HERMENEUTICS In the conclusion to “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” 31 Kearney suggests that there are four orientations for continuing the conversation on carnal hermeneutics: the deconstructive hermeneutics of touch, the feminist hermeneutics of the body (for example, Judith Butler’s recent work), the theological hermeneutics of incarnation, and the diacritical hermeneutics of the flesh. I argue that one dimension that is perhaps currently underdeveloped in carnal hermeneutics is its properly political and social dimension. In order to more fully develop it, we can draw on Judith Butler’s work 32 (which Kearney briefly mentions as a feminist hermeneutic of the body) and also on Ricœur’s work. Here I am thinking about how to deal with fragile bodies that appear in the public space and that also summon our ethical responsibility toward them. It takes little imagination to propose examples of lives that are, to borrow Butler’s terminology, precarious. Just think of forced migrants such as those that were displaced by the Syrian conflict, many of whom faced tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea when trying to reach Europe. To make sense of these phenomena, I think it is useful to turn to the vocabulary of “recognition.” Recognition theory, partly inspired by a contemporary retrieval of Hegelian philosophy, but also aiming to go beyond it,

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emerged in the last thirty years as a way to grasp the intersubjective grounding of subjectivity and to understand the moral motivation of social actors and historically disenfranchised groups to attain equal rights or validation for their cultural claims or specific ways of life. Ricœur was no stranger to this movement, as his last published book, The Course of Recognition, made clear. In that book, he attempts to spell out in a coherent and philosophically meaningful fashion the many meanings the concept of recognition assumes in the history of philosophy and the ethical significance of granting recognition. In a way, The Course of Recognition picks up and expands some of the main conclusions of Oneself as Another, insofar as the latter was an exploration of the fundamental human capacities and their epistemic mode of validation, to which Ricœur called, in a hermeneutical fashion, attestation. Additionally, The Course of Recognition asserts that the attestation of these capacities is tantamount to a process of “recognition of oneself” that is dependent on mutual relations of recognizing others (and “oneself as another”). We can thus assume that the latent hermeneutics of the flesh pinpointed and analyzed by Kearney in the tenth study of Oneself as Another is not only implicitly assumed in The Course of Recognition but also transformed into something more complex. Indeed “recognizing oneself” also entails a complex interplay between the perception of the body as object and of the flesh as my own lived body. Moreover, when Ricœur analyzes the possibility to consider relationships of mutual recognition with the help of the model of reciprocal giftexchange, 33 he is also acknowledging its intrinsically embodied nature. Not only is the need for recognition driven by embodied affectivity but its concrete instantiation involves a given number of gestures and rituals, argues Ricœur. Some scholars, like Tomás Domingo Moratalla, 34 insist on this bodily aspect of recognition, which is only tacitly indicated in Ricœur, and suggest the fruitfulness of fully articulating it. Indeed, if we read Ricœur’s Course of Recognition alongside, for instance, Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself 35 or Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition, we realize both the inner connection between individual and collective identities and bodily experience and also the way demands for recognition are intrinsically tied to normative orders that can be just or unjust. This means that Ricœur’s attempt to grasp the inner workings of our bodily nature and their impact on the way we make sense of reality and of ourselves did not stop in Oneself and Another and indeed can be traced up to his last published book, even if, again, this attempt would be in need of further development. Carnal hermeneutics is well suited to take up an analysis of the fragile body not only in existential and ethical terms but also in the very concrete exposure of political protest. It ought, moreover, to consider the experience of bodily identities actively striving for recognition, even if getting such

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recognition entails social and political change and thus a transformation of the very language and normative orders within which we inhabit, as well as the multiple layers of the relations between body, language, and interpretation that take place in such an endeavor. This is needed because our bodies are active interpreters, as the carnal hermeneutical project contends, and also because the bodily presence in the public space calls for new interpretations, interpretations that not only take stock of the strong evaluative character of our human predicament, of the living traditions that might help to make sense of it, but also of the ethical responsibility that falls upon us, philosophers, when faced with phenomena such as those of fragile lives on the brink of bodily destruction. Such tasks are a challenge to carnal hermeneutics. But this is a challenge that might well be worth pursuing. NOTES 1. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1995). 2. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay, with comments by Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, “Carnal Hermeneutics from Head to Foot,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 2. 4. Ibid., 2. 5. Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, 15. 6. Richard Kearney describes the anatheistic wager as a “renewed quest for God after God.” See Kearney, Anatheism. Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. xiii—in which “God must die so that God might be reborn” (ibid., p. xvi). This intriguing approach thus involves letting go the certainty of a metaphysical God and embracing the possibility of a “God that may be.” The Ana-theos, God after God, is seen by Kearney as a “wager of faith beyond faith” (ibid., 3) and, as such, involves the double movement of 1) abandonment and 2) recovery. It is linked with the project of a carnal hermeneutics insofar as the anatheistic return, going beyond theism and atheism, goes through a hermeneutic appreciation of “incarnate existence, as sacred word made flesh” (ibid., 4). 7. Gonçalo Marcelo, “Narrative and Recognition in the Flesh: An Interview with Richard Kearney,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 43, no. 8 (October 2017): 2. 8. Paul Ricœur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans. Erazim Kohák (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966). 9. Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 10. Vinicio Busacchi, “Why Those Who Disregard Foreigners Despise Themselves,” Critical Hermeneutics 2, no. 1 (August 2018): 122. 11. Claude Romano, At the Heart of Reason, trans. Michael B. Smith and Claude Romano (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), chapter 22, “Phenomenology as Hermeneutics.” 12. Ricœur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ (London: Routledge, 1977). 13. Ricœur’s hermeneutic turn includes not only fundamental philosophical reflections on what is hermeneutics, what it is to interpret, understand, or explain texts, or other cultural or linguistic artifacts such as signs, symbols, or dreams, but also specific analyses of the poetic function of language and, more specifically, of what he calls “semantic innovation.” These studies entail analyzing how language works in ways that are not denotative and that can serve

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either to expand the limits of our imagination or even of our perceived reality. For him, semantic innovation involves what happens when a “living metaphor” is put forward (that is, when an unusual predicative attribution casts a new light on a given phenomenon) and also the narrative refiguration of time. As such, the metaphoric is included, for Ricœur, in the poetic, but the latter also includes other phenomena that are at stake in the relation between language and reality. 14. Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 15. Ricœur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). 16. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricœur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 17. Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy, 6. 18. Ibid., 65. 19. Ibid., 59–343. 20. Ibid., 92. 21. Ibid., 109. 22. These concepts pose a significant challenge for translators and Ricœur sometimes uses them in the German original. In French, he prefers to keep “représentation” for Vorstellung and suggests, in Freud and Philosophy, “présentation” for Repräsentanz. He notes that this last, very important concept to which he comes back in later works, namely in his incursions into the epistemology of historiography, “denotes the psychical expression or representative of an instinct, in either the ideational or the affective order” (ibid., 116). In the English translation of Freud and Philosophy the translator keeps “representative” as the choice to translate Repräsentanz (ibid.). 23. Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 24. Ricœur, Fallible Man. 25. Ibid., chapter 4, 81–132. 26. Namely in the concluding essay of this book, when he discusses the importance of life for Spinoza. See Ricœur, Oneself as Another, 315. 27. Ricœur, Living Up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 28. Ibid., 13. 29. Ricœur, Oneself as Another, 316. 30. Ricœur, “La souffrance n’est pas la douleur,” in Souffrance et douleur. Autour de Paul Ricœur, ed. Claire Marin and Nathalie Zaccai-Reyners (Paris: PUF, 2013), 13–34. 31. Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” 56. 32. For instance, see Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004). 33. Ricœur, The Course of Recognition, op. cit., 232 ff. 34. Tomás Domingo Moratalla, “Cuerpo reconocido. El cuerpo en la hermenéutica del reconocimiento de Paul Ricœur,” Investigaciones Fenomenológicas: Anuario de la Sociedad Española de Fenomenología 2 (2010): 219–30. 35. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Busacchi, Vinicio. “Why Those Who Disregard Foreigners Despise Themselves.” Critical Hermeneutics 2, no. 1 (August 2018): 105–27. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004.

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Changeux, Jean-Pierre and Paul Ricœur. What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature and the Brain. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Honneth, Axel. Reification. A New Look at an Old Idea. Edited by Martin Jay, with comments by Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1995. Kearney, Richard. Anatheism. Returning to God after God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. ———. “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics.” In Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, 1–11. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Kearney, Richard and Brian Treanor (eds). Carnal Hermeneutics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. ———. “Carnal Hermeneutics from Head to Foot.” In Carnal Hermeneutics, edited by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, 15–56. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Marcelo, Gonçalo. “Narrative and Recognition in the Flesh. An Interview with Richard Kearney.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 43, no. 8 (October 2017): 777–92. Moratalla, Tomás Domingo. “Cuerpo reconocido. El cuerpo en la hermenéutica del reconocimiento de Paul Ricœur.” Investigaciones Fenomenológicas: Anuario de la Sociedad Española de Fenomenología 2 (2010): 219–30. Ricœur, Paul. Fallible Man. Translated by Charles Kelbley. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986. ———. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by Erazim Kohák. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966. ———. Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. ———. “La souffrance n’est pas la douleur.” In Souffrance et douleur. Autour de Paul Ricœur. Edited by Claire Marin and Nathalie Zaccai-Reyners, 13–34. Paris: PUF, 2013. ———. Living Up to Death. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. ———. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. The Course of Recognition. Translated by David Pellauer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. ———. The Rule of Metaphor. The Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ. London: Routledge, 1977. ———. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Romano, Claude. At the Heart of Reason. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Claude Romano. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015.

Section II

The Body in Love and Sickness Sarah Horton

Thus far we have seen that somatic desire is the very condition for our lives and that, in consequence, nothing we do, and nothing that we are, can be separated from it. As the chapters of our first section have argued, all learning and all interpreting depend on and begin with the flesh. Now we turn to two specific experiences—love and illness—in order to see how the desiring body reveals itself in them. Indeed, as love and sickness are both commonplace and yet singularly important to those who live them or die of them, no examination of somatic desire could be complete in which they did not appear. Moreover, that the same section of this volume should be devoted to love and to sickness is not merely coincidental. It is not without reason that we speak of lovesickness. And although the contributors to this section—Richard Kearney, Emmanuel Falque, and John Panteleimon Manoussakis—approach illness and love from different perspectives, all three realize that when we speak of eros, we must also grapple with the reality of thanatos. “Embrace and Differentiation: A Phenomenology of Eros,” a dialogue between Kearney and Falque, considers not only the relation between eros and thanatos but also the relation between eros and agape. Falque argues that for the Christian, eros is transformed into agape, whereas Kearney maintains that eros is already holy, already saves us from thanatos. Their differences prove fruitful, however—as is fitting given that both emphasize the importance of openness to, and in fact love for, alterity—because they compel us to ask whether our passions and drives are necessarily chaotic and what it would mean to view the body as sacred.

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It would be wrong to conclude, from Falque’s emphasis on transformation, that he finds no sanctity in the joys and sorrows of ordinary human life. In “Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body,” he reveals the sacred even in illness. The spread body, the body that we have, the body that in suffering does become an object, still desires and struggles for life, and though the nature of the combat is different, the body given to another in eros is equally engaged in a physical struggle—and these struggles are not unlike that endured by Christ when he gave himself for us on the Cross in an act of agapic love. Certainly we should seek to aid others in their pain, insofar as it is possible to do so; Falque in no way seeks to valorize suffering for suffering’s sake. Yet as all three chapters in this section testify, experiences that push us to our limits, such as the passion of erotic love and the agony of an illness unto death, prove to be crucibles in which the body’s desires show themselves with exceptional force. John Panteleimon Manoussakis’ “Dying to Desire: Soma, Sema, Sarx, and Sex” explores a painful and troubling limit to desire: it is impossible for desire to attain its object without killing that object. Thus it turns out that eros desires even thanatos. When it comes to desire and the flesh, philosophy itself reaches its limit, for the philosopher-lover is not exempt from the necrophiliac yearnings of eros. And even here, unexpected as it may seem, we return to the themes of the sacred and the divine, for God himself is an object of philosophy’s desire, and love’s object is also its idol. We thereby return to our earlier question about what it means to view the body as sacred, and in so doing we are reminded anew that longing to separate body and soul is precisely longing for death. Our bodies may at times seem alien (especially in the experience of illness), but we are desiring bodies all the same. It is worth noting, finally, that eros and thanatos are both terms drawn from myth: Eros was a god of love, Thanatos a god of death. This point reminds us that myths and stories are inseparable from human life and that philosophy must recognize their value instead of naively opposing them to some purely logical, and hence supposedly ideal, truth. It is therefore appropriate that this section is followed by one in which each chapter turns to a particular author or work of literature to illuminate some aspect of somatic desire.

Chapter Five

Embrace and Differentiation A Phenomenology of Eros Emmanuel Falque and Richard Kearney

Richard Kearney (RK): It is a great pleasure to have Emmanuel Falque here this evening as part of this joint seminar to discuss the questions of desire, body, and the flesh. 1 As requested, we will be going back and forth between the philosophies of eros analyzed in our recent volumes—my Carnal Hermeneutics (co-edited with Brian Treanor) and Emmanuel’s The Wedding Feast of the Lamb. I will ask Emmanuel to speak in a moment; then I will respond and we’ll have a conversation. But a few words of introduction first. Emmanuel Falque has done a very brave thing in “crossing the Rubicon” (to quote the title of another of his books). He has dared to mix the waters of phenomenology and theology, which was rather taboo in France and Germany for much of the last century, and on the Continent generally, particularly after Husserl said that we must bracket religious matters when doing phenomenology (not that he always observed that bracketing himself). This position of methodological agnosticism was radicalized by Heidegger in his Tübingen address on philosophy and theology. Never the twain shall meet—that was normative for several generations of phenomenologists. And even Ricœur and Levinas always made a point of saying that their philosophy was not theology; when they did discuss religion it was in separate publications. For example, Levinas had his Talmudic lectures, and Ricœur had his Thinking Biblically. But they kept philosophy and religion separate—or rather, they tried to; the separation was never totally watertight in their later writings. Then a new generation of phenomenologists and hermeneuts came along at the end of the century and brought philosophy and religion into dialogue again with the famous “theological turn,” to use Dominique Janicaud’s term. Some of them, like Marion, didn’t say that they were doing this at first, but 71

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they did it anyway; others, like Falque, Lacoste, and Chrétien, did say that this was what they were doing. I think this bold crossing of theology and phenomenology is remarkable, and you will witness an example of it in Emmanuel’s presentation here today. Emmanuel Falque (EF): Thank you, Richard. I will be speaking mainly about the sixth chapter of The Wedding Feast of the Lamb (entitled “Embrace and Differentiation”). In this chapter, as in all my books, philosophy and theology are intertwined but also separated. There I take up the question “What does ‘This is my body’ mean?” And this is not only a theological and liturgical question but is also a philosophical and erotic question, or even an erotic experience. In my opinion, we cannot separate theology and experience: if you are studying theology, you have to link the dogmatic concept to an experience because if you don’t do that, the dogmatic concept always remains empty. So in my Philosophical Triduum I try to link the question of resurrection (Easter Sunday) to that of birth (in The Metamorphosis of Finitude), the question of Gethsemane (Good Friday) to that of suffering and death (in The Guide to Gethsemane), and the question of the Last Supper (Holy Thursday) to that of body, desire, and the flesh (in The Wedding Feast of the Lamb). In that latter book, I aim to show that we have to distinguish the heritage of the Eucharist, its content, its modality, and its aim, and I explain that the heritage of the Eucharist is animality. Although it is not strange to speak of animality in a work of philosophy (Heidegger spoke of it, after all!), it might seem strange to do so in a work of theology, since in theology we do not distinguish between animality and bestiality and therefore reject animality. In fact, however, we must reject not animality but only bestiality, which is one way of living our animality—but certainly not the only one. RK: Has anyone before you talked about the animality of Christ? At first blush, it seems rather scandalous, even blasphemous, as a statement. But that is, of course, to ignore how the God of the Bible is often compared to an animal—the Lion of Judah, the Dove of peace, the Eagle of wisdom, the Lamb of innocence. Though not as often, or as literally, as in certain Eastern wisdom traditions like Hinduism, where monkeys, elephants, cows, and snakes are, in special ways, treated as sacred or divine. Hence the invocation of powerful animal divinities such as Hanuman (the monkey god) or Ganesh (the elephant god). And in the Western classical tradition, we have many stories of the deities, especially Zeus, appearing as an animal or bird (swan or bull etc.), and certain divinities manifesting as hybrid “humanimals”—for example, Chiron, brother of Zeus, who carried out his sacred healing vocation as a centaur (half horse, half human). But such tales of sacred animality are often rejected as pagan or primitive in the Abrahamic moral tradition—

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one thinks particularly of the biblical prohibition against Baal’s “graven images” of animal gods and golden calves. Can you cite any examples of official biblical teachings that sanctioned or sanctified the idea of divine animality? EF: That’s a good question. The Council in Trullo in 692 C.E. said that we may no longer represent Christ as a lamb, or more generally as an animal, but that decision was in fact not against animality but was because of the significance of lamb imagery in paganism and Judaism. So the Council of Trullo said images of Christ could not depict him as an animal. But in fact John Scotus Eriugena in the nineth century, for example, spoke of Christ as an animal; we reject this today, but there was a time in the Christian tradition when we could speak that way. This does not mean that Christ was an animal but rather that Christ assumed our part of animality, since if he assumed our humanity he also had to assume our part of animality. That is the heritage of the Eucharist, and it means that the Eucharist is not only a passage from humanity to divinity but also a passage from our animality to humanity. We are humanized by the Eucharist. This does not mean that the aim of Christianity is humanization or that Christianity is humanism; it is a matter of humanization in filiation. So that is the heritage of the Eucharist. The content of the Eucharist is the body. What are we eating in the Eucharist when we say, “This is my body”? This is important for me because I am coming from the generation of Vatican II, and an important point was that when you celebrate the Eucharist, you are sharing a meal to which you are invited. But then we have to ask what is on the menu. We tend to forget the menu. What are we eating, and what is a body? The question of cannibalism is a real question, as we can see in John 6:56, when the people ask, “Who is this man who gives us his flesh to eat?” So what does it mean to eat the flesh? The modality of the Eucharist is precisely eros, which is what I will be speaking more about here. Christ says “This is my body, given up for you,” and I will be considering today what it means to give a body. Finally, the aim of the Eucharist is abiding; as Christ said, “The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him” (John 6:53). So the aim is to remain in God, and we have to interrogate the status of presence, which in my view is not merely the “thingification of substance.” We must distinguish between this “thingification of substance” that Heidegger criticized and “manence,” or the act of abiding, as emphasized by Stanislas Breton. Abiding is being or remaining “with,” be it a matter of eros or of agape. It is in this sense that all lived fidelity calls us to “abide.”

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RK: These preliminary remarks are very useful. Could you now give us a more detailed critical account of your treatment of the two kinds of love— eros and agape—in chapter 6 of The Wedding Feast of the Lamb? EF: Yes, of course. I acknowledge the distinction between eros and agape. Anders Nygren (in his Agape and Eros) takes the view that there is a complete equivocity of eros and agape, while Jean-Luc Marion sees in the Eucharist a pure univocity of eros and agape; in fact, my chapter could be a sort of hidden response to Marion’s Erotic Phenomenon. I argue that it is not enough to speak about univocity or equivocity; rather, we have to speak about the conversion of eros into agape. The point where I disagree with Marion concerns the status of fidelity. I was very astonished when I read The Erotic Phenomenon because Marion states that we all have automatic flesh— which is true, because we are animal—but then his thesis is that in fact fidelity is not in the flesh but in the spoken voice, which means that it is a promise. You are to remain faithful because of your promise. My view, however, is that we have to speak of a fidelity of the flesh and not only of a fidelity of the promise, for there is no ratified marriage without the consummated marriage. Indeed, in the Catholic Church you are married only when the marriage is consummated, not just with the promise. So this is a very important point. We are married when we give the body, and so I maintain that we cannot sustain the thesis of the univocity of eros and agape. Univocity is insufficient because it amounts to lowering God, as it were, to the level of the human being. Only God gave his body completely. We must therefore sustain the thesis of conversion of eros to agape. If you are a Christian believer, and only if you are—and you do not have to be a believer—you can think that the erotic “This is my body” that occurs between a man and a woman can find a sense in the “This is my body” that Christ addresses to the Church in the Eucharist. That is what I mean when I refer to the conversion of eros into agape. And that is my first point. My second point is that when discussing the link between eros and agape, we must also consider the link between the body and desire. This question is obviously a philosophical one, but it is also a theological one. Discussing the body and desire of course requires us to distinguish between desires and needs. Here I must raise two points, of which the first is theological. It is a fact—and I saw this after writing The Metamorphosis of Finitude—that Christ’s Passion was not only suffering but also desire, for Christ said to his disciples on Holy Thursday, “I desire with a great desire to eat this Passover with you” (Luke 22:15). Christ as God has the desire to eat the Passover as a man, and because there is a form of desire in Christ, there is an erotic dimension to Holy Thursday. It is exactly what Hegel explains in his Phenomenology of Spirit, when he addresses the desire for recognition and states that we have to distinguish between desire and needs: need is need of an

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object, but desire is desire of the desire of the other. With regard to human sexuality, that means we don’t desire only the other but also desire the other’s own desire. Hegel even says desire is anthropogenic: you become human when you desire not only the other but the desire of the other. When Christ said, “I desire with a great desire to eat this Passover with you,” he was speaking not just about a desire to eat the Passover; he said, “I desire with a great desire” because it was a matter of a desire of desire, of desiring to become or to be recognized as God. If desire is anthropogenic for the human being, it is theogenic for God. As I said before, the heritage of the Eucharist is the passage from animality to humanity, and this is so because God took upon himself our passion and our drives and took them upon himself in the Eucharist in order to inhabit them and change them. Thus when I receive the Eucharist, I become more human in filiation, and God becomes more God if not for himself at least for me. And it is the same with desire between a man and a woman: each becomes more himself or herself, as the erotic experience is absolutely not an experience of fusion. This brings us to my third point, which concerns love and differentiation. It is not enough to love the other because he or she is different from me—that is good, but it is not enough because the love of difference is difference as love. This means that loving is not only loving that the other is different from me but also loving the act of differentiation. In the erotic experience, in sexuality, the man becomes more a man in the encounter with the woman, and the woman becomes more a woman in the encounter with the man. The man cannot experience what the woman experiences and vice versa because there is a genital difference. You can’t feel what the other feels, and this is absolutely true in the experience between man and woman. And if one cannot experience what the other experiences, this means that in the experience of sexuality the other becomes more who he is or who she is. I say this because the other is always strange to me; it is a matter of what I call the gap of the flesh. The gap of the flesh means that there is some failure in the flesh—the experience of flesh is sometimes a failure—yet the failure of the flesh in the erotic experience is actually a success. There is a success in the fact that I cannot feel what the other is feeling; and the success is precisely that if I cannot feel what the other is feeling, then there is a sort of obscurity of the other, who has to become who he or she is and not only who I am. In that sense, it is absolutely the same in eros as in the Eucharist. As in eros the woman is more feminine and the man is more masculine, so too in the Eucharist the human being is more human and God is more God. In short, the act of love is differentiation, and that is why I am completely against the idea of love as fusion. Aristophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium is altogether false. The difference between Aristophanes’ myth and Genesis is that in the beginning the creation of difference is good, while in Plato it is a sort of punishment.

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In Genesis difference is first, and this brings us to my fourth point, which concerns our central discussion here of the body. The meaning of Genesis is not only a matter of speech. In my book The Loving Struggle, there is a chapter on the ark of the flesh, which responds to Chrétien’s book The Ark of Speech. Chrétien’s book is very good, but I was astonished to see that he is always considering speech, or the word. But there is the moment when God took Adam’s rib to create Eve, and Adam and Eve are not face to face but rib to rib, side by side 2—exactly as Merleau-Ponty said, in fact. This is the moment of silent experience, and the silent experience is exactly what I and all my generation of phenomenologists are looking for. It is what Husserl discusses in the fifth Cartesian Meditation, where he says that the silent experience is always first—a muteness wanting to find its own sense. I want to come back to the silent experience, but I am not sure that it is a matter of returning to sense. In my view, there are three failures of phenomenology: the hypertrophy of the lived body (Leib) over the animal or material body (Körper), the hypertrophy of sense over chaos, and the hypertrophy of passivity over activity. If what we want is a human body, we cannot think the body independently of the question of love. To say that the body desires is false; the body does not desire anything or anyone. Rather, it is desire that needs a body. This means first that we can think transubstantiation because substance is not “substantification” (as Heidegger claims); on the contrary, substance is an act. Thomas Aquinas, of course, refers to the act of being, and Leibniz and Spinoza say that substance is a force. Force is first. It is not the body that makes love but love that makes a body. We are force, we are strength, and because of this force that is loving, we need a body. Take the theory of evolution as an analogy: it is not that cows eat grass because they were made for eating grass but that their bodies adapted to eat grass. Similarly, in love, we are a force looking for a body. It is absolutely the same for God, and that is the sense of the Eucharist. What does it mean when the priest says that the force of the spirit is coming to change the bread to body and the wine to blood? It means that God is love and therefore always wants to find a body, as we do, but his way of finding a body is not exactly the same as ours because he created the body. In order to properly think the body, we have to try to find something between the extended body and the lived body. This is very important. In The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, I introduce the idea of the “spread body” (le corps épandu). To understand the spread body, consider first that in Descartes there is the extended body, in Husserl there is the lived body, and, surprisingly, there is a sort of swerve of the flesh in French phenomenology. 3 This swerve of the flesh came about because French phenomenologists interpreted Leib as flesh (chair). In fact the translation of Leib as chair comes from Ricœur (in his famous paper on reading the fifth Cartesian Meditation)

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and Merleau-Ponty (who says in his Phenomenology of Perception that we have to translate Leib as chair). In Levinas’ 1931 translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, however, he always translates Leib as corps organique (organic body) (in section 44, for example), and indeed, Leib had been translated that way in most other philosophical texts. For example, when you translate Nietzsche into French, you always translate Leib as body (corps), never as flesh (chair). It is good to speak about the flesh, but we must not neglect the organic body. Moreover, this point is also a theological one. Tertullian, arguing against Gnosticism, emphasizes that Christ has a true body because he is not an angel. This means that Christ has a body with real hands, hair, stomach, genital organs, and so on, just as I do—but what has phenomenology said about this? Absolutely nothing, because the biological body has been completely forgotten. In short, the spread body is the biological body seen as a human body (and the spread body is a human body also). The spread body is exactly between Descartes’ extended body and Husserl’s lived body. It is, for example, the body that is anesthetized or sleeping, or the body of Christ on the cross. I explore this further in “Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body.” 4 My fifth and final point deals with the question of the “limited phenomenon.” The limited phenomenon is neither Ricœur’s fallibility nor Marion’s saturation. Ricœur spoke about fallibility because there is a disproportion between myself and my desire or my force. I do not think we can always speak this way; my thesis is that if I experience desire it is not because of lack or disproportion but because of limit. The other is always a resistance for me. This is true in eros because the erotic experience is absolutely becoming one; if the couple has to become one flesh, they always remain two bodies. There is no pleasure without combat, without difference of bodies. This is important because we are created within the limit, and we have to love our limits. In fact, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said as much in the fantastic course on creation and the fall that he gave in 1932. He said that God gave Eve to Adam to give him a limit and to ask him to love her limit and his own limit. You are a limited phenomenon, but you do not have to ask, “Why did you create me within limitations?” because there is a difference between limit and limitation. Limit is positive. But that difference is not in Ricœur. Finitude does not have any contrary; the finite is always a part of the infinite, and so you presuppose the infinite when you speak of the finite, but that is not so when you speak of finitude. Limit is on the side of finitude. The difference between the saturated phenomenon and the limited phenomenon is the difference between Pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaventure; and whereas Marion first worked on Dionysius, I first worked on Bonaventure. PseudoDionysius writes of glory and offers an apophatic theology; Bonaventure writes of humility and offers a kataphatic one.

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To conclude, if I can not only accept but also love the fact that I am limited, it is possible to love that the other is limited. The limit of the other means not only that she (or he) is not like me; it means that I have to love that she is not like me and that I am not like her, and the very fact of loving that is our love. The more different the other is from me, the more we are the same, because we are alike in our difference. That point is very important because it is the condition of the conversion of eros into agape and the conversion of the body into flesh. Here Jean-Paul Sartre offers a surprisingly good analysis: he explains in Being and Nothingness that when a man experiences desire for a woman, he becomes himself because his consciousness is incarnated in his body and he is also incarnated in his flesh. For me the other is a body and I am a flesh. The act of loving means that the other becomes flesh for me. He becomes flesh because he is not only an object. Of course he is often an object, and sexuality is often need and not desire. But when the other becomes flesh and not only a body, that is because I am in the desire of the desire of the other—and for me, that is exactly the sense of Christ’s life. The sense of Christ’s life is a possible way for the body to become flesh. And what is this flesh? It is the flesh of the Son of God. The Resurrection is the act in which flesh becomes completely the flesh of God. And as Romano Guardini has said, the Ascension is the moment when Christ put the human body in the heart of God. RK: Thank you, Emmanuel. I will respond relatively briefly. My first point is really one of method. You are a committed phenomenologist. The things themselves, the body, love, eros—all these things matter to you. You are engaged, enthusiastic, and expert in your descriptions; you are also a hermeneut in action, in conversation with such figures as Husserl, Ricœur, Sartre, Marion, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas—a very rich critical conversation with the traditions. And, third, you are a Catholic theologian in name and deed, declaring yourself as such in Crossing the Rubicon. My general question—and then I’ll raise a few more specific points—is this: is what you are saying about eros, flesh, desire, and the body a specifically Catholic description of those phenomena, or is it universally eligible for all human beings irrespective of their confessional allegiance? Even independent of their nonChristian or non-Abrahamic identity? It seems to me that much of what you say (and say brilliantly) is very Christocentric; and yet in your descriptions there seems to be the desire, following Husserl, to make this a phenomenological work with universal claims (not to deny that Christianity makes universal claims too at a religious level). Considering this as a work of philosophy, I always have the sense that for you it is philosophy that needs to be completed by theology. I often get the sense that you’re saying, “Okay, this is philosophical up to a point, and now we are going to give the theological interpretation.” I see chapter 6 of The Wedding Feast of the Lamb as already

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theological, as the liturgical trumping the linguistic, the conjugal trumping the nuptial, agape trumping eros—in short, Christianity trumping humanism. That’s what I’m hoping we’ll tease out here—the phenomenological method on the one hand, the confessional method on the other—and ask how they are compatible or indeed mutually reinforcing (as they may well be). My tone is that of a devil’s advocate because I think we agree on 90 percent of things, and its more interesting for our audience if tackle the other 10 percent, addressing our differences in a “loving struggle” (to borrow the title of another of your books). First, the question of eros. You go to great pains to show that you are critical of Gnosticism and dualism. You say you are going to go down deep and dirty when it comes to the animal, the carnal, and so on; and yet when you describe the drives (eros and thanatos), you speak of eros in terms of a “chaos” of our passions and drives—often synonymous, it seems, with animality, materiality, organicity. For you eros would seem to be a part of the organic body, for which you have great respect, but it is a chaos of passions and drives that needs to be saved and transformed by the Eucharist. But why is eros as drive not holy and meaningful in itself? Why does it need to be redeemed? Why is eros—as the love drive—not Eucharistic from the word go? After all, Pseudo-Dionysius spoke of Christ as eros crucified, not as agape crucified. And following Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, eros has often been spoken of as a life force that signifies and unites, that brings disparate and conflicting things together, that may even need to rise up against the destructive chaos of thanatos—as Freud says at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents, and as Herbert Marcuse later elaborates in Eros and Civilization. If one wants to go further and actually give that a theological interpretation (which I’m all for), why can’t one say that in light of the Incarnation, the Word is the flesh of eros? As Teilhard de Chardin says, there is a cosmic Eucharist. The cosmos itself is Eucharistic as earth coming into the Kingdom—in and through Christ. Moreover, Christological cosmology does not begin with the historical birth of Jesus Christ but is at work from the beginning of creation to the end, from Alpha to Omega. “Before Abraham was, I am.” The call of “I-Am-Who-May-Be” (Exodus 3:14) is at work from the word go. Fiat. Let there be light. Let word be made flesh, again and again, from Genesis and Exodus to the Gospels and the Eschaton. Teilhard says very movingly that his first religious insight as a child was that “God is in the rocks.” God is everything from the mineral, vegetal, and animal to the human and beyond. That’s what he celebrates in his famous “Mass for the World” in the Gobi desert with his fellow scientists (many of them secular Chinese atheists). 5 So it’s not as if the rocks, the animals, the cosmos need to be redeemed by the Eucharist—it is always already Eucharistic through and through: a posse ceaselessly incarnating as esse—forever calling out for the response of possest. Yes. Amen. I will. I am. Eros is not some ontological

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deficit, some curse or sin that requires to be hallowed by agape, because eros is already holy. The Jews knew that. And Christ’s incarnation is a reminder of this basic truth: God is in all things. Iranaeus, Eriugena, Bovaventure, Duns Scotus, Ignatius, and all the great Rhine mystics acknowledged this. Scotus called it ensarkosis—divine enfleshing in and through nature (hence the later term panentheism). Many Christian artists and poets throughout the ages have powerfully testified to the presence of God in the most ordinary and carnal of things, right down to the metaphysical ecstasies of John Donne and the poetic epiphanies of Gerard Manley Hopkins—“Glory be to God for dappled things” or “When Kingfishers Catch Fire’: “[F]or Christ plays in ten thousand places / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Eros is already Eucharistic—the desire for oneness-in-difference, for community in bread and wine—right from the word go. I call this micro-eschatology—the end is already there from the beginning, in the “least of these,” the kingdom of little things, mustard seeds, the widow’s mites, the cups of water. As a footnote to this first point, I would add: where for you there is a risk of becoming enclosed in the play of the carnal, I would say that the carnal is always already expression and interpretation; the carnal is not something we could be enclosed in, since there is already eucharistic desire at work in it. Or to refer to Aristotle, flesh is not just an organ but already a medium (metaxu). 6 Or again, as we see in De Anima chapter 2, touch knows differences. 7 In the beginning is hermeneutics. With the first stirring of flesh we are tasting, touching, testing the world, sounding out and responding to others. Following that is my second question: why do you think the sacrament of marriage is necessary to redeem eros? Throughout your text, there is a contrast between lovers and spouses. I’ll just quote one passage: “While lovers may simply be content to be part of humanity—which alone is very significant in their relationship—married spouses search for God, to be incorporated with him and to live their lovemaking in another way.” 8 You do mention lovers in the text (in connection with Michel Henry and Sartre), but when you talk about eros, it is always matrimonial and conjugal. It is not the Song of Songs, which, as Ricœur says, is nuptial, not matrimonial. 9 Why this exclusive privileging of the matrimonial over the nuptial, of the conjugal over the amorous? The Shulamite and the shepherd in the Song of Songs are not married, but their love is eros and is holy. So why do we need a matrimonial transformation of eros? Isn’t eros enough whether it expresses itself in terms of lovers or in terms of spouses? The cult of the matrimonial smacks to me of a certain ecclesiastical conservatism where the official Catholic Church—which we both hail from—is still so dismally out of touch with the younger generations who frequently experience loving eros in a pre-conjugal fashion and do so with the sensitivity, fidelity, and commitment that you

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associate with the conjugal. Why can’t it be a both/and—meaningful eros for spouses and lovers? Also, when you mention marriage you do so in relation to the sacrament of marriage and the sacrament of the Eucharist. That could make some people say, “I can’t go there because I’m not part of your sacraments. I am not baptized in the Catholic faith.” You have, I know, an extremely open and inclusive approach to Catholicism—which I applaud. I realize that you do not think your frequent use of Catholic language might prevent non-believers from feeling admitted to the sacramental fold, integrated into your descriptions. Most of what you say in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb is, I think, phenomenologically and hermeneutically available, in a universal sense, to everyone regardless of their traditions. But I see this phenomenological openness to be somewhat in tension with your confessional language as a Catholic thinker. Unless you refer to the sacraments in a metaphorical sense? But I do not think so. You are too much of a realist for that. The next ancillary point is that your writing on eros seems to me to be overly heterocentric. Heterosexuality seems to be not only normative but mandatory. In fact at one point you say that sexual difference is “constitutive and originary.” 10 Is it heterosexuality that constitutes the modality of sexual difference? Can there not be a sexual difference between same-sex lovers? Does sexual difference have to be biologically gendered and genital? You do say that sexual difference is natural, not cultural—you take on Judith Butler in that regard—but, again, might that not be too exclusive regarding some people? I’ve just come back from SPEP, and in the conference hotel there were signs saying, “Male, female, and transgender—all welcome.” We’re not there yet at our respective institutions, but I have the sense that your presuppositions regarding sexual desire are fundamentally heteronormative. In short, my question is: why can homosexual love not also bear witness to the celebration of Eucharistic difference that is the core of your argument? Are not same-sex partners different persons? Different desires? Different bodies, each with his/her own singular uniqueness and thisness (haecceitas)? In sum, I cannot help sensing a certain tacit dualism at work in the text at several levels—making too much of a difference between male and female, between agape and eros, between living flesh and spread body, between spirit and chaos. And this separatism of spirit and matter seems to me almost “gnostic” at times (uncharacteristic of your otherwise very incarnationalist approach) and makes strange allies with a certain literalist overemphasis on naturalgenital-biological gender differences at the expense of other kinds of more personal-carnal-haeceital differences (which we all enjoy, irrespective of gender). I’d like you to comment on what I see, perhaps wrongly, as a tension between gnostic and literalist tendencies in your analysis. The last point—and this brings us back to my first—is that you are operating from a Christocentric hermeneutic. I do not think this is a bad thing as

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long as one says, “This is what I am doing; I’m dealing with the Christian, Catholic sacrament of marriage and the Eucharist.” But the language of “conversion,” of eros as something that needs to be transported and transfigured, does seem to reintroduce an element of condescension toward carnality. Granted, you go a long way to acknowledge the “animality” of all bodies, even Christ’s body; but then we discover that this admission is a methodological step on the way to something else, something higher, more transcendent. I’ll just quote one passage: “[D]ivine love (agape) [. . .] in espousing human love (eros) succeeds in integrating it and transforming it at the heart of the Eucharistic act.” 11 So you seem to be saying that in eros, as lovers, we’re waiting for our filiation in the act of the Eucharist, right? Which again raises questions for those who don’t travel the road to the Eucharist—or marriage—as a Catholic sacrament and yet want to partake of everything else you so powerfully describe in the mystery of the Eucharist. And it is here I think that we need to speak of a cosmic Eucharist, à la Delia Illo or Teilhard de Chardin, or a universal baptism like Origen, from which nobody is excluded. Unless they choose to exclude themselves. Everyone is eligible for the Cosmic feast of hospitality. Every host and every guest engaging in the sharing of bread and water (Matthew 25). And insofar as one is prepared to bring Christ and Christianity into phenomenological and hermeneutic investigations of eros—as you do, and why not?—what kind of Christ are we talking about when we talk of the body? You mention the importance of the fact that Jesus had genitals and a stomach; and I’d like to acknowledge these biological details, since at another point in your text you say that in heaven resurrected bodies will have no need for organs like genitals or stomachs (you quote Aquinas). But why? Are you really talking about a resurrected Jesus without genitals or a stomach? And, I do admit, we don’t have much official Church iconography to show that he did have genitals or a stomach (with some notable exceptions). Mary shows her breasts, and Jesus shows his wounds, but we don’t often see Jesus’ penis or testes, do we? Why not? Why the cover-up of his lower half? Even in the Sacré-Cœur replica of the Shroud of Turin (in Paris), which shows his whole body, Jesus is covering his genitals as if he had nothing better to do with his hands while he was being buried! As if Jesus was some puritan who wanted to keep the record pure for posterity—I am incarnate but not fully! Didn’t Jesus himself ask, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, You are gods’” (John 10:34)? He surely didn’t mean divine from the waist up, that our being created in the “image and likeness” of God excluded our bodily organs and functions. So my final question is this: given your Eucharistic embrace of flesh, of body, of desire, which is incredibly generous and inclusive, shouldn’t you allow for celebrating the “thisness” of the resurrected body in all its specificity, all its particulars, the Eucharistic body with genitals and intestines? Why cut Jesus off at the waist? A phenomenology of Christ deserves better than

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that. For as Merleau-Ponty rightly observes, every organ has its imaginaire and its symbolique; Bachelard has his poetics of the body; even Freud, who can be overly reductionist and secularist, as Freudian orthodoxy shows, recognizes the symbolic quality of the oral, the anal, and the genital. And mystical poets like Péguy, Hopkins, Claudel, and even James Joyce celebrate a hallowing of the organic body and eros that doesn’t have to be separated from flesh or redeemed into agape. For them eros is agape: the carnal is the symbolic and vice versa. Symbol and spirit do not need to be superadded to the flesh aprés coup, after the event, to change it into something else, more divine—and therefore “redeem” it from itself. 12 Flesh is already divine. So, I ask, does your suggestion that theology completes philosophy not carry a certain supercessionism—with conjugal spouses completing amorous lovers, agape completing eros, and Christianity completing other religions and non-religions alike? EF: Thank you, Richard, for very good and important questions. This is very interesting because at the colloquium in Paris on my work—which has been published as a book of over 700 pages (entitled Une Analytique du passage)—nobody said what you said. You are reading my book in a certain context that is absolutely not the French context, so the questions are not the same at all. In France you are either a Catholic or an atheist; there are very few Protestants or members of other religions. As I like to say, Ricœur is the only Protestant in France—and the most well-known philosopher, including in Catholic thought! There is also the question of secularization, but that is not the same. First, you saw this very important point, which is that in my books I try to speak about the phenomena, the “things themselves.” But you cannot speak about the things themselves without speaking with others. That is why I quote a lot—I am never thinking alone. On that point we absolutely agree—we are always in conversation. Your first question, which is perhaps the most difficult one, is about the universality of my discourse. Now, perhaps I have not finished my work. Perhaps I will die tomorrow, but perhaps I have more time! My current project is to write a book that is only philosophy, and you will see that my “Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body” only mentions God at the end. It is not that I was first a theologian and will become a philosopher—absolutely not. Rather, because of Christ’s incarnation, I become more incarnate in myself. This dimension of pure humanity is a sort of consequence of my thesis of the “simply human” [l’homme tout court] that I developed in The Metamorphosis of Finitude. My second point is that I never say that it is better to be a Christian believer than not to be a believer. I am against this idea, and if you read chapter 3 of The Metamorphosis of Finitude (“Is There a Drama of Atheist Humanism?”), you will see that I say that there is no drama of atheist human-

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ism. Merleau-Ponty said in his lecture, “In Praise of Philosophy,” at the Collège de France, in reference to Henri de Lubac (but without quoting him), that he did not know why for believers all non-theism is always a form of atheism or anti-theism. Why, if he was not speaking about God, did believers think he was speaking against God? Merleau-Ponty was never against God (the same was not true of Sartre). I think it is the same today in France. One day, someone in my family told me, “I don’t need your God.” For ten years I wanted to convert him, and then I understood that he had converted me: I have concluded that it is possible to live without God, and indeed, we all have to live without God, even the believer. As Ernst Jüngel said in his book God as the Mystery of the World, we can live without God, and to live without God is not to be against God, since if I live without God, I have to live only with my own humanity. This is exactly what Levinas was talking about when he said that I have to be separated, created, atheist. For me it is exactly the same. Next, I didn’t want to say that it is better to be married, as if fidelity was easier because I am married. I am married, and I don’t want to write outside my experience because I think that one is always writing from one’s own experience. I know a lot of people who are absolutely not believers but who are completely faithful to their spouses, and I was thinking of one of them when I wrote that “[t]he union of the flesh is not ‘better’ in sacramental marriage; it is ‘other,’ or rather, differently oriented.” 13 Lovers may simply be content to be part of humanity, which by itself is very significant in their relationship, and they may also believe in the fidelity of the flesh. In my view, you don’t need God to live in the fidelity of the flesh. God just wants to give us a new meaning of fidelity, which is human too but is not only human, in the conversion of Eros into Agape. The Eucharist is God who gives himself first in the act of agape. Then I can live from this act—“this is my body”—but this act is also a Christian one as well. RK: But in Proverbs we learn that divine wisdom—Sophia—was there from the beginning of time giving herself to the world and to all things in the world. You don’t have to wait for Jesus Christ and the last supper for a Eucharistic presence of God in the world. Isn’t the act of Abraham and Sarah offering food to the strangers at Mamre already a Eucharistic event of hospitality to the Stranger? Could Matthew 25 have hoped for more? Doesn’t Jesus identify the Christ with any stranger (hospes) being a host or guest of Eucharistic hospitality? Not just those initiated in the Christian or Jewish faith, not just those who cry out “Lord, Lord”! If anything Matt 25 seems to proclaim the message of a natural, universal baptism for everyone—of any religion or none—for anyone who gives or receives a cup of cold water. The Kingdom is wide open for all who wish to enter. Isn’t that what Christ the stranger (hospes) announces in Matt 25?

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EF: Yes, but Jesus Christ is the topos of transformation. RK: For people who believe in Jesus, yes, but what about the vast majority of those in the world who do not? Are they excluded from transformation? I don’t think Jesus would want that, and I read him as saying as much in Matthew 25: he is every and any stranger. And that includes Buddhists who believe in the compassionate sharing of food with all sentient beings. Or Jews and Muslims who believe in Abraham and Sarah’s wager of absolute hospitality and act accordingly. And those who profess no explicit religion or faith but actually do love and justice, actually incarnate the call to host the stranger, enact the call of the beloved. EF: That is the second point—what does it meant to be transformed? First, I say that the Eucharist changes eros into agape. When you go to the Eucharist, the sense of “This is my body” changes from what it is between a man and a woman to what it is between God and humanity. Salvation does not mean that God takes me from my animality—as if I was an animal and now become a human. You are absolutely right: that would be a new form of Gnosticism or dualism. But I think that salvation is a transformation of myself in the form of inhabitation. Salvation absolutely does not mean that now you don’t have any drives and you have to be good and so on. It means that you accept that someone else is coming where you are. Salvation is not only transformation of the situation; it is transformation where you are. Salvation is the act of accepting the other. The difference between Lacoste and me is that for Lacoste we are first in finitude, but then we are coram deo, and when you are coram deo everything changes. But my thesis is that we are cum deo, not coram deo. (And cum deo is my name—Emmanuel!) This means that salvation is first the fact that you are not alone where you are. For example, you are living something in your passion, drive, or sexuality, and you are completely alone—and then salvation is to accept that someone else is coming. RK: But why should that not be the work of eros? As mentioned, Dionysius the Areopagite calls Christ eros—not some separate paternal agape that is coming to save and transform eros? Christ is both eros and agape at once: “I and the Father are one.” Considering Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I would say that while Freud hardly had a theological bone in his body, he can help us rethink Christian eros psychoanalytically when he says eros is always an opening to otherness, the outside, the strange, the new, the unexpected. It is wonder and surprise (which are the flip side of trauma and operate according to the same temporality of Nachträglichkeit. The basic insight of unconscious eros is that self alone is not enough—we always need the Other who

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comes. What Levinas calls “exteriority” or “transcendence.” If you are left to yourself, you die—that’s thanatos. Eros is what comes from the other and goes toward the other; and it is both metaphysical and organic as a love drive. Sometimes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud makes it sound purely biological and zoological, but then you turn the page and he’s talking about Schopenhauer, the Upanishads, Kant, and Plato. And then one can see that eros is, deep down, at once a biological and ontological drive toward otherness—and, we could add (though Freud never did) a drive toward Eucharistic communion. Eros is not a “chaos” of organic sensation that needs to be saved and transformed by something else. The body is redeemed and redeemable precisely as the call of desire, the cry of the flesh. The body is flesh. It doesn’t need to become it. Surely that is the basic phenomenological message of Christian incarnation—the divine word as flesh through and through: Hic est corpus meum! The Word (Logos, Christ) is not just acting as flesh, as if it were flesh, pretending to be flesh, it is flesh—body and blood. So the body is not an organic mess waiting for God to come along and knock it into shape—and make it human! The body is already flesh: that’s why God has always desired it and wants to become it, again and again. But only if we, as loving human beings, as erotic beings, let word be flesh. The God who may be (Exodus 3:14) can only be flesh if we say yes to the call. If human eros answers to divine eros, flesh to flesh, hand to hand, mouth to mouth, corps-àcorps. EF: There are two senses of the question of transformation. First, there is the ontological sense, which means that resurrection is an ontological event, not an ontic one. It is not something that happens in the world but something that changes the structure of the world. And this project stands from the beginning of creation, from before creation. That is Irenaeus’ perspective. RK: Yes. I agree. And for Ireaneus, Creation is already good—from the word go. When God created eros in the first act of genesis, it was good. And it remains so unless we make it otherwise. EF: We agree on that. Then the second point is knowing what transformation is for me; and in The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, I am only speaking of transformation for me because the Eucharist is a viaticum—that is, it is my manner of being transformed today. And of course I agree with you when you say that in psychoanalysis I have to welcome what happens in myself and welcome the other. RK: But when I mention Freud, I am not thinking only of the psychoanalytic situation. The other is not only the analyst, or for the analyst. Freud has some interesting things to say about Eros as a life force and a love force, revealing

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that desire is not a chaos of organic impulses that need to be converted into something else. I think he’s right. And if we combine that insight with the bold mystical teaching from Pseudo-Dionysius on, that God created us with eros and that God is eros, then we have the invitation to live that out in relation to others. We don’t need marriage or some formal ecclesiastical sacrament of Baptism or the Eucharist—to redeem it. (Though I personally am very committed to both Catholic sacraments, I do not want to prescribe them as normative or paradigmatic for those who do not share such sacramental practices or beliefs.) As Chesterton said, when we meet our Maker, he will not ask us why we were not more like Him but why we were not more like ourselves. EF: Yes, I agree with you. But the question is why there is not only eros but also thanatos. In fact, God came to redeem us from thanatos. And that is the sense of chaos for me. I saw that if God is present in the Eucharist, he can come where I am in passion, drives, anxiety, so that I am not alone. And I think the Eucharist is why when I am speaking about the lovers there is a matrimonial perspective. RK: But for you it seems the matrimonial is teleological—erotic love is in search of marriage, fulfilled by marriage, crowned by marriage. Like the earthly Mary being “assumed” into a heavenly Mother. The Song of Songs doesn’t stand a chance. Nor the troubadours of fine amour. Nor most lovers in our world today (at least in the West). There is still, it seems to me, a privileging of the matrimonial in your analysis. And don’t get me wrong—I am all for the matrimonial (I am happily married for forty years with two wonderful daughters!). But I think the matrimonial is not the first or last paradigm of eros. The primary paradigm is the nuptial, meaning a binding of two beings (of whatever sex or gender) in an interplay of togetherness. The poet John Donne speaks here of “commingling” and “interanimation.” And chapter 8 of the Song of Songs speaks of a free play of love (eros) that is stronger than death (thanatos)—a sacred erotic liaison that is prior to duties and responsibilities of marriage contracts, laws and norms relating to childbearing, property and the economy of a home. “Matrimonial” comes from the words “Mater” and “maternity.” It refers to the life of motherhood (and fatherhood) and carries all the necessary protections and provisions required for parental child-reading, sharing a house and domestic concerns. By contrast, the shepherd and Shulamite woman in the Song of Songs have no home, don’t mention marriage or law—and there isn’t a baby in sight! Just fawns and doves and lilies and pomegranates! If one is going to make distinctions between eros and agape I would place eros with the nuptial and agape with the matrimonial. Which is not to deny for one moment that the two can complement and supplement each other—or overlap. Nuptial eros is

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sometimes a precursor to matrimonial agape, but not always. And every marriage needs a bit of nuptial play to keep it alive. This is not just a question for the Abrahamic tradition, either: it is also present in the Celtic wisdom literature (Emer and Fand) and in Greek mythology (Aphrodite and Hera). It seems to be a transcultural, almost perennial concern. EF: Though it seems that way, I am not in fact privileging the matrimonial; it is something else. If you are married only because of tradition, it means nothing, or it is not enough. In the Catholic tradition, it is written that you always have to celebrate the Eucharist when you celebrate a marriage. It is the meaning of the Christian marriage, but no one is obliged to believe in it. For believers, there is no “This is my body” independently of Christ’s “This is my body” to humanity. But it is of course possible for non-believers to read my books. In fact, a lot of people who are not believers read them, even in France, because they are first speaking about the “simply human” and also its meaning in a Christian culture (which is not only a past culture). A believer is not “better” than a non-believer, but he has something else which is simply different. RK: I fully agree that non-Christians would get a huge amount from your books. You are an excellent phenomenologist! And your Christian philosophy is profoundly anthropological. “Christ as man fully alive,” as the Greek Fathers taught. EF: Yes. You can say, “I am not a believer but I would like to know what it means to eat a body in Christ.” I tried to find the credibility of Christianity, and I think the aim of Christianity today is not to convert others. Credibility is not only belief but is also the philosophical act of showing that Christianity always has a meaning for today. That is why I said in Parcours d’embûches that there is no apologetics in my work—or at least I hope there is not because I don’t want to convert. It is first necessary that religion be credible, and afterward the question of believing in God is raised. Developing a phenomenology of the “simply human” is not immediately imposing the question of divinity. I am a philosopher, but I am also a believer, and if I am a believer I can say that. RK: And you do. You boldly own up to that. You say, “I am doing Catholic hermeneutics.” Indeed, when you do phenomenological hermeneutics you honestly acknowledge where you are speaking from. I admire that confessional candor and integrity. EF: Yes. That is why I say in Crossing the Rubicon that “[t]he more we theologize, the better we philosophize.” 14

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NOTES 1. This text presents an edited and expanded version of a conversation between Emmanuel Falque and Richard Kearney, held at Boston College on October 26, 2016. It has been transcribed and edited by Sarah Horton. 2. Côte à côte, the French expression for “side by side,” translates literally as “rib to rib.” 3. See Emmanuel Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 1–4, “Introduction: The Swerve of the Flesh.” 4. See the following chapter. 5. See Richard Kearney, “Toward an Open Eucharist,” in Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue: Boundaries, Transgressions, and Invitations, ed. Marianne Moyaert and Joris Geldhof, 138–55 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015) and Richard Kearney, “Two Prophets of Eucharistic Hospitality,” Japan Mission Journal 68, no. 1 (2014): 14–25. 6. See Aristotle, De Anima, trans. J.A. Smith (London: Clarendon, 1931), 2, 428. 7. See ibid., 418. 8. Falquer, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, 170. 9. See Paul Ricœur, “The Nuptial Metaphor,” in André LaCoque and Paul Ricœur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, 265–306, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 10. Falquer, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, 138. 11. Ibid., 134. 12. See Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), chapter 4, “In the Flesh: Sacramental Imagination.” 13. Falquer, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, 170. 14. Emmanuel Falque, Crossing the Rubicon, trans. Reuben Shank (New York: Fordham, 2013), 25.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by J.A. Smith. London: Clarendon, 1931. Falque, Emmanuel. Crossing the Rubicon. Translated by Reuben Shank. New York: Fordham, 2013. ———. The Wedding Feast of the Lamb. Translated by George Hughes. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Kearney, Richard. Anatheism: Returning to God After God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. ———. “Toward an Open Eucharist.” In Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue: Boundaries, Transgressions, and Invitations, edited by Marianne Moyaert and Joris Geldhof, 138–155. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. ———. “Two Prophets of Eucharistic Hospitality.” Japan Mission Journal 68, no. 1 (2014): 14–25. Ricœur, Paul. “The Nuptial Metaphor.” In André LaCoque and Paul Ricœur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, 265–306. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Chapter Six

Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body

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For the palliative care unit at Luynes-CHU, Tours, France “No one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body” 2—and philosophers probably less than anybody. There is an infinite gap, if not to say a chasm, between talk “about” the body and the reality “of” the body. Philosophers see it and even sense it, when they finally come into contact with suffering bodies. Physicians, constantly thrust into the organic and engrossed by their technique, live this reality, but do not always have the words for expressing it. The very paradox of ethics probably consists in the fact that it never speaks much of the body except to escape from it—or rather, that it always seeks to create meaning there where suffering is of the order of the infans (without speech or “infancy”). This is the case for two reasons. (a) First of all, ethics often lacks anthropology, or even “metaphysics,” such that one will seek consensus or values without truly “ontologizing” corporeality. Yet the issue is not only that of establishing norms, even when they are shared ones, but of knowing what this so-called “human” body is about—a body that we still continually put to work, treat, sometimes even sculpt, often massage and also manipulate. In other words, we are still waiting for the announcement of an “existential analytic of the body,” the kind of analytic that would turn the human body, including its animal and biological dimensions, into the “transcendental” that could serve as the starting point for the appearance of the world (Nietzsche). The corporeality of such an analytic would no longer be given as “present-tohand” (vorhanden) or “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden), but simply as “there” (Da), outside of and beyond any grasp. 3 The least one can say is that the medical body lives by bodily struggle [corps-à-corps]. Silence is called for when the body is exposed. By talking too much or too technically one runs 91

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the risk of smothering the pain that nevertheless tries to make itself heard. 4 (b) Secondly, philosophers who do ethics tend to set themselves up as prophets or forerunners of “meaning,” thereby communicating faith in a “signified” to a medical corps that should first simply see how suffering is exacerbated in its pure and simple humanity. Hermeneutics and phenomenology have secretly “joined forces” in order to affirm the “primacy of sense” (Ricœur) or the “intentionality of consciousness” (Husserl), leading us to believe that nothing remains outside the signified or, rather, that to live is always to make sense through narrative or the intentional aim. Admittedly there is always a “phenomenology of the night” and clarity does not prevail everywhere. Yet, the “night of phenomenology” (rather than the “phenomenology of the night”) does not only express the pathos of suffering (Michel Henry), but instead renounces “making sense” of an overflow of the self by the self, where only silence is called for. The chaos of suffering or the excess of pain are not depths to be tidied up or gone beyond. At the very most this chasm will be “contained” or ”limited” in the “being-there” of those who are charged with accompanying it. One always “dies” alone (Heidegger), just as one always “suffers” alone. The “mineness” (Jemeinigkeit) of moral suffering and even more that of physical pain is lived and is seen in the “clinic” (klinein, to recline) by anyone who knows how to observe it: there, confined to the bed and tied to this body as if encapsulated. We still need the eyes to see this suffering, to allow it to exhibit itself and not always wish to master everything. [Instead we must practice] “being-there” and almost simply “existing,” as Donatien Mallet says about the care maintained “between science and existence”: “This attitude of welcome without mastery is at the opposite end of what one learns in departments of medicine. A whole apprenticeship is necessary. Rather than comprehending, mastering, responding or doing, it is a matter of sitting down, standing still, giving up knowing in order to let be.” 5 Accordingly, the “excess of sense over non-sense,” the “hypertrophy of flesh over body,” and the “primacy of passivity over activity” are today so many pitfalls to avoid, certainly in philosophy but also in the ethical discourse aimed at the health professions. The topics of descending into the depths rather than making sense of it via narrative, acknowledging the thinglike strangeness of my own body rather than solely reducing it to the lived body, the struggle for life or the power of the organic rather than simply welcoming suffering, all open up onto the concept of the “spread body,” caught between the “extended body” and the “lived body.” Already conceptually posited in The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, it must at the same time be experienced physically and differently (by the surgical unit and palliative care). The time has come to work out what I only suggested in some preparatory lines:

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To inhabit the realm of the nerves, to recover the lucidity of Chaos, or rather to weigh one’s nerves by the evidence of the pure flesh, that is what makes up what is organic in our humanity. We hardly dare to confront it, yet we are continually called back to it. Artaud protests in a kind of passion that is almost Christlike, “whatever I have been able to make of my life, it has not stopped me gently re-penetrating into my own being, and settling myself there a bit more firmly every day” [Le Pèse-Nerfs/The Nerve Meter]. The body “is spread out,” more than it is extended or lived. To repenetrate one’s own being does not simply come down to being incorporated in a physical or objective body (Körper) or to be incarnated in a phenomenological or subjective flesh (Leib), instead it means to be embodied [. . .] in an organic flesh made up of nerves, muscles, digestion, secretion, respiration [. . .] things that can, like so much of “this is my body,” remain foreign to me if I am not fully able to make them my own. [. . .] Moreover, the bedridden patient knows this. The hospices are so full of them that we often forget this: the suffering body often becomes just this body splayed out on its bed, having a hard time accepting it. My body weighs on me, not because it is first of all mine, but on the contrary because sickness makes it so difficult to assume it as mine, although I must wear and bear it all the same. 6

THE INCARNATE The Woes and the Words of the Body There are “woes” [maux: evils, pains, hurts] and “words” [mots, pronounced like maux] of the body. Paradoxically one (suffering it) does not come without the other (saying it). Yet, to be clear, it is not at all a matter of “speaking” or even of “exchanging” or “transmitting” so as just to interpret or make sense. A hermeneutics of the text or of language or even the rooting of a life in the narrative of its personal and family history already signifies “too much” from the point of view of a meaning either presupposed or always to be pursued. To return to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s authoritative definition in the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception, phenomenology “involves describing, and not explaining or analyzing. This first rule—to be a ‘descriptive psychology’ or to return ‘to the things themselves,’ which Husserl set for an emerging phenomenology—is first and foremost the disavowal of science.” 7 For the phenomenologist, but maybe sometimes also for the physician, description must take precedence over interpretation and facticity over sense. Both stand there “in front of,” or at times “with,” and investigate experience more than knowledge. Zurück zu den Sachen selbst—“back to the things themselves.” This celebrated slogan of phenomenology certainly belongs to philosophy, but it is lived and encountered also in art or literature and in medical practice. The disavowal of science in no way describes, either in Merleau-Ponty or in any other phenomenologist, and even less for any physician, a disqualification of epistemology for the benefit of ethics or

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discourse. Nothing would be more contrary or even perverse, especially as regards palliative care, than to reject scientific or technological measures (diagnosis, morphine, or others) in the name of a supposed or necessary change of paradigm from “curative” to “palliative.” To say with Heidegger that “science itself does not think” (Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht) does not mean that science “cannot think.” Quite to the contrary, it means that “its auxiliary means” are not of the order of thinking or of “going to the bottom of” (ergründen) but belong instead to knowing and to “grounding” (begründen). 8 We must descend to the “ground” (Grund), where the roots of the tree of metaphysics and hence our existences are buried. This is probably the “palliative” approach faced with the “curative,” to care rather than to intervene, although these two approaches should not be opposed in too unilateral a fashion. Husserl, the father of phenomenology, already indicates that the “life world” (Lebenswelt) is the “forgotten basis of sense of the natural sciences” beyond any theoretical or scientific structure. The “scaffolding” of science or even of medicine should not forget that it is based on the ground of a “pre-reflexive” world marked by everydayness and corporeality or even just humanity. In science and medicine there is no “construction” without “substructure,” that is to say, no abstracting and technologizing without a “human world” that undergirds it and gives it meaning. Maybe this is the very thing that an “ethics of the spread body” wants to remind us of, certainly inasmuch as it bears on the human body, but also on the animal and biological part in us, as that by which we are constituted. 9 Whether returning to the “ground” from which we are drawn or paying attention to the “life world” from which we are woven, the radical nature of the “words” of language have no other goal than to express the “woes” of the body. The well-known “transfer” from one medical team to another, especially in the realm of nursing care, does not first come to “interpret” (hermeneutics), but rather to “describe” or simply to “say” (phenomenology). Far from inscribing suffering immediately into a “narrative,” which is all the same proper to do if all one desires is to attain meaning, it is suitable first to expose it or even to “paint” or “sculpt” it in order to render it visible on this “canvas” or on this “material” of the body where it is being incarnated. Language is never first, it is always second. One does not begin with interpretation but with exposition. It does not immediately produce meaning but opens onto the yawning gap of the impossibility of signifying. By “grafting hermeneutics onto phenomenology” (Ricœur) too much, physicians themselves have forgotten the silent plunge into the body that continually comes to constitute them. The palliative approach no longer seeks the “why” [pourquoi?] in any causal fashion (leitmotif of the curative approach), but sometimes is caught in the “for what” [pour quoi?] in a final manner (quest for meaning or search for signification). Between the two, there is nothing—and

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it is maybe in this “nothing” or this “between the two” that the “spread body” is maintained, if not caught in suffering at least incapable of getting out of it: “The rose does have no why; it blossoms without reason, forgetful of itself, oblivious to our vision.” 10 Describing before Constructing It is thus understood that in “transfer,” or rather “hand-off” (suffering and passing by), in the medical and nursing world the first requirement is precisely to “describe” and not to “interpret” or “analyze.” Words “clash” for the one who knows how to hear them, just as suffering “howls” for the one who knows how to see it. One does not tend from one end (at the patient’s bedside) and analyze from the other (in synthesis or transfer). Everything is care for the body and word of the body. Caregivers “tend” [panse] patients when they attend to their wounds as they also “think” [pense] them when they record their state. The continuity of care is absolute and the fragile and delicate manner of “saying” and “speaking” imitates and transcribes the attentive and careful mode of “touching” and “tending.” One hears the moan [plainte] as one enters into the wound [plaie] and thus one entrusts the task of transcribing the “woes of the body” (in care) to the “words of the body” (in transfer/transmission) within a single act by which one becomes passion [pâtir, lit. suffering] and passing [passage], in other words, guide [passeur: lit. ferryman, smuggler]. “Nausea,” “vomiting,” “weakness,” “soiling,” “flushing,” “headaches,” “convulsions,” “aspirations,” “scabs,” “tumor excoriation,” “swollen tongue,” “pus,” “infection,” “congestion,” “secretions,” “stool,” “repulsive smell,” “pressure point,” “dilation,” “digestion,” “cognitive disorders,” “paraplegia,” “enema,” “saturated diapers,” “bleeding,” “discharge,” “sedation,” “edemas,” “elimination,” “feeding,” “tracheotomy,” “urinary probe,” “wheezing,” “hallucination,” “decompression”—these are as much “words” clamoring for a hearing as “woes” displayed on the body. There is an almost perfect equivalence between words [mots] and woes [maux] in the “transfer,” not because it speaks sense in it (there is neither narrative nor interpretation as of yet), but to the contrary because it “describes” the movements of consciousness or, rather, the kinesthesia of the body. And if one really wants to be convinced of this and expects instead a patient or someone who truly “suffers” his pain to note down the drama in unfiltered language, then one must read Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain, quite far from his Letters from My Windmill, unless one perceives in the “goat of Mr. Seguin” the “physical death struggle” that his author also had to undergo. Struck with syphilis at the age of twenty, afflicted with tremors and breathlessness, even falling and collapsing, Daudet writes, according to the very words of his manuscript, dictante dolore—“as pain dic-

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tates him.” 11 Language neither makes “sense” nor excavates non-sense. Instead it is expressed in the “neuter” or the “outside of sense,” to say it with Maurice Blanchot. 12 “What are you doing at the moment?” asks Daudet. He answers: “I’m in pain.” [. . .] Shower noises, ringing voices, the metallic click of foils from the back room. The deep sadness this causes me—the physical life of which I am no longer capable. [. . .] Concentration on walking straight. Fear of an attack: shooting pains that either nail me to the spot, or twist me around so that my foot pumps up and down like a knife-grinder’s. [. . .] Memory of my first visit to Dr. Guyon in the rue Ville-l’Evêque. He probed me: some tenseness in the bladder, the prostate a little sensitive. In a word, nothing. But that nothing was the start of everything: the Invasion. Warning signs going back a long way. Strange aches; great flames of pain furrowing my body, cutting it to pieces, lighting it up. [. . .] My friends, the ship is sinking. I’m going down, holed below the water-line. The flag’s still nailed to the mast, but there’s fire everywhere, even in the water. Beginning of the end. [. . .] How much I suffered last night, in my heel and in my ribs. Sheer torture [. . .] there are no words to express it, only howls of pain could do so. Are words actually any use to describe what pain (or passion, for that matter) really feels like? Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful. No general theory about pain. Each patient discovers his own, and the nature of pain varies, like a singer’s voice, according to the acoustics of the hall. 13

The “incarnate” is the word of the body for expressing this link to myself and to my own body, as a “weight,” a “plasticity” and a “nerve meter,” from which I could never separate or detach myself. My own body penetrates me or even destroys me, as a nail grown into my flesh [l’ongle s’incarne dans ma chair]. Ready to construct “itself” (in health), it is also ready to selfdestruct (in illness). A tumor (for example, the cancerous tumor of the tongue, of the jaw, or of the anus) not only does not simply “grow,” it also begins to “invade,” “dissect,” “putrefy,” or “decompose,” in such a way that the person him- or herself becomes “disfigured” by it. This is where palliative care (I will return to this in the conclusion) tries “aesthetically” to “reconfigure” the patient. One must have gone to see this in order to come to terms with its horror, although the care, without realizing it, will attach us to the body “tended” like this and makes of the “common humanity” the sole “metaphysical” base by which we are still united. 14 I “Have” a Body Thus, surely I “am” my body, as philosophy continually repeats and as the nurses here certify. Yet, I also “have” a body and even if I deny it one day my body “will have” me. The body as spread out certainly is not to be reduced to

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its thing-like dimension (Descartes’ res extensa). But the ethical or phenomenological dimension (lived body or Husserl’s Leib) is also not sufficient for it. There is an “in-between” or a “middle term.” Bursting with the organic, the mine, the fleshly expanding is what I undergo and have never chosen. I no longer live my body. In some way this body lives me. In the experience of illness “I am another” (Rimbaud) and it guides what in it is me [moi]. I become the object of my pain and by becoming it I accordingly objectify myself. The lived experience of suffering is practically no longer mine because the self [le moi] itself is wrecked through suffering. I thought I was hurting here or there (pain), but now I become solely “this” hurt (suffering). This certainly shows the unity of the psychical and the somatic, but also and above all, beyond this unified complex, the nothing that remains if not a “me thing” and “quasi animal,” splayed out on a bed as if borne away by its extremes (convulsions, scabs, tumors, secretions, digestion, discharge, sedation [. . .]) and nevertheless envisaged in a human fashion (the caregiver’s attention to the patient, deciphering the moaning more than attention to the words, “being-there” without illusion of “being-with,” maintained in the “limit” of the palliative approach and renouncing the “omnipotence” of the curative). As I have noted elsewhere, The “spread body” between Descartes’s extended body and Husserl’s lived body [The Wedding Feast of the Lamb § 1: “The Residue of the Body”] preserves the resistance of the extended body and the intentionality of the lived body. It is at the same time the “body” in its absolutely irreducible materiality and the “flesh” in its lived experience that is impossible, however, to synthesize. The anaesthetized, sleeping, or crucified body appears, and appears to itself, first as “body” (Körper) in an organicity that is at times so invasive, and suffering so much, that it is in fact necessary to silence its pain, and later as “flesh” (Leib) in the aim that, however, I or another never cease to attribute to it (the doctor’s aim, for example, regarding respect for the human, and other, body on which he is in the midst of operating). 15

CARE OR THE “CORPS-À-CORPS” [LIT. “BODY TO BODY,” REFERRING TO HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT] Tending [Panser] and Thinking [Penser] the Body The nurse at work or serving such an “expanding” (of the body)—splayed out on a bed, stretched out on a chair, or even extended on a cross—is the one who makes strong (firmare), who tends the body, who takes care of the “infirm” (infirmus: weak, feeble), who holds upright someone who is collapsing and sustains with his or her presence what otherwise would vanish into complete absence. 16 The physician who “treats” and who “heals” (medical care), stands first of all within the distance of “thinking” or even of

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speaking and “diagnosing.” The physician prescribes the protocol (of care) and becomes the bearer of speech (to the patient, to the family, or even to the medical corps). Yet physicians must learn from nurses or at least not forget that it is not exclusively a matter of “thinking,” but also a matter of “tending.” For one will practice one’s job effectively by remaining a “doctor” (toubib—from the Arab “tabib”—as “military doctor” ready to do anything or even to hear anything). This swapping of places obviously does not mean that one should no longer remain “at one’s place.” A team just like an institution operates within “roles,” which it had better not interchange. Yet identity never arises just out of functionality, even if the “services” that might renounce it are rare. It relies on a “shared humanity” in which the caregivers and the patients are engaged together. Medicine takes place “between science and existence” and one will exist in a unified manner when the epistemological pole and metaphysical research are tied together. 17 To Inhabit the Limit The “human as such” [l’homme tout court], defined ontologically and held within the “limit” of suffering and death, hence cannot be satisfied with a flight into a netherworld, certainly not when in good health but even less so in sickness. If there is “spirituality” within the accompaniment of those who are suffering or indeed those who are dying, then it would in this case concern more care in the here and now than consolation about a beyond. To “inhabit the limit” (which is not “limitation”) is to renounce the “curative” approach for the “palliative.” Neither the caregiver nor the patient can still draw consolation from what they are not or no more (in good health) and will never be again. In the palliative approach “humbly following the body” is substituted for the curative approach’s unceasing quest for “great health” (Nietzsche). No longer “intervention” but instead “accompaniment.” Not that “caring for” or “tending” would no longer be concerned with healing— wounds [la plaie] always produce complaints [la plainte] if they are not relieved—but inasmuch as the “limit”—in other words, the horizon filled up with existence as much as with the illness—forbids any talk of flight or of regret. Medication alone cannot comfort because it always in the end gives proof of its ineffectiveness. But it is there, in that very hollow, that the fullness of our humanity is held. It is only where “finitude” is finally accepted, when one stops trying to derive the “finite” from the “infinite” or “limit” from “limitation,” that the shared “being-there” of patient and caregiver are finally acknowledged. This is where we enter together into this “sharing of humanity” [partage d’humanité], which should never have been left behind in the first place. 18

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The “Struggling” Body “Sometimes healing, often soothing, always consoling.” This Hippocratic saying, as taken over by Ambroise Paré and Louis Pasteur, accords the “hollow” priority over the “full,” “care” over “performance,” accepts “lack” over the insistence on “success.” One should not misunderstand this. No one in the medical corps gives up on the “struggle.” In philosophy we have spoken too much of passivity and in ethics just of the welcome of the other or of suffering in such a way that we have given up on and have become blind to what there is of struggle “in” life or “for” life. Certainly, we must both “tend” and “think” and have “words” of speech in order to describe the “woes” of the body. But nothing replaces the infra-linguistic, this struggle of the body to survive and not to be abandoned. Nietzsche’s saying that “the body is what is most surprising” 19 is here not only that of a sick person—he was also afflicted with syphilis (following the example of Alphonse Daudet) and practically at death’s door—but it also says something about the experience of illness and of health in it. There is something “surprising” even in the body of the patient, even and sometimes especially for the eyes of the caregiver. What is a major event for the team or even for family and friends is often less the paraphernalia of words with which ill people seek to be consoled or convince themselves that they no longer want to “go on,” but the biological in them, which, paradoxically and in quasi-“animal-like” fashion, often does not want to give up. The patient “wants” to be done and even to “say” so, while his or her body expresses the opposite, gasps for life so as not to leave it, struggles “within” it in an animal-like reflex of survival, and admits in the flesh what his or her words at other times would never have expressed. The discussions about the “end of life” can certainly fix norms for it or even try to “euthanize” it at any price, but there remains a “power of the body” one had better also question before prescribing an “end of life,” starting from the consciousness of a patient who once made a declaration. The struggle within life and the stakes of “survival” are at times such that one cannot predict how many days are left. Indeed, one sometimes gives up for practically “dead” a patient who could almost “rise” on the morrow. One thinks an existence is “finished” that all the same has not said its final word in the vigil of those who have come to meet it. One almost proclaims “passing” [décès] when the power of the living still opens surprising “access” [accès]. Not only are there manifold examples, but caregivers themselves are sometimes amazed. Caring for a body caught in this chancy condition accordingly means to follow it step by step, as it struggles along, rather than decreeing norms that are certainly necessary but at times far from reality. Surprisingly Paul Ricœur himself, the great “upholder” of hermeneutics, of “meaning” and of “interpretation,” made this experience of the “struggle

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of the body” beyond sense and non-sense, if not for himself at least when exposed to the palliative care accorded to his wife Simone first at home and later at the hospital. 20 Ricœur speaks of this struggle or even of the fact that “recourse to the confessional is not necessary” if one really sticks to the essential, as he says in an aside that shows his surprise: “Having said this, what the physician in the palliative care unit bears witness to is the grace granted some dying people that assures what I have called the mobilization of the deepest resources of life in the coming to light of the Essential, fracturing the limitations of the confessionally religious.” 21 Better, because the sick person “is struggling for life until death” 22 and remains still “living up to death” (cf. the title of the book), I, following Ricœur, take the distinction between the person in agony struggling within and for life (agon) and the dying person seen as already dead or “ready to die” (moribundus) to be absolutely essential. Where the “gaze on the dying” is compassionate, “suffers with,” and sees the patient or the one to whom I am “close” as “still living” and hence calling on “the most essential resources of life,” the “spectacle of the moribund” instead is observed from afar, objectified as “soon having to stop living” and thus takes it (almost) as “already dead”: “compassion,” Ricœur says, “is not a moaning-with, as pity, commiseration, figures of regret, can be; it is a struggling-with, an accompanying [. . .] the gaze directed toward the dying person [le mourant] turns toward him as a dying person [un agonisant] who is struggling for life until death and not toward a dying person [un moribond] who will soon be someone dead [un mort].” 23 If there is such a “power of the body” or struggle “in” the life of the organic itself, then it is not surprising that philosophy itself sometimes goes back to Spinoza or Nietzsche (under Gilles Deleuze’s impetus for example), probably because hermeneutics and phenomenology at times have “abstracted” or “separated” (ab-structo) between the living on the one hand and its experience on the other—a sentiment maybe shared by Ricœur at the end of his existence. It was certainly necessary to rid ourselves of the notion of the “mechanical” (Descartes’ extended body). In reaction, philosophy turned to the body proper [corps propre] or to the “flesh” (Leib), a quasi-mystical notion or one so subjectivized that its nature as a thing has been entirely forgotten (Husserl’s lived body). The body as “stretched out” or “spread out” takes from both, from the mechanical and the mystical, from extension and lived experience. Yet it is not a “mixture” but more like an “intermediary space” or a “border zone.” “This” specific body is the one I aid when I am a caregiver or that almost assists me when I am the patient, “stretched out” on the bed as one is stretched out on a cross, taken in the “language of the body,” which becomes its only “word” [verbe]. This body hovering between sleeping and waking, forgetting itself in a gaze sometimes absent sometimes insistent, grasping “this” limb as if it no longer belonged to it, (almost) no longer recognizing itself in a mirror one barely dares to hold out to him or

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her. Neither narrating its history nor undergoing its lived experience—although these are absolutely necessary for “carrying out care”—can cloud or conceal the presence of this corporeal mass “there”: The nursing aides bear its weight each day; the suppurating and gaping abscess or the swelling of “this” tumor continues to have the effect of “repulsing” even the most experienced nurse; the physician’s incomprehension of this particular reaction to a dose of morphine, which shows that alleviating pain is less a firmly declared theory than a practice that has to be adjusted at each moment. Ethics and Ethos An “ethics of the spread body” thus will not search for norms. I would say rather that it stands “beyond” declaration of principles. This is not because a search for values, especially consensual ones, would be unnecessary, but because a substrate always remains, which is not that of communication or even of interaction, but of “being-there” or better of “being beside” or “next to” through which patients finds themselves “accompanied” or at least “assisted.” This particular kind of ethics does not deny the preceding ones but seeks to ground them. It speaks the remainder of the flesh when the “signifying word” has finally gone silent; it speaks the chaos of the body and by the body, rather than the superimposition of significations that water down its exposition. Far from morality (declaration of principles) and even from ethics in the current sense of the term (reflection on principles), the spread body must be considered first in its “manner of being,” its “behavior” or its “ethos” in the precise sense Spinoza gives it in his Ethics: not a “morality” (a scale of values), but an “ethology” (description of a situation in its context), of the “relations of speed and slowness, of the capacity for affecting and being affected.” 24 Human ethics or an ethology of the spread body is in no way a matter of the laboratory, especially in palliative care. It is held “in” life and “by” life, to use Michel Henry’s words, but in this case not for speaking of auto-affection of self by itself in its pathos (or its flesh), but of heteroaffection of self by the other in his or her body (or bios). The “ethics of the spread body” unfolds in a “real situation”; it concerns “real” men and women, even “real bodies,” certainly made of flesh and blood, but also, as I have said, of “nausea,” of “vomiting,” of “asthenia,” of “soiling,” of “flushing,” of “headaches,” of “convulsions,” of “aspirations,” of “scabs,” of “tumors,” and so forth. To be there “in the flesh” [en chair et en os] would not or no longer mean to exist there “in person” (leibhaftig, as Husserl says), but to be made up of “flesh” [chairs] and “bones” [os]. This does not mean that I am being reduced to my anatomical structure or to my biological program. Quite to the contrary, it means that I am being held and maintained in life via “organic forces within me” that make me and render

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me alive, neither only via my matter or my hylē nor exclusively via my spirit or my psychē but via a “body” or a soma through which the whole of myself is expressed and hence also generated. Spinoza’s “cry” stems from this, as it is transmitted and translated by Gilles Deleuze. The medical body would gain not necessarily from passing it along, but at least from becoming its echo. In this way it does not remain confined to the sphere of the “signified” alone but accepts descending “together” into the “unconscious of the body” (Nietzsche) of which we are constituted in shared fashion: “You do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, in given arrangement, a given combination. [. . .] In short, if we are Spinozist, we will not define a thing by its form, nor by its organs and its functions, nor as a substance or a subject. Borrowing terms from the Middle Ages, or from geography, we will define it by longitude and latitude.” 25 THE HYPER-MATERIALITY OF THE BODY The Primitive Text of the Natural Human Scarcely three years after the publication of his first philosophical or even philological work (The Birth of Tragedy), Nietzsche confesses or even decides “to deal with nothing but physiology, medicine, and natural science,” which will finally direct his whole life. 26 An existence affected by illness (as I mentioned, in Nietzsche’s case it was syphilis) can no longer think in the same manner or, rather, will have to “disqualify” all manners of thinking, so as to treat “illness” no longer as a transitory state (toward health), but as the very being of the one who is affected by it. The preface to the second edition (1886) of the Gay Science wonders “what will become of thought itself when it is subjected to the pressure of sickness? This is the question that concerns the psychologist, and here an experiment is possible.” 27 Such a “return to the body” or to the “new viewpoint of illness” obviously does not mean that philosophy or medicine would no longer have anything to do with or should no longer do epistemology; quite the opposite. But both are to be written anew “according to the guideline of the body.” 28 They are no longer to exult in “reassuring terminology” like that of welcome, of listening, of the gift, of attention, and of relationship, although these are certainly always necessary, if they do not at the same time enter and descend into the “jumble of the body.” In truth, they are always already within it, yet even so they deny it by categorizing or even planning and signifying. Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil: “Behind the camouflage of beautiful, twinkling, tinkling, festive words such as genuine honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, self-sacrifice [. . .] stands the primitive text, the rough text, of the

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natural human.” 29 It is this very thing that palliative care shows by bringing limits to light and that the ethicist, when first an observer of behavior (ethos) but also in search for shared values (ethics), comes to describe before interpreting it or analyzing it. The Living and the Suffering Illness is therefore first abyss and chaos, certainly destructuring of the body, but also of the self, of the social body, of personality, of family and friends, and of everything that ensures that one has not yet been reduced to pure animality. The “rough text of the natural human” must come back up when the “cultural” falls or vanishes. Thus I will here use waking and sleeping not in a philosophical sense (Descartes), but situate it at the heart of medical practice itself. In fact, palliative care and the operating room are two locations from which the “body stretched out” must be thought anew, albeit in a quite different sense. Although morphine and anesthesia are both forms of sleep, they do not maintain the same relationship with waking. While the former (morphine) tries to maintain what is alive in the one suffering, the latter (anesthesia) instead extinguishes as much as possible what is alive so as to make it “operable” beyond any suffering. The technique is the same but with the opposite aim; “sedation” functions as the precise point of the “limit” and “passage” between “suffering” and “dying.” The palliative approach maintains the “living” in suffering; the curative approach abolishes suffering while hoping to preserve bare life. Both concern the “stretched out” or “spread out” body and its ethics or ethos, but in an opposite or inverted way. While the palliative approach pushes the body, whose burden it must always bear, into the direction of the “lived body” (Leib), the curative approach tends toward the “extended body,” in which the body is reduced to the state of a thing (Körper). In both cases the aim of the physician, of the visitors, or of the patient him- or herself genuinely intends the body and thereby turns it not into a simple animal or biological body, but into a “human body” woven of a history and truly able to be “narrated.” Yet its materiality or, as Levinas says, its hyper-materiality also remains undeniable. It remains abstract in an “idealism of the flesh,” which absolute “lived experience” or the “feeling” of the body could be peddled all the way into medical discourse itself. Writing in response to an existence and a family decimated by the war, the Jewish philosopher writes: “My being doubles with a having; I am encumbered by myself. And this is material existence. [. . .] To understand the body starting with its materiality [. . .] is to reduce it to an ontological event.” 30 Philosophical discussions of Levinas’ work have turned too quickly to ethics or veered too rapidly toward an interpretation of the face as “welcome of the other,” “gift,” or “sacrament of the neighbor.” Even medical or religious talk has “omitted” or rather “abstracted” the tragic

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that precedes the phenomenological and underlies it all the way through. Yet Totality and Infinity had not forgotten it—a work that opens precisely with “war” in its preface before sanctioning the “face” as the effigy of alterity: “Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality [. . .]. In war reality rends the words and images that dissimulate it, to obtrude in its nudity and its harshness. Harsh reality (this sounds like a pleonasm!), harsh object-lesson, at the very moment of its fulguration when the drapings of illusion burn war is produced as the pure experience of pure being.” 31 “Flesh”—Singular and Plural [la “chair” et les “chairs”] Between flesh and body, between the lived experience of the body and its extension, between Leib and Körper, one would thus have to return to the “flesh” or rather the flesh of many. The plural “flesh” are here understood as these shreds of the body that are impossible to separate from myself, tumors that are not me and even so progressively invade me; they flood me in invasive fashion and soon become me entirely. In medicine one speaks of “flesh” being cicatrized, in cooking of “flesh” being “firmed up,” in the jails of “flesh” being flayed, or in war of “flesh” being crushed as “cannon fodder” [chairs à canon]. 32 Between Leib and Körper, between body as subject and body as object, stands caro (in Latin), Fleisch (in German), flesh (in English), which one had better retrieve today, including in palliative care, which is directly exposed to it. Philosophy is also concerned with “meat.” Not that one could reduce the reality of the “spread body” to it, far from it, but inasmuch as the living and suffering human emerges from “living flesh” more than from “dead flesh”—from the “pig” (the living animal) rather than from “pork” (the same animal as dead), as the linguistic distinction has it. The “remainder of the flesh” when the sick person can no longer say anything but is only able to suffer or maybe just to moan, is not (yet) the dead body, precisely by virtue of the fact that the flesh always “lives” and sometimes manifests an unimaginable “will to carry on.” In palliative care there is no more electrocardiogram or encephalogram, no respirator and certainly no resuscitator. All that is left is “morphine” for enduring a life not yet fully quit. Actually, the “power of the body” becomes the final criterion for guiding action. To “hear the patient” is less about listening to his or her consciousness, which is often muddled by the effect of tumors and medication. It is more about allowing the body to resonate in its deepest “carcass” and “cavities.” It means to be ready to listen as if to pick up the echo of its innermost depths, its blood vessels and canals, its final breaths. The “spread body” is certainly “stretched out” on a surface, if not to contemplate at least to observe, but is also “heard” [s’entend] in the hollows and voids no one, not even medicine, can probe. Life remains still suspended in this chaos of the

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body and in the inundation by flesh. It is advisable together to cling to these anchoring points, not in order to master everything but instead in order to recognize that not everything has been reached yet. The lapse or the limit between the “living” and the “corpse” is at times so fine that one has a hard time noticing it, but it is this frontier that is the existential space where the body must still and always continue to express itself. PITY FOR MEAT [LA VIANDE] Gilles Deleuze speaks of “pity for meat” when he is commenting on Francis Bacon’s canvasses, 33 but it can also be used in the context of palliative care and in regard to the action of nursing rather than healing. When illness has actually become a “state” and is no longer simply the temporary and transitory phase toward the restoration of health, when the suffering body can be soothed but no longer either healed or totally anesthetized, then flesh (singular and plural) or “living meat” is held before the caregiver. It raises the question just how far this body “goes” that is deconstructed, self-destructs, is mutilated and sometimes even “hollowed out” by the illness. When the “lived flesh” fades away or no longer manages to express itself in its locus of experience (Leib) and when the “body” is not or not yet reduced to the condition of an object or corpse (Körper), it goes through this limited state of “living flesh” that at times can only be seen via “skin on bones”—something we always are even when our “great health” makes us forget this. Palliative care, or sometimes art or literature, remind us of this because in this case the “body” has no other choice than leaving itself exposed, to the point of showing our limit and even our animality that in this case cannot be disguised any longer. “Real crucifixions happen at the slaughterhouse,” exclaimed Francis Bacon, thereby taking up in his own fashion Rembrandt’s or Soutine’s “flayed ox.” 34 At the risk of shocking or occasionally even of repelling, there is also something of an emaciated and often gaunt “carcass” on the hospital bed, albeit (luckily) except for the fact that hospitality, in contrast to the [butcher’s] block (and at times to euthanasia?) will not try to “terminate” the body but instead to “nurse” it. Thus the “body splayed out” remains human not because its organs could indicate it as such but through the “aim” and the “bodily struggle” [le “corps-à-corps”] with which care—just like eros in other places and in other ways—comes to surround it. “Pity for meat” (Deleuze-Bacon) becomes for me “pity for the body,” not against the organic and the biological dimensions, but across them in order to aim at it differently. In the “bodily contact” [le “corps-à-corps”] of care or of eros the other becomes “flesh” (or lived experience of the body) for me, inasmuch as he or she becomes incarnate in the materiality of his or her “body” (or of organic-

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ity), which is also of the same “substance” as mine. The body spread out is not reducible to the “body” and still less to meat or to an animal, not because it has nothing in common with them, but because in this case this shared texture is inhabited by a gaze or even a word that serves to humanize it. “Care” makes the body move from animality to humanity just as the eucharistic sacrament is meant for humanizing and not only for divinizing. 35 THE PALLIATIVE AND THE CURATIVE APPROACH To Heal or to Care For “Flesh” or “meat” thus explodes when the body is exposed. One certainly sees this on the operating table in a duly cordoned off “room,” defined by a “field” supposed to demarcate its limits. This flesh is not “dead,” at times it is even “lush,” but it is inhabited differently, namely only by the throbbing or the rattle of what has been anaesthetized. In contrast, the flesh is lived and almost shared in palliative care or at the very least one allows it to be displayed on the entire body or rather on the person on the bed who must be looked after. The “bodily contact” of patient and caregiver is quite different in the curative and the palliative context. It is not that one is worth more than the other but the “stages” of one (the curative) are not those of the other (the palliative). (a) In the first instance, the curative context, one must agree to “instrumentalize.” Indeed, this is its very function in order to operate and thereby to obtain the expected result. To extend the palliative approach into the curative would constitute confusion of norms and just as much of procedures. The talk that tries to make physicians believe that their profession is only about “care,” or about attention to and hearing of the other, does not stand up to the many hours spent “with” the body—for example in the operating room. This is similar to the way in which for Rodin the human body is also material to work on or even to sculpt in his atelier. Here, in contrast, one expects and hopes that the body will respond to the “mastery” one would like to impose on it. (b) The second instance, the palliative context, instead has the task of “keeping vigil.” It is not the case that palliative care does not instrumentalize or that curative care does not keep vigil [veille], but the point is that in the palliative context slumber is only an intermediary time or moment between waking [la veille]. It is all a matter of limit or border and all stands at the limit or border. The extra dose of “morphine” (called “bolus”) can make one drowsy or sleepy, can lead to falling asleep or even dying. The patient in palliative care continually hovers on the edge between life and death. The conviction that one side [life] is (almost) always better than the other [death] is nonetheless shared by the care team, certain that life is “always” worth being lived as long as the biological human is not entirely extinguished and has not yet expired into the thing-like or the ani-

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mal. The limits of being-there or of existence, as I have said, keep care in the here below and forbid any appeal to a hereafter, which would probably not be sufficient for consoling the one who is on the verge of leaving us. There is something of the ephemeral in the palliative context, maybe even more so than in the curative. To consecrate it in this way is the distinguishing mark of palliative care. One does not heal so as to extend life into health—one has already given up on this—but one cares in order to “be there” within the illness. Being-There The gaping of the sick body’s chaos means that one is never truly “with” but only “next to” or “at its side.” One does not share the “mineness” of suffering and of death. Consequently the caregiver might be able to contain the failing of the body or at least to limit it, so that it does not completely inundate the psyche of this wasted body. The “silence of organs,” as in (Leriche’s) definition of health, is shattered and howls under the ordeal of or even the defeat by the illness. The cosmetic organization of the subject (world and order) descends into the chaotic (hollowness and disorder). The sick person no longer “has” pain, but “is” and “becomes” the pain that he or she “has.” Being and having become identified with each other and reduced to the body; as is true for each of us although in our “great health” we often pretend not to think about it. One must say with Mallet that “illness gets to the person in the perception of his or her corporeality. This absent body, forgotten in the “silence of organs,” returns. It no longer functions as silent support for the mind. It opens onto a strangeness and introduces an alterity difficult to ensure. Illness is disorder and chaos. It fragments, breaks up, reduces the body to a painful zone or a suffering organ. The limits of the body, which used to be delineated, are reshuffled. Flesh becomes swollen, scrawny, warped, gaping. It oozes and dries up. Illness shoves out of the way the craving for unity within a demarcated body.” 36 In this context, where the caregiver might have believed to be “with” (Mitsein), it emerges that one can really only be “there” (Dasein). To accompany does not mean to walk the same path but to act from “sideways”: “The one who accompanies walks beside, does not direct or master. He or she does not refer exclusively to knowledge. [. . .] The first move is a time of passivity, of receptivity, of welcome, or even of contemplation. The second move is the act of solidarity and of proximity.” 37 Spinoza himself has taught us— and we would be wrong to forget it—that there is nothing worse than pity: “Someone who is easily touched by compassion, and is moved by another’s sorrow or tears, often does something which he afterwards regrets.” 38 Regret over a badly performed action or even an unrestrained feeling can certainly overwhelm the caregiver who thereby loses the proper distance from the

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patient. Yet there is more. To be wary of pity is not just justified through regret over having become attached or even over having been mistaken by shedding “false tears,” as Spinoza calls them. Instead, the caregiver can learn from Spinoza that one cannot simply present a mirror of the illness to the one who already suffers from it. If everything “endeavors to persist in its own being” (conatus), 39 it is health rather than illness that one offers to the suffering person or even to the team that accompanies him or her, joy instead of sadness, increase of the self rather than its destruction. Pity or commiseration falsely pulls the patients “down,” dragging the caregiver down with them. “Being-there” or “being-with” pull them “up,” offering them the struggle for life when they despair of survival, the attempt to raise them “up” when they are lying down, the will to move or at least to allow their “mobility” to be increased (an expression used in hospital parlance), when nothing is left but the immobility of a body so covered with scars that it is bruised by being weighed down. Rehabilitation of Desire In truth, an entirely new concept of desire must be envisioned here or even a veritable conversion performed by what comes down less to the caregiver holding the desired object out to the patient than to “arouse” him or her as a desiring subject. This is why each request is attended to with such care. Each mouthful is “swallowed” through a hole no longer made for “gulping down” like this. “To care” is to create the desirable rather than to wait for desire. Desire is not “lack,” it is “production” and “creator of an object.” Accordingly, we read at the core of the Ethics that “in no case do we [. . .] desire anything because we deem it to be good, but rather we deem a thing to be good because we [. . .] desire it.” 40 The useful and the harmful rather than Good and Evil “in itself” guide palliative care even more than curative medicine. No longer health against illness (assuming that health could be a good “in itself”) but “being well” against “being ill”—these are experience and vocabulary of “accompaniment,” speaking of a patient as more or less “in pain,” “uncomfortable,” or only “moved” with difficulty. Life is the “effort to persist in being” and palliative care remains “struggle for enhancement” and not solely “care for diminishment” or even fading out in the blessed euphoria of substances made for wholly soothing. The prejudice that assumes that palliative care leads to death is just as false as the assumption that curative care restores life. In both cases the same conatus, the same “effort to persist in being,” whether animal or human, guides the caregiver in the attempt to communicate it to the patient. This is why the caregiver upon leaving the room of a patient or even in the most ordinary task rightly has the impression of being almost “emptied of substance” in a kind of “transfer of substance” or of “transubstantiation” (to use a religious term here). The

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conatus or the power of one’s own body, including here that of its organic dimension, is not kept to oneself in care but is given to the other so that he or she would continue to hold onto life. The caregiver must show patients and help them to believe that it is still worth the effort for us and for them to love and desire life. The “patient” “suffers” [pâtit] (as the word suggests in French) and the “caregiver” guides on the “way” [passage]. “Handing over” [passation] rather than handing down [transmission] is “suffering” [pâtir] and “passage” from patient to caregiver. Here “guide” [passeur]—maybe better than “mediator”—designates the medical body as a whole. It does so not inasmuch as one would have to “pass” or “hand over” [faire passer] to another world (as I have underlined, only a very intimate and purely personal approach could introduce these kinds of presuppositions) but, to the contrary, inasmuch as the caregiver “endures” [pâtit] suffering the world and the other in order to make suffering “pass” or to reinscribe it at the heart of a desire made not in order to escape it but instead to inhabit its “limit” and to display it always better. This “bearing of chaos” does not get rid of disorder or the yawning chasm. It says simply that one “stands there” in twos or threes or even more, which is already a lot when everything seems to be falling to pieces. The “team” does not only operate in football or soccer, but at its origin refers to a “series of barges tied to one another and drawn by humans or horses during the time of towboats.” 41 Any irenicism and idealization of care set aside, it goes with palliative care as with “charitable works” [bienfaisance] and “blessing” [bénédiction]: there is no “doing well” [bien-faisance] without “speaking well” [bénédiction]. The appropriateness of “woes” and “words” means that there is not the “body” on one side and the “word” [verbe] on the other. “Care” concerns both, which means that the “word becomes flesh” (on the hospital bed) so that the “flesh becomes word” (in handing over or transfer). The saying of the desert father Mark the Ascetic—“the word becomes flesh so that the flesh becomes word” 42—is not only true of Christ’s incarnation but valid for all our modes of incorporation. “Speaking of language” always remains engaged with the “living of the body,” to the point that the “body” itself displays its own language. An “ethics of the spread body” not only formulates no norms or rules for living well together, it unfolds a genuine “ethos” or a “way of being” by which “flesh” (singular and plural) signifies injury and exposes its chaos. When the body is stretched or splayed out, it is still there, pinned to the bed or nailed to the cross. Yet in its pain, when it is exposed in its deformity and even in its nakedness, it paradoxically highlights and reveals [il relève et révèle] its share in the sacred. One becomes maybe more attached to the “body” than to “people” or to their “psyches,” given that one has cared for, treated, or even desired them (the latter only in the case of eros). The rhythm of breathing, the face, the gaze serve for recognition, but

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wounds, pus, or reflux also speak of themselves. What cannot be named is not named. It is simply, but with difficulty, inhabited. When the outside is cared for it is not because one gives up examining it but rather because one lives what is injured in the mode of the “caress.” Valéry says that “nothing is deeper in man than his skin.” 43 CONCLUSION: RETURN TO THE “LIFE-WORLD” The patient, even within palliative care, obviously still belongs to the “world of the living.” This conviction, as necessary as it is for the caregivers as for the whole social body who surrounds the patient (family, institution, etc.), certainly does not make him or her return to those who maintain “great health.” But the body “spread” or “stretched” out in its “ethics” or its ethos, its “way of being” or its sometimes very strange or even unbearable “moods,” all the same reminds us what there is in it of the “life world” (Lebenswelt), albeit in its limited experience that we sometimes encounter and most often forget. Nothing exists first of all by its consciousness or its thinking cogito. We are primarily by the body we “have,” hoping that one day we will “become” it. The “remainder of the flesh” of a patient splayed out on a bed makes it again obvious. Not “yet dead” and even well and truly “living,” his “carcass of flesh” or his “meat” merits all the respect one owes to a living human being and not to the animal, inasmuch as this frame is aimed at and shared in the “community of bodies” that forms the basis of our humanity. In this way physicians and caregivers go back to the patient’s room first of all with their body and not only with their head, just as one penetrates the other in eros or partakes of it in the “this is my body.” There is something “sacred” in the marriage bed, on the Eucharistic altar, and when one approaches the hospital bed and the body lying in it. The “expanding of the body” certainly cannot be compared, yet all the same the “thing” is there that has to be incarnated, inhabited, and also humanized. Eros, eating [the Eucharist], and care fall under the same “bodily struggle” [corps-à-corps], albeit oriented and certainly desired in different ways. Against the trivialization of [sexual] enjoyment, communion, and also of suffering, everyone, and especially the physician, would enter any bedroom in a quasi-sacred fashion, especially when the expansion [of the body] is that of illness rather than one of eros or agape. There is thus a “gaze that senses” and a “gaze that points” and the two are far from identical. The first (the gaze that senses) forms the basis of our shared humanity or at the very least of this transcendental dimension of the body that is not at all easy to formulate. In entering a room “the visual precedes the word, the greeting, the beginning of the encounter. It is a time of solitude, of conscious perceptions, both unconscious and conscious, when the doctor, from his or her own subjectivity,

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picks up on an atmosphere [. . .]. He or she ‘smells,’ senses, scans the patient [. . .]. He allows himself to be ‘impressed’ by lights and shadows, like a fresh roll of film, without pursuing definitive development.” 44 In contrast, the other (the gaze that points) continues to nourish the “myth of the purity of the gaze,” “abstracts from the sick person,” precisely in order to objectivize the clinical gaze, to see the illness “across pictures,” almost “via thought” and no longer across the body or via bodily contact: “By analyzing these images, clinicians believe they can objectivize the real. They think that they have direct access to the essence of the sickness [. . .]. In a Neoplatonic move the virtual is taken for a real object.” 45 To “sense” rather than to “puncture,” to “experience” and not only to “diagnose,” to “embody” or “incarnate” and not to “abstract” or “analyze”— [in these ways] palliative care absolutely does not amount to mitigating [pallier] in the sense of “compensating,” “toning down,” “covering with disguise,” or especially “healing only in appearance” (the current meaning of remedy as “palliative”). In contrast, the palliative in medicine, as also in the (French) language and practice of dyeing, “brings back up,” “paints,” “colors,” and “feeds”—just as dye-makers off-set their tank [pallie sa cuve] with a wooden rake called a “rabble” so as to “bring back up to the surface the (colored) substances that tend to settle [on the bottom]” (the technical and active sense of the word “pallier”). 46 Consequently and paradoxically, there is aesthetics in palliative care or even in any form of the “body stretched out.” Not that the body would be “beautiful” or even less “harmonious,” not that one could so easily “love” or even “desire” what is at first just “offputting,” but inasmuch as care comes to “fasten” and “reconfigure,” as much as that is possible, everything that in this bruised flesh at first cannot but repel and disfigure. To esteem oneself all the way to and here including one’s own body or even to acknowledge and appreciate oneself are not the vain words of certain practices one falsely accuses of easy comfort (psychology, aesthetic care, psychomotricity, etc.). The “beautiful” (in aesthetization) accompanies the “true” (within the horizon of death) and the “good” (in charitable work and blessing). The famous convertibility of the transcendentals is not only a matter of theology. It expresses “care” when it operates as a whole and is not reduced to a “field” that is always made only to protect us better. The “body splayed out” is therefore “stretched out” in some way just as the flesh “draws” from all sides only to display itself better (spreading). It “spreads itself out” even there where it becomes “scattered” into bits and pieces if the caregiver does not come to contain it, treat it, and also limit it. It finally stretches itself out inasmuch as it “spills” over objects and the world, the whole of the social and medical body that surrounds it whose attention consists this time not only in “delimiting” it but also in agreeing to be “affected” by it. Its ethics is “respect for its way of being” (ethos), “modalities and attributes of substance” rather than “substance itself” (Spinoza), “accom-

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paniment of the body” or “struggle for the body” [corps-à-corps] more than all the overlap of “signifying.” There is “infancy,” of the infans or of the “without speech” (in-femi), in the bedridden body. Losing “its means” in some way, the sick person discovers him- or herself as an “end,” if only for this “remainder of the flesh” by which he or she is left “exposed.” To gather the “silent experience” of such a “body” does not mean to give up thinking, and obviously also signifying, but searches underneath logos and reason, or even narrative as well, for the action of “binding sheaves” or “gathering together” (legein) this “scattered body” having such a hard time existing. 47 One could say of suffering what Saint Augustine was content humbly to affirm in regard to the Trinity: “In order to speak of the ineffable, one must speak as one can what one cannot explain [. . .]. Yet, when the question is asked, What three? human language labors altogether under great poverty of speech (magna prorsus inopia). The answer, however, is given three ‘persons’ not that it might be [completely] spoken, but that it might not be left [wholly] unspoken (non illud diceretur, sed ne tuceretur).” 48 Thus the infans, or the child in us, would give up speaking, not in the dumbness of the one who would like to fall silent but in the ineffable dimension of the subject who permits itself to be affected and tries to put into words, and into gestures, what the unnamable can nevertheless not signify. Georges Bernanos admits by way of preface to Great Cemeteries Under the Moon: “My life is certainly full of dead people. But the most dead of the dead is the little boy I used to be. And yet, when the hour comes, he will be the one to take the place at the head of my life, to gather together my poor years up to the final one, and like a young leader rallies his disordered troops, he will enter first into the home of the Father.” 49 Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner 50 NOTES 1. [The French term “épandu” can mean “stretched out,” “spread out,” “splayed out” (as on a bed), “expanded” (over an entire area), or even “extended” (as in water covering a flooded plain).—Trans.] 2. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), Part III, Proposition 2, Note, 132. 3. Didier Franck evokes this dual perspective in Nietzsche et l’ombre de Dieu (Paris: PUF, 1998). On this point see the synthesis provided by Alain Séguy-Duclos, “L’analytique transcendantales du corps,” Critique 635 (2000): 298–311 and Henri Maldiney, “La prise,” in Qu’est-ce que l’homme? Hommage à Alphonse de Waelhens (Brussels: Publication des facultés universitaires de Saint-Louis, 1990), 134–57. 4. This is probably the reason why I turned away from the ethics of my early work (“Transparence éthique et fondements aristotelico-thomistes du problème contemporain du statut de l’embryon humain,” DEA or Master II thesis, Université de Nanterre, 1990, under the direction of Dr. Anne Fagot-Largeault) in order to unfold an “anthropology of the body.” Cf. (especially), Falque, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

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5. Donatien Mallet, La médecine entre science et existence (Paris: Vuibert, 2007), 54. Let me here express my warmest gratitude to Donatien Mallet and the entire medical team at the Palliative Care Unit of Luynes-CHU in Tours for their attentive and generous welcome. This text owes much—if not everything—to him, as much by exchanges as by shared experience. To “sit with,” to “stand still,” to “give up knowing,” to “let be” are all attitudes of a new epistemology of medicine that is still in development. Dr. Mallet’s book sketches its outlines, without renouncing care, diagnosis, or treatment. Between “science” and “existence,” at the intersection of “medicine” and “philosophy,” a meeting point is discovered, which we can only rejoice to have recovered here considering how much it innervated the act of the birth of medicine in antiquity (Hippocrates). 6. Cf. Wedding Feast, §18, 113; translation modified. Regarding the three stumbling blocks denounced here, see Wedding Feast, 23. For the definition of the “body spread out” between the “extended body” and the “lived body,” see ibid., §1, 12–15. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), lxxi. 8. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 8 and Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 57. [Stambaugh translates ergründen as “to give the ground” and begründen as “to account for.” See her note on 57.] 9. Cf. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 10. Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. Maria Shrady (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 54. Cited and discussed by Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (1956; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 11. “Epigraph: dictante dolore”: Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain, trans. Julian Barnes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 29. The original title La Doulou uses the Provençal term for the French douleur (pain). 12. Cf. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 386 (translation modified): “If literary experience is really the experience of the outside, it is also meant for exposing us beyond sense.” 13. Daudet, Land of Pain, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15. Formulations that are differently but no less tragically illuminated in the work of Raymond Guérin, Le pus de la plaie: journal de maladie (Paris: Ed. “Le Tout sur le Tout,” 1982). 14. Besides medical accompaniment, I would like to render homage here to the team of nurses and caregivers at the Palliative Care Unit of Luynes (CHU, Tours), who allowed me to approach to the point of care and maybe also to think what I would never have even suspected. 15. Cf. Falque, “The Discarnate Madman,” trans. Sarah Horton, Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 1, no. 1 (2018), forthcoming. 16. L’infirmier (nurse) is etymologically linked to “enfirmier” (eighteenth-century formulation [cf. the old English “infirmary”]), not as the one who encloses (enferme), but as he who makes strong (rend ferme). 17. Cf. Mallet: “The human is constituted by the manner of inhabiting his body, time, and relation to the other. These three characteristics can be the supporting points for resituating the objectivizing interpretation of complaint [la plainte] into an existential perspective. One of the tasks of the caregiver will be to construct a habitat where scientific objectification and attention to corporeality, temporality and the alterity of different actors can meet up. This interpretation would be a terrain for cultivating a network of meaning and action that would be respectful of the singularity of each and the limits of the human condition. Medicine hence would have to assume the paradoxical tension between science and existence. It ought to have a concern for acting that tends to relieve a part of human suffering but remains eager to create in the midst of the encounters a web of meaning that is bearable for the patient, the people around him, and the caregivers.” Mallet, Entre science et existence, 230; emphasis added. 18. For this entire perspective of the “limit,” of “finitude,” and of the “human as such,” I refer the reader to Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), Part I: “Précis of Finitude,” as well as Wedding Feast of the Lamb, §22: “Love at the Limit.”

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19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fragments posthumes (1884), in Œuvres philosophiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), vol. IX, fragment 37 [4], 310. Taken up again in 1885, vol. XI, fragment 36 [35], 297: “The body is thought more surprising than the soul.” 20. Paul Ricœur, Living Up to Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). In the postface by Catherine Goldenstein “visits by Dr. Lucie Hacpille” are mentioned as “a specialist in palliative care” who comes to the home (92). 21. Ibid., 15; emphasis added. 22. Ibid., 17. 23. Ibid.; emphasis added; translation lightly modified. 24. Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza and Us,” in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 125. For a more technical analysis, see chapter two of the same work (17–29). 25. Deleuze, “Spinoza and Us,” in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 125, 127. 26. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Œuvres philosophiques complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), VIII, 298. 27. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random, 1974), 34; translation lightly modified. 28. Nietzsche, Fragments posthumes, IX, 374 (fragment 26). 29. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §230, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 123, translation modified. 30. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 56; emphasis added. 31. Idem, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21. 32. [These are all idiomatic expressions, which employ the word for “flesh” in French (usually in the plural). Most of them cannot be rendered with the same terminology in English.—Trans.] 33. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 21. See also §27: “The Quarrel over Meat” in The Wedding Feast of the Lamb. 34. Deleuze comments: “Bacon is a religious painter only in butcher shops.” Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, 22. 35. “Eros is thus Eucharist inasmuch as it is transformed—from animality into humanity in filiation, just as from the erotic to the charitable in transubstantiation.” The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, 49; translation modified. 36. Mallet, Entre science et existence, 22. 37. Ibid., 23. 38. Spinoza, Ethics, IV, Prop. 50, Note, 221. The proposition says: “Pity, in a man who lives under the guidance of reason, is in itself bad and useless” (221). 39. “Everything, in so far as it is in itself (quantum in se est), endeavors to persist in its own being (in suo esse persevare conatur).” Spinoza, Ethics, III, Prop. VI, 136. 40. The full citation reads: “It is thus plain from what has been said, that in no case do we strive for, wish for, long for, or desire anything because we deem it to be good (quia bonum esse judicamus), but on the other hand we deem a thing to be good, because we strive for it (quia id conamur), wish for it, long for it, or desire it.” Spinoza, Ethics, III, Prop. IX, Note, 137. Deleuze and Guattari implicitly comment on this: “if desire is the lack of the real object, its very nature as a real entity depends upon an ‘essence of lack’ that produces the fantasized object. Desire thus conceived of as production, though merely the production of fantasies, has been explained perfectly by psychoanalysis. [. . .] If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. [. . .] Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 25–26. 41. Definition of équipe [team], in old French esquif, from the Dictionnaire Robert-Lafont (Paris: Robert-Lafont, 1962).

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42. Mark the Ascetic, “Letter to Nicolas the Solitary,” The Philokalia: The Complete Text, ed. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, vol. 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 155; translation modified. 43. Paul Valéry, L’idée fixe, trans. David Paul (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 33. An “apology” on behalf of the “surface” (or of care for the “surface”), which would also distinguish the palliative from the curative approach. 44. Mallet, Entre science et existence, 29. 45. Ibid., 32. 46. This technical term “pallier” or “palliative” is affirmed by Littré (and the Dictionnaire des arts for “dye-making”). 47. Cf. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 129: “The terms are like buckets or kegs, out of which we can scoop sense.” Thus the subsequent analysis: “Laying, legein, concerns what lies there. To lay is to let lie before us. When we say something about something, we make it lie there before us, which means at the same time we make it appear” (ibid., 202). Cf. “However, just as early and even more originally—and therefore already in the previously cited meaning—it [legein] means what our similarly sounding legen means: to lay down, to lay before. In legen a ‘bringing together’ prevails, the Latin legere understood as lesen, in the sense of collecting and bringing together.” Heidegger, “Logos,” in Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1984 [first published 1975]), 60. 48. Augustine, De Trinitate, V.9.10, trans. Arthur West Haddan as On the Trinity in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 3 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 92 [the bracketed words are in the translation as bracketed; the first phrase is translated from the French text, as the English translation is quite different]. 49. Georges Bernanos, Les grands cimetières sous la lune (Paris: Plon, 1938), iv–v. 50. [I want to acknowledge my gratitude to Dr. Joseph Calandrino, hospice and palliative care physician at Northport VA Medical Center, who helped tremendously in rendering all kinds of medical terminology into English for this translation. He also graciously hosted a discussion of this paper between Emmanuel Falque and several physicians, nurses, and philosophers/philosophy students at his house in November 2016, exemplifying the conversation between physicians and philosophers Falque advocates at the beginning of this piece.—Trans.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine. On the Trinity [De Trintate]. Translated by Arthur West Haddan. In Volume 3 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994. Bernanos, Georges. Les grands cimetières sous la lune. Paris: Plon, 1938. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Daudet, Alphonse. In the Land of Pain. Translated by Julian Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ———. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Éditions Robert-Lafont. Dictionnaire Robert-Lafont. Paris: Robert-Lafont, 1962. Emmanuel Falque. “The Discarnate Madman.” Translated by Sarah Horton. Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 1, no. 1 (2018), forthcoming. ———. The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection. Translated by George Hughes. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. ———. “Transparence éthique et fondements aristotelico-thomistes du problème contemporain du statut de l’embryon humain.” DEA or Master II thesis, Université de Nanterre, 1990.

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———. The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist. Translated by George Hughes. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Franck, Didier. Nietzsche et l’ombre de Dieu. Paris: PUF, 1998. Guérin, Raymond. Le pus de la plaie: journal de maladie. Paris: Ed. “Le Tout sur le Tout,” 1982. Heidegger, Martin. Early Greek Thinking. Translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. 1975. Reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1984. ———. Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. ———. The Principle of Reason. Translated by Reginald Lilly. 1956. Reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. ———. What Is Called Thinking? Translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Translated by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987. ———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Maldiney, Henri. “La prise.” In Qu’est-ce que l’homme? Hommage à Alphonse de Waelhens, 134–57. Brussels: Publication des facultés universitaires de Saint-Louis, 1990. Mallet, Donatien. La médecine entre science et existence. Paris: Vuibert, 2007. Mark the Ascetic. “Letter to Nicolas the Solitary.” In Volume 1 of The Philokalia: The Complete Text, edited by G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1979. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. Ecce Homo. In Œuvres philosophiques complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. ———. Fragments posthumes (1884). In Œuvres philosophiques complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1982. ———. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random, 1974. Ricœur, Paul. Living Up to Death. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Séguy-Duclos, Alain. “L’analytique transcendantales du corps.” Critique 635 (2000): 298–311. Silesius, Angelus. The Cherubinic Wanderer. Translated by Maria Shrady. New York: Paulist Press, 1986. Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics. Translated by R.H.M. Elwes. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. Valéry, Paul. L’idée fixe. Trans. David Paul. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.

Chapter Seven

Dying to Desire Soma, Sema, Sarx, and Sex John Panteleimon Manoussakis

“Where have you been? And where are you going?” This is the opening line of Plato’s Phaedrus. 1 “Where” asks about a place. Whatever answer one gives to this question, it will invariably suggest a place, a “there.” Where? There. One is “there,” however, by virtue of one’s body. The “there” is made possible only by the body, as the place of that which takes up place. Yet the body does not only take up place but also takes place, as the double “where” in Socrates’ question indicates: “where from” and “where to.” Insofar as Socrates’ question opens up the traversal between two points and, thereby, inquires not only after a body but more specifically after the movement of the body, a moving body that is animated, then Socrates’ question already anticipates the most memorable passages of the Phaedrus. The myth of the soulchariot that ascends to heavens and descends to earth is just a long answer to the question Socrates asks of Phaedrus in the first line of the dialogue: “Where have you been? And where are you going?” The destiny of the animated body or of the body’s soul that occupies the center of this dialogue serves as the illustration of the soul’s self-movement. The immortality of the soul is not here, as for example in the Phaedo, a conclusion to be demonstrated by a series of arguments. Indeed, the soul is immortal, but only as consequence of the soul’s movement—for a self-moving soul could not but also be, Socrates argues, an ever-moving soul. If the Socratic myth depicts the soul as a chariot driven by two horses, this is because the soul is literally an automobile (τὸ αὑτὸ κινοῦν, 245c7, d7). It would be a mistake at this point to suggest that it is desire that moves the soul. It is true that, according to the soul’s cosmic journey as narrated by Socrates, it is desire that drives the soul’s chariot—the desire to be with the 117

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gods at the supra-celestial place (“where are you going?”) and, once fallen, the desire that attracts it toward the beloved who is a reflection on earth of that “image of what they saw up there” (250a) above the heavens (“where have you been?”). Nevertheless, these three—the soul itself, its movement, and the desire that motivates it—cannot be separated. Desire is the soul’s movement as much as that which moves itself cannot be anything else but the soul itself. And yet this lengthy and intricate vision condenses itself into one single word. The answer that Socrates gives on behalf of Phaedrus to his own question—“Where have you been? And where are you going?”—is simply “there.” Where Phaedrus is going is that same place, where Phaedrus has been before and from where, in a sense, he never left. For all its wanderings, the soul remains attached to its original “there” by the cord of anamnesis and it takes only the twitch of remembering in order to reel it back. The chariot of the soul, like the horses in a carousel, moves in a circle that repeats itself. It is this eternal return of the same that enables recollection and which—to make an equally circular argument—requires a revolving soul. It is, therefore, not so much a genuine movement as the semblance of motion, an image of a time that is itself the image of the timeless (Timaeus, 37d). IS THAT A SCROLL UNDER YOUR CLOAK (OR ARE YOU JUST GLAD TO SEE ME)? Let us return, then, to the beginning, if only to the beginning of this dialogue. For Socrates’ exitus (“exodus,” says the Greek text) out of the city walls and, in a sense, out of the Athenian body politic, foreshadows the transmigration of the souls out of the body as it will be narrated in great detail in Socrates’ palinode. Socrates is hungry, he says, and Phaedrus has under his cloak “a potion to charm” (pharmakon, 230d6) him out of the city, leading him “as people lead hungry animals forward by shaking branches of fruit before them.” 2 Socrates is hungry for what is hidden under Phaedrus’ cloak. Is it, then, for Phaedrus’ body? In a sense, the scroll hidden under Phaedrus’ cloak is as much a body as it is his body: a body of text “engendered” by him in the same way that Socrates will attribute the authorship of his first speech to Phaedrus (244). For Phaedrus has begotten, as Socrates remarks, “more of the speeches that have been given during your lifetime than anyone else, whether you composed them yourself or in one way or another forced others to make them.” 3 In this sense, then, Lysias’ speech is a body of text “born” (γεγενῆσθαι) by Phaedrus’ own body. And as it is now written on a piece of parchment, a piece of skin resting upon Phaedrus’ skin, bulging under his cloak, it cannot escape Socrates’ attention. “But first show me what you are holding in your left hand under your cloak, my friend.” 4 The young Phaedrus

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can carry this scroll, which he has produced from under his cloak, as if he was dangling a carrot before a hungry Socrates. And more than a carrot. It is not, however, the desire for Phaedrus’ living body (Leib) that drives Socrates beyond the body of the city; rather, it is his desire for the body’s sign, for the scroll or, in psychoanalytic terms, for the phallus. “What is shown to us here is this very elision, thanks to which it [the organ] is no longer anything but the very sign that I mentioned: the sign of absence.” 5 Socrates has just described himself as a drug addict, as “a man who is sick with passion for hearing speeches” (228b6), and who is willing to go anywhere in order to get hold of the drug (pharmakon) of his addiction (230d). Yet nothing here intimates Socrates’ own description of desire: no shafts swell (251b6), no prick is throbbing like a pulsing artery (251d3), and above all, Socrates is not, as the lovers in his speech, beside himself (250). Instead, what Socrates desires is the lifeless body of a text engraved, like a tattoo, on the mummified skin of an animal. 6 Although “dead,” or because “dead,” that body of Phaedrus is reproductive of itself. It keeps generating more and more speeches (at least two more in the course of the Phaedrus, without counting the dialogue itself). It keeps piling up discursive bodies over other bodies, with a fecundity that calls for yet more layers of text. Even as it is decomposed by endless hermeneutics, the body of Phaedrus composes an entire corpus. Such proliferation of signifiers is necessary so as to hide behind them the absence of the body. 7 There is nothing under Phaedrus’ cloak, as there is nothing inside Socrates (οὐδὲν ὤν; Symposium, 219), as Socrates himself admits to Alcibiades who desires to “split [him] right in the middle” (215b), to “open [him] like Silenus’ statues” (216e), so that he can look inside Socrates (216d). Socrates captures the double meaning of the body, as described here, by tracing the etymology of sōma, the Greek word for “body,” to sēma—a term which, as he explains in Cratylus, reduces the body into a signifier: “Thus some people say that the body (sōma) is the tomb (sēma) of the soul, on the grounds that it is entombed in its present life, while others say that it is correctly called ‘a sign’ (sēma) because the soul signifies whatever it wants to signify by means of the body.” 8 Socrates’ desire for Phaedrus’ body remains semantic—in this double sense of sēma—which in turn means that for such a desire the body is only symbolic. Even though Socrates moves beyond the walls of the city, his desire cannot drive him “beside himself.” He remains, like the soul in his palinode, perfectly re-collected within himself. And, therefore, as the soul does not move or, if it does, its movement is only that of a revolution around itself, so Socrates’ desire is a desire that cannot break away from the self-referential circle of its metaphysics. There is, however, another way. The beginning of the Charmides reverses, in more than one way, the beginning of the Phaedrus. The Charmides begins with Socrates’ return to the city from the battle of Potidaea. It was in

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Potidaea where some of the stories which Alcibiades narrates at the end of the Symposium had occurred. Stories that famously exemplified the philosopher’s detachment from his body—a body “out of place” or “without place,” as Alcibiades puts it (ἀτοπία, 221d2). Thus, we are all the more surprised to read in the first pages of the Charmides how this same Socrates, unperturbed by any bodily passion, is driven “beside himself” by a mere glimpse under Charmides’ cloak. This is, then, the crucial question: what does Charmides have that the others lacked? Socrates confesses that when it comes to beautiful boys he cannot tell the difference: to him they are all equally beautiful (Charmides, 154b). Their beauty has a blinding effect on him, for he is unable to see them as them, that is, as anything else other than beautiful and, with respect to their beauty, equally interchangeable. In a different sense, their beauty protects Socrates’ eyes from a different kind of blindness: the blindness that he could suffer perhaps, if he were to gaze directly at the person itself, stripped of beauty’s draping. And yet, as soon as Charmides enters the palaestra Socrates finds himself particularly charmed by Charmides. His voice-over commentary explains how everyone present at the time, even the youngest of the boys, looks at Charmides. In a hierarchy so strict in roles and positions as Greek pederasty, the beloved (eromenos) is always the object of desire and never the desiring subject (erastes). Charmides’ presence, however, turns even those desired objects, the young boys, into desiring subjects. Socrates adds another significant detail: everyone present in the palaestra looks at Charmides ὥσπερ ἄγαλμα. Most translations render this expression “as if he were a statue,” and there is nothing wrong with that except that the reader of the dialogue in Plato’s times did not have our modern experience of strolling through the galleries of a museum in order to admire the beauty of Greek statues. Therefore, to say that Socrates gazed at Charmides “as if he were a statute” does not explain what is of crucial importance in our text, and it misleads us by suggesting a disinterested look, more or less in line with Kant’s aesthetics. Instead, the agalma is closer to an ex voto: an object to exalt and exult the gods, a body extracted from context or function, excessive and exotic. It is in this sense that Socrates uses it in the Phaedrus (215 and 252d) and Alcibiades in the Symposium (215b, 216e, and 222) to describe the object of desire. Agalma is an uncanny object which, in Lacan’s interpretation, is to be translated by the “partial object,” or the objet petit a, 9 and which, in the vocabulary of Marion’s phenomenology, would be called a saturated phenomenon. Desire’s agalma will now challenge the Socratic pharmakon. For as soon as Charmides joins Socrates’ company, Socrates—this same Socrates whom “no one ever saw [. . .] drunk,” 10 no matter how much he had to drink, and who remained unaffected by the “frightful cold” of Thrace, even when he walked barefooted in the ice; this same Socrates who scorned

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with equal ease both sex and death—this Socrates finds himself overpowered by what lies hidden under Charmides’ cloak: And then, my friend, I really was in difficulties, and although I had thought it would be perfectly easy to talk to him, I found my previous brash confidence quite gone. And when Critias said that I was the person who knew the remedy [pharmakon] and he turned his full gaze upon me in a manner beyond description and seemed on the point of asking a question, and when everyone in the palaestra surged all around us in a circle, my noble friend, I saw inside his cloak and caught on fire and was quite beside myself (155c–d). 11

While the body of Phaedrus was productive of logoi, the body of Charmides constitutes the very limit of logos. Confronted with the potency of flesh, philosophy becomes impotent; Socrates is left speechless. The body of Charmides moves Socrates “beside himself” (“being no longer in [within] myself”: οὐκετ᾽ ἐν ἐμαυτοῦ ἦν) that is, it prompts him to exit himself. “No longer myself”: Does this mean more or less of myself? More or less than a self? Socrates had employed precisely the same expression in the Phaedrus in order to identify the effect that eros has on lovers: “being no longer in [within] themselves” (οὐκετ᾽ ἐν αὑτῶν γίγνονται, 250a7). In that passage, however, he goes further and provides us with an explanation which could serve, I believe, as an answer to our question. If Charmides’ body silences Socrates then that is because, according to Socrates himself in the Phaedrus: “[his] experience is beyond [his] comprehension because [he] cannot fully grasp what it is that [he is] seeing” (250). Phaedrus’ body, as we have already explained, was precisely a body—namely, the semantic soma clothed with multiple layers of signification that organize it and present it as readily available to be comprehended by one’s desire. For a body is nothing if not graspable. On the other hand, Charmides’ body reveals an object mute and ineffable, bare and unbearable. “[W]hat is unbearable about it is that it is not simply a sign and a signifier [as the body of Phaedrus] but the presence of desire. It is the real presence.” 12 Or, put differently, the presence of the real. THE GARMENTS OF SKIN AND THE NAKED BODY Confronted with the real presence of the body, Socrates resorts to one last trick. He demands to see Charmides naked. However, it is not enough to see the naked body of Charmides. Socrates desires more. He wishes to see Charmides naked of his body: “Then why don’t we undress this part of him [the soul] and have a look at it before we inspect his body?” 13 Charmides is indeed good looking (εὐπρόσωπος); in fact, so much so (ὑπερφυῶς or “excessively,” as Socrates observes) that, were he to remove his clothes, he would appear effaced: ἀπρόσωπος (154d)—that is, both impersonal and even

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ugly. It is this ugliness that Socrates finds unbearable and from which he seeks to escape by going beyond and behind the materiality of Charmides’ body. For a body is less naked when nude. Nakedness—“that real nakedness” as Levinas explains—“is not absence of clothing, but we might say the absence of forms.” 14 “A form is that by which a thing shows itself and is graspable.” 15 Socrates knows this all too well. After all, the forms are supposed to be his territory. Stripped of one of the highest forms, the form of beauty, Charmides’ body is form-less and, thus, “humble, bare and ugly.” 16 But it is also the real thing, the thing itself. It is not for us to decide whether Socrates got more or less than what he bargained for. He wanted to peek underneath Charmides’ body so as to see his bodiless form (the soul); instead he was given a glimpse of the formless body, an impenetrable flesh even to his eyes, no matter how penetrating otherwise. Voyeuristic by principle, in its foundational desire for knowledge, philosophy has remained faithful to the practice of such metaphysical striptease. Everywhere the philosopher fixes his gaze, he looks underneath the garments of things. One example should suffice. Let us revisit that famous passage in which Descartes asks the decisive question of modern epistemology. It is still a question about bodies (corpora); bodies which we touch (quae tangimus), and which we see (quae videmus). What do I see when I see a body? In the case of his example, what I see in this piece of wax is not any of its properties such as “the sweetness of the honey, or the fragrance of the flowers, or the whiteness, or the shape, or the sound.” 17 For things around me keep changing their properties like actors change their costumes as they enter and exit the theater of theoria. Rather, Descartes argues, the wax is “a body which presented itself to me in these various forms a little while ago, but which now exhibits different ones.” 18 And, as the hats and coats I see when I look out of my window are not “the men themselves,” for they “could conceal automatons,” 19 so the properties that clothe this piece of wax are not the thing itself. The real thing is a body stripped of its bodily forms; the body without properties. Cogito’s proper object is that which is left unveiled after I demand—his words—that the piece of wax “take the clothes off” (vestibus detractis), so I can see it naked (nudam). 20 Namely nothing. Under these clothes which conceal and reveal the body lies yet another, more permanent layer of clothing, namely the body itself as that which, in the language of Genesis 3:21, is called “the garments of skin.” What is there, if anything at all, under one’s skin? Is it the soul, as Socrates believes when he suggests that Charmides be stripped of his body? Is it the immutable object of knowledge which Descartes seeks when he demands that the wax be stripped of its properties? Or is it, perhaps, the uncanny object of desire, the agalma, which Alcibiades assures us that we would discover if we were to open up Socrates’ body? And if the body is that cloth covered with clothes, what lies underneath it? Cebes’ analogy in the Phaedo aims at illustrating the

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relationship of the body to the soul as that of a cloak worn by its weaver (87–88b). Does this mean, then, that the soul is the body under the body, the enduring body of the body, in the same sense that the body is a more permanent cloth under one’s clothes? One of Empedocles’ fragments goes even further. In such terms that echo very closely the language of Genesis, Empedocles speaks of the soul as being dressed by the “uncanny garment of flesh” (σαρκῶν ἀλλογνῶτι περιστέλλουσα χιτῶνι). 21 Furthermore, the idea that the body is the soul’s carnal apparel raises another question: that of the soul’s naked body. How did the soul become naked or was she always naked? Is nakedness the natural state of the soul? Are the garments of flesh, the veils of skin, confining or protecting her? Once more we are reminded of the soul’s cosmic journey as told by Socrates in the Phaedrus. There the “earthly body” is the result of a condensation of sorts that takes place as “the soul that sheds its wings” falls until it becomes “solidified” (246c). Origen thinks that both passages—Genesis 3:21 and Phaedrus 246c—describe the same event: the embodiment of an otherwise “naked” soul: “[T]he garments of skins which God, because of the transgression of men, made for those who had sinned, contains a secret and mystical doctrine (superior to Plato’s) of the soul’s losing its wings and descending to earth ‘until it can lay hold of some solid place.’” 22 To his fellow Christian readers, however, Origen’s interpretation of the “garments of skin” was entirely unacceptable. For Origen, as it seems, it was not Adam’s body that was without clothes (“their eyes were opened and they realized they were naked”: Gen. 3:7) but rather it was Adam himself who was without a body. The subsequent exegesis oscillated between two equally unsatisfactory alternatives; on the one hand, there was some modified version of Origen’s allegorical and Platonizing reading that threatened to exclude the human body from God’s original creation and, on the other, a rather literal reading that would propose a God dressing the first humans in leather. For if one is to avoid saying the latter, that is, if the “garments of skin” must mean something more than the outfit which the first humans worn for their exit from Eden, then God must have made at least two human bodies: the body made from the dust of the earth before the fall (Gen. 2:7) and the body made of skins after the fall (Gen. 3:21). Thus, suddenly, there is a seemingly endless proliferation of bodies: there is not only a body before and after Eden, but also a body of skin and a body of light; 23 there is a light body and a thicker body (τὴν παχυτέραν σάρκαν); 24 there is a living body whose death became this dead tunic (νεκρόν χιτῶνα) 25 that now lives; and, finally, in Paul’s letters, there is the body of Christ with which I have clothed myself (Gal. 3:27), dressing myself with Christ (Eph. 4:24), if not merely dressing up as Christ. Our very brief survey of the literature generated by Genesis displays how great is the temptation of dualism, for no matter what characterization or explanation is provided for the body’s duplicity, it invariably follows the

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logic of a binary antithesis. To a degree, this is to be accounted for by the body’s unique position. Neither only an object in the world, nor entirely an immaterial subject, 26 the body as necessarily the body of someone but also as the body for someone is both subject and object and, therefore, neither “pure” subject nor mere object, but the threshold or the metaxy between subjectivity and objectivity. The body that reveals and the body that is revealed are but two different presentations of this body. The body is the incorporation of desire—that is, the body is not simply there, self-same and unaffected by the desires that seek it out. For there is no body there first, awaiting to be discovered by desire only afterward. Rather, it is this discovering (read: uncovering) that produces the body. If we can speak of a “body” prior to the advent of desire, this is only retrospectively and only after desire has collected the various members of what is not yet a body—a process which deserves to be called remembering—into an ideal form which everybody recognizes as a body. There is a danger in the temptation to ascribe a technical term to each of these two manifestations of the body (before and after desire), so as to help us identify them more clearly. Perhaps for an analysis like ours, such a danger is to some extent inevitable. Nevertheless, and as long as one keeps in mind this caveat, we could say—tracing the very trajectory we have followed here from Greek metaphysics to phenomenology to psychoanalysis—that desire transforms sarx into soma, Leib into Körper, the fragmented body into the specular body. And, as we will see shortly, it is desire again that dismembers the body back to its fragments which become a partial object. In any case, the desired body is not identical with the body conceived in abstracto—if such a thing was indeed possible. Therefore, the question about the body is ultimately a question about desire. What is the body’s desire? Is there a desire that is distinctively a bodily desire? And what is it that the desire for the body desires? SPECULAR BODIES, SPECTRAL DESIRES The body I desire is, by venture of my desire, a sick body. It remains to see whether its sickness is a sickness unto death. In the Phaedrus, Socrates describes the lover’s body as affected or, to stay in line with his metaphor, infected by desire (251). The stigmata of eros are cyphers curved on the lover’s flesh displaying to the beloved, as if on a mirror, that very desire he ignited in the first place. Now the reflection of that desire (of his desire, in every sense, for there is no other) returns to himself: After the lover has spent some time doing this, staying near the boy (and even touching him during sports and on other occasions), then the spring that feeds the stream Zeus named “Desire” when he was in love with Ganymede begins to flow mightily in the lover and is partly absorbed by him, and when he is

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filled it overflows and runs away outside him. Think how a breeze or an echo bounces back from a smooth solid object to its source; that is how the stream of beauty goes back to the beautiful boy and sets him aflutter. It enters through his eyes, which are its natural route to the soul; there it waters the passages for the wings, starts the wings growing, and fills the soul of the loved one with love in return. Then the boy is in love, but has no idea what he loves. He does not understand, and cannot explain, what has happened to him. It is as if he had caught an eye disease from someone else, but could not identify the cause; he does not realize that he is seeing himself in the lover as in a mirror. So when the lover is near, the boy’s pain is relieved just as the lover’s is, and when they are apart he yearns as much as he is yearned for, because he has a mirror image of love [εἴδωλον ἔρωτος; literally, “idol of love”] in him—“backlove” [ἀντέρωτα]—though he neither speaks nor thinks of it as love, but as friendship. Still, his desire is nearly the same as the lover’s, though weaker: he wants to see, touch, kiss, and lie down with him; and of course, as you might expect, he acts on these desires soon after they occur. 27

In this passage where desire replicates itself, voices reverberate, and every image meets its double, the text itself mimics its own metaphor, for it is composed in such a way as to repeat itself, while avoiding reiteration. For example, the stream of Desire (τοῦ ῥεύματος) is compared to the stream of beauty (τὸ ῥεύμα), and while the former overflows (ἀπορρεῖ), the latter halts the beloved’s quest for understanding (ἀπορεῖ). Plato employs here two different verbs whose difference in spelling is inaudible in Greek. The result is precisely what this passage announces: the echo of a voice, the mirror image of an image. Such stylistic effect is, of course, very much in line with the point Socrates makes, namely, the reciprocity and symmetry of desire’s double intentionality: love and backlove. Chronology notwithstanding, is the mirror of desire Plato’s anticipation of Lacan’s celebrated “mirror stage,” or is it Lacan who returns to Plato? We have already seen that Alcibiades’s declaration of desire in the Symposium is not for Socrates but for the agalma hidden within Socrates; 28 as Socrates’ desire is not for the body under the cloak of Charmides but for the form under his flesh. That object in the Other or the objectified Other is nothing other than myself as another, as othered by desire 29—what Plato has so aptly called, in the passage we have just quoted “the idol of love” (εἴδωλον ἔρωτος). The object of desire is not a terminus but an origin; it is not an object toward which desire moves but that object from which the very movement that we call desire originates. As such, the object of desire is never the Other but the object in the Other or the Other as an object, the objectified Other. 30 Of course, the objectified Other is no longer the Other, assuming that there was ever a time when the Other was not (for me) objectified. The beloved is in love only when he catches a glimpse of himself in the lover “as in a mirror.” If “he yearns as much as he is yearned for” that is because, as our text states with a disarming honesty, the beloved “has a mirror image of

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love in him.” Whom does he yearn for and by whom is he yearned for if not himself? Sure enough, that is a self which, like his reflection in the mirror, is reversed—he who sees himself is a subject and he who is seen is an object. What the beloved sees when he looks at his idol in the mirror is himself as an object in the lover and for the lover. Standing in front of the lover, the beloved can say to himself “thou art that.” And what does the lover see in the beloved? Now things get a bit more complicated. For what is the lover’s desire for the beloved if not the desire for himself? As the lover of his beloved, the lover has taken the place—and, in a sense, he has re-placed—his lover; that is, that lover from the time when he (the lover) was himself the beloved. For the lover was not long ago another’s beloved, as this beloved now will become one day the lover of yet another beloved. Therefore, the lover’s desire for the beloved is for the lover a desire for his younger self. The lover is in love with his past self or with the specter of himself, that is, with what lies now in the past, dead. Insofar as the present lover was the past beloved, his desire for the present beloved is the desire that he, as a beloved, had. Now, as the lover, he can finally satisfy his desire in the only way possible: by becoming his own lover which, as we shall see, means, by becoming his dead father, in order to do now to the beloved (that is, to the image of his younger self, to himself) that which his lover did or did not do to him then. All the lover really wants is to fuck himself, his younger self, a self past and dead. Perhaps the rectum is a grave, after all. 31 In Greek metaphysics desire is always past, however, this is a past without history. The beloved’s desire is a reaction, a refraction, and a reflection of the lover’s desire. But the desire of the lover is not original. After all, the lover’s desire is occasioned by the beloved, and the beloved cannot be anything more than the occasion 32 that sets in motion the desire of the lover by reminding him (the lover) of an immemorial memory: “a soul is reminded [ἀναμιμνῄσκεσθαι] of the reality there by what it finds here”; for only “a few remain whose memory [τῆς μνήμῃς] is good enough” as to recall those celestial visions. 33 “When the charioteer [of the soul] sees that face, his memory [ἡ μνήμη] is carried back to the real nature of Beauty [. . .].” 34 Not only, therefore, the lover functions as a mirror for the beloved, in which he (the beloved) can see his own “idol,” but also the beloved is for the lover an “image” or an “icon” (ὁμοιώμασιν: 250b3; εἰκόνας: 250b4) of that original and originary beauty which, of course, the lover’s soul had encountered long before his present encounter with the beloved’s beauty. Long before his existence even. Desire is, then, the name of a nostalgia for a time before time, the attempt, always failing and always recommencing, “to return to the inanimate state,” 35 before corporeal existence. In other words, desire is the desire of Thanatos. For Lacan too, it is the narcissistic image in the mirror that constitutes me, for “what the subject finds in this altered image of his body is the paradigm

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of all the forms of resemblance.” 36 In employing such terms as “paradigm,” “form,” and “resemblance,” Lacan is already speaking in Plato’s language. What the mirror stage seeks to explain is nothing other than the formation of the subject quite literally. Paradoxically, that which the mirror reflects is, prior to its reflection, nothing. The infant without words and without image is formless: asemic. 37 It remains submerged into an undifferentiated and absolute whole which, to the extent that knows of no difference, allows him no identity. When this image is perceived by a child, something is suddenly proposed to him whereby he does not merely receive the sight of an image in which he recognizes himself; this image already presents itself as an ideal Urbild, as something that is both ahead of him and behind him, as something that has always existed, as something that subsists by itself, and as something before which he senses his own fissures as a prematurely born being and experiences himself as still insufficiently coordinated to correspond to it in its totality. 38

Thus, the form-al subject is born. Formal, because the specular image forms (that is, it remembers) into a unity, as much narcissistic as imaginary, “both formative and erogenic,” 39 the disjecta membra of my unreflected self. It is only through the semantics of the image, the sēma, that I discover my body (soma). Only now I can say: Thou art that. Which is to say: This is my body. As for Plato so, too, for Lacan, the mirror of desire does not reflect my body, it creates it and it is this creation that allows me to recognize that this is I. That which the body has replaced, however, is not completely eclipsed. That ineffable and unrepresentable sarx, that “fragmented body,” as Lacan calls it, which, insofar as it is fragmented is far from being a body in the proper sense, returns “in dreams.” “It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions [. . .].” 40 Growing wings—like a fleshy suppuration oozing out of the body’s cracks. Wasn’t it precisely this image that Socrates used in the Phaedrus in order to describe the body infected by desire? Let us take another look in the mirror: In any case, what the subject finds in this altered image of his body is the paradigm of all the forms of resemblance that will bring over on to the world of objects a tinge of hostility, by projecting on them the manifestation of the narcissistic image, which, from the pleasure derived from meeting himself in the mirror, becomes when confrontating his fellow man an outlet for his most intimate aggressivity. 41

The accomplishment of the subject’s identity necessitates, of course, the introduction of difference. Even before the difference between the subject and its objects, the I and the Other, the mirror of desire interjects a difference

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within the subject: between the mirror’s reflection (the lover) and that which it reflects (the beloved). The mere positing of the specular image is selfalienating since it is necessarily posed as something that is me and yet notme, an extraneous self, an exteriority that gives me the intimacy I enjoy with myself. The very charge of narcissism that binds me to it provokes my hostility toward it. Let us assume that I am standing in front of another human being whom I have asked to perform for me a pantomime of sorts by mimicking my movements; if I were to raise my right hand, he would repeat the same gesture, except it would have to be his left hand, acting precisely as my reflection. Similarly, the reflection of eros of which Plato writes completes me but only by reversing me, by turning me upside-down and insideout. That is why in sex I always find in the other an image of myself—only askew. Facing a man there is a woman, across the older lover there is a younger beloved, the passive partner sees himself in the active, and so on. Lacan’s phrase “intimate aggressivity” captures the twinsome character of my desire as both that which compels me to obey the pleasure principle but also as that which drives me beyond it. The Mirror of Erised in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone “shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts.” 42 But the Mirror of Erised is the mirror of desire and, more precisely, of the desire that reverses me—“Erised” is an ambigram of “Desire” written backward, as if in a mirror. And when Harry looks in the mirror what he sees is his dead parents, that is, himself as dead. Let us add now that this form-al self which, as we have seen, was born in front of desire’s mirror is the accomplishment of that beyond. “What is left of the object, what survives after the libidinal effect of the destructive Trieb, after the action of Thanatos, is precisely what eternalizes the object in the guise of a form.” 43 The first corpse is the living body. For Lacan, the specular image is above all a funerary stele, a gravestone. Commenting on the primary function of art in antiquity, which for him is the effort to immortalize the mortal by engraving it “in statuary,” Lacan adds: “This is also the function that is served in a certain way by the subject’s image in my theory of the mirror [stage].” 44 This was a point that Lacan had made already in his first proposal of the mirror stage when he promised that “psychoanalysis may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the ‘Thou are that,’ in which is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny.” 45 The problem with the structural unity of Plato’s Phaedrus which has vexed so much so many honorable scholars is resolved once we take into consideration the connection between the mirror of eros in which the beloved is immortalized and writing, in its close association with death, funerary practices, and monuments. Think of the memorial to the soldiers fallen in the Vietnam War. Five hundred feet long, the Memorial Wall is nothing but a funeral stele of black granite inscribed with the names of those who fought in Vietnam. Here

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already we can see the connection between writing and death. Yet, the Vietnam Memorial Wall is polished to a high finish as to function for whomever stands in front of it as a mirror. What the visitor to the memorial sees is his reflection over an endless list of names of those who have died. In a way, the Vietnam memorial becomes to its visitor his memorial. 46 The notion that the specular image of the beloved’s body (narcissism/ pleasure principle) is in truth the spectral image of the lover’s corpse (aggression/death drive)—the truth of soma is the sēma—is exemplified with some clarity in Oedipus’ double destiny of patricide and incest. For prior to their refraction into two distinct acts, that is, before the object of desire is differentiated into the paternal and the maternal Other, it aims at one and the same object which combines Eros (for the mother) with Thanatos (for the father). What Oedipus desires is to sleep with what he has killed. Don’t I confess to this very crime (“tué le désir”) as soon as I express my desire for you? (“tu es le désir”) 47 Oedipus kills his father, but the father—“What is the Father?” asks Lacan in order to say: “It is the dead Father” 48—refuses to die. The father returns like the ghost of the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, or like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, in order to reclaim what is properly his, namely, the sexual libido of his son and the object to which it is directed, the mother. He does so by continuing to act through the son’s desire. For killing the father can have only one inevitable result: to find oneself in the mother’s bed. While in bed, however, Oedipus acts “in the name of the Father” (le nom du père) but also in the place of the Mother. He can finally satisfy his desire by doing (as his own dead father) to his mother what his father never did to himself (le non du père). If Oedipus wishes to get rid of his father for good, he would have to renounce his sexuality, to kill his desire. Our last argument raises a suspicion regarding Socrates’ wish to strip Charmides’ soul of his body. In the Phaedo Socrates had given philosophy a solemn definition; philosophy, he says, is characterized by nothing else than the preoccupation [μελέτημα, 67d8] with death; and death is that very thing which Socrates wished to see Charmides undergoing, that is, the separation of the soul from the body. Is it possible that Socrates’ desire for Charmides is somehow the desire for a corpse? A far-fetched suggestion perhaps. Yet, when in the middle of the Republic, that is, in the middle of a discussion among philosophers and about philosophy, Socrates chooses to tell the story of Leontius, he might have wished to make a different point than what is normally assumed in our classrooms: Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was going up from the Piraeus along the outside of the North Wall when he saw some corpses lying at the executioner’s feet. He had an appetite to look at them but at the same time he was disgusted and turned away. For a time he struggled with himself and covered his face, but, finally, overpowered by the appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed

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If we are to believe that for the readers of Plato’s times this Leontius had a particular desire for corpses or for young pale boys who looked like corpses, 50 Socrates’ story may imply that the philosopher’s desire, his above all, for we should not forget what the philo- of philosophy stands for, is for what is, like the idol or the idea, dead. Nietzsche has a good point when he accuses philosophers of a necrophilia for concepts, for “when these honorable idolaters of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it.” 51 Any attempt to articulate a metaphysics of desire cannot but take the form of a “phenomenology of fetishes,” 52 that is, of the phantasmagoric transformations of the phallus, among which one should not forget to count those objects in which philosophers take pride—be they knowledge, truth, wisdom, or god. In the case of Charmides, however, we find some intriguing suggestions in a poem which, even though far removed from Plato’s Athens, displays an intimate proximity with Plato’s text. That poem was written by Oscar Wilde and bears the same title as the Platonic dialogue in question, namely Charmides. Wilde’s Charmides is every bit as charming as his ancient namesake; but instead of being imagined stripping off his clothes, it is he who strips the statue of Athena of its cultic veils and, in an unexpected turn of events, rapes it: Never I ween did lover hold such tryst, For all night long he murmured honeyed word, And saw her sweet unravished limbs, and kissed Her pale and argent body undisturbed, And paddled with the polished throat, and pressed His hot and beating heart upon her chill and icy breast. It was as if Numidian javelins Pierced through and through his wild and whirling brain, And his nerves thrilled like throbbing violins In exquisite pulsation, and the pain Was such sweet anguish that he never drew His lips from hers till overhead the lark of warning flew. 53

Interestingly enough, in Plato’s text it was Charmides himself who was compared to the agalma (“as if he were a statue,” 154c8) and it was with the Socratic agalma that Alcibiades desires to have intercourse. Wilde’s Charmides satisfies both desires: he strips the agalma naked and copulates with it. His jouissance, however, could not go unpunished. As his boat sails, Athena appears to this “over-bold adulterer,” this “dear profaner of great mysteries,” this “ardent amorous idolater” (vs. 265–67) in the form of a storm and drowns him. Charmides’ corpse is washed up in the shore where it is discov-

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ered by a dryad, a young virgin dedicated to Artemis, who is so enamored with it that she tries (for more than two hundred lines of the poem) to have sex with it. By doing so, the young girl has forsaken her vows of chastity and she is, therefore, struck dead by one of Artemis’ arrows. Their dead bodies are soon discovered by a transient Venus who asks Proserpine, on their behalf, to “let Desire pass across dread Charon’s icy ford” (618). The poem ends with the narrator withdrawing his gaze from the corpses as they consummate their posthumous desire in the land of no return. Both were victims of desire, although not of a desire for each other, nor indeed for another at all, but rather for an object and, what is more, for a dead object. If for Freud “the pleasure principle [Eros] seems actually to serve the death instincts” 54 [Thanatos], Wilde’s poetic imagination dares to go further than Freud by making explicit what Freud had only implied. If what I desire is myself as another, my “idol of love” reflected on the lover’s mirror, then the death drive of the Beyond the Pleasure Principle seeks my self-destruction not directly, as one may suppose, but rather obliquely, by a detour through the Other: if my desire seeks to have its object, “the idol of love,” that is, my idol of my love, then, the death drive is first and foremost directed toward it. It is my lover that my desire wishes dead. For I don’t know how else to love, except by killing what I love; for my desire knows of no other object than a corpse. “It is here that we will find the crux of what constitutes the dead end and problem of love—namely that the subject can only satisfy the Other’s demand by demeaning the Other, turning this Other into the object of his desire.” 55 And what else is an Other who has turned into an object if not a corpse? Wilde’s banned play Salome (1893), written originally in French and later adapted as the libretto for a Richard Strauss opera by the same title, makes the specular image of desire all the more spectacular by giving desire’s necrophilia central stage. Wilde’s reading of Salome’s scriptural story (Mark 6:21–28 and Matthew 14:6–11) introduces to the Gospel narrative two new elements that attest to his brilliance. When we think of Salome today the first thing that comes to mind is that seductive dance of the seven veils, removed one by one, until her naked body is fully exposed for the lascivious gaze of King Herod. Although the dance of the seven veils has become canonical in Salome’s story, neither Mark nor Matthew provided any details other than that during the celebrations of Herod, Salome “danced.” “In all reference throughout history to Salome and John the Baptist—religious and historical texts, medieval plays, poetry, painting, sculpture—since her birth two thousand years ago and until 1893 there is no mention of Salome’s dance being called the Dance of the Seven Veils. Until Oscar Wilde.” 56 It is, then, believed that Oscar Wilde is to be credited with the invention of striptease (excluding, of course, the striptease that, as we have seen, Socrates proposes to Charmides, and the striptease Descartes demands from his piece of wax). Even so, what is the significance of specifically seven

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veils? Surely, three veils or ten would have had the same effect. The answer is to be found in the Sumerian poem The Descent of Inanna, written in cuneiform around 3000 B.C. The poem tells the story of how Inanna, who later becomes known as Ishtar, Astarte, and Aphrodite, descends to the underworld clothed and bejeweled with her “divine powers.” Once she arrives at the gates of the “land of no return,” she is refused admission and Ereshkigal, the goddess of the dead and Inanna’s sister, instructs the gatekeepers to bolt the seven gates of the underworld. Then, each of the gates is to be opened separately and Inanna allowed to enter but only after she has removed one article of her clothing. Going from one gate to the other, Inanna is stripped from clothes, one for each of the seven gates. So when she arrives in the presence of her sister she is fully naked. “They looked at her—it was the look of death. They spoke to her—it was the speech of anger. They shouted at her—it was the shout of heavy guilt. The afflicted woman was turned into a corpse. And the corpse was hung on a hook (vs. 164–172).” 57 By giving Salome seven veils or, rather, by having Salome remove no more no less than exactly seven veils, Wilde’s reference to Inanna’s journey to the “land of no return” strips Salome of the garments of her skin. If her dance seduces Herod so much as to promise, with an oath no less, that he will give her anything she desires “up to half his kingdom” (Mk. 6:23), that is because her striptease reveals much more than her naked body. It reveals her corpse. “Such is the woman concealed behind her veil: it is the absence of the penis that turns her into the phallus, the object of desire.” 58 Salome, however, is not interested in Herod’s kingdom. If her dance pleased the king, let her have a different reward. The macabre object of her desire is served to her on a silver platter: the decapitated head of St. John the Baptist (Iokanaan). What could she possibly want to do with a dead head? The answer to this question is the second innovation that Wilde introduces to his reading of Salome. Isn’t it the desire of every woman to kiss the decapitated head? As soon as the head of the Prophet emerges from the underground cistern, Salome seizes it and addresses him in these words: Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now [Je la baiserai maintenant]. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss [Je baiserai] thy mouth, Iokanaan. I said it; did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now. [. . .] Well, I still live, but thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will. Ah, Iokanaan, Iokanaan, thou wert the man that I loved alone among men! [. . .] I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire. What shall I do now, Iokanaan? 59

Like the praying mantis, Salome wants to eat the head of St. John’s decapitated body (“I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit”; “I am hungry for thy body”). Like Socrates, hungry for what is hidden under Phae-

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drus’ cloak (“as people lead hungry animals forward by shaking branches of fruit before them” 60), she is willing to go not only beyond the walls of the city, but even beyond the threshold of Hades. John’s head is her agalma, her “idol of love,” her phallus. 61 Stories of lovers descending to the underworld in order to retrieve their beloved abound in ancient literature—that of Orpheus being a well-known example. They all seem to suggest that if the beloved is to be retrieved, then he was already lost to me. Perhaps the beloved is desired only insofar as he is lost. If the lover’s journey is, unlike the hero’s odyssey, not in some distant land but to the land of no return, that’s because my sexual desire demands more than a lost other. There is no need to explain further what more my desire demands of me. Our foregoing discussion does not allow us to find comfort in the illusion that the beloved is an Other. Desire is a promise—Je baiserai, 62 says Salome. Will it ever be fulfilled? And, were such a time to come, will I not discover that it was a promise made to the one who is no one (personne)? There is nothing new in all this. It is all to be found already in a story, equally obscure and obscene, about Dionysus as told by the secondcentury Church Father Clement of Alexandria: Dionysus, eagerly desiring to descend to Hades, did not know the way; a man, by name Prosymnus, offers to tell him, not without reward. The reward was a disgraceful one, though not so in the opinion of Dionysus: it was an Aphrodisian favor that was asked of Dionysus as a reward. The god was not reluctant to grant the request made to him, and promise with an oath [Je baiserai]. Having learned the way, he departed and again returned: he did not find Prosymnus, for he had died. In order to acquit himself of his promise to his lover, he rushes to his tomb [sēma], and burns with unnatural lust. Cutting a fig-branch that was at hand, he shaped it into a phallus, and so performed his promise to the dead man [soma/sēma]. 63

Like Salome, we never desire the Other; we never desire the Other’s body; we desire the object in the Other, the object of the Other, that very same Other whom our desire has reduced to its object. We desire the part or partial object which, although a part of the whole, desire invests it with a significance infinitely greater than the whole. And if the only way to have the object of desire is to kill it, and if the only way to have it is to descend to Hades, as Salome is prepared to do by stripping herself of her body, then all the better. For isn’t it the underworld that I enter through the gates of my lover’s body? Isn’t his body (soma) the grave (sēma) to which my desire is leading me? Isn’t my desire the sarcophagus of his flesh (sarx)?

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NOTES 1. Plato, Phaedrus, 227; Plato: Complete Works [PCW], ed. John M. Cooper, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 507. 2. Ibid., 230d; PCW, 510. Derrida’s magisterial reading of the Phaedrus has brought to light all the subtleties of Plato’s text, relieving us from the burden of repeating this task here. See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981). 3. Plato, Phaedrus, 242b; PCW, 520. 4. Ibid., 228d, PCW, 509. 5. Jacques Lacan, Transference (Seminar VIII), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 230. My emphasis. 6. The difference between writing and speech in the Phaedrus is cast in terms of “the breathless sign” as opposed to “the living voice,” that is, as a difference organized by the opposition between life and death. For the implications of this dichotomy and the association of writing with death, see Derrida’s Dissemination (in particular 84–94). 7. “I hope that you have carefully observed the flowers that are located in front of Cupid’s genitals in Zucchi’s painting. They are characterized by such abundance only so that one cannot see that there is nothing behind them” (Lacan, Transference [Seminar VIII], 229). 8. Plato, Cratylus, 400c; PCW, trans. C.D.C. Reeve, 118. The same interpretation is given in Gorgias, 493; PCW, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, 436–37, and it can be traced to fragment 14 of the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus. 9. “Included in the objet a is the ἄγαλμα, the inestimable treasure that Alcibiades declares is contained in the rustic box that for him Socrates’s face represents. [. . .] It is because he has not seen Socrates’s prick, if I may be permitted to follow Plato, who does not spare us the details, that Alcibiades the seducer exalts in him the ἄγαλμα, the marvel that he would like Socrates to cede to him in avowing his desire [. . .]” (Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], 322). See also Lacan, Transference (Seminar VIII), 142, 143, 147. 10. Plato, Symposium, 220; PCW, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, 501. 11. Plato, Charmides, 155c–d; PCW, trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague, 642. 12. Lacan, Transference (Seminar VIII), 246. 13. Plato, Charmides, 154e; PCW, 642. It is unfortunate that the Charmides did not capture Derrida’s attention except for a short passage in which Derrida compares Charmides’ cloak to that of Phaedrus: “And one could also consider the astonishing dramatic staging of the first act of the Charmides. It should be followed moment by moment. Dazzled by the beauty of Charmides, Socrates wants above all to undress the soul of this young man who loves philosophy. Charmides is sent for so that he can be presented to a doctor (Socrates) who can relieve him of his headaches and his weakness. Socrates accepts to pass himself off as a man who knows a cure for headaches. There then ensues a ‘cloak’ scene similar to the one in the Phaedrus, involving a certain pharmakon [. . .]” (Dissemination, 124). 14. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 46. 15. Ibid., 39. 16. Ibid., 51. 17. René Descartes, Meditations, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1784). 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 21. 20. Ibid., 22. 21. Empedocles, Fragment 126 (DK, 362). 22. Origen, Contra Celsum, IV: XL, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 515 (translation modified).

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23. The difference between “skin” and “light” in Hebrew is inaudible and it depends on whether one spells the word with an aleph (“light”) or an aiyin (“skin”). 24. Gregory Nazianzen, Sermon 45: “On the Holy Easter,” PG 36: 633. 25. Gregory of Nyssa, De Anima et Resurrectione, GNO 3.3, 111–12. 26. For the ambiguous status of the body see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 9 and 248–49. 27. Plato, Phaedrus, 255b–e; PCW, 532. 28. “[A]galma: the object hidden within the subject” (Lacan, Transference [Seminar VIII], 169). 29. “If the subject has this singular relationship to the object of desire, it is because he himself was initially an object of desire that became incarnate” (ibid., 208). 30. “What is at stake in desire is not a subject but rather an object. Herein lies what one might call the terrible commandment of the god of love. The commandment is to make of the object it designates to us something that, first of all, is an object, and, second, an object before which we falter, vacillate, and disappear as subjects” (Ibid., 170). 31. The reference is to Leo Bersani’s book Is the Rectum a Grave? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010). 32. “Viewed Socratically, any point of departure in time is eo ipso something accidental, a vanishing point, an occasion” (Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985], 11). Kierkegaard’s argument here is that if truth and knowledge are reached by means of recollection, then it makes no difference who was the “teacher” who reminded me what I already knew. Similarly, it makes no difference who the beloved is, as he is nothing more than a souvenir of a desire I already have had. 33. Plato, Phaedrus, 250; PCW, 527. 34. Plato, Phaedrus, 254b5, 531. 35. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 46. 36. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: A Selection, 307. 37. By “asemic,” I refer to the connection between sēma and soma as discussed earlier. As asemic, that is, without sēma, the infant is also without soma (asomatic). 38. Lacan, Transference (Seminar VIII), 351. 39. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, 3. 40. Ibid., 4 (my emphasis). 41. Ibid., 307. 42. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1998), 213. 43. Lacan, Transference (Seminar VIII), 351. 44. Ibid. 45. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” in Écrits: A Selection, 7. 46. For an interpretation of the Vietnam Memorial informed by Lacan’s theories, see William J. Richardson, “Toward the Future of Truth” in Heidegger and the Greeks, ed. Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 93–110. 47. For the homophone phrases “desire has been killed” and “you are what I desire” in French, see Lacan, Transference (Seminar VIII), 201. 48. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” in Écrits: A Selection, 310. 49. Plato, Republic IV, 439e–440; PCW, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve, 1071. 50. The German philologist Theodor Bergk was the first to advance this hypothesis (1857) on the basis of fragment from the comic poet Theopompus. 51. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1982), 479. 52. Lacan, Transference (Seminar VIII), 141.

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53. Oscar Wilde, “Charmides” (vs. 121–32) [1881], in Collected Poems (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994), 53. 54. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 77. 55. Lacan, Transference (Seminar VIII), 219. 56. Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 31. 57. J. A. Black, G. Cunningham, E. Fluckiger-Hawker, E. Robson, and G. Zólyomi, The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/) (Oxford, 1998). 58. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject” in Écrits: A Selection, 322. 59. Oscar Wilde, Salome: A Tragedy in One Act (1893; repr., Boston: J. W. Luce, 1912), 64–66. 60. Plato, Phaedrus, 230d; PCW, 510. 61. “The discovery made by psychoanalysis is that the subject does not merely encounter images of his own fragmentation in the Other’s field, but already, and right from the outset, encounters objects of the Other’s desire—namely, the mother’s objects, not simply in a state of fragmentation, but with the privileged status granted them by the mother’s desire. In particular, as Melanie Klein tells us, one of these objects, the paternal phallus, is encountered right from the subject’s first fantasies. [. . .] The paternal phallus is perceived—in the internal realm of the mother’s body, into which the first imaginary formations are projected—as something that is distinguished as very highly accentuated or even dangerous” (Lacan, Transference [Seminar VIII], 214–15). 62. Future tense of the verb baiser (“to kiss,” but more often “to fuck”). 63. Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Heathen, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 180. Emphasis and annotation is mine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bentley, Toni. Sisters of Salome. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave? Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Black, J. A., G. Cunningham, E. Fluckiger-Hawker, E. Robson, and G. Zólyomi, The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/), Oxford, 1998. Clement of Alexandria. Exhortation to the Heathen. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 2, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. Descartes, René. Meditations. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume II. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Empedocles. Fragment 126. In Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker Vol. I, edited by H. Diels and W. Kranz (DK), 6th ed. Berlin: Weidman, 1952. First published 1903. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1961. Gregory Nazianzen. Sermon 45: “On the Holy Easter.” In Patrologiae Graeca (PG), edited by J.P. Migne. Paris: Imprimerie Catholic, 1857–66. Gregory of Nyssa. De Anima et Resurrectione. In Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO), volume 3.3, edited by Andreas Spira. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. ———. Transference (Seminar VIII), edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Levinas, Emmanuel. Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001.

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Kierkegaard, Søren. Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. In The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1982. Origen. Contra Celsum. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 4, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905. Plato. Charmides. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 639–63. Translated by Rosamond Kent Sprague. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. ———. Cratylus. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 101–56. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. ———. Gorgias. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 791–869. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. ———. Phaedrus. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 506–56. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. ———. Republic. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 971–1223. Translated by G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. ———. Symposium. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 457–505. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. ———. Timaeus. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 1224–92. Translated by Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Richardson, William J. “Toward the Future of Truth.” In Heidegger and the Greeks, edited by Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, 93–110. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York: Scholastic, 1998. Wilde, Oscar. “Charmides.” In Collected Poems. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994. First published 1881. ———. Salome: A Tragedy in One Act. Boston: J. W. Luce, 1912. First published 1893.

Section III

The Inscribed Body Text and the Afterlife of the Flesh Stephen Mendelsohn

The limits of the flesh, desire, and the embodied life are revealed through the process of writing and the encounter with the written word. The desire to write, to inscribe oneself in a sense both onto and into the page, exhibits (albeit implicitly) the desire for an embodied life beyond the life of one’s own body. As such it is no mere happenstance that even at the moment of its birth writing is immediately associated with death, weakness, frailty, and the finitude of human life. In the act of putting pen to paper I enact a double process of distancing myself from myself through what in the first instance might have been a desire to make myself present to myself and to others in a more permanent and lasting way than the life of the body affords. With the written word I desire—ultimately in vain—to cohabit a body outside of my body that is somehow still mine. I attempt not only to confirm to myself that I am here but also to confirm to others that I was here. This primal urge to write bespeaks the desire for an afterlife. But not the afterlife one might seek in heaven or a metaphysical beyond. The need to write—to leave a mark that is indisputably one’s own—announces the desire to remain here; however, when we are attentive—as Socrates is in the Phaedrus—to the failure of the flesh of the text to deliver to us the semi-permanent seat within the realm of becoming that it seems on its surface to promise, new light may be shed on the power of writing and of literature to disclose the limits of human life as such. The written word and the critical distance it affords can reveal that despite the limitations inherent in the life of

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embodied desiring—both marked out by and inscribed within the moments of birth and death. It is precisely these limitations that serve as the condition of possibility for desire, eros, and action. In allowing me to see these limitations more clearly for what they are, the acts of writing and reading put me in my place. They help to teach me that the apparent confines of the flesh and of mortality are not confines at all: they afford the space and time within which desire can open onto a world that meets it, yields to it, frustrates it, and often times destroys it. If desire were not situated within limitation then it could no longer reach beyond itself—it would not be desire. In “Anxiety, Melancholy, Shrapnel: Contribution to a Phenomenology of Desire,” Richard Rojcewicz clearly demonstrates the crucial mediating role that writing plays in reflecting on the central position desire and eros occupy in meaningful human life. Bringing the literary writing of Shakespeare to bear on the philosophical writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Rojcewicz shows precisely how through a careful reading of Hamlet we can come to better understand the deep relationship between Heidegger’s notion of anxiety and Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of embodied sexuality. While through their analyses of anxiety and the case of Schn., Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty provide instances in which desire ceases to operate in its normal capacity, as Hamlet’s drama unfolds, Shakespeare allows us to see such an abnormal cessation of desire play itself out in Hamlet’s inability take a clear course of action. In “The Poetics of Lack and the Problem of Ground in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger” and “From the Writing of Desire to the Desire of Writing,” Christopher Yates and Miguel de Beistegui, respectively, explore two essential poles of limitation with respect to embodied desire. Through his reading of Hunger, Yates brings the problem of the apparently unlimited nature of bodily desire to the fore. Desire, in its most basic and its most profound and complex expressions of itself in and through the needs of the body, can and must sometimes frustrate itself artificially whenever it is encountered as it is: namely, as limited precisely by way of its apparent lack of limitation. Desire begets desire rather than satiety, and the experience of hunger under the threat of starvation puts this aspect of desire on display. De Beistegui traces Proust’s struggle with the problem of desire’s limitation through its frustration in attaining many of its particular aims, objects, and ends. It is by way of this frustration of desire that I can feel myself to be other than myself and the world in which I am consigned to live out my desires. For Proust, according to de Beistegui, the act of writing can provide consolation in a world that perpetually offers up possibilities of desire to me only to preclude the possibility of the consummation of those desires once they have been awakened. Finally, in “Miracle,” Alphonso Lingis, through the lens of the novels of Jean Genet, vindicates the inherent desirability of the embodied life—espe-

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cially in the encounter with the grotesque that the flesh can become. Contrary to a metaphysics of desire that seeks to condemn and reject the material element of embodied life by orienting desire strictly toward a transcendent realm of disembodied truth and knowledge of that which lies behind and beyond the material, many of Genet’s characters find desirable those aspects of materiality that are typically most reviled by the philosophical tradition. Lingis’ reading of Genet leaves room for something to be desired in fleshly existence, even in what have been received as its most base and revolting features.

Chapter Eight

Anxiety, Melancholy, Shrapnel Contribution to a Phenomenology of Desire Richard Rojcewicz

Central to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is the thesis that the things of the world are not present to us simply because we possess sense organs. Those organs must come into play within a more primordial function, more primordial than perception. Perception enjoys a primacy over thought but does nevertheless itself “repose” on something, does have its own “vital root.” Perception rests on a more basic affiliation with the world, a more secret bodily connection by which the world exists for us. The world does not come to matter to us because we perceive it; on the contrary, we can perceive it only because we are already invested in it. This more primordial somatic relation is difficult to discern if we merely analyze the comportment of the perceiving subject to space, things, tools, or the natural world. These all seem to exist in themselves, independently of our stake in them. Therefore, if we wish to shed light on the world as it comes to be present to us, we should consider that sector of our life which manifestly has meaning and reality only for ourselves, namely, our affective milieu. Thus arises Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body as a sexed being: “Let us try to see how something begins to exist for us through desire or love, and we will thereby comprehend better how beings and objects can exist in general.” 1 It is, of course, no simple matter to pursue this phenomenology of desire. We are so caught up in our affective milieu that we lack the distance needed to grasp it in its nascent state. That is why Merleau-Ponty, as is usual with him, takes up a case in which the normal relation to the world has been disturbed. The way the normal life of desire may break down could provide the distance which allows sight. In general, for Merleau-Ponty, we need to 143

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slacken the intentional threads tying us to the world in order to see just how and just how fast they bind us. The appeal to the abnormal is, in other words, an inherently phenomenological strategy; it is Merleau-Ponty’s way of carrying out Husserl’s transcendental reduction. It is slackening the threads, not out of doubt, but precisely in order to contemplate their workings. The abnormal case analyzed by Merleau-Ponty in the present context is that of Schn., a German soldier who suffered a brain injury from shrapnel in World War I. Schn. was investigated firsthand by Kurt Goldstein, and it is the latter’s medical-psychological observations that Merleau-Ponty raises to the philosophical level. What I am proposing here is to examine two further instances in which the intentional threads to the world are slackened: anxiety as analyzed in Heidegger’s Being and Time and the melancholy of Hamlet. I hope to show an identity of structure common to anxiety, melancholy, and the case of Schn. I want to let these three illuminate one another, and I thereby seek to contribute to a phenomenology of desire. ANXIETY For Heidegger, anxiety arises from a certain breakdown in the structure of the world, and so we need to begin by laying out that structure. The most precise way to understand Heidegger’s concept of world in Being and Time is to think in terms of the ancient Greek notion of κόσμoς. The cosmos is indeed the whole, everything taken together, but the focus of the Greek word is not the whole but the togetherness. The cosmos is a well-ordered whole. Thus the opposite of the cosmos is not nothingness; the opposite is chaos. The κoσμητής, the cosmetician, is for the Greeks the hairdresser, the one who arranges hair beautifully. In turn, the opposite of ordered hair is not baldness but is dishevelment, messy hair. The cosmos is not simply everything that in some way or other avoids non-being and not simply what is allencompassing, the context for everything; instead, the cosmos is the beautiful arrangement of everything. The Latin term for world, mundus, corresponds exactly to κόσμoς. The basic meaning of mundus is neatness, elegance, and only by extension is it applied to the world, in virtue of the splendid order of everything in the universe. Heidegger expresses this notion of the world as a cosmos or mundus with the synonyms he uses for world: relational totality, equipmental totality, involvement, significance. All of these are meant to express an understanding of the world as a whole wherein the parts are assigned to one another, are well arranged, fitted together. Despite what may seem a morbid cloud hovering over Being and Time, in virtue of the prominence of phenomena such as death, guilt, and anxiety, the

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primary experience according to Heidegger is a positive one: an understanding that the things of the world hang together, that the world is in joint. This sense of the world as well-ordered is what Heidegger means by the “worldhood of the world.” It is a vague, global sense that things hang together. Worldhood is disclosed primarily through moods, and it precedes the perception of individual things hanging together. It is a grasp of the Gestalt of the world, a disclosure of meaning prior to an awareness of the content that bears the meaning. Strictly speaking, worldhood is not a sense of things hanging together, since it precedes an experience of things. It is a vague feeling of hangingtogether-ness, of I-know-not-what hanging together. That the world is out of joint could only be a later, derived experience. The world is of course not in perfect order, not a perfect cosmos. Hardly. But for Heidegger the disorder stands out from a more general background of order, not vice versa. Without entering into all the details, or in other words by radically simplifying, we could say Heidegger divides the functional relations composing the world into two: the in-order-to and the for-the-sake-of-which. The former are the relations among things. Heidegger’s examples of such relations in Being and Time involve either hammering (in cobbling shoes or building a house) or driving a car. The world of the cobbler, involving hammers, nails, lasts, leather, dance floors, hiking trails, and the elements, is composed of various in-order-to relations. Hammering is undertaken in order to drive nails, which is in order to fasten soles, which is in order to support the uppers, which is in order to enclose a foot. And all of this is for the sake of something: allowing Dasein to hike in the woods (or go dancing, or play football, or walk in rain and snow). There are all sorts of in-order-to relations, but the for-the-sake-of-which is always only Dasein, some possibility of Dasein. The full structure of the world includes both sorts of relations. In other words, the full structure includes Dasein. Dasein is essentially related to the things of the world. A worldless Dasein, strictly speaking, is unthinkable. The worldhood of the world therefore includes a sense that Dasein is in harmony with things. Heidegger claims that Dasein for the most part even understands itself in terms of things, as just another thing. Yet this harmony can be broken, forcing Dasein to understand itself neither in terms of things nor in terms of other Daseins but in its own terms, out of its own resources, in a freely chosen way. That is the path to authenticity. The harmonious structure of the world can break down in two respects, corresponding to ruptures in the relations of the in-order-to or the for-thesake-of-which. Hammers can break, or be missing, or get in the way. These everyday occurrences, in their negativity, bring home to Dasein something positive, namely, the fact that for the most part things do run smoothly, that things are assigned to one another and are usually in joint. But it is also

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possible for Dasein to feel disconnected from the entire totality of in-order-to relations. Those relations may go on without a noticeable rupture, but Dasein may feel them to be insignificant, to have no meaning, to signify nothing to the particular Dasein. There may be a break between things in the world and the for-the-sake-of-which. That is the experience of anxiety. In anxiety, the intentional threads tying us to the world are slackened. The things and their interrelations in the world no longer exist for us. What motives are involved here? That is, what motivates anxiety, and, first of all, what is Heidegger’s motive for taking up the theme of anxiety in Being and Time? Heidegger’s motive is a positive one. In order to interpret the Being of Dasein and read off the meaning of Being in general, it is necessary to grasp Dasein in its wholeness. This wholeness is diachronic, extending through time, all the way to death (which motivates Heidegger’s concern with beingtoward-death), and it is also synchronic, comprehending all the present moments of Dasein, all the moments of being-in-the-world. These moments (the world, the self, and being-in) are unified, according to Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis. Yet he insists that the analysis must have a phenomenal basis; the unity seen by the reflecting philosopher must be attested to everyday Dasein. Anxiety is the attestation of that unity. According to Heidegger, what we are anxious in the face of (wovor) is the world as a whole; the things in it present themselves to us as strangely and obtrusively there, without rhyme or reason. What we are anxious about (worum) is our own free existence; we can no longer understand ourselves in terms of the world, since the world has become meaningless to us, so we are thrown back on our own resources and need to make a free authentic choice of what to do with our lives. Finally, anxiety is itself a mood, a way of beingin. Thus the moments of being-in-the-world are shown to anxious Dasein in their unity, while the diversity of the moments is also respected. The Wovor is being-in-the-world with the moment of world highlighted, the Worum is being-in-the-world with the moment of the self highlighted, and anxiety as mood highlights the moment of being-in as such. Thus anxiety is revelatory of the wholeness of Dasein 2 and is not entirely negative. It is even a necessary experience on the path to authenticity, that is, individualization. What motivates anxiety? Heidegger is most clear on what is not the motive. It is not fear, boredom, conscience, or the prevalent inauthenticity of contemporary Dasein. The motive cannot be fear, since fear is always directed to a definite object. Boredom cannot be the motive, for we are bored only when we have nothing practical to be occupied with; anxiety, however, can arise “in the most innocuous situations,” 3 that is, in the very midst of everyday practical occupations. As for conscience, it is a voice telling of Dasein’s guilt and so might seem to provoke anxiety. Yet for Heidegger conscience would be something that can dispel anxiety. In anxiety, Dasein

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feels detached from the world and so as lacking in guilt for what is happening there. Conscience tells Dasein that such detachment is not an option; Dasein is guilty, is involved. Even to be detached is a way of attachment, and so Dasein is condemned to be involved in the world, condemned to be the forthe-sake-of-which. Thus conscience, as Heidegger emphasizes, is revelatory, is not simply minatory and negative. Conscience for Heidegger is Ent-schlossenheit (not “resoluteness,” but “uncoveredness,” “discernment”). Conscience discloses practical possibilities, or at least it brings home the necessity of taking practical action. Thus conscience makes heroes of us all. As for inauthenticity, it is a fleeing from individuality and is a falling into the theyself. Ordinarily, for Heidegger, fleeing is revelatory: we must know what we are fleeing from in order to turn our back on it. But in this case Heidegger evidently believes contemporary Dasein is so caught up in fleeing, so tranquilized by everyday concerns, so busy in doing what others are doing, that there is no time left for an anxious moment. That is why anxiety, as Heidegger understands it, “‘authentic’ anxiety [. . .] is rare.” 4 As to what does motivate the experience of anxiety, Heidegger offers only hints. The two hints are darkness and physiology. Indeed Heidegger claims that anxiety does not need darkness. In fact, we might think anxiety is impossible in darkness, since anxiety involves a disclosure of the obstinacy and obtrusiveness of the world, and how can such disclosure take place if we do not even see the world? According to Heidegger, “In the dark, most emphatically nothing is to be seen, yet the world is precisely still there and indeed more obtrusively.” 5 In the dark, in the night, the world does not go away but is even more obtrusive. How so? Heidegger obviously does not mean we are liable to bump into things while walking around in the dark. Let us take a clue from Merleau-Ponty: For reflection, all space is subtended by a thought that synthesizes the parts of space; and this thought can arise from nowhere. On the other hand, it is from the very center of nocturnal space that I am united to space. The anguish of neuropaths in the night derives from this: nighttime makes palpable to us our contingency, namely, the gratuitous and indefatigable movement by which we seek to transcend ourselves in things and to anchor ourselves in things without any guarantee that we will always find things. 6

In the day, the parts of space can be synthesized from any part. But at night I am the center of space; thereby I come to realize my role in being-inthe-world, namely, that I am the center and have to transcend myself into things. Such is what scares neuropaths, namely, that they have to carry this out themselves and might not succeed. Darkness not only highlights the self but also makes the world obtrude. If the things of the world are missing in visibility, then I am thrown back on myself to synthesize space, but the world still obtrudes: precisely as foreign, as something I need to find anchorage in

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without anything offered to take hold of. The world sticks out as strangely and obtrusively there. Furthermore, the eerie feeling that accompanies darkness is a mode of being-in. So world, self, and being-in, the moments of being-in-the-world, are unified in darkness, just as they are in anxiety. Accordingly, while anxiety does not need darkness, it is also hardly impossible in the dark either. The second motive mentioned by Heidegger is physiology: “Anxiety is often ‘physiologically’ conditioned.” 7 We will return to physiology later, more than once, but in a Heideggerian context this invocation of the physiological is most surprising. It would seem that Heidegger should agree completely with Sartre: A coward is responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that because he has a cowardly heart or lung or brain; he is not like that on account of his physiological makeup; on the contrary, he is like that because he has made himself a coward by his acts. There is no such thing as a cowardly temperament; there are nervous temperaments; there is poor blood, as people say, or rich temperaments. But the man whose blood is poor is not a coward on that account, for what constitutes cowardice is the act of renouncing or yielding. A temperament is not an act. 8

Substitute “anxiety” for “cowardice,” and, mutandis mutatis, Heidegger could have written that passage. In other words, physiology would seem to have nothing to do with anxiety; a nervous temperament does not make one anxious in Heidegger’s sense. In fact, it requires strength of character to be open to anxiety. Perhaps Heidegger is hinting not that the nervous temperament is susceptible to anxiety but that only the strong temperament is, the person of rich blood. In any case, Heidegger goes on to say that this conditioning is an ontological problem, for “a physiological triggering of anxiety is possible only because Dasein is anxious in the ground of its Being.” 9 How is Dasein anxious in its ground? The ground of the Being of Dasein is temporality (Zeitlichkeit). That means temporality, Dasein’s relatedness to past, present, and future, enables Dasein’s peculiar way of comporting to possibilities. Future possibilities are not simply and utterly outstanding but are already to some extent incorporated into present Dasein. (The prime example is death. This future possibility is not entirely outstanding; on the contrary, it already bathes our present existence in an atmosphere of mortality.) And past actualities are not simply and utterly over and done with but are still open possibilities for present Dasein. (Any already actualized possibility is an example. I am an old man, but there are many ways to be old, and these remain open to my free choice.) Dasein is already what it is not yet and is not yet what it already is. Now, where is the anxiety in this temporal complexity?

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The anxiety must lie in the peculiar open-endedness of Dasein. Dasein is never secure in its connection to the world, never secure in its being the forthe-sake-of-which. My past engagements in the world are still up to me to appropriate; I cannot rest on my laurels. And my possible future engagements cannot simply be put off to a later time; I am already acting them out. Thus there is no security; I am never wholly attached to the world. It is because of this, because I am basically anxious, because I am always on the edge, that anxiety can be triggered physiologically. On the other hand, to be on the edge also means never to be wholly unattached from the world. Accordingly, physiology could only on rare occasions trigger anxiety. Nevertheless, one can imagine a physiological condition, such as a lesion to the central nervous system, that would not be severe enough to affect perception or abstract thinking but could trigger anxiety in Heidegger’s sense. In other words, the condition would not destroy the perceived world but would detach the subject from it. The lesson to be drawn from Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety is that the opposite, the attachment to the world, cannot be taken for granted. Anxiety is always threatening, for it is latent in the very ground of our Being. Mere perception of the world, or even of the smooth functioning of the in-order-to relations within the world, does not guarantee that we will accept the role of the for-the-sake-of-which. From what does and does not motivate anxiety, we can say that what attaches us to the world is not mere perception, not practical activity, not duty, not daytime, not our physiological makeup, and not our peculiar temporality. All of these are compatible with complete indifference toward the world. There must be something in the world that touches us more nearly, some emotional attachment. The world perceived in anxiety is affectively neutral; so there must be in our ordinary lives, although we take it for granted, something that shifts the world out of neutral, something we desire, something toward which we feel at least a modicum of affection or aversion, if not actual love or hate. The attunement spoken of by MerleauPonty, the function, beneath perception, by which the world matters to us, must have to do with the opposite of neutrality, namely, desire. MELANCHOLY Hamlet calls his own state of mind melancholy (II, ii, 587). Very early in the play, before he encounters his father’s ghost, he expresses this state of mind as follows: How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world. (I, ii, 133–34)

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Such melancholy exactly corresponds to Heideggerian anxiety. The “uses of this world” are the in-order-to relations. These go on for Hamlet without a break, but they are to him insignificant. In anxiety, the world does not seem broken, nor does it disappear; on the contrary, it obtrudes—although as alien and meaningless. Likewise, Hamlet says his disposition is so heavy that “this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory” (II, ii, 295–96). The world is still goodly, a frame of things that are in good order, but juts out as sterile, that is, again, weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. That is the basic structure of both anxiety and melancholy, and we will find it in Schn. as well. The core phenomenon is an intact world that leaves one cold. Hamlet’s famous soliloquy is also an expression of this same melancholy or anxiety. To be or not to be—he says that that is the question, but it is not the question he actually poses. The question is not between being and nonbeing but between two ways of being, passive or active, detached or engaged. The question, Hamlet immediately goes on to say, is whether ’tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles (III, i, 57–59). In other words, the question is whether to be listless, mope, and just let fate take its course or to act and do something about the situation, to “end” the troubles by “opposing” them (III, i, 60). The question is whether the uses of this world will provoke warmth, a reaction with some heart in it, instead of listlessness. Hamlet asks, regarding one of the visiting actors: “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?” (II, ii, 543). An analogous question applies to Hamlet: what actually is his father’s murder to him? What are the uses of the world to him? Or again, after delivering a paean to humanity (“What a piece of work is a man”), Hamlet asks: “And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?” (II, ii, 304–5). This question (What is the world to me?) expresses precisely what is played out in the course of the drama. Will Hamlet’s situation actually move him to action, or will he remain detached? The decision, we can say for certain, will not be made at the level of abstract argumentation. Hamlet’s rationalizations are weak, and we see through them. After he promises the ghost revenge “with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love” (I, v, 29–30), he delays on the grounds that he needs more proof. The devil may be tempting him to murder! So the melancholic Dane puts on “The Mousetrap” and gains the evidence. But he still does not exact revenge when provided a perfect opportunity, and the reason is that his uncle is praying and so would be sent to heaven! With these far-fetched rationalizations, Hamlet is surely drawing a long bow, a very long bow. Hamlet himself reflects on his inability to act and blames either his body or his soul, his physiological makeup (at one point, II, ii, 124, he refers to his body as a machine), or his excessive thoughtfulness. In various soliloquies, he supposes he must be “muddy-mettled” (II, ii, 552), “pigeon-livered” (II, ii,

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562), “lacking in gall” (II, ii, 562), “not splenetive” (V, i, 248), or else he is overly conscious, too reflective. So he blames conscience, which is not what Heidegger means by the term, but is instead self-consciousness, reflection: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. (III, i, 83–85)

What does bring Hamlet to act? What motivates him out of his melancholy? If the opposite of listlessness is passion, then what brings Hamlet to act passionately? Hamlet can be said to act with warmth only three times: when grappling with Laertes in Ophelia’s grave, when fencing with Laertes, and when finally exacting revenge on the king. The first two are actually said to be passionate acts, and we can infer that the last one is passionate as well (“Then venom, to thy work!”) (V, ii, 317–18). Hamlet overcomes his listlessness for the first time when by chance he happens on Ophelia’s obsequies. Yet it is not actually Ophelia’s death that moves him; it is her brother’s behavior at the grave. Hamlet later tells Horatio: But sure the bravery of his grief did put me Into a tow’ring passion. (V, ii, 79–80)

The brave display of Laertes’ grief was his leaping into the grave, protesting how much he loved Ophelia. Hamlet leaps in after him and boasts: I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers Could not with all their quantity of love Make up my sum. (V, i, 256–58)

Hamlet and Laertes grapple, and the king has to order attendants: “Pluck them asunder” (V, i, 251). Hamlet then charges that Laertes is trying to “outface me with leaping in her gave” (V, i, 265), and he names the things he will do to show how much his love surpasses that of Laertes, including drinking vinegar and eating a crocodile (V, i, 263). It is Hamlet’s envy of Laertes’ swordsmanship that motivates the king to stage the fencing match. He tells Laertes that a gentleman of Normandy, in Hamlet’s hearing, gave a mastery report of Laertes’ skill with the rapier. According to the king: this report of his Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy That he could nothing do but wish and beg Your sudden coming o’er to play with you. Now, out of this—(IV, vii, 101–5)

Out of this the plot is hatched for Hamlet’s undoing: the rapier “unbated” (IV, vii, 136) (not blunted as in a friendly match), the point dipped in a “mortal contagion” (IV, vii, 145), and the cup of wine poisoned. During the

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fourth pass, Laertes and Hamlet take to fighting in earnest, and again the king has to command: “Part them. They are incensed” (V, ii, 291). The play then proceeds headlong to its blood-soaked end. In one instant, Hamlet learns the sword has been envenomed, he is about to die, Laertes is about to die, the queen has been poisoned, and, as Laertes tells him, “The king’s to blame” (V, ii, 309) for everything. It is a sea of troubles, and Hamlet finally takes arms against it. He stabs the king with the fatal sword, forces down the king’s throat the dregs of the poisoned wine, and addresses his first harsh words to the murderer of his father: Here, thou incestuous, murd’rous, damned Dane, Drink off this potion. [. . .] Follow my mother. (V, ii, 314–16)

Let us look more closely at the relation of Hamlet to Laertes, since Ophelia’s brother seems central to all of the eponymous soliloquizer’s passion. The two lords have this in common: a father’s murder to avenge. But the contrast in their resoluteness could not be greater. Laertes is rash and would even cut Hamlet’s throat “i’ th’ church” (IV, vii, 125). But his own mother says of Hamlet: as patient as the female dove When that her golden couplets are disclosed, His silence will sit drooping. (V, i, 273–75)

In other words, Hamlet is as patient, silent, and drooping as a brooding hen. Yet Laertes moves him to passion. Several times during the play, Hamlet speaks well of Laertes. He calls Laertes a very noble youth (V, i, 211), says he loved Laertes ever (V, i, 277), is very sorry he forgot himself to Laertes (V, ii, 75–76), says he will court his favors (V, ii, 78), and twice calls him brother (V, ii, 233; V, ii, 242). On the other hand, there is the rivalry, having to do with fencing and with love for Ophelia. Is there any connection between these? Hamlet’s behavior changes, beginning with the departure of Laertes for France. That is the exact moment Ophelia is reluctantly compelled by her father Polonius to repulse Hamlet’s advances and not to “slander any moment leisure as to give words or talk” with him (I, iii, 133–34). The change in Hamlet is that he now seriously takes up fencing: “Since Laertes went into France, I have been in continual practice” (V, ii, 199–200). Laertes is supposed to be the best swordsman in all of France, and so when they play the match, Hamlet has to receive large odds in the betting and only has to avoid being hit four times in order to win. Yet the tragic prince is in such good practice that he remains unscathed in the first three passes and touches Laertes twice. Hamlet himself is struck only when the bout becomes a melee and the swords are mixed up.

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It could well be that Hamlet had a sexual relation with Ophelia. We are told very little about Hamlet’s life while his father was still king, that is, before the play begins. But we do learn that he loved Ophelia. For example, Polonius says he saw “this hot love on the wing” (II, ii, 132) before his daughter told him anything about it. But Ophelia tells her father shortly after the new king is crowned. So Polonius must have seen the love long before that. What sort of “hot love” was it? Both Laertes and Polonius believe that Ophelia is by no means “a green girl, unsifted in such perilous circumstance” (I, iii, 101–2). Laertes feels the need to warn Ophelia of the dangers of opening her “chaste treasure to Hamlet’s unmastered importunity” (I, iii, 30–31), and Polonius is afraid Ophelia will present him with a “fool” (I, iii, 109), an illegitimate grandchild. Yet Ophelia obeys her father in repelling Hamlet’s advances, and what seems to have been Hamlet’s genuine love for Ophelia turns into some bizarre form of resentment (“Get thee to a nunnery”). Both Ophelia and her father believe spurned love has caused Hamlet to go mad. Is there not an obvious meaningful connection between Hamlet’s simultaneous obsession with fencing and the breaking of relations with Ophelia? The thrusting of the rapier in fencing would be a sublimation of those relations. In other words, the love for Ophelia would be the one single root of Hamlet’s passionate behavior toward Laertes. Fighting Laertes in Ophelia’s grave and fighting him with swords mean the same. These fights are passionate because they represent passion for Ophelia. What motivates Hamlet out of melancholy has to do with desire. SHRAPNEL Goldstein’s diagnosis of the effect of the brain lesion of Schn. was “soul blindness,” Seelenblindheit. 10 This abnormality would now be classified among the aphasias, but “soul blindness” names the condition very well. Schn. was blind not in eye but in soul. The anxiety of Being and Time and Hamlet’s melancholy are also instances of soul blindness. The eye sees perfectly, but the soul is not “into” it, remains neutral to it. In soulless seeing, the spectacle seems strange and obtrusive, that is, weary, stale, flat, unprofitable, sterile, cold. The phenomenon of letting something go in one ear and out the other is comparable. There is nothing wrong with the ears, but what is heard does not “register,” as we say. The life of Schn. in general was like that; nothing registered. But Schn. could compensate. He developed what he called “footholds,” Anhaltspunkte, various stratagems to make up for what he lacked. He lacked a meaningful grasp of what he saw, so he had recourse to his intelligence, which indeed was unimpaired by the brain lesion. He could usually arrive at the same end

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as a normal person, but he did not get there in the normal way. For example, he lost the normal possession of his own body, and to know his posture he needed to interpret certain signs. The pressure he felt on the soles of his feet was interpreted as a sign that he was standing. It is possible to think that there is no difference in kind between the methods of Schn. and normal methods. Empiricism would say the only difference is that normal people carry out the process very rapidly and can rely on past accomplishments, whereas Schn. had to carry out the process deliberately and laboriously every time anew. Schn. spoke deliberately; he had to find each word and represent it before he could say it. It is again possible to think the normal person does the same, only very quickly, such that the previous explicit representation is not noticed. Goldstein does not mention Schn. dancing. But we can imagine what that dancing would be like. It would be the same as the dancing of any selfconscious dancer. Every step would have to be represented explicitly before it was carried out. I myself, the author of this paper, do unhappily dance that way. I represent the steps to myself: left foot, right foot, together; right foot, left foot, together. I tell my feet what to do and am unable to let them move for themselves. That is why I dance, if you could call it that, woodenly. In every sector of his life, Schn. behaved woodenly. Merleau-Ponty attempts to show that this is pathological behavior, not simply a more deliberate version of the normal. A graceful dancer does not at all first represent what the feet are supposed to do. A normal person does not interpret signs to know his own posture but instead has a more intimate knowledge of himself than an interpretation of signs would allow. Wooden behavior does not result because the mental processes are slow or because a habit has not yet been formed. It is due to a missing element. Especially as regards sexuality, there is manifest a difference in kind between Schn. and a normal subject. The sexual apparatus is intact in Schn.; he is capable of sex and is not impotent. But the way his sexual life has deteriorated points to a missing element that cannot be compensated by an abnormal person’s roundabout methods. According to Merleau-Ponty, sexuality is an original intentionality. It is a way one body intends another. It is this intentionality that is missing in Schn., and that is what makes his sexual life incomparable to the normal person’s. This intentionality could be called desire or libido. Lacking this desire, Schn. is emotionally detached from the erotic world. Everything about that world remains intact, in the sense that Schn. is capable of sexual pleasure and capable of sexual ideas. But desire does not breathe life into his sexual situations. Thus we find in Schn. the same structure we found in anxiety and melancholy. From an outside point of view, the erotic world is not broken; but it does not exist for Schn., it does not touch his heart and soul. That is the root of the dissolution of his affective milieu.

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Before the war, Schn. led a life of normal sexuality. He was married and had children. On June 4, 1915, at the age of twenty-four, while serving as a private in the German army, he suffered wounds from mine shrapnel, in the back of the head, on the left side. He was immediately struck unconscious and remained in that state for four days. 11 Merleau-Ponty recounts the characteristic symptoms of the deterioration of the sexual life of Schn.: He no longer spontaneously pursued sexual activity. Pornographic images, conversations on sexual matters, or the perception of a naked body did not bring to life any desire in him. He seldom kissed, and a kiss never stimulated him sexually. His sexual reactions were very narrowly localized and did not begin without contact. If this foreplay was interrupted, he made no attempt to pursue the sexual cycle. In intercourse, penetration was never sought spontaneously. If his partner achieved orgasm first and broke off from him, his faint desire evaporated. There were no active movements, except just prior to orgasm, which was very brief. Nocturnal emissions were rare and always without dreams. 12

We see here the familiar structure. Schn. was not present to the sexual world. He was indifferent to it; it did not exist for him. Yet all the external conditions of a normal sexual life were intact. Those conditions involve body and mind, tactility and intelligence, a capacity for feelings of pleasure and a knowledge of what to do. All of these were unimpaired in Schn. At least he could achieve all these in the roundabout way that was usual with him. But these roundabout ways are of no avail when it comes to sexuality. What the compensatory methods of Schn. basically amount to is a substitution of intellect for a more primordial bodily attunement. But sexuality is nothing but a bodily attunement; it is an intentionality that emanates not from abstract consciousness but from body to body, and so there is no possible intellectual compensation for the loss of this attunement. There may be compensations for defects in motoricity or speech or calculation. In all of these areas Schn. did not proceed in the normal way, but he did eventually arrive at comparable results. But there is no intellectual compensation for a lack of desire. To tell oneself intellectually that something is desirable is not the same as actually feeling that thing desirable. One cannot by will power make another’s body desirable. It is possible to “go through the motions” in many areas of life without actually putting one’s heart and soul into these motions. But sexuality, desire, love, and hatred are precisely matters of the heart and soul. What abnormal persons such as Schn. can do is list intellectually all the reasons someone might be desirable, all the qualities someone has that ought to make for desirability. But the listing of those reasons will not convince the body. The body has its reasons which the mind does not know.

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The body is therefore not a thing, not a machine. One way to describe the abnormality of Schn. is to say his body had indeed become a machine. As such, it was in good working order. All reflexes were intact, all functions sound, all movements possible. Schn. held down a job and could go about his daily tasks. He lived at home and was able to take care of himself. Yet there was something strange about the way he inhabited his body. It was as if his body was not besouled. He moved as if he were telling his body what to do instead of letting his body move on its own. If not carried out in concrete contexts, his motions could even have a staccato quality: “they lost a melodic physiognomy, and they seemed to be composed of fragments placed end to end.” 13 Accordingly, we can say that the normal body is not a machine. It has its own intentionality. It knows its own way around in the world. The normal body does not simply carry out the directives of the mind very quickly, on account of long practice. The body is itself a subject and not merely an object for a more interior subject. Most of all, the body is the subject of sexuality. Again, this body must be understood precisely as a subject, as besouled, as possessing its own knowledge and its own desire. It is the desirous body that is the subject of sexuality. The body of Schn. had lost a capacity for desire, hence the deterioration of his sexuality. The ultimate reason was a wound to the brain. How are we then to understand this physiological conditioning? It would be comparable to a physiological conditioning of anxiety or melancholy. It would be physiology conditioning an indifference toward the world, making the world appear neutral. Indeed the entire universe of Schn. was neutral. Faces were for him neither congenial nor inimical, sunshine and rain neither cheerful nor sad. 14 His moods did change, but only as he felt comfortable or uncomfortable in his own body, not on account of any attunement to his surroundings. In the sexual sphere, however, there is no compensation for this neutrality. Brain injuries never affect a mere stock of contents. That is exactly what Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty are always preaching. Instead, injuries to the central sector bring about a lower level of functioning with respect to all contents. Indeed the place of the lesion might lead to more pronounced effects in some specific area rather than another, in the manner of a figure prominent on a ground. 15 But every area, the entire background, is affected. Existence in general declines, not simply one area, such as language, and not simply one part of language, such as the stock of words. Current neuroscience and its atomistic conception of brain functioning must be making Goldstein and Merleau-Ponty turn over in their graves. A cerebral injury would never remove certain parts of speech and leave others, take away all prepositions, for example, or all adverbs. Nor is there an area in the brain where all the words beginning with the letter “s” are stored, whereby a lesion in that area would subtract those words from the person’s vocabulary. The effect on language in the case of Schn. was general; lan-

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guage as a whole declined in a characteristic way, and so did his entire existence. The effect was not the disappearance of words but the diction becoming more primitive, with very few subordinate clauses and no plays on words, and the speaking less spontaneous. Schn. spoke his own language the way normal people speak a language in which they are not fluent. He had to make explicit in his mind the grammatical rules and then apply them. Normal people do not speak their native language that way; they may in fact be totally ignorant of the rules they are spontaneously obeying. The formulation of the rules is a compensation; the normal person does not simply formulate them quickly. The normal person totally bypasses all formulation of rules and lets his tongue speak. That is what it means to be fluent. In all areas of his existence, including sexuality, Schn. did not lose content; he lost fluency in that content. Anxiety is the same sort of loss, and so is melancholy. According to Merleau-Ponty, the lesson to be learned about physiology in the case of Schn. is that sexuality is not a matter of reflex behavior. There is no anatomically distinct sexual center in the brain: The case of Schn. seems rather to demonstrate that there are no sexual reflexes and no pure state of pleasure. For, let us remind ourselves, all the impairments of Schn. resulted from a wound confined to the occipital region. If human sexuality is tied to an autonomous reflex apparatus, if the sexual object acts on some anatomically specialized organ of pleasure, then the cerebral injury should result in the liberation of these automatic responses and should translate itself into an accentuation of sexual behavior. 16

For Merleau-Ponty, what the pathological condition brings to light is a vital zone between automatic response and consciousness, a zone in which sexual life plays out. This is the zone of desire. What the injury has affected is not the body as machine nor the soul as intelligence; it has affected the body as intentional, as desirous. Why should this function be disturbed by physiology while the others are relatively immune? Why should anxiety or melancholy be subject to physiological conditioning? According to Heidegger, it is because Dasein is already anxious in the ground of its Being. In other words, Dasein is already fragile, already on the verge of anxiety. We would then say that the body as intentionality is what is most fragile. It is more fragile than the body as mechanism and soul as intelligence. Why? Let us take a clue from Merleau-Ponty: “What has disappeared in this subject is his power to project before himself a sexual world, to place himself in an erotic situation, or, once a sexual situation is launched, to maintain it and carry it through to gratification.” 17 The key word is “project.” Schn. had lost the power of the virtual; he could not place himself in a virtual situation. For example, he could not on command touch a point of his body. But he knew very well where that point was if he needed to scratch it. Likewise, he

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could not pronounce any word unless it was part of a concrete situation. He could not say “No” on command. When pressed to do so, he said in frustration, “No, I cannot do it.” We could summarize by noting that Schn. was unable to play. 18 The world of Schn. was bifurcated into two: the material and the ideal, the concrete and the abstract, the body as mechanism and the soul as pure consciousness. But sexuality exists between these worlds. Erotic perception is not an intellectual signification and is not comparable to the perception of any inert thing. According to Merleau-Ponty: For a normal subject, a body is not simply perceived like any other thing; this objective perception is inhabited by a more secret one: the visible body is subtended by a strictly individual sexual schema that accentuates the erogenous areas, outlines a sexual physiognomy, and calls forth the appropriate gestures of one’s own body. 19

What is this more secret perception? It is not imagination. It is not to see oneself, with the mind’s eye, in a sexual situation. Imagination is a kind of fulfilled intuition, a picture. A normal person does not need to form a picture in order to be interested sexually. The power of the virtual that was lacking to Schn. is a bodily power, a bodily intentionality, one that proceeds without images. To perceive something as a sexual situation is not to picture oneself there; it is to desire oneself there. It is not the mind’s eye that carries out this perception, but the body’s eye, or rather, the whole body. The power of the virtual lacking to Schn. was not a power of imagining but a power of looking on with desire. Then why is this power, this more secret perception, fragile? I venture to say it is so because, as Merleau-Ponty states, “if the subject perceives the situation coolly, disinterestedly, it is above all because he does not live it and is not engaged in it.” 20 Thinking, perception, and even imagination are secure. They require no engagement. They make no demand on actual living. They do not require an engagement. But sexuality does. Sexuality is a way of going out of one’s body to engage another body. It requires courage, leaving the safe confines of one’s own world. To perceive sexually is already to lend one’s body to another. That is what is meant by saying that sexuality is an intentionality. The sexual world is thus comparable to darkness. The deterioration of sexuality in Schn. is the same as the anguish of neuropaths in the night. Sexuality, like darkness, “makes palpable to us our contingency, namely, the gratuitous and indefatigable movement by which we seek to transcend ourselves” in an other, without any guarantee that we will always find an other, that is, in this case, an other who will accept our desire. Sexuality requires the

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same courage as does the overcoming of the eerie feeling that accompanies being in the dark; it is a courage Schn. could not muster. In all of his symptoms, we find in Schn. a rigidity. He needed footholds. He could not let go. He could not improvise. He was not fluent. He needed the foothold of previously represented words in order to speak, the foothold of a previously represented number series in order to count. His counting was soulless. He had no intuitive grasp of numbers; the larger of two numbers was simply the one to the right on the imagined number series. This same inability to improvise, to let the body rather than the mind be the subject, colored all his existence; the difference is that in the sexual sphere, there are no footholds. Sexuality is either improvisation or else it is nothing. There is no foothold supporting desire; any possible foothold, such as intellectual or moral arguments, could have no effect on desire. Sexuality is a bodily intentionality; it must be left to the body to accomplish, if it is to be accomplished at all. A fortiori, it cannot be carried out by sheer will power. According to St. Augustine, in the Garden of Paradise, before they transgressed, Adam and Eve would indeed have been endowed with the capacity for sex by will power. Coition would have taken place dispassionately, without eroticism, without the “disease of libido,” libidinis morbus, 21 and therefore “without blushing,” sine erubescendo. 22 Augustine may or may not be correct in regard to prelapsarian sex, but even he knows, although he deprecates the fact, that ever since the Fall sexuality has been nothing but a bodily intentionality, impervious to the will. In the end, what Heidegger says about the physiological conditioning of anxiety applies perfectly. Physiological conditioning is possible because Dasein is in its ground anxious. That means Dasein is not secure in its relation to possibilities. Nothing in the past is fully acquired, and nothing in the future is fully outstanding. One cannot argue oneself out of anxiety or melancholy; one must be bold and latch onto a possibility that may come to naught. Sexuality is the same, in the sense that one cannot argue or will oneself into desire; one has to leave it to the body. That is improvisation, abandoning arguments and a previously thought out plan; in other words, it is abandoning precisely that which would be used to compensate for an inability to improvise. Therefore, since what forced Schn. to compensate was a brain lesion, we can understand how sexuality, more than perception or thought, could be attenuated by shrapnel. Perception and thinking can call on other resources, can have compensations; desire cannot. Desire rests on its own resources, and, as the somatic function par excellence, it understandably requires all the resources of the body. Accordingly, it makes sense that, compared to every other function, desire is the one most susceptible when those resources are damaged.

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CONCLUSION Recall that Merleau-Ponty proposed to study affective life in order to disinter the more secret function by which a world exists for us at all, the function more primordial than perception. The world must matter to us in order for the senses to operate. We are not present to the world simply by opening our eyes, any more than we hear the sounds of nature while walking in the woods simply because our ears are in good working order. We must lend ourselves to the auditory world and to the visible spectacle or else their solicitations fall on deaf ears and blind eyes. It is because we are invested in the world that those solicitations “register.” Heidegger is making his way to the same primordial function with his concept of the worldhood of the world. That is a mood, a vague global sense that things hang together and that “all the uses of this world” do matter to us. Heidegger stresses that such a sense is presupposed by any determinate disclosure of particular things in their assignment to one another. We must be connected to the world in an affective way in order then to perceive coolly, as detached epistemological subjects. The Gestalt, the affective meaning, precedes the determinate content. What Heidegger names the worldhood of the world corresponds to what is called intentional arc by Merleau-Ponty. So the latter concludes his phenomenology of the body as a sexed being in the following way: Thus we come to see that sexual life constitutes an original intentionality; and, at the same time, we are uncovering the vital root of perception, of motoricity, and of representation when we make all these “processes” repose on an “intentional arc.” It is this arc that weakens in an impaired subject and that provides the experiences of a normal one their share of vitality and fecundity. 23

Merleau-Ponty is here designating the deficient element in anxiety, in melancholy, and in Schn., since intentional arc and the mood that constitutes worldhood are names for the function that connects us to the world affectively. It is the function by which the world has an affective tone and is not neutral to us, not detached from us. It is a sense that everything hangs together, that the uses of this world are in order among themselves and are also not weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable to us. This most basic, secret, somatic, affective function may be called worldhood of the world or intentional arc, but the common name for it is desire. NOTES 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 180. “The body as a sexed being” is the title of Chapter V of Part One: The Body.

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2. Is anxiety truly revelatory of wholeness to everyday Dasein? Is anxiety phenomenal— that is, lived—attestation of Heidegger’s theory? Or is the wholeness evident only to a Dasein already familiar with that theory of anxiety? The three moments of world, self, and being-in (mood) are brought together in Heidegger’s reflection, but does everyday anxious Dasein sense them unified? Is anxiety as described by Heidegger not rather an experience of fragmentation? Perhaps Heidegger could say everyday anxious Dasein senses these moments so very disassociated that it is thereby reminded of their usual unity. A positivity would again be disclosed through a negativity. 3. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 11th ed., 1967), 189. 4. Ibid., 190. 5. Ibid., 189. 6. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 328. 7. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 190 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1964), 59–60. 9. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 190. 10. Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb, “Psychologische Analysen hirnpathologischer Fälle auf Grund von Untersuchungen Hirnverletzter,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 41 (1918): 9. 11. Goldstein, “Psychologische Analysen,” 9. 12. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 181. 13. Ibid., 135. 14. Ibid., 183. 15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement (Paris: PUF, 6th ed., 1967), 101. 16. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 181–82. 17. Ibid., 182. 18. Ibid., 157. 19. Ibid., 182. 20. Ibid., 183. 21. Ibid., De civitate Dei, Libri XI–XXII (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955), xxviii, 443. (The reference is to the title and text of Chapter 21 of Book XIV of the City of God.) 22. Augustinus, De civitate, xxviii, 449. (Title and text of Chapter 26 of Book XIV.) 23. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie, 184.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustinus, Aurelius. De civitate Dei, Libri XI–XXII. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955. Goldstein, Kurt and Adhémar Gelb. “Psychologische Analysen hirnpathologischer Fälle auf Grund von Untersuchungen Hirnverletzter.” In Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 41 (1918). Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 11th ed., 1967. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. ———. La structure du comportement. Paris: PUF, 6th ed., 1967. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Existentialisme est un humanism. Paris: Nagel, 1964. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Edited by Willard Farnham. NY: Penguin Books, 1969.

Chapter Nine

The Poetics of Lack and the Problem of Ground in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger Christopher Yates

In 1882 Nietzsche sent a madman to the city streets to announce the death of God and to wonder, bewildered, at the churchgoers parading through the “tombs and sepulchers” of their comfortable pietism. 1 In his celebrated novel of 1890, Hunger, Norwegian poet Knut Hamsun drew his readers to the streets of Kristiania (Oslo) to wander with an unnamed hero amid the extremities of hunger and the anxieties of desire and the body therein. Just as Plato took Socrates and Glaucon “down to the Piraeus,” such descents are occasioned by a perceived emergency in the field of doxa and the question as to whether some curative logos (however mad) might come to pass. Hamsun’s emergency is embodied in the form of a young writer enduring the strife of agitated isolation and impoverishment. Told through a firstperson voice of immediate recollection, the story is an altogether relentless event of decodification that tests possibilities for subjective and hermeneutic recodification. As a phenomenological study of desire and the body in their most visceral forms, the narrative is a reduction to a “between” space in which the pretensions of autonomy collide with the strivings of immanent becoming. One finds the Kantian subject gnawing itself down to the marrow of his sensible and rational faculties, then marshaling his imagination to grapple with an amassing appetite for self-deception. Paul Auster has praised Hamsun for giving us “an art that begins with the knowledge that there can be no right answers.” Looking death in the face, Hamsun’s hero “systematically unburdens himself of every belief in every system [. . .]. There is nothing to keep him going—and yet he keeps on going. He walks straight into the twentieth century.” 2

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Hamsun is to be praised, but a liberating humanistic resolve is not what one finds here. We find a protagonist who spends his days walking the city streets, loitering on park benches, visiting a pawnbroker with the last meager articles of his person (down to the buttons), taking sojourns to a cemetery, and encountering strangers in ways that see him attempt, in turn, charity and deceit, attraction and repulsion, pleading and pride. Bread, shelter, and his literary efforts all come sparingly. His hunger becomes so abject that he feeds on items as diverse as a woodchip, an orange peel, a bone, a pocket, even his own finger. 3 When he finds food he gorges himself, then vomits bulimically. Otherwise he feeds on the sight of the fjord and its ships, the attentions of a woman, the imagined relief of death, and swearing at God. 4 Throughout lies a tightening spiral of self-coaxing and self-derision. When, for example, he resolves to visit a local parson, he coaxes himself at the doorstep: “Look, you are sorely troubled, fighting an awesome battle with the powers of darkness [. . .].” 5 When he searches for an acquaintance to loan him money for a candle, he condemns himself: “I laughed scornfully at my tender scruples [. . .] and was at a loss for words that were strong enough to deride myself for my folly.” 6 The line between resolve and folly is ever present in the story. Its course runs between an early observation of Kristiania as “that strange city which no one leaves before it has set a mark on him” and a seafaring farewell to the place “where the windows shone so brightly in every home.” 7 Hamsun invites his reader to ask: Has the hero safely endured the markmaking power of his city or does his final romantic vision reveal the damage it has wrought? And what is the mark that his hunger reveals in him? Put philosophically, How does subjectivity fare when the ontic topos of desire and the body colors the possibility of an ontological and epistemic archê with a palette of lack, of groundlessness? Is it the case that we live, as it were, in that autumnal “time of year when everything turns color and dies,” or is it the case that we might attain some word of measure to brighten “the darkness before me”? 8 My concern is not to show that Hamsun converts desire and the body, as we might hope he would, into modes of self-discovery or assertion. Rather, I am going to make the case that the novel’s treatment of hunger amounts to a compelling study of how we live in a field of lack, the character of which has everything to do with the way the being of desire and body stands tethered to the problem of ground, or Grund. The story rightly determines that the mark of lived experience consists ultimately in how we endure the abject threshold between the provisional satisfactions of self-deception and a remainder of agnostic faith that would stand on watch for a different story. We will learn how this mark comes to the fore if we read Hamsun in dialogue with the philosophies of G. W. F. Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer on matters of self-consciousness, will, and striving; and then, at the limits of these, if we consider how the story resonates with F. W. J.

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Schelling and Martin Heidegger’s reconfigurations of lack as an experience of creative dissonance, anxiety, and wonder before the Nothing. Hamsun distills the scope of these issues in terms of what we might call the zero-point of desire and the body. The way he does so, I will conclude, sounds a note of promise and caution to our contemporary hermeneutics of subjectivity. AWAKING TO THE PROBLEM OF GROUND We meet the character in the immediacy of his own thoughts as he awakens in an attic room to the sound of a clock keeping time and a wall-papered image of freshly baked bread. We do not know the origins of this sojourn, and we meet him, a stranger to us, as he is meeting the city, a stranger to him. And we meet him in a state of hunger, wonder, longing. He finds himself shorn of any known archê yet desperately needing one, and meanwhile facing what J. G. Fichte described as that “unstable inner conflict” attending one who begins to “know [he] is deceived” and yet “is,” or is becoming, deceived. 9 In this way the story is built on the asystic tremors within German Idealism’s attempts to secure an unconditioned principle—one cognized, or intuited, or poetized—in a manner that requires, dauntingly, “the agility and dexterity of mind to think simultaneously, not only of the object, but also of their own thinking thereof.” 10 And such thinking, of course, cannot elide this awaking body that is, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it, the “the medium of all my relations with the world.” 11 Nor will the conceptual desire for the unconditioned be able to evade what the body’s desire knows all too well: the paradoxical interplay of presence and absence. As Jean-François Lyotard states, “That which desires has got what it lacks, without which it would not desire it, and yet it does not have it, it does not know it, otherwise it would not desire it either.” 12 To pose the matter of system and subject on terms set by thought, body, and desire is to venture an engagement with lack within what Michel Foucault terms the space of “exposure” that reveals inner experience to be “an experience of the impossible ([. . .] that which we experience and that which constitutes the experience).” 13 Exposure in this case might also include the staggering underside of becoming what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call the “Body without Organs,” the locus of experience on which we “live our waking lives,” without the constraints of stratifying concepts and norms, so as to occupy the “field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire.” 14 As soon as Hamsun’s character reports, “I opened the window and looked out,” we sense that what awaits him is an exposure to the full force of a hunger that will collapse any assuring distance between the agility of mind and the torsions of deception and that will actually mark the loss of “organs” in a harrowing way. 15

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For Hegel, the tensions between lack and possession, absence, and presence were precisely what a proper grasp on the system of knowledge and being would overcome. I am thinking in particular of three features in The Phenomenology of Mind: the turning of thought, the role of negation in the pursuit of recognition, and the being of the body within the primacy of act. Let us see how Hegel opens the window on this scene, then return to the story. First, there is the psychological report he gives on what may befall the self in the passage from natural consciousness to “the actual knowledge of what truly is.” 16 The “Introduction” identifies experiences of fear, despair, and distrust; the “Preface” acknowledges the “poverty of one’s nature” and the feeling of toil. 17 Both attend the journey to the place of full self-consciousness in which “mind has made its existence adequate to and one with its essential nature” and “is object to itself as it is, and [. . .] the separation between knowing and truth, is overcome.” 18 Initially, in its “parlous state,” the self experiences a “fear of error” and a still deeper “fear of truth.” 19 Human longing may, in the “unrestrained ferment of sheer emotion,” opt for “the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract” just as a “wanderer in the desert [craves] the merest mouthful of water.” 20 But “genuine knowledge” does not emerge through “some sort of ecstatic enthusiasm” that embraces edification over “the strenuous toil of conceptual reflection,” or that invites a kind of “formal intelligence” in which reason “rambles about with no real thoughts to reason with.” 21 This red flag over reason’s vulnerabilities is an iteration of Immanuel Kant’s concern about the temptations of fanaticism (Schwärmerei)—the state of apodictic phantasie in which one passes into “the delusion [Wahn] of wanting to SEE something beyond all bounds of sensibility, i.e., of dreaming according to principles (raving with reason).” 22 A similar problem is what Friedrich Nietzsche called the “error of imaginary causes.” 23 When faced by a painful unknown, we instinctively seek the relief that comes with furnishing a “cause”; since we feel that “any explanation whatsoever is better than none,” we tend to confound “truth” with “what is believed to be true.” 24 These issues will arise as a question for Hamsun as his protagonist tries to negotiate the line between an authentic “lucidity” and a self-deceptive “enthusiastic inventiveness.” So far it is possible to say that he stands before the wager of self-consciousness and must implicitly enter his city streets with the temptations of “fanaticism” in check. We can further say that, since that guardedness in thought must happen within the self’s relation to itself, there is also the question as to whether Hamsun’s character will “rave” with the kind of “belief” Jean-Paul Sartre sees at the heart of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi)—where one might elect to determine that his being coincides with his freedom “by means of not-being-what-one-is.” 25

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To these preparatory cautions regarding the course of thought we need to add, secondly, Hegel’s positive assertions about the course of desire in the movement of becoming. Desire names the ground and traction by which selfconsciousness is fully actualized. Irreducible to an accident that would adhere to a substance, desire pilots one’s relation to self, ideas, objects, epochs, and, of course, other persons. Traveling a cycle of departure and return, conflict and satisfaction, it authors the story in which the transcendental subject “returns out of otherness” and “becomes what he is” through and as the “negating Action, which transforms given Being” and thus “transforms himself.” 26 As Sartre says, there is “no inertia in consciousness.” 27 What does desire in man want first of all? Recognition—affirmation of his stature and confirmation that he is “the I revealed by speech,” the I that feels the coming “satisfaction” of its desire for truth in self-consciousness. 28 This elaborates how man’s “true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden).” 29 And, as we know, this “becoming” take shape through negation—transforming that which stands opposed to the “I” underway, be it a rival in the Lord/Bondsman contest, an idea of sense certainty belonging to natural consciousness, a material object open to formation, or (most specifically) “another Desire, another greedy emptiness, another I.” 30 These are the actions by which “man freely creates himself.” 31 Alexandre Kojève likens desire to hunger, and it is no great stretch to see that the “satisfaction” attained by sublating the object that is food into one’s body is a material microcosm of how “self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” 32 It is possible to say that this account of desire sets the existential terms on which Hamsun’s hero will undergo the hunger of becoming. At the same time, it is also possible that, following Sartre, when the pursuit of satisfaction functions at a desperate pitch he might resolve, albeit in all “sincerity,” to flee the staggering incongruence of for-itself and in-itself, hasten the coincidence of being what one “is,” and thereby aggravate the “inner disintegration in the heart of being.” 33 To the perils and promise of thought and to the being of desire we may finally add the ontic situation of the body. We sometimes forget that Hegel addresses this issue in section V of the Phenomenology. The “connate body” is where the individual exists in himself as “an original determinate being of his own,” whereas the individual exists for himself as a “free activity” in the “movement of consciousness.” 34 The tension between the two is one of fixity vs. movement, shape vs. deed, and the tension exists because one’s “genuine being” consists originally as act, where the body operates as an “expression” of oneself and not simply “a bare immediate fact.” 35 Hegel is not saying that the in-itself of body wrecks the for-itself of freedom, for both are party to the being of “act.” Without the body action has no expression. True, the interplay involves compromises that effectively “other” the self’s “inner” direction. But the result of this separation is a relation that may yield an individual’s

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free “realization in the world.” 36 Hamsun’s character awakens to this possibility, but its assurance is increasingly bracketed in the story. Note that Hegel gives examples of how the character of action is reduced to an external expression, but one in which subjectivity is still “meant” in a free way. The action of the “inner” manifests in the “mouth that speaks, the hand that works, [and] the legs too, if we care to add them.” Language, gesture, and labor show a “surrender” of the self’s “inner” direction into the outer realm of “something else.” But “act” unfolds according to assurances; voice, hand, and especially “handwriting” (among “other organs”) “[play] the part of an inner in relation to the externality of action and fate.” 37 As with the larger historical movement of Geist, the house divided becomes a house remodeled and, in turn, inhabited more fully. For the body to “play a part” is for it to render a real service to self-consciousness, and sometimes the same body evidences this. For example, even “the individual’s conversing with himself” can be an external action in which one is “reflected into himself [and] gives articulate expression to this self-reflection” as “his speaking is itself an outer expression.” 38 Of course, the body can also betray how an individual might be playing a part that is impatient with the course of “act.” When Sartre critiques the bad faith of his café waiter, he points specifically to how his gestures bespeak a “risk” taken to make the allotted in-itself of his employ serve the covert desires of his for-itself—to wear the waiterly body so well, in the spirit of irony, that it furnishes a space of counterfeit transcendence. 39 What is clear in Hegel, regardless, is that the body is the given that the free activity of the for-itself traverses in the interests of act and thereby in the service of one’s “realization in the world.” Applied to the novel, the question will be whether the body, thus understood, is indeed an able partner in such act, and whether the act itself is true to what Erlebnis in its own way knows. Our task is not to critique these treatments of thought, desire, and body on their own terms but to see how Hamsun’s story puts them to the test on the terms that befall his hero. In each case he will say a partial yes to them as a conceptual inventory of human experience but a no to the faith Hegel places in the passion narrative they realize. Earlier I spoke of the central question of the “mark” that Kristiania leaves on Hamsun’s protagonist and of how that question is framed for us between (a) the initial gaze through a bedroom window, and (b) the concluding gaze at the warm brightness of the city windows from across the fjord. We now turn our attention to what passes between these visions as the character toils with the course of desire and body at the limits of what Hegel would call “natural consciousness.” Two specific phenomena show that Hegel’s terms are certainly in play but that in their very operation the hero begins to attain an acute ability to deceive himself and to credence the private doxa of his own imagination.

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First, aware of his dissolution, the narrator seeks refuge in his thoughts and in reviling his condition. These modes are sometimes at odds but never far apart. After observing a band of walkers “dancing their way through life as though it were a ballroom!” he reflects on how “a terrible injustice had been done to me.” But the sorrow of victimhood does not mitigate the strain of lost concentration nor his powerlessness before the effects of “trivial incidents [and] miserable trifles.” 40 Dismay takes root within a mind that intends resilience: “it was as though my brain trickled quietly out of my head, leaving me empty.” Later he reports a “curious confusion” in which “a tissue in my brain had snapped.” 41 He feels his measures against suffering are futile, but he remains ambitious and assertive in his self-derision and shame, hastening to their clarity. Following an act of kindness from a policeman, he castigates himself: “I reviled myself for my poverty, shouted epithets at myself, invented insulting names [. . .].” After begging unsuccessfully for money from a cashier, he laments how he had “lowered [him]self to the crassest sort of panhandling.” 42 The point is not so much the guilt or selfloathing, but the purposiveness they bring him while he tries to hold back from categorical conclusions. It is as though he is teetering on the brink of some “ferment of emotion” or Schwärmerei but doing so knowingly. Put another way, he for the moment tries to draw strength from resisting bad faith. The situation reveals an attempt to resolve a contest between outward and inward emotions by finding a logic that would bear their weight. His selfawareness is already at a pitch, but, failing the supposed assurances of sound judgment, he funnels the emotional cargo of lack inward in the manner of a tactical self-direction. How does this predicament square with Hegel’s psychological observations about the turn from “natural” to “actual” knowledge? The sense of toil, despair, distrust, and fear of error is shared. The character is also consciously aware of the risks of the “ecstatic enthusiasm” of superficial edification as well as the paralysis of “rambling thoughts.” But the “parlous state” in the novel shakes Hegel’s clinical treatment. The character tries desperately to summon proper reason, but the failure of this negation sends a carom of wearisome confusion back upon the tissues of his brain. It is almost as though it would be better to purge the very idea of selfconsciousness altogether. There appears to be no self-realizing “act” that would repair the conflict between the free for-itself and the connate in-itself, nor the apparent void between these ligatures of “expression” and the social world in which they would “mean” something. A second phenomenon further tests Hegel’s account of desire, recognition, and negation and shows how the pull of self-deception vies with the promise of self-consciousness. Hamsun inscribes his poor hero in the very ledger of lord/bondsman strife, and not just as a case of conceding to hunger as “master.” Unable to experience sustained recognition from others, he turns

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to objects, but then he fills the remaining void with the satisfaction of deceiving others. In an early park bench scene, he passes his gaze over his own limbs and feet and converts them, for a moment, into “subtle thoughts.” Then he shudders at his terrible “alienation” and the absurdity of finding solace in the “recognition” proffered by his shoes. But instead of remaining in the momentary clarity of self-derision and shame, he sublates the absurdity into a further measure: ensnaring a stranger, his bondsman, in a fiction of falserecognition. He observes an old man reading a newspaper nearby on the bench, a man with repellant “sick eyes.” 43 Engaging this man in the illusion of polite conversation, he proceeds to lie about his home address, his landlord, an electric hymn book invented by one Happolati of Persia, who as it happens was also the father of Ylajali, a beautiful fairy princess, and so on. Having strung the stranger along, he finally lashes out at him for his gullibility and wickedness in believing these tales. And his disgust is genuine, as though an act of judicious appraisal. Hungering thus for food and recognition, he begins to feed on fictions and the authority of his authorship. For a moment these measures bring a quiet triumph. The public is his bondsman, the imagination his weapon of transformation. But the scenario still suggests that the tactics of negation may just as well lead to a cul-de-sac of delusional satisfaction as anything in the neighborhood of evolving freedom or self-consciousness. Alienation swells. The lesson is confirmed as the imagined Ylajali figure returns several times. When the narrator at last attains a flash of recognition and erotic promise from a “lady in black,” he three times cries out in earnest the name “Ylajali.” 44 He is held in the irruption of his own prior fiction. The self that had at first gravitated toward a poetic reprieve for the sake of sport, now—as if compelled from within by the sagacity of the fiction—suffers it. Initially the character knew he was spinning a yarn, but now the narrative nets the author. What has happened? Being able to identify the risk of “ferment” yet then exercise it as a way to trap others in recognition can, ironically, position one’s own self to be more pliable before its power. Hamsun is testing the extent to which Hegel’s path of self-consciousness is, owing to the alienating conspiracy of desire and body, actually a path of self-deception. Can we say the problem is that his character is in bad faith? Yes and no. He is insofar as he shows the human tendency to assert the cunning of the for-itself when the pressures of the initself feel impossibly alienating. But when the fictions wash back through him he is (as we will further see) alarmed, unsettled, and desperately does not “wish to be” in some superficial “flight” from the scene of incongruence. 45 The situation is in fact much worse than Sartre imagined, for the “disintegration in the heart of being” is not just known but felt in the body’s hunger. Imagine Sartre’s waiter starving while at work; the non-coincidence of freedom and facticity becomes “embodied” in the non-coincidence of nourishment and hunger. Hamsun’s character does try his hand at making role-

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playing a mode of empowerment; but his hunger “knows” that is a feeble solution, and his mind “feels” it could ensnare him all the more. Here we have a case in which someone in the worst of circumstances is undergoing a crisis of faith in Hegelian Werden while also trying to resist bad faith’s implicit “belief.” The situation calls for terms more asystic than those of dialectical redemption or existentialist humanism. THE CONCRETION OF A THOUSAND NEEDS Hamsun is not leveling a moral charge against his hero. He is sending the canary into the mineshafts of subjectivity to see whether there is any archê that might lend coherence, or sustenance, to the plight of mind, body, and desire. Schopenhauer proves a closer ally than Hegel in this interrogation of lack. His philosophy is more alert to the way the life of desire and the body reveal how the antecedent ground that is will (Wille) has (or seems to have) such pervasive authority that it renders the scene of life effectively a “striving [Streben] without aim or end.” 46 I do not wish to say that Hamsun’s story fully “verifies” this philosophy, but that there is certainly a revealing accord between them that warrants our attention if we are going to see how the desire-body problem is animated by the issue of ground. One could well say that if Hegel is the philosopher of nourishment, Schopenhauer is the philosopher of hunger. The body, with its “constant striving [stete Streben],” is in some ways more knowledgeable than a mind consigned to mere ideas or representations (Vorstellungen). 47 We can better appreciate the depth and intensity of the story’s reckoning if we see how it pits the problem of “will” against the promise of the “absolute,” particularly in terms of paralysis and striving. The experience of paralysis (this term is mine, not Schopenhauer’s) names the predicament of knowledge, but not one that can so easily be “turned” from natural consciousness to full self-consciousness. Knowledge knows the world of experience in the limited guise of, following Kant, appearances. At the same time, properly philosophical thought knows what is noumenal and governing all nature through the principle of sufficient reason—the will as “the inmost nature, the kernel, of every individual thing, and also of the whole.” The will “operates blindly . . . in the deliberate action of man.” But the opportunistic point (for knowledge) is that, more than the mere in-itself of our facticity or material of expression in “act,” the body is the singular object “of which I know not merely the one aspect, that of the idea, but also the other aspect which is called will.” As the site of actions and motives, the will “in” the body “must be the indispensable condition and presupposition” of life. 48 Everything depends on this deductive “must be.” What is objectified in a person’s ideas, actions, and “the permanent substra-

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tum of these, his body [Leib]” must be the will, “the being-in-itself of everything in the world.” 49 And what is known when one knows such will? What is always known tacitly is now known conceptually: the will as the “groundless [Grundlose]” force that condemns desire to the insatiable striving of a course without end (“der ein endloses Streben ist”). 50 Striving itself does not divide into a problem of consciousness on one side and embodiment on the other. Superlative in terms of being an object known as both idea and will, one still experiences the body as the living revelation of the “subordination” required by the will as such. We hunger, we need; of course we “act,” but (contra Hegel) our “parlous state” surrounds our “foritself” on all sides. It is as though our for-itself is the in-itself of will. Born and bred in “need, deficiency—in short, pain,” man has “willing and striving” as “his whole being [. . .] an unquenchable thirst.” Indeed, “every meal we eat, every sleep we take, every time we warm ourselves” are all actions circumscribed by our coming death. 51 Schopenhauer speaks of man as “the most necessitous of all beings; he is concrete willing and needing through and through; he is the concretion of a thousand needs [ist ein Konkrement von tausend Bedürfnissen].” Hence, at once ours and will’s, striving is a kind of double agent. “Threatened on all sides,” we “can escape only by constant watchfulness.” 52 What is this escape? How does striving grow watchful? For Schopenhauer, we wager a bit of reprieve on ascetic self-denial and/or the aesthetic experience of eternal ideas, both of which will give the appearance of madness. The reprieves are best understood as attempts to reclaim for our own ends the space of “Nothingness” that is otherwise the province of will. 53 Ultimately, they are an enterprise in negation of (a) the desiring in us that is the derivation of the will itself, and (b) our thinking the world only as idea. First, self-denial arises as a resistance to the will’s “iron command to nourish” the body. It engages in a territorial dispute over the body as the site of the will’s objectification and concretion of lack. One tries to “mortify his will” and negate his subordination by granting the will less material to work with. The aesthete “nourishes” the body “sparingly, lest its robust good health and its full bloom should reanimate and more vigorously stimulate the will.” 54 Some relief results, but the will reclaims the territory of the body, its object, and there reclaims the governance of striving, its effect. Second, for the man of artistic genius, and/or in an aesthetic experience of the beautiful, the dispute with “the sullen pressure of the will” is waged on the level of intellectual sensation. The genius knows and communicates an eidos behind the will’s irrational expressiveness. Less constrained by phenomenal knowledge, the genius possesses a Platonic view of “the Eternal Ideas [Ideen],” and “strives to grasp the Idea of each thing.” 55 The person who experiences the beautiful, by the same token, enters “the state of pure contemplation, above all willing, that is, above all desires and cares.” He “looks back, smiling and

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at rest, on the delusions of the world.” 56 One reading of Hamsun’s novel might have it that this is true of his character’s final departing look back upon Kristiania. But Schopenhauer, we know, hedges a bit; his tone wavers between the assertive and the aspirational. The genius sometimes falters in his sobriety, falls prey to the deceits of the crafty, and either appears mad to the unenlightened or genuinely approaches madness. Geniuses are “given to talking to themselves” and, mistaking elements of past and present, can “fall into error and nonsense.” 57 Indeed, nearly every time Schopenhauer extols the virtues of aesthetic contemplation in cutting “the thousand cords of will” he then pivots back to man as the “concretion of a thousand needs.” There is an aesthetic knowledge that would “break the sting of our desires,” but then resumes the “dreamlike stumbling towards death.” 58 It may well be that the revelations brought through the works of Raphael and Correggio vanquish the will and win for knowledge a brief Sabbath. But then our prevailing feelings of “empty nothingness” and “painful longing [Sehnsucht]” return all the more. 59 As for self-denial, what it attains by way of negation is at best an ascent to “the outer limits of the positive” that still proves the rule: life is “strain and stress without purpose and without rest.” 60 All of this deepens the matter of “lack.” Hamsun’s story appears to reply: And if all this is so, still we must look at a striving underway and consider the paradoxical situation of a self who ventures aspirational measures while sensing, increasingly, their fragility. I LET IT RAGE? Hegel and Schopenhauer’s accounts resonate with one another through the novel in terms of how they regard the following: desire as the originary rule of human becoming, the body as the site in which human expression is mediated, alienation and lack as the terms on which we negotiate the problem of ground, and how, to properly think these very matters, one must guard against epistemic fancy, fear, and naïve resolve. Both also apply bodily terms to the predicament of consciousness (“hunger,” “thirst,” “satisfaction”), and both even identify the phenomenon of “talking to oneself” as an indicator of a state of mind—for Hegel, possible self-reflection; for Schopenhauer, possible madness. The difference in this final detail might seem trivial on a philosophical reading but is revealing when attuned through a main character who talks to himself ad infinitum. His self-discourse shows what it is like to undergo the withering of the absolute under the problem of the will. The ratio levied by experiences of paralysis and striving gradually belies the naiveté of any rubric that would see the rise of self-consciousness through negation, recognition, and act. There is the agency of the for-itself, and self-

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discourse materializes this, but deeper still is a groundlessness that leaves mind, like body, in a state of hunger. The character is asking himself, How does one live and “watch” in the void of dialectical resolve? How does one endure the “marking” presence of absence if the very topos of our Streben— desire and the body—seems fated to “dreamlike stumbling” or worse? Hamsun essentially cuts to the chase by testing the merits of the “aspirational” in the worst of circumstances and the last refuge of striving: lucid awareness. At first, as we have begun to see, there is good news—the character is alert, poised for enlightenment: “However estranged I was from myself in that moment [. . .] nothing that was taking place around me escaped my attention [. . .]. I was lucid and self-possessed; everything rushed in upon me with a brilliant distinctness, as if an intense light had suddenly sprung up around me.” 61 In Schopenhauer’s parlance, one could say that he is holding himself ready to glimpse beyond mere “representations,” as if his hunger and isolation have trained his faculties to attain a state of contemplation “above all desires and cares.” He is cautiously aware of the “trackless paths”—the ferments and fanaticisms—his thoughts and speech might take. Still, as with the addictive appeal of his own fictions, he starts to credit his genius with a special potential for deliverance. Echoing Schopenhauer’s delight in music, “I feel caught up in these notes, dissolved into a tune—I float, and I perceive so clearly how I float, soaring high above the mountains, dancing through realms of light [. . .].” 62 But the meaning in the release is more mustered than true, magnifying the vulnerability lodged in the aspirational quality of the reprieve. The character is alert to this predicament, but in a weakening way. “Madness rages through my brain and I let it rage.” 63 He is observing himself on the brink of testing whether a concretion of madness can help him survive the concretion of need. And he is not optimistic, for as the description continues, “I was so strangely ruined, nothing but a shadow of what I once was.” 64 Self-deception is not a matter of false hope or self-trickery but of what mode of endurance we let course in us. My opinion is that Hamsun is depicting how the predicament of hungeras-groundlessness dispels the hopes of self-consciousness, admits the primacy of striving, then faces the abyssal problem of how self-deception seems the last resort for satisfying the “lack” that is the essence of desire and the body. This is his reduction. The way he evokes the question of the city’s “mark” on his character is by drawing everything toward a threshold in which, having no teleological guarantees, we either place faith in madness or in some preserve of watchfulness that outlasts Schopenhauerian striving. But the difference between the two is only of the slightest degree in kind; probably watchfulness, too, will have its deceits. Still, the threshold can be seen in a single stride of the mind encapsulated late in the story. I already referred to the character’s special attentiveness early on in the novel. A similar refrain occurs near the end: “In all that I observed in this way there was nothing, not

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even a tiny incidental circumstance, that escaped me. My attention was most alert, every little thing was sensitively picked up, and I had my own ideas about these matters as they occurred. So there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with my sanity. As things were, how could there possibly be anything the matter with it?” By now we know he is trying to assure himself of something that is not the case. Soon thereafter he concedes: “I am lost [. . .]. Ladies and gentlemen I’m lost.” 65 As with “letting madness rage,” again we have a self-description, but the energy of adjoining self-suspicion is now spent. Hamsun is mourning the “mark” life inscribes, and he wonders whether some other way of managing the threshold could obtain. Schopenhauer’s “watchfulness” may have been on track but needs something further, even if by only a slight change in the terms of the narrative we live. Hamsun has been tightening the screws on this need all along. Midway through the story he identifies a moment of “enthusiastic” inventiveness that would seem to extract desire from bodily lack and attach it to the nourishment of signification. Astonished, the character imagines he has found a new word: “I sit up in bed and say, It doesn’t exist in the language, I have invented it—Kuboå. It does have letters like a word—sweet Jesus, man, you have invented a word. . . . Kuboå . . . of great grammatical importance. The word stood out sharply against the darkness before me.” 66 Though he cannot decide on a meaning, he resolves that the word’s invention alone is a sufficient triumph. The light of imagination breaks through the darkness of groundlessness to conceive a potential “body” of meaning, a cunning ground against the groundless. But we know the invention, as with the case of the genius, will not endure. Striving cannot finally live in the satisfaction of signifying potential. Later the hero bites his own finger and licks its blood, as though turning the body’s own failed index of meaning into something that might nourish him otherwise. 67 The momentum of “enthusiasm” is trying to answer the momentum of lack, and all this is understandable. But where does it lead? Desire passes from word (consciousness), to finger (body), and then to vision (both) as the hero looks back on the city and sadly invents another light: the image of windows that “shone so brightly in every home.” THE MYTHOS OF THE GROUNDLESS I have said that the novel, working from within the immanent scene of desire and body in relation to “lack,” investigates the problem of ground. The question of the city’s “mark” on the hero formulates the question of how we bear the mark of an abyssal archê. We bear it most vividly in a hunger that is as epistemic as it is corporeal. Hegel and Schopenhauer help us see the investigation at play in the story, and the story in turn more closely accords with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of striving and will than with Hegel’s ac-

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count of act and absolute. But Hamsun has also hesitated over Schopenhauer’s aspirational reprieves and shown that we must further reckon with the pull of self-deception in our striving. He laments the tight quarters of this threshold in which what remains of human agency is pressed between embracing the nourishment of a mad enthusiasm or somehow staying on the shoreline and awaiting a different measure taking to arrive. I believe he intends the latter but is rightly reluctant to grant some formula for such “watchfulness.” How could he, when he has thoroughly shown that we are so wholly subject to desire and the body and their conspiracy of lack that we know not how to conceive of some coming Samaritan ground? We have, to be sure, undergone a steady interruption in any metaphysics of presence that would attempt to imagine or secure such a ground. Perhaps an evolution of Geist could be underway, or some eternal ideas might lie behind the veil of Kristiania. But probably not, and in any event to look upward toward these terms of assurance would seem to amount to another iteration of looking backward to bright windows. This is the bind that desire and the body teach the mind to feel. Hamsun is not going to give us a happy ending. That is not to say he gives us a cynical or nihilistic one either. In point of fact, there is no ending. The story stops on a point of uncertain departure, almost as though stopping at the place where Plato begins his Phaedrus—a journey outside of the city walls to the banks of the Ilissus River and the question of a mythos and madness at the heart of logos. This is no carefree errand. Applying the insights of John Sallis in his Delimitations (and of Bernard Freydberg’s superb reading of this text), one could say it is a wandering past the limits of reason in the mode of theoria and into the unsteady spillway of ontological difference. 68 It is a passage into an ēthos of ek-sistence in which one ventures the loss of “given” archai and reckons with, following Heidegger, the paradoxical play of seclusion and showing at the heart of alētheia. Hamsun’s integrity is evident in the fact that he does not enclose a narrative that has, on its own terms, breeched the metaphysics of presence. He leaves us in the ēthos of his hero and the question of what deed, or ergon, comes next. Can we still speak of “watchfulness” in this vein? To answer this question we must briefly reconsider the terms on which Streben and Sehnsucht are lived in the face of the Grund question. The issue that decides this possibility was briefly sighted above but not yet drawn out from behind the Idealist quilting of Geist and Wille: the Nothing. Mindful of the deconstruction of “presence” (noted above) and the function of seclusion or concealment (one could say “lack”) in any event of truth, we have to see whether the Nothing may be a phenomenon in which the character of negation is neither fully “transformative” (Hegel) nor crushingly “necessary” (Schopenhauer), but can be constitutive of human becoming in a heterogeneous way. Friedrich Schelling initiates this turn in two steps. First, epistemically, he holds that

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Kant’s “thing in itself” does not posit an unknown “X” in the manner of a formula waiting to be solved by the deduction of “will,” but more deeply a “0” in the manner of an “absolutely nothing,” an absence of explanation landing right in the presence of explanatory thought. 69 But what thought can here do is question the presumed lucidity of the very copula (“is”) on which speculative inquiry itself depends. The point of this question, secondly, is to track back through the principle of subject-predicate identity into the ontological “as” of becoming—the primordial wellsprings of self, freedom, and indeed all being. Before there is an objective self charged with body and desire there must be a mediating “gravitational” movement “as nothing” toward contingency and self-positing, a movement of necessary “dissonance.” In other words, the self already comes to be by the pull of lack into the field of pure substantiality. Lack is, in effect, capacitating. The constitutive “as nothing” intensifies into the “as infinite” of human freedom; 70 freedom and thought are born into the contingency of the “is” by way of the groundlessness of the “as,” and the “as” creates life. Schelling extends the point even to the being of God, where a formative division subsists between existence and ground “in” God—God as form and order, and God as formlessness and disorder. 71 Beneath both sides is an unground, a “self-seclusion of the ground” that balances the play of light and dark principles in the being of God but must leave their harmony unsettled (for the sake of freedom) in the creature born of God’s becoming: man. 72 None of this would feed Hamsun’s hero, but what it does say is that his striving and longing in the face of lack are iterations of his birthright, not aberrations of some formulaic ground. His threshold, then, is where superlative lack most closely concretizes the an -archê, the Ungrund, and thus the essential “as” by which the life of the self grows from the life of the Nothing. That at least means (a) that his emergency situation is something “being” itself understands and transfigures, and (b) that his peril, though desperate, brackets for him the errant maneuvers of an onto-theological “is.” Heidegger’s account of the Nothing is strikingly similar and contributes a further measure to the asystic space of Hamsun’s threshold. In the 1929 lecture “What Is Metaphysics,” he first comes to the issue as a problem of thought that mirrors the initial hesitations of Hamsun’s post-Kantian hero. 73 The scientific and systematizing mind has deceived itself by believing that only “somethings” are offered to thought. We presume to “think” the totality of beings yet we do not comprehend the Nothing as the “basic occurrence of our Da-sein.” Still, lived experience intuits what we are reluctant to know. In the fundamental mood of “anxiety” (our being Unheimlich) we feel a “slipping away of the whole.” We “shrink back” with “a kind of bewildered calm,” and we stutter about in modes of what Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Hamsun have all diversely observed: “compulsive talk.” 74 But lest we take refuge in some “forgetting” of being-as-Nothing, Heidegger says we must

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hover in the abyss, hold ourselves out over the finitude of being’s “groundless ground” and “let the sweep of our suspense take its full course.” 75 The Nothing, to be clear, does not presence in the manner of a categorial archê or force of subordination. It overwhelms us in a way that arouses “wonder” and inspires us to “liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has [. . .].” 76 If anxiety and wonder are close companions, then it is possible that the praxis of watchfulness can bend through the logos of turbulence. Just as we saw Schelling coordinate constitutive lack with the “intensification” of human becoming, we find that Heidegger coordinates groundlessness with an intensification of (recalling our point about mythos) the poetic imagination. If we turn to his Nietzsche Lectures we learn that Dasein’s unheimlich “holding” inspires afresh the “poetizing character of reason.” 77 The result can go one of two ways, and I think Hamsun senses this. Poetizing can falter into a misguided partnership between subjective Wille and Machen that converts striving into a coercive “making.” Or poetizing could be a bringing-forth in the sense of a Hervorbringen-lassen and Gelassenheit of unconcealment, an engaged yielding. The difference is one of inventive and “enthusiastic” striving on the one hand, and a watchful poiesis on the other— one that outlasts the tempting lucidity of our designs and does not rely on metrics of self-realization, act, asceticism, or aestheticism. The turn to poiesis would be the better possibility Hamsun wants to inscribe in his final threshold. It would be a stretch to say Heideggerian “hovering” means a stationing of the body (though it could imply this), but to abide in our constitutive anxiety and live creatively in the “between space” of the uncanny does at least mean a relocation of desire. What I am suggesting is that Schelling and Heidegger’s treatments of the Nothing alter the terms of the Grund problem and the wagers of Streben and Sehnsucht therein. Admittedly, they are preparatory measures, but the novel has taught us that preparatory measures are where everything is decided. They offer us a way to behold the groundless ground as a condition for the possibility of a creative striving that would make the gridlock of desire and body more porous. The destiny of lack is, at least, not finally decided by a tenuous faith in self-consciousness or a draining combat with will, or a concession to the madness left in their wake. Nor will it do, as I believe the novel confirms, to torque desire and the body themselves into some emancipatory Grund. All told, the novel leaves us with a summary word of caution and promise. As a critical diagnostic, although Hamsun would agree a humanistic conception of autonomous subjectivity is nonsense, he would have us remember that for better or worse there is a self to which we are subject, and that desire and body do not make for ready instruments of creative possibility. And as a positive confession, his novel shows us how the experience of lack begs the question of Ground, and how retrieving this question on

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better terms might inspire a watchful striving that could imagine the grace of endurance. NOTES 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120. 2. Paul Auster, “The Art of Hunger,” in Knut Hamsun, Hunger, trans. Robert Bly (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), xvii. 3. Knut Hamsun, Hunger, trans. Sverre Lyngstad (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 70, 76; 84; 135–36, 109–10. 4. Ibid., 67, 76, 99, 195, 181; 115–16; 130, 138; 136–37. 5. Ibid., 82. 6. Ibid., 105. 7. Ibid., 3, 197. 8. Ibid., 4 (see also 27, 84); 65. 9. J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 82. 10. Ibid., 79. 11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Contemporary Philosophical Movement,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 86. 12. Jean-François Lyotard, Why Philosophize?, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 20. 13. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 2 (New York: The New Press, 1999), 71. 14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 150, 154. 15. Hamsun, Hunger, 3. 16. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2003), 44. 17. Ibid., 5. 18. Ibid., 21. 19. Ibid., 44–45. 20. Ibid., 5–6. 21. Ibid., 15, 34. 22. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 135. 23. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2004), 25. 24. Ibid., 26–27. 25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 70. 26. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1969), 99, 38. 27. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 61. 28. Kojève, Reading of Hegel, 3; Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 103. 29. Kojève, Reading of Hegel, 38. 30. Ibid., 40. 31. Ibid., 234. 32. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 103. 33. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 65, 70. 34. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 177, 175. 35. Ibid., 183, 175–76.

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36. Ibid., 179 37. Ibid., 177, 179. 38. Ibid., 180. 39. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 70. 40. Hamsun, Hunger, 16. 41. Ibid., 18, 42. 42. Ibid., 61, 91. 43. Ibid., 19–21. 44. Ibid., 115. See also 72, 172, 189, 191. 45. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 70. 46. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, ed. David Berman, trans. Jill Berman (London: Everyman, 1995), 203. 47. Ibid., 198. 48. Ibid., 42, 58, 39. 49. Ibid., 41, 50–51. 50. Ibid., 53, 84. 51. Ibid., 197. 52. Ibid., 198. 53. See ibid., 259–62. 54. Ibid., 198, 240. 55. Ibid., 245, 110–12. 56. Ibid., 245–46. 57. Ibid., 118, 114, 117. 58. Ibid., 246, 238, 204. 59. Ibid., 262. 60. Ibid., 261. 61. Hamsun, Hunger, 13. 62. Ibid., 71, 77. 63. Ibid., 128. 64. Ibid., 129. 65. Ibid., 165, 190. 66. Ibid., 65. 67. Ibid., 110. 68. See John Sallis, Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995) and Bernard Freydberg, The Thought of John Sallis: Phenomenology, Plato, Imagination (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012). 69. F. W. J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 101. 70. Ibid., 115–16. 71. See F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006). 72. Freydberg, The Thought of John Sallis, 54–56. 73. In his Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger discusses several of Hamsun’s works in relation to the question of the Nothing. See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 28–29. 74. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings, ed. and trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1972), 101–2. 75. Ibid., 109–10. 76. Ibid. 77. Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. III, 97. Nietzsche: Volumes III and IV: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics; Nihilism, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco: 1987), vol. III, 97.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Auster, Paul. “The Art of Hunger” (1970), in Knut Hamsun, Hunger, v–xvii. Translated by Robert Bly. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Fichte, J. G. The Science of Knowledge. Edited and translated by Peter Heath and John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Foucault, Michel. “A Preface to Transgression.” In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 2). New York: The New Press, 1999. Freydberg, Bernard. The Thought of John Sallis: Phenomenology, Plato, Imagination. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Hamsun, Knut. Hunger. Translated by Sverre Lyngstad. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2003. Heidegger, Martin. “What Is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings. Edited and translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1972. ———. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. Nietzsche: Volumes III and IV: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics; Nihilism. Edited by David Farrell Krell. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Edited by Allan Bloom. Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1969. Lyotard, Jean-François. Why Philosophize? Translated by Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Contemporary Philosophical Movement.” In The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Edited by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2004), 25. Sallis, John. Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Schelling, F.W.J. On the History of Modern Philosophy. Translated by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Edited by David Berman. Translated by Jill Berman. London: Everyman, 1995.

Chapter Ten

From the Writing of Desire to the Desire of Writing Reflections on Proust Miguel de Beistegui

On one level, In Search of Time Lost is a novel about dissatisfaction and disappointment, suffering and melancholy—in short, a novel about despair. Whether in relation to Marcel or Swann, whether in matters of love or art, the novel is filled with flawed experiences, failures, and deeply skeptical and pessimistic views regarding our ability to reach genuine happiness, which can all be attributed to the fact that we are desiring beings. Desire is what seems to propel us into the world and toward others, yet in the cruelest way, since the share of unhappiness it brings about far outweighs its moments of satisfaction. Furthermore, desire seems without end and condemned to being reborn as soon as it’s satisfied. What desire does is to create a disjunction within experience, a gap as it were, between a reality that we can imagine, or anticipate and the reality to which, sooner or later, it finds itself confronted. As if produced by an evil genius, it feeds off the promise of a future and a reality that is ultimately denied—or, when it is granted, is immediately replaced by another, with the paradoxical result that it finds itself growing each time it is satisfied. It is, to use Blanchot’s expression in Faux pas, “the torment of a desire that knows itself only in absence and to which presence can bring nothing.” 1 The present, then, becomes the site of a negative experience: it is either the not yet of a fulfillment to come or the frustration of a promise that’s always betrayed. Does the novel provide a way out of the aporia of desire? And if so, is such a solution also a way out of desire itself? Or does the novel indicate another level or, better said perhaps, another economy of desire, which would not be premised on lack and on the disjunc183

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tion between perception and imagination, present and future, but on another sense of experience? THE APORIA OF DESIRE Proust’s novel provides us with many examples of such a disjunction between future and past, desire and reality: when Marcel desires to see a peasant girl appear in front of him, 2 when he hears La Berma in Phèdre, or sees the duchesse de Guermantes for the first time; or also, and more importantly still, when, on a train, he tries to describe in writing a row of trees that unfolds before his eyes, and which he finds “boring.” 3 But nowhere is the experience of desire more patent than in erotic love. Malcolm Bowie puts it nicely: “Sexual desire in À la recherche du temps perdu is highly localized, but it is also the abyss in which all other forms of desire threaten to sink.” 4 I leave aside the question of Proust’s own love affairs, his homosexuality and penchant for masturbation, his perpetual unhappy arousal, his extreme possessiveness and jealous nature, and focus instead on what his novel tells us about the logic or economy of desire, which applies to all sexual preferences and practices—all “perversions” or “paraphiliae”—available to human beings, from hetero- to homo- and bi-sexuality, pedophilia, sadism, masochism, voyeurism, and onanism, the variety and complexity of which the narrator finds endlessly enchanting and intellectually stimulating. His conclusion is that, on the whole, the men or women we desire are disappointing, and this feeling we call love is dull. 5 The feeling in question has nothing to do with the emotion we can derive from the beauty, the intelligence, or the kindness of the one we love. Of his mistresses, the narrator says this: When I saw them, when I listened to them, I found nothing in them that could resemble my love or be able to explain it. Yet my one joy was to see them, my one anxiety to wait for them. It was as if a virtue having no connection with them had been adjoined to them incidentally by nature, and that this virtue, this electricity-like power, had the effect on me of exciting my love, that is to say of directing all my actions and causing all my sufferings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the goodness of these women were wholly distinct. 6

A lack of intelligence or elegance can constitute just so many obstacles to love, as evidenced by Swann’s love for Odette, who isn’t even his type. 7 But these obstacles aren’t insurmountable. On the contrary. Spotting a resemblance between a lover and the representation of a biblical character in a great master’s painting and letting the imagination bring these two worlds together can easily do away with the flaws (and even the qualities) of the

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woman in question. The object of desire then no longer has any actual reference to desire itself, which is fueled by its own appetite and constructs its object on the basis of fragments. If anything, the object might occasion this desire, but it’s certainly not its efficient cause. What we love in a person is that kind of life, unknown to us, to which love would grant us access; it is the promise of a new world, or a lost world perhaps, which she encapsulates and might hand over to us as one hands over a treasure. In fact, the narrator himself only starts loving Albertine when he “suddenly” sees in “the real Albertine, the one I saw every day, [and] who I thought was hidebound in bourgeois prejudices,” the embodiment of the imaginary Albertine, far more attractive than the real one, namely the Albertine “who, at a time when I did not even know her, I had thought was taking furtive looks at me on the esplanade, the one who, when she saw me walking off, had seemed to be wending so reluctantly her own way home.” 8 Meeting the gaze of an unknown woman is enough to make him fall in love with her, since those eyes contain everything he could ever know of a thought, a wish, or a memory. “The hope of taking possession of all that,” Proust writes, “is what gives her eyes their value, much more than any mere material beauty.” 9 And if Marcel indiscriminately loves all the young girls in flower, it’s because the first time he caught a glimpse of them on the beach at Balbec, they were a “little gang” and, for him, such multiplicity has the power to evoke “the towering blue waves or the shapes of a parade passing in front of the sea.” 10 What he wants to recapture is the place where they are and he’s not, the world that is theirs at this particular moment and not his, recapture by finding them again. Making out Albertine’s gaze as she is surrounded by her friends, Marcel immediately wants to possess everything that shines in it and that’s unknown to him: the things, people, and places she calls on, the thoughts she harbors toward them, “her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will.” 11 In other words, Marcel falls in love with Albertine as a whole, with her ability to inhabit a world that’s different from his. This, by the way, would also account for snobbery as a form of mimetic desire: in Proust’s novel, Parisian society revolves around the duchesse de Guermantes, whose mannerisms, expressions, and witticisms it tries to emulate. Similarly, the Verdurin want the recognition—the desire—of the Cambremer, and the Cambremer that of Charlus. But he, at the very top of that chain of desire, seeks the desire of Morel, which escapes him. If there is a truth to that mimetic logic, we might as well fall in love with a checkout girl as a duchess, so long as we live on the Faubourg Saint-Germain and hang out with the right sort of crowd. A homely checkout girl can awaken the memory of a long gone—and so deeply prized—point in time or a world that’s unknown and alien, pricking the imagination and letting it run free. 12 And so it’s not all that surprising that Swann’s ready to sacrifice everything to Miss Sacripan, that Saint-Loup’s willing to squander his entire fortune on another cocotte,

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Rachel, just like Marcel when he’s struggling to keep Albertine from leaving him. This life, however, isn’t one we’ll ever be able to know completely; the world of the loved one will never truly be our world. The reason why “we find desiring innocent, and hideous that the other should desire” 13 actually stems from the fact that what we desire in the other is ultimately the other’s own capacity for desire. To love is to desire the other’s desire; it’s to turn the other’s desire into our own, to want to enter the world that the other holds within himself or herself and to possess thereby that which cannot be possessed. Right from the start Marcel says this about Albertine: My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore and which was composed of the lives led by these young girls, because what was laid out now before my eyes was that extension and potential multiplication of self which we know as happiness. 14

And it’s because it’s unattainable, and the narrator knows it, that he prefers and possesses Albertine when she is asleep, deprived of her freedom and her own desire, like a plant or a landscape. This becomes most clear in the following remarkable passage from La Prisonnière, in which Marcel manages to climax while Albertine lies next to him, dormant, his desire able to find a momentary “appeasement” (apaisement): Sometimes [Albertine’s sleep] brought me a pleasure that was less pure. I did not have to move at all, I let my leg loll against hers, like a trailing oar to which one gives every now and then a tiny impulsion like the occasional wingbeat of a bird asleep in mid-air. [. . .] The sound of Albertine’s breathing, growing louder, could almost have been mistaken for the breathlessness of pleasure, and as my own pleasure reached completion, I could kiss her without breaking into her sleep. It seemed to me at those moments that I had possessed her more completely, like an unconscious and unresisting part of dumb nature. 15

Love might well be the promise of happiness that Stendhal claimed for beauty, but it’s a promise that’s never realized. Why? Because love only lasts as long as the other remains terra incognita, uncharted territory. As long as the other still seems to be hiding something from me, I love him or her out of a possessive kind of love that torments me. If love’s essentially jealous, it’s because it aims to seize the other as a whole, to know that part of the other that was shown to someone else, to experience the other’s experiences as my own and make the other’s world my own. Precisely because the other is someone who’s different from me, his or her perspective on and knowledge

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of the world differ from mine, and neither will ever be mine, regardless of how intelligent I might be and how stupid he or she might be in turn: “How many people, towns, pathways jealousy makes us desperate to know! It is a thirst for knowledge thanks to which we come to have, on a series of isolated points, all possible information except the information we really want.” 16 The mere fact that the loved one is an other implies that I’ll never know the world as he or she does. And yet where else did my love originate if not in the promise of that new world? A part of that world, of that life will always escape me; the object of my desire will always have the power to steal away from me, thereby renewing and spurring my own desire. My desire, as the desire of the desire of the other, 17 is fueled by its structural dissatisfaction, by its inability to reach the presence of its object: “Having a liking for someone is one thing; but to be afflicted with the sadness, the feeling of something irreparable having happened, the anguish which all accompany the onset of love, what is necessary is the risk [. . .] of an impossibility.” 18 Jealousy is the passion—the illness or madness—for that impossible possession, an impossibility one nonetheless cannot settle for. 19 “Possessing” a woman implies wanting to take hold of what is ungraspable within her. And with this we’ve just doomed ourselves to the worst possible torment. Love only endures as long as the quest remains unfinished, as long as the thirst remains unquenched. But the fulfillment of the promise that constituted love actually brings love to an end: as soon as the loved one is no longer unknown to me, as soon as I am no longer jealous, I stop loving. When it’s not jealous, love is indifferent. Of Swann, Proust says that When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, longed for, imaginary, [. . .] when normal relationships were established between that would put an end to his madness and his gloom, then no doubt the actions of Odette’s daily life would appear to him of little interest in themselves [. . .]. [H]e told himself that when he had recovered his health what Odette might be doing would leave him indifferent. 20

Similarly, Albertine was as wonderful and desirable as she was unattainable. When he first kisses her, however, when she finally gives in, she’s already begun to lose some of her mystery: I should really have liked, before kissing her, to have been able to re-create in her the mystery she had held for me on the beach before I knew her, to discover in her the place where she had lived before that; in default of such mystery, I could at least insinuate all the memories of the time we had spent in Balbec, the sound of the waves breaking beneath my window, the shouts of the children. 21

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Don’t think for a moment that kissing and touching the lips that until now have been only longed for could reawaken the mystery. There’s no such thing as “knowledge through the lips.” 22 The kiss, crushing our ability to see and to feel against folds of skin and flesh, only underlines the cruel absence of a true organ of knowledge. The instant Albertine is held and captured, she becomes boring. The narrator remembers that “[i]t was because I had seen her as a mysterious bird, then as a great actress of the beach scene, desired and, who knows, enjoyed, that she had seemed wonderful to me. Once a captive in my house, the marvelous bird [. . .] had lost all its colours [. . .]. Little by little she had lost her beauty.” 23 Once imagination’s jealousy doesn’t need to rear its ugly head, love itself dies and is replaced by boredom, that kind of expectation that’s devoid of any object: “I could feel that my life with Albertine was nothing but, on the one hand, when I was not jealous, boredom, and on the other, when I was, suffering.” 24 Desire, then, if not life as a whole, as Schopenhauer thought, would alternate between suffering and boredom, between the ultimate and paroxystic expression of the imagination (thanks to which one may be concerned with the world and with beings in particular) and indifference or longing where the world and beings fall away from us and that we call happiness only insofar as they put an end to our pain. 25 If life disturbs me, I’m unhappy; if I’m happy, it’s only because I’m indifferent to life. Continually lauded, love would ultimately be the most tenacious illusion of all, the most overrated feeling and the most disappointing experience. As soon as they’re possessed, women, elevated and seemingly magnified by the power of our imagination and the strength of our desire, end up crushed by an invisible force that leads them to trip and fall “on the flat earth of vulgar reality.” 26 Such would be the tragic fate of our essentially narcissistic desire. DESIRE, KNOWLEDGE, AND POWER On one level, then, the experience of desire is one of constant disappointment, frustration, and unhappiness. Yet, as we’ve just begun to see, the most passionate and, we could say, alienated forms of desire in Proust’s novel seem to point beyond themselves to a moment of resolution. The reason for this is that the hidden but ultimate goal of desire is knowledge, and the subject of desire is animated by an insatiable thirst for truth. After all, homo concupiscens is also homo sapiens. Over against the “emotional and moral penalties” associated with desire, Bowie writes, “the jealous lover hears, and heeds, an imperious call to know.” 27 And “overshadowing the promise of sexual satisfaction another, improbable, order of pleasure is seen”: that of a mind suddenly confronted by, and able to grasp, ‘une étroite section lumineuse pratiquée à même l’inconnu’ (I, 283).” 28 To that extent, we could say

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desire is fundamentally and quite literally philosophical—if, by philosophy, one understands our natural and irresistible inclination to know. To that extent, the other is not the ultimate object of my desire but only who I love: there is something I desire beyond my desire of the other. In its pathological and at times sometimes delusional manifestations, love needs to be distinguished from what the pathology reveals. And what it actually reveals is an innate and insatiable curiosity, a will to know all that there is to know about every being and every kind of being. The real significance of love, perhaps the most extreme and futile expression of the imagination, is epistemological: what drives us to imagine is being unable to know. Knowing—knowing everything—is what we really want. This is how, in his relationship with Albertine, the narrator becomes an obsessive scientist or scholar who draws on a wide range of disciplines, from chemistry, biology, physics, botany, and physiology to philosophy, history, grammar, and psychology, but—and this is what distinguishes him from the encyclopedic and stupid enterprise of Bouvard and Pécuchet—with the sole aim of analyzing, scrutinizing, deciphering, and interpreting his lover’s every word, gesture, and movement. Jealousy, including the pain it generates, thus becomes the necessary stimulus for a deeper desire, namely, the desire to get behind appearances and arrive at the structure and essence of things, which itself is a source of pleasure. From “douleur” to “douceur,” there is only the difference of a letter, but one that signals the via dolorosa of thought, or, Hegel would say, the painful work of the negative, without which there can be no knowledge or felicity. And if, in the end, “the most exclusive love for any person is always love for something else,” 29 it’s because that something is the Absolute. The reality of love is exhausted in this demand for an absolute which it fails to meet qua erotic love. Its actualization lies in its transformation and transcendence. Equally, for the one who can understand it, love is indicative of an infinite desire and one step toward the contemplation of this “divinity (or Idea)” 30 that the one we love (and, as a result, because of whom we suffer) is “only a fragmentary reflection at the lowest level.” 31 And, instead of—but also because of—the pain we once felt, this whole process of contemplation can even make us happy. This is precisely how Swann ends up at his mistress’s house in order to spy on her. Desperate to know whether she’s in another man’s arms, he decides to knock at the shutters of the flat which he believes to be hers: And perhaps, what he was feeling at this moment, which was almost pleasant, was also something different from the assuaging of a doubt and a distress: it was a pleasure in knowledge. If, ever since he had fallen in love, things had regained for him a little of the delightful interest they had once had for him, but only insofar as they were illuminated by the memory of Odette, now it was another of the faculties of his studious youth that his jealousy revived, a passion for truth, but for a truth that was likewise interposed between him and

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Loving passionately would therefore involve loving more than the one being loved; it would involve loving what demands to be loved within him or her but what he or she is not, namely truth. The only possible love, at least in the sense of a love that doesn’t just lead to suffering and disappointment, would be the love of truth. This is indeed a philosophical view of love—a Platonic one, to be exact—in which Eros, once properly understood and applied, leads to aletheia and sophia, and in which passion is a pathway to knowledge. So far, we’ve seen how desire, even in its most passionate guise (in love and snobbery), turns out to be oriented toward what seems to be a higher, nobler end, namely, knowledge, and provide a way out of the aporia I began by evoking. In addition, desire seems to be irreducibly bound up with a simultaneous feeling of pleasure and pain. The pain consists in the realization that desire is bound up with a form of dissatisfaction and lack, and one that, in addition, is irreducible, insofar as the desire of the other can never become entirely my own. The pleasure, on the other hand, consists in realizing that something can be learned from such a negative feeling and that knowledge isn’t entirely excluded from the realm of passions. This image of desire seems to resonate with Platonic or possibly Freudian themes and with the idea of an inner dynamic and transformation of desire, which progressively elevates it to the world of Ideas. Doesn’t Proust himself write the following at the end of his book: “The whole art of living is to use the people who make us suffer simply as steps enabling us to obtain access to their divine form and thus joyfully to people our lives with divinities”? 33 Desire, then, would be intrinsically philosophical, and philosophy itself, as the love of wisdom, intrinsically erotic. Except that, while opening up the possibility of such a resolution, the narrator ends up denying it: despite all his efforts, his discipline and intelligence, his scientific and systematic approach to the “system” Albertine, the questions that obsess him from the start, regarding her sexuality, her relationships in the past and the present, her innermost feelings and thoughts, remain a mystery by the end of The Prisoner. The Platonic or Hegelian moment of reconciliation never takes place, and the moment of truth, or absolute truth, is

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endlessly postponed: “Jealousy, whose eyes are bandaged, is not only powerless to see anything in the surrounding darkness; it is one of those tortures where a task has constantly to be begun again, like that of the Danaids or of Ixion.” 34 A disturbing thought indeed, which deprives the path of truth of its expected outcome and reveals a truth of a different kind; for if the desire to possess an other, decipher her codes, habits, and thoughts, indicates a desire to know, and thus a connection with truth, we need to acknowledge that the reverse is also true. In other words, the desire to know, and the quest for truth, is itself a desire to possess, appropriate, dominate, and subjugate. We may be entitled to say that jealous love is philosophical, but only if we recognize that the scholar or scientist is also jealous, that is, animated by a desire to observe, decode, monitor, capture, and control. The prism of science is also that of the jealous, paranoid lover. The “natural” movement of desire would then not simply be an ascending Platonic one, from jealousy, snobbery, and paranoia to their “divine” expression or form but also from knowledge, truth, and the noblest ideals to their hidden, far less noble and still effective origin. We would then need to distinguish between the desire to know (désir de connaître), in the sense that we’ve talked about thus far, and which resonates with a fairly classical conception of knowledge and philosophy, and what, following Foucault, we could call the “will to know” (volonté de savoir). Based on the very way in which Proust combines the desire to know (and to know everything) with the desire to possess, appropriate, and dominate, we would need to refute the idea that desire can ever elevate itself to a position of pure disinterestedness. Behind every desire to know, and every quest for truth, there is a will to know, that is, a will to impose a force onto another and to exercise one’s power over others. The highest truths of art, philosophy, and science would themselves be the expression of such a drive. If the novel amounts to a critique of intelligence, as Proust himself claimed, it’s also to the extent that intelligence is disconnected from the will or desire that animates it and which puts it on the same level as the passions, the dark and unavowable desires, the violence that the novel describes. This, also, is what would allow us to conclude that, despite Marcel’s avowed ambition to write a novel of philosophical value, the Recherche amounts to a critique of philosophy—so long as by “philosophy” we understand the natural or innate desire for truth that all human beings supposedly share and which can be arrived at not through the exercise of a form of violence, and the imposition of a will, but through good will and the proper method. Our genuine cognitive faculties, or at least the forces that set those faculties in motion, are thus the passions. The mistake, then, would be to separate the desire to know from the desire to possess, and the epistemology of truth from the metaphysics of power.

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THE DESIRE OF WRITING Does this mean, as Girard argues, that the only true remedy to the torments of desire consists in understanding the nature of the illusion that is at the heart of the lover’s or the snob’s dissatisfaction through the production of the work? Does the redemptive value of the novel lie precisely in its ability to narrate the misadventures of what Girard calls “metaphysical desire” and to turn Marcel into an ascetic hero: “We need to call hero the character that triumphs over metaphysical desire in a tragic conclusion and thus becomes able to write the novel?” 35 Is sublimation through writing really the lesson of the novel, and the only way for the narrator to channel his desire? Or does the novel reveal a different kind of desire, one that would be precisely linked to the possibility of the work? The question, then, is one of knowing whether, behind or beneath the narcissistic and paranoid economy of desire, there isn’t an altogether different type of desire which animates writing itself or the desire of the work; it is whether the desire of writing, as the source from which the book flows, consists of a letting go of the will to know and possess. Were that to be the case, we would need to distinguish between the desire of the writer and the desire or moving center of the book, of which the author would himself be ignorant. We would even need to assume that it’s as a result of that ignorance that the author is able to write. The question of desire, and of its relation to writing, could then be formulated as follows: “À quoi tend la littérature?” 36 The desire in question, however, is not one that can simply be postulated or wished. It has to emerge from experience. But how could it, so long as experience is itself temporally constrained, that is, marked by this disjunction or gap between future and present, which desire exploits? Could experience exceed those constraints and reveal a different temporal order? Furthermore, could it overcome the feelings of pleasure and pain which, thus far, we’ve defined as constitutive of desire itself? This, I think, is precisely what the novel, and especially Time Regained, does. It does so by shifting the center of gravity of time from the future to the past or from anticipation and imagination to involuntary memory. We can’t ignore the fact that the vocation of Marcel as a writer (“the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book” 37) and his hitherto frustrated desire to write finally come to something as a result of a series of experiences involving the past. This, naturally, and as Proust himself insisted in a letter to Jacques Rivière from February 6, 1914, does not mean that either his or the narrator’s vocation is to recall and record past events and memories. That past—the past that we recollect, recognize, and organize—is no remedy for the shortcomings of desire, if only because the moments our intellect selects, and those it leaves out, remain a function of our hopes, anxieties, and aspirations—in short, our desires. Literature—at least for Proust—cannot consist in an effort to remember one’s past, and

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assemble, no matter how elegantly, or amusingly, one’s memories. Although Proust doesn’t refer explicitly to the experiences of involuntary memory as a form of desire, he establishes a profound connection between the two, if only by insisting on the renewed “appetite for life” 38 that they bring about in Marcel. The appetite or desire in question has to do, of course, with the discovery of an entirely new life, or a new dimension of life, tucked away and forgotten within the folds of lived experience, the very being of which is a source of infinite “felicity” and “joy” (allégresse) and one that, we should emphasize, is not tainted by any pain (and the absence of the latter is probably why Proust feels he can’t call it desire). But what’s most important is to understand that, ultimately, the connection in question allows us to see the singularity of literature, which, let’s recall, Marcel also defines as “the real life” (la vraie vie). 39 For the past in question is the past that falls into oblivion from the start, into an obscurity that is neither the negation of light nor the obstacle that the intellect needs to overcome through the exercise of its own, natural light (lumen naturale); this obscurity is rather the other side or the lining of light, the shadow that all lived experience carries with it, and which literature probes. That’s what’s at stake in the famous moments of bliss disseminated throughout the novel and concentrated in Time Regained. Behind the extreme sensation of joy, there is the experience of a new obligation, or of what we could call the categorical imperative of art: “Stop and grasp me if you can, if you have the strength, and try and resolve the enigma of felicity that I propose.” Now the enigma in question is that of a recognition but one that’s precisely not the repetition of something we already knew. Whereas, in the latter, our faculties converge with a view to re-cognizing an object in its already known identity, and this in such a way that nothing new can ever be experienced; the latter presupposes the recognition of something that was never known or even lived. It’s perhaps not a coincidence if, immediately after the scenes of involuntary memory in Time Regained, Proust gives a brilliant and comic illustration of the process of re-cognition in the long scene of the bal de têtes. In it, Marcel is able to recognize the Prince de Guermantes only at the cost of considerable efforts of “reasoning” and memory, focused on “resemblances” that eventually enable him to establish the “identity” of the Prince. 40 Similarly, “only some lingering remnant of the way he glanced around” (seul un petit bout de regard resté le même) allows the narrator to “recognize” the duc de Châtellerault. 41 Finally, once “the proudest face” and “the most jutting chest,” d’Argencourt had turned into a “disintegrated bum” (une loque en bouillie) and a “sublime dodderer,” who Marcel is able to recognize only because of his “occasional smile.” 42 But this farce or comedy of recognition, this pleasure that Marcel finds in slowly identifying everyone and finding the past in the present, is altogether different from the joy he experiences when he finds Venice in the stones of the

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Guermantes courtyard or Combray in a madeleine. In this instance, what’s recognized was never cognized, and that’s precisely what distinguishes the pleasure of recognition from the joy of recollection. Venice, Combray, and Balbec have returned but truer than they ever were; truer, that is, than when they were actually experienced and subsequently remembered. For the most part, remembrance, perception, and the intellect are essentially selective and work together with a view to achieving a goal or facilitating an action which leave out more than they actually retain: this is how words, actions, or impressions that may have a virtual significance are “separated” and sidelined by “the intelligence which had no need of them for its rational purposes.” 43 Now, in order that this past, which has never quite passed but continues to accompany, silently, and as its invisible margins or virtual reality, each of my own perceptions, may return, it’s necessary that the normal order of the faculties be suspended and that a new order be introduced. My present opens up and expands, exceeds the confines within which action and the intelligence kept it, and brings back the most remote and forgotten corners of my life, which I thought were lost forever, or didn’t even know were there. Those abandoned, rejected moments of my life return, and their return signals the salt of life and the matter of art. Why? Because we now know that what we call life and what, through an act of creation, can become the stuff of literature, exceeds the limits of any given life, of my life, and lies dormant, in a virtual state of being that chance, or the desire of the work, can bring back to life. The life in question is no longer strictly speaking mine and its desire no longer that of a power that exercises its dominion over the world. The self that is now subjected to such limit-experiences is no longer the self that gathers itself around the faculties of cognition in order to identify and recognize the object, but the self that functions at the limit of itself, and which is no longer gathered at its extremity. It’s a dilated, expanded, and vertiginous self. It’s a self that’s become an other. This is made quite clear in the famous passage where Marcel takes down François le Champi from the Guermantes library: [I]f in the library I take down François le Champi, a child immediately rises up within me and takes my place, the only one who has the right to read the title François le Champi and who reads it as he read it then, with the same impressions of the weather outside in the garden, the same dreams as he formed then about other countries and about life, the same anxiety about the future. 44

“A child,” he’s careful to say, just some child or other, and not “myself as a child,” or “my own childhood.” This child isn’t something that belongs to the narrator but the presence in him of an anonymous or impersonal being that possesses him. In place of a personal pronoun, what we have is an indefinite article that suggests the emergence of a stranger or an intruder from the

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depths of the narrator’s soul. That intruder, though, as he realizes a little later on, is actually himself, and more so than the self we usually call our own: it’s a self that’s at once forgotten and preserved, eternal and intact, and that sits alongside the self that’s advancing inevitably toward its own death. It’s a self that returns and comes to the surface from a place that the narrator cannot recognize. And if that self rises up and takes the place of the narrator’s consciousness and lived experience, it’s because, up until that point, he occupied a place that he thought was his but where he didn’t belong. That place belonged to the self, never announced, never expected, which returns to haunt him: it is the spectral place of what the French language calls a revenant. In these sort of reminiscences, as we saw earlier on, I come back to myself, but only as that part of myself that’s relegated to the bottom of my soul and that surprises me, like ghosts always do: I thought that self had gone, living on only in memory—a faint and dead representation of a tableau vivant—but here it is re-emerging, returning me to myself and to the past, taking my place, taking over my present. My place, though, or what I normally think of as my place, is actually the place of the dying self, and the present that gives way to the past is the place of my death: death isn’t still to come; it’s already here, in each present moment insofar as their inexorable sequence draws me in toward it. Life, the life that’s not survival and that doesn’t grow older, is the life of the pure past. True time is the time which, doubling the present, never fades away and becomes eternal from the start. In this new configuration, it’s the present that fades away before the past, and not, as we tend to think, the past that fades away to make room for the present. At the end of the day, the present is the place where I am farthest from myself and as it were alienated from myself. If, as we recall from Marcel’s numerous disappointments and disillusions, the present really is a source of suffering, it’s because it suffers from the fact that it is not, from the fact that it is a lack or an empty shell. All the same, we need this deficiency or poverty of the present so that the past can sneak up from behind it and, on the odd occasion, take its place; the present has to be porous for eternity to penetrate. It’s not the present that’s real, then, or immediate impression. What’s real, rather, is “a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously,” a “unique” relationship, as Proust promptly stresses, which, when transposed to literature, requires the invention of a style. But if that’s the case, then there is no longer any reason to follow the negative path of desire and live between the anticipation of a future that will inevitably disappoint and a present that’s essentially an empty placeholder. For in excess of desire, there is the reality and infinite depth of an impersonal, anonymous life, which is the life of literature itself. Marcel was unable to find the beauty of Balbec, or that of Venice, when he was there. That was very much the source of his dissatisfaction and his despair at becoming a

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writer. Through the experiences of involuntary memory, which open up the possibility of literature and awaken a new appetite or desire for life, Marcel realizes that he can enjoy that beauty retrospectively, that is, thanks to a temporal disjunction that defies chronology, and thus, also, the negative cycle of desire: Yes, if the memory, thanks to forgetfulness, has not been able to make a single connection, to throw up a single link between it and the present moment, if it has stayed in its place, at its date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the depths of a valley or at the peak of a summit, it suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is an air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost. 45

There is no longer any reason to despair of life or literature, which is no longer condemned to repeat or describe, more or less faithfully, what everyone already knows. Between life and literature, there is now a new alliance— one that, far from realism and the “literature of observations,” celebrates the union of desire and difference, or novelty. “Style” will be its incarnation and guarantee, if only because it’s “a question not of technique, but of vision.” The vision in question, Proust goes on to say, isn’t that of the ordinary self, oriented toward the identity of the world as an object of recognition, but toward the “difference” and “distance” of the world, in which the self is dissolved: “It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual” 46—and, I would add, which each individual would be unaware of. True power and genuine knowledge are to be found in literature. But it’s a power that doesn’t take hold of the world and a knowledge that’s only a gaze—not the inquisitive, scrutinizing, and invasive gaze of the jealous lover or scientist, which “seeks to see in the surrounding darkness,” but the gaze that plunges into the obscurity of a Night older than the light of Day and from which it extracts the living matter of literature. It’s a desire that ceases to be narcissistic and becomes Orphean. Writing itself becomes the movement through which the innerworldly self of the author is dissolved and another, impersonal life begins to take shape. CONCLUSION To write, Deleuze says in a text inspired by his reading of Proust and the thought of Blanchot, doesn’t consist in “imposing a form on a lived content [une matière vécue],” and the act of writing “exceeds all livable or lived

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content.” 47 Not, mind you, in favor of a death inherent to life itself, and to what would resemble a death drive, but of a dying that signals a threshold, a passage to the limit, or the crossing of a lifeline. In the words of Blanchot: Desire, writing, do not remain in place, but pass one over the other: these are not play on words, for desire is always desire of dying, not a wish. And yet, desire is related to Wunsch, and is a nondesire too—the powerless power that traverses writing—just as writing is the desired, undesired torment which endures everything, even impatience. Dying desire, desire to die, we live these together—not that they coincide—in the obscurity of the interim. 48

In this dying, which is without end and which my own death—“possibility of the impossibility of existence,” as Heidegger put it—can’t suspend or interrupt, since it suspends my life as being-toward-death, along with its anxiety, its projects, and its “unsurpassable horizon,” desire turns me away from myself, from my star and the entire cosmic order. The desire in question doesn’t unfold under a starry sky and doesn’t bathe in the light of the firmament and consideration (which Heidegger called Sorge). Rather, and in Blanchot’s words, it sinks deep into the Night, which is not the flip side or negation of day but the life of the “neuter,” or of “disaster.” Beyond any “curiosity” and “knowledge,” it unfolds as the desire of writing. If, in the end, desire is indeed “this detour through which ‘I’ am disconsidered” 49 or “I” find myself turned away from my original “consideration,” it takes place in and as writing. Minimally, writing is the experience of the dispossession of the self, in which its narcissistic desire, or the care of itself, is led astray and adrift, carried away toward the impersonal life of the neuter. If, as Heidegger believed, death is what individualizes me absolutely, and that through which this life indeed becomes my life, then the turning of desire, as the desire of writing, consists in the impossibility of my own death and of myself as ownness. It consists rather of an infinitive and impersonal “dying,” that is, of an event that is without beginning or end, anarchic and interminable. “I” must die so that “dying” may take place. From that point of view, the desire of writing isn’t a wish or drive emanating from the self but a power without power—without, that is, the power of existence. It’s a desire that signals the limit of existence and of death as the limit and condition of all possibilities. Death, insofar as it mine, is indeed still indicative of my power. But the desire of writing signals another form of life, a pure event that is unlike anything I may have lived. This is the extent to which “dying” would not be the negation or impossibility of life but its highest realization and the ultimate and most joyful expression of desire: “I” would never be more alive than dying, of a life that would precisely not be that of my own, lived experience, or of consciousness, but of this burgeoning and flourishing unconscious that the self suffocates, or at least reduces. At stake, here, is an unlived matter, far more decisive that anything lived: an event in which “I”

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am finally able to die, and in the vanishing of which something far greater and more beautiful than my own memories, my past, in short, my Erlebnis is able to emerge; a life that is no longer my life, nor even life, but a life, which is neither particular nor universal but impersonal. When “I” am no longer there, when there is no longer anyone, there remains the impersonal, in which writing takes place. To be sure, the “s/he” of writing is still a person, even though it is the most impersonal. It’s the person which literature can’t do without, but it’s a person that withdraws and vanishes in the face of the pure event: a child in François le Champi, Venice between two cobblestones, love in a sonata. It’s when the writer crosses that threshold, and when desire, lost in the depths of Night, and far from the torments of existence, has become the writing of disaster, that life reaches its highest expression. No doubt, the writer suffers from feeling things and creatures to that extent. But that suffering is also his joy—the unparalleled joy of inexhaustible and infinite Being, the joy of knowing that he is condemned to err and never know, but in an erring that is deeper than any exploration of the world. Infinitely désœuvré, the writer can now abandon himself to this desire that is not with a view to enjoyment but that is enjoyment, or, as René Char puts, “désir demeuré désir.” 50 NOTES 1. Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 54. 2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time [SLT], ed. Christopher Prendergast, vol. 1, The Way by Swann’s, trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 156–57. 3. See Proust, SLT, ed. Christopher Prendergast, vol. 6, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 163. 4. Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 210. 5. In The Prisoner, the narrator evokes “[t]he disappointment [he] had experienced with women whom [he] had known” (Proust, SLT, ed. Prendergast, vol. 5, The Prisoner and The Fugitive, trans. Carol Clark [London: Penguin Classics, 2003], 153). And Sodom and Gomorrah posits love as “a sentiment which (whatever its cause) is always erroneous” (Proust, SLT, ed. Prendergast, vol. 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock [London: Penguin Classics, 2003], 199). 6. Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 518–19. 7. Proust, The Way by Swann’s, 383. 8. Proust, SLT, ed. Prendergast, vol. 2, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 508. Later in Paris, when he is about to kiss Albertine for the first time, Marcel ponders on the following, which is the same as wondering whether, in love, one ever possesses the loved one, namely the imaginary being, or only her flesh: “What a difference there is between possessing a woman with one’s body alone, because she is no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl one used to see on the beach with her friends on certain days, without even knowing why it was on those days and not on others, so that one trembled to think one might not see her again” (Proust, SLT, ed. Prendergast, vol. 3, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne [London: Penguin Classics, 2003], 360). 9. Proust, The Prisoner, 154. 10. Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 413. 11. Ibid., 375. 12. Proust, The Way by Swann’s, 157.

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13. Proust, The Prisoner, 153. 14. Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 375. 15. Proust, The Prisoner, 62. 16. Ibid., 75. 17. The phrase I’m using here is Lacan’s phrase, borrowed in turn from Kojève’s reading of the master-slave dialectics in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In Book I of his Seminar, Lacan identifies at least two possible meanings in this expression: I obviously desire to be desired by the other, but, equally and most importantly, I desire what the other desires, that is, the desire which is his or hers and not mine. This double definition of love (as imaginary or specular love) can naturally be reflected by narcissistic and aggressive tendencies, as evidenced by Swann’s attitude toward Odette or by how Marcel relates to Albertine: while recognizing the other’s desire (a recognition consequently inscribed in the symbolic economy of the Law, which arises from the recognition of the image of the Father as irreducibly other than my own image and than the ideal ego I was able to form thanks to its projection), I aim to seize and reduce it at once. To love is thus to want the other to recognize me in my place, but it also consists in wanting to take the other’s place. Hence there is an irreducible and destructive tension for which there might be a solution in Lacan’s theory, unlike in Proust, where it remains unresolved. 18. Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 411–12. 19. The equivalence between love and chronic pain, which pathologizes love, is a constant theme in Proust: Swann’s love for Odette is a “holy evil” (The Way by Swann’s, 233), “his morbid state” (ibid., 302), “his madness” (ibid., 302). The narrator’s love for Albertine is described as “an incurable ailment” (The Prisoner, 74), “a kind of mutual torture” (ibid., 96) in which the other’s existence “is no longer anything but a cause of pain” (The Fugitive, 442–43). On this question, see Nicolas Grimaldi’s compelling study, La jalousie. Étude sur l’imaginaire proustien (Paris: Le Méjan, Actes Sud, 1993). 20. Proust, The Way by Swann’s, 302. 21. Proust, The Guermantes Way, 362. 22. Ibid. 23. Proust, The Prisoner, 155–56. 24. Ibid., 364. 25. Proust evokes “the tedium that we find in the midst of happiness” (The Fugitive, 400). 26. Proust, The Prisoner, 155. 27. Malcolm Bowie, Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge (London: Queen Mary College, 1978), 4. 28. Ibid., 5. The quotation from Proust translates as “a narrow illuminated section cut directly out of the unknown” (The Way by Swann’s, 285). 29. Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, 413. 30. Proust, Finding Time Again, 207. 31. Ibid. 32. Proust, The Way by Swann’s, 276 (emphasis mine). Regarding this section, see Malcolm Bowie’s insightful reading “Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge” in Freud, Proust, and Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 49–66, along with Deleuze’s Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964) (Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard [Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000]). For Deleuze, the world of Proust is a world made of sensible signs waiting to be deciphered. While the discovery of truth depends on intelligence, the emergence or instigation of truth conversely depends on the sensible. 33. Proust, Finding Time Again, 207. 34. Proust, The Prisoner, 135. 35. René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1997), 332. 36. Maurice Blanchot in Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Madaule, Correspondance 1953–2002 (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 130. 37. Proust, The Guermantes Way, 395. 38. Proust, Finding Time Again, 180. Translation modified. 39. Ibid., 204. 40. Ibid., 229, translation modified. 41. Ibid., 230.

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42. Ibid., 231. 43. Ibid., 178. 44. Ibid., 194. 45. Ibid., 178–79. 46. Ibid., 204. 47. Gilles Deleuze, “La littérature et la vie,” in Critique et clinique (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1993) 11. 48. Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 71–72. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 42. 49. Maurice Blanchot, Le pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 91. 50. “The poem,” Char writes, is “the realized love of the desire that’s remained desire [l’amour réalisé du désir demeuré désir].” Cited by Blanchot in L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 250.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blanchot, Maurice. L’écriture du désastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ———. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. ———. Faux pas. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. ———. Le pas au-delà. Paris: Gallimard, 1973. Blanchot, Maurice, and Pierre Madaule. Correspondance 1953–2002. Paris: Gallimard, 2012. Bowie, Malcolm. Proust Among the Stars. London: HarperCollins, 1998. ———. Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge. London: Queen Mary College, 1978. ———. Freud, Proust, and Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. Critique et clinique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1993. ———. Proust et les signes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. Proust and Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Girard, René. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: Grasset, 1977. Grimaldi, Nicolas. La jalousie. Étude sur l’imaginaire proustien. Paris: Le Méjan, Actes Sud, 1993. Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time, edited by Christopher Prendergast. Vol. 1, The Way by Swann’s. Translated by Lydia Davis. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. ———. In Search of Lost Time, edited by Christopher Prendergast. Vol. 2, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Translated by James Grieve. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. ———. In Search of Lost Time, edited by Christopher Prendergast. Vol. 3, The Guermantes Way. Translated by Mark Treharne. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. ———. In Search of Lost Time, edited by Christopher Prendergast. Vol. 4, Sodom and Gomorrah. Translated by John Sturrock. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. ———. In Search of Lost Time, edited by Christopher Prendergast. Vol. 5, The Prisoner and The Fugitive. Translated by Carol Clark. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. ———. In Search of Lost Time, edited by Christopher Prendergast. Vol. 6, Finding Time Again. Translated by Ian Patterson. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Chapter Eleven

Miracle Alphonso Lingis

An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality. An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love. A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a sobbing accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love.

Georges Bataille 1 BEINGS AND PARODIES In classical metaphysics, and in Husserl’s phenomenology, each perceived object is doubled up with its idea or eidetic form; Georges Bataille sees objects as doubled up with their shadows, reflections, and parodies. 2 Indeed, the idea of a thing is a parody of it. Lead is the parody of gold; air is the parody of water. The crooked branches of a tree in winter look like the arms and claws of an old man; the one is a grotesque or burlesque version of the other. The ancient Egyptians depicted human bodies with heads of jaguars, ibises, crocodiles; we look at people and see heads of foxes, weasels, hawks, deer, rats, rabbits, and artists have not stopped depicting them. We look at a vagina and see also a gash, a muff, a pussy; we look at a penis and see also a snake, a sausage, a banana. The surrealists made these objects the central themes of their art. Salvador Dali painted women who double up into chests of drawers, horses with spider legs. 201

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“I can perceive the erotic, laughable, terrifying, repugnant or tragic value of a single object at the same time,” Bataille notes. 3 Laughter turns into tears, tears break into laughter. The ingenuous meeting of persons speaking directly and without mental reservations turns into impudent coquettishness that calculates moves and maneuvers. Innocent play switches into the real aggressions of combat. Rage abruptly alternates with ecstasy. Any unlikely or strange death soon appears to us also to be absurd and ridiculous; our horror gives rise to morbid laughter. In eroticism we are switched convulsively from the pure to the impure, from the lascivious to the chaste, from mad passion to cunning. There is high-spiritedness in cruelty and sordid crime. We have known times when great joys are also experienced as oppressive and crushing. Things whose grotesqueness and ugliness fill us with repugnance end up being transfigured into visions of evil beauty. Who has not known the beauty of serpents, cobras, octopuses; who has not been captivated by the beauty of murderers and of the devil? ABJECT LOVE Jean Genet, an unwanted birth, was adopted by a couple to work on their farm. Incarcerated at the age of fifteen in the juvenile penal colony of Mettray, reincarcerated ten times before being sentenced to life imprisonment, Genet lived in exile from the human community. An education of only six years of primary school, harsh penal conditions, enforced silence, solitary confinements, and hunger isolated him in the suffering substance of his body. The soul appeared to be only the harmonious unfolding, the extension, in fine and shaded scrolls, of secret labor, of the movements of algae and waves, of organs living a strange life in its deep darkness, of those organs themselves, the liver, the spleen, the green coating of the stomach, the humors, the blood, the chyle, the coral canals, a vermilion sea, the blue intestines. 4 Inland, I went through landscapes of sharp rocks that gnawed the sky and ripped the azure. This rigid, dry, malicious indigence flouted my own and my human tenderness. Yet it incited me to hardness. [. . .] I wanted to be a rock among rocks. I was happy to be one, and proud. Thus did I hold to the soil. I had my companions. I knew what the mineral kingdom was. 5

Genet finds pride in the pursuit of abjection. An unremitting work of making himself insensitive to men’s blows, abjection is a protection. Abjection is also a mire in which anyone who provokes it is caught in turn. Actively pursued, abjection becomes the exercise of free acts. 6 In the black depths of abjection Genet found love. He found love in the cell blocks of prisons where he spent his adolescence and outside in the underworld of army deserters, thieves, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes,

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homosexuals and transvestites, and petty crooks. The five books Genet wrote are nothing but love songs. How does love emerge from abjection? By miracle. If the simple precept of Jesus, “Love,” was to give birth to the most extraordinary pack of monsters: metamorphoses into flowers, escapes by angels, tortures on the rack, resurrection, dances with pagan animals, devoured ribs, cured lepers, kissed lepers, canonized guts, flowers condemned mirthlessly by notorious councils, in short an entire legend which is called Golden, the even more overwhelming miracles with which our families teemed were bound in the end to unite, merge, mingle, cook, boil in cauldrons so as to make visible in the depths of my heart the most scintillating of crystals: Love. 7

Love is the unconditioned miracle that reaches another when every bond of trust and collaboration, always conditional, is no longer possible. Consummate beauty is the apparition that produces this prodigy, this fatality. Beauty closes in upon itself, depending on nothing from its surroundings, which dissolve into darkness or pure light about it. The movements and manipulations of workers are measured to the tasks; they are useful, efficient, without overtones, without aura. 8 “I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty—a sunken beauty.” 9 The movements and gestures of prisoners are disconnected from tasks and skills and from the intentions of the prisoner. They take place in dream landscapes. In beauty they close in on themselves. Love is the debauch of sexual penetration between dreamers whose dreams penetrate one another. Beauty is not only in the radiance but also in the intensity of contours and movements, where the whole constellation of surrounding objects in which they materialize is condensed. The ladder Genet sees Harcamone carrying on his shoulder is a ladder carrying him—“the ladder of escape, of kidnappings, of serenades, of a circus, of a boat, it was scales and arpeggios: it was the murderer’s wings.” 10 The radiance and intensity of sovereign gestures give them, disconnected from intention as from efficacy as they are, an appropriateness that reasoned, practical, or moral justification could never give them. Genet finds that in the beauty that enchants love, there is always something ugly there also, which, instead of putting an end to love, also attracts the lover’s gaze and indeed captivates it so that it becomes love of ugliness. Love enters through “the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded.” 11 For love is tenderness in the midst of adoration. There is no other origin of beauty than the wound, singular, different for each person, hidden or visible, which every man keeps inside him, which he preserves and where he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a passing but profound solitude. “Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The

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rarest. It exploits coincidence.” 12 Genet found he adored a man who had flat ears, another a slight stammer, a third who had lost three fingers, Stilitano with his severed hand. “Splendid depravity, sweet and kindly, which makes it possible to love those who are ugly, dirty and disfigured!” 13 Genet is carried along in a descent from the world, into prison, into foulness, scatophagy, perhaps into madness, and hell, which will finally land him in a garden of saintliness where roses bloom, roses whose beauty is composed of the rims of the petals, their folds, gashes, tips, spots, insect holes, blushes, and even their mossy stems with thorns. 14 Dominated by his strength and age, I gave the work my utmost care. Crushed by that mass of flesh, which was devoid of the slightest spirituality, I experienced the giddiness of finally meeting the perfect brute, indifferent to my happiness. I discovered the sweetness that could be contained in a thick fleece on torso, belly and thighs and what force it could transmit. I finally let myself be buried in that stormy night. Out of gratitude or fear I placed a kiss on Armand’s hairy arm. 15

Love is the spell enchanted not only with the stains of physical ugliness, the foulness, the excrement of the other, but even with the black splendor of the hatred with which the other turns on one. Divine, pursued by kids [. . .] screaming “Maricona” and throwing stones at her, [. . .] climbed into an empty train. [. . .] She crouched under a seat, cursing the horde of brats, rattling with hatred for them. It was impossible to devour the kids, to rip them to pieces with her teeth and nails, as she would have liked; abruptly from her excess of rage and hatred, which fell into the absurd grandeur of their hatred, love for them burst forth. 16

EROS AND THANATOS Genet knew a love that could turn into love for a murderer, for the very murderer who killed the one he loved. Genet’s love for the young communist resistant Jean D., who was killed during the August 1944 Paris insurrection against the German occupation, is so extreme that it cannot but find Jean D.’s corpse ravishing and dreams of cannibalizing it that it remain within him. Jean D. was killed by a French militiaman who had taken to the rooftops with the Germans and for several days fired on the populace who had mounted barricades. 17 In order to extend love over not only the specks of physical ugliness, the excrement, the corpse of Jean D., Genet must also pour the same rivers of love over the act that killed him and the killer himself. My hatred of the militiaman was so intense, so beautiful that it was equivalent to the strongest love. No doubt it was he who had killed Jean. I desired him. I

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was suffering so because of Jean’s death that I was willing to do anything to forget about him. The best trick I could play on that fierce gang known as destiny, which delegates a kid to do its work, and the best I could play on the kid, would be to invest him with the love I felt for his victim. I implored the little fellow’s image: “I’d like you to have killed him!” 18

Love songs sing of men who killed in war, of bandits who killed for their outcast band, of men maddened by jealousy or revenge who killed the man who killed their love. A murderer has not, as has a warrior or soldier, killed fellow humans for the sake of a nation or a people. Genet’s lyrics sing of outcasts who, unlike the jealous or demented whose violence is not their own, kill consciously and cynically. A murder frees the murderer from the hundred great roles a hero may play in society, a hundred great roles that possess him. Genet’s songs do not celebrate, in the hoodlum, the instincts and loyalties of a higher community, bolder and stronger, than that protected by the community of the police. The killers of whom Genet sings did not enrich themselves with their crimes and indeed had nothing in view when they killed. Ernestine’s murderous impulse was implanted by the presence of a huge army revolver at the back of a drawer—which “must alone bear the fearful, though light, responsibility for the crime.” 19 It was the old man’s necktie, too tight, which he took off that gave Our Lady of the Flowers the idea of tightening it more to strangle him. The murderous force achieves nothing and empties the murderer of everything but the corpse of his victim and the death he awaits in murder by another or execution by society. Our Lady of the Flowers retches, trying to vomit out the taste and smell of the carcass. It is the physical disgust of the first hour, of the murderer for the murdered, of which a number of murderers have spoken to Genet. “Your dead man is inside you; mingled with your blood, he flows in your veins, oozes out through your pores, and your heart lives on him, as cemetery flowers sprout from corpses. [. . .] He emerges from you through your eyes, your ears, your mouth.” 20 The murderer makes himself the grave of his victim; he will live a dead man’s existence in his own body. The murderer can get rid of the corpse that possesses him only by being occupied by the void of death. Around Genet’s chained heroes there is only “a pure, deserted, desolate field, a field of azure or sand, a dumb, dry, magnetic field.” 21 I want to sing murder, for I love murderers. [. . .] I would like to kill a handsome blond boy, so that, already united by the verbal link that joins the murderer and the murdered (each existing thanks to the other), I may be visited, during days and nights of hopeless melancholy, by the handsome ghost of which I would be the haunted castle. 22

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The murderer makes himself the grave of his victim; he will live a dead man’s existence in his own body. But the blood he has shed, the constant danger to which the murderer’s body is exposed of being executed or murdered in turn, the way he defies the laws of life, and the most easily imagined attributes of exceptional strength prevent people from despising the criminal. Genet chooses to reach the subterranean world of abjection through crimes that are more degrading: theft, prostitution, begging, betrayal of friends, and treason against the community or nation. 23 Genet is enthralled by a virility that does not succeed in pitting itself against prison walls, that does not escape capture, punishment, and the death sentence—virility of pimps and cowards. LOVE AND BETRAYAL The strength to betray shows that one shall have broken the stoutest of bonds, the bonds of love; this evidence of strength makes Genet admire traitors and love them. 24 Genet early found in Mettray that it was the big shots and not the creeps that were capable of betrayal. “I was learning that traitors were born among knights, among the noblest, the haughtiest.” 25 But Genet obscurely knows that there is an extremity of love liberated by breaking the bonds of love. Love separates itself entirely from the craving to possess another and even from the will that the other be and live. If betrayal was the most difficult task in the ascesis of love for Genet to learn, it was for Genet, and not only is for us, the most difficult to understand. Genet’s most intolerable love song, Funeral Rites, is a long anguished effort to understand the necessity with which love itself engenders betrayal. Betrayal produced in love is not an act of appropriation and self-appropriation; it is sacrificial. “I make of sacrifice, rather than of solitude, the highest virtue. It is the creative virtue par excellence. There must be damnation in it.” 26 “Refusing to let my act be magnified by disinterestedness, to let it be purely gratuitous, an act performed for the fun of it, I completed my ignominy. I required that my betrayal be paid for. I wanted to strip my acts of anything beautiful that might be involved in them despite everything.” 27 Genet pursued a radical individualism that could no longer be understood by the dialectic that creates societal and sociopathic forms. This individualism was not simply the repudiation of the social posts that had excluded him. It was a fidelity to the suffering that was consubstantial with life in him. He called it sanctity. The word for him invoked asceticism, renunciation. The realm of beauty is bigger.—As we go about in nature, with joy and cunning, bent on discovering and as it were catching in the act the beauty proper to everything; as we try to see how that piece of coastline, with its rocks, inlets, olive trees and pines, attains to its perfection and mastery wheth-

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er in the sunshine, or when the sky is stormy, or when twilight has almost gone; so we ought to go about among men, viewing and discovering them, showing them their good and evil, so that they shall behold their own proper beauty which unfolds itself in one case in the sunlight, in another amid storms, and in a third only when night is falling and the sky is full of rain. Is it then forbidden to enjoy the evil man as a wild landscape possessing its own bold lineaments and effects of light, if the same man appears in our eyes as a sketch and caricature and, as a blot in nature, causes us pain, when he poses as good and law-abiding?—Yes, it is forbidden, hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good—a fact that sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone!—As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty and many of them have not yet been discovered. —Friedrich Nietzsche 28

BASE MATERIALITY OF LOVE Bataille thinks of Sleeping Beauty, when she is awakened, covered with spider webs and dust six inches deep. 29 We address the environment about us through a grid of names, classifications, utilities set before us. We understand material substances with mathematical formulas. But there is also a compulsion to surrender to materiality. We float in lakes and in the sea. We trudge through the snow that has covered the map of paths and things. We cross the desert, the steps of the camel taking up the waves of the dunes. We climb cliffs and trek the rocky barrens of mountains. Farmers plow the fields, mechanics are covered with grime, miners are black with coal dust. Children play in the mud. In organisms, constructions, artifacts, and implements, materiality is confined in forms and contracts identities and significance. Fragments, scraps, shreds, scoria, and body excretions lose their forms and significance. If the surfaces of the planet are not bare sunbaked rock but regulated by climate that brings periodic rain, it is because they are covered with the corpses of organisms. Decomposing organisms, things sinking into mud and sludge, rotting substances, excrement, ooze, and slime become base materiality. Base materiality is formless and opaque, impenetrable to insight but also seething with compacted forces. There is no apprehending by its contours, no seeing it as an instance of a category, no penetrating observation. It repels the fumbling reach of the mind. But our sensuality is in contact with base materiality. It does not keep its distance; we find ourselves set in materiality. We feel weariness and fatigue, an impotence to launch initiatives. Base materiality is torpor and darkness that rise up in us, that weigh us down.

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Bataille believed that the unconscious muddling beneath our waking consciousness is in contact with formless materiality. The images that take form cannot rise out of materiality, which destabilizes them and makes them monstrous. Gnostic stones depicted acephalic gods with animal heads; gods with the legs of a man, the body of a serpent, and the head of a cock. Bataille saw in Gnosticism the conception of matter as an active principle of darkness and evil, and in the Gnostics a sinister love of darkness, a monstrous taste for obscene and lawless forms. 30 Our culture too is not only an elaboration of ideas and ideals but also a fascination with base materiality in drip paintings, excremental sculpture, obscene performances, and rubbish installations. Before the denuded body of the beloved, the lover disrobes, exposes himself or herself, naked and vulnerable. There is a specific excitement in the collapse of posture and wariness, the divestment of functions, roles, and selfrespect. One’s stand in one’s field of operations is overcome with dizziness, one’s posture held erect for tasks collapses, one’s parts and limbs are dismembered, one’s hands and thighs roll about on their own. One staggers about possessed, no longer in control of one’s thoughts and values, no longer master of one’s feelings, invaded by violent emotions that sense the obscenity in anguish, that push on into it in a momentum that can no longer derail or control itself, that sense also the exhilaration of risking oneself, of plunging into the danger zone, of expenditure of all one’s forces at a loss. Lover and beloved become anonymous and infantile. The eyes cloud and become wet and spongy, hair is turning into webs and gleam. The mouth loosens the chain of its sentences, babbles, giggles, the tongue spreads its wet over the lips, the lips cease to shape words in ordered sequences to turn into a wet and open orifice. One knows the pleasures of the posture of a body becoming dissolute, the bones turning into gum. The aimless stroking of a hand on an abdomen turns it into a gland, a heart palpating with blood and frenzy. Glands stiffen and harden, becoming bones and rods; the bodies tense up, harden, grope and grapple, pistons and rods of a machine that has no idea what it is trying to achieve or produce. There is penetration of one body into another, penetration that takes nothing for itself, penetration that discovers nothing. The bodies collapse, melt, gelatinize. There is left the coursing of the trapped blood, the flush of heat, the spirit vaporizing in gasps and sighs. NOTES 1. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–39, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and from Éditions Gallimard, 1985), 6. Reprinted with permission from the University of Minnesota Press. 2. Ibid., 5–9.

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3. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, volumes II & III, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 235. 4. Jean Genet, Funeral Rites, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 62. 5. Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 76. 6. “One evening, he took from his pocket something hard and dry and put it into his mouth. The warmth and moisture quickly restored the softness of the shriveled worm which had remained in the pocket where it had dried and which the darkness had prevented the boy from recognizing. [. . .] He made his tongue and palate knowingly and patiently suffer the hideous contact. This willfulness was his first poet's attitude, an attitude governed by pride. He was ten years old.” Genet, Funeral Rites, 103. 7. Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 280. That other Golden Legend that we find in Emily Brontë, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, and the files of the police tells of soldiers who deserted for an enemy woman, who followed condemned murderers to Siberia, diplomats who lost their heads over and transmitted state secrets to transvestites, beautiful women who fell in love with bandits, cripples, and eunuchs. 8. Ibid., 32. 9. Genet, The Thief’s Journal, 111. 10. Genet, Miracle of the Rose, 192–93. 11. Ibid., 76. 12. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 88. 13. Genet, The Thief’s Journal, 91. 14. Genet, Miracle of the Rose, 236–37. 15. Genet, The Thief’s Journal, 134. 16. Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, 220, translation modified. 17. Genet, Funeral Rites, 54. 18. Ibid., 54–55. 19. Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, 64. 20. Ibid., 119. 21. Ibid., 62. 22. Ibid., 120. 23. Genet, The Thief’s Journal, 107. 24. Ibid., 46. 25. Genet, Miracle of the Rose, 306. 26. Genet, The Thief’s Journal, 215. 27. Ibid., 80. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans, R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press: 1997), §463, 194–95. 29. Georges Bataille, “Dust,” in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ed. Alastair Brotchie, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 42, translation modified. 30. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 48.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share, volumes II & III. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1993. ———. “Dust.” In Encyclopaedia Acephalica, edited by Alastair Brotchie, 42–43. Translated by Iain White. London: Atlas Press, 1995. ———. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–39. Edited and translated by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Genet, Jean. Funeral Rites. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press, 1969. ———. Miracle of the Rose. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press, 1966.

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———. Our Lady of Flowers. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press, 1963. ———. The Thief’s Journal. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Conclusion Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney

Our hope is that this collection of essays, rather than attempting to “solve” the problems that arise when philosophers consider seriously the question of somatic desire, instead serves to re-problematize and reorient the tenor and tone of the contemporary discourse on the body from the perspectives of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and philosophies of literature and religion. This collection demonstrates beyond question that it is both hasty and naive to attempt to discredit or simply disregard the carnal situation within, through, and out of which all philosophy must necessarily speak. The common threads running through all of these pieces have been the attempt to think philosophy as always coupled with and emerging from the situated, contextualized body, and to recognize that all desire—whether it is the desire for food, water, sex, or the “rational” desire for truth—is always already bound up with and made possible only by the body. To simply dismiss the body would be to remain blind to what serves as the archê of philosophy itself. Several of these arguments are developments, amplifications, and additions to the hermeneutic and phenomenological analyses of embodiment recently published in Carnal Hermeneutics. 1 Yet to posit the body as archê in this sense is to say that philosophy is born out of the human being’s most primordial and familiar encounter with limit: that is, the encounter with the body that is mine. Only as limit can the body become the site in which desire qua desire is most properly at home. This is to take the term limit not simply as negation and enclosure but rather as the point at which the desiring body holds open the promise and possibility of human life’s constant engagement to seek possibilities beyond its particular situation from within the givenness of reality incarnate. Even in the face of anxiety, violence, illness, and the ever-imminent threat of death, the 211

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body desires to remain here, as it is, at rest in its perpetual motion. In the knowledge that our bodies are marked for death, and so too the possibility of our particular desires, we undertake a second sailing of sorts in the attempt to inscribe our thoughts and experiences into the flesh of the text. We are desperate to give them a life of their own beyond the limits of our bodies, knowing in our hearts that these too will be subject to the material deterioration and misinterpretation that we ourselves have undergone. Thus the body is situated as the nexus point that unites the complex manifold of desires and aspirations that mark me for who I am. Contrary to a discourse that seeks simply to leave the body behind in favor of the search for a truth that transcends my bodily possibilities, this collection of essays takes seriously the thesis that even the most “abstract” philosophical thinking owes a great debt to the concrete situation provided by the body as the place by which these thoughts are made possible. Together these essays demonstrate that my body is the philosophical guide and teacher par excellence insofar as it at once opens me up to possibilities far beyond what material existence as such seems to offer while at the same time presenting me with the possibility of limitation, negation, and ultimately death. Serious and sustained reflection upon somatic desire helps me to better become human: to become better at being human. When I am attentive to the ceaseless, pulsating drags and pulls of the wants and needs of the body and the possibilities that they push me toward—in addition to the impossibilities that they lay bare—I become open to the suggestion that lying at the base of all of my “highest” and most “noble” aspirations beyond the body may be the desire simply to live. To want to carry on in the life incarnate even though it inevitably entails exposure to the filth and decay that come part and parcel with being material. To desire and hope for the life of the body after death is to hope for the continuance of desire itself and the good life that it always promises yet never entirely yields. NOTE 1. Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

Index

abiding, 73 abject/abjection, 164, 202, 203, 206 abscess, 101 absence, xi, 46, 97, 119, 121, 132, 165, 166, 174, 177, 183, 188, 193 abyss, xi, 103, 174, 175, 178, 184 aesthetics, 111, 120 affective milieu, 143, 154 agalma, 120, 122, 125, 130, 133 agape, x, 69, 74, 78–80, 81–83, 84, 85, 87, 110 agent, 10, 172 Alcibiades, 119, 120, 122, 125, 130, 134n9 aletheia, 176, 190 alienate/alienation/alienated, vii, viii, xi–xii, 3, 70, 128, 150, 170, 173, 184, 188, 195 alterity, viii, 45, 52, 69, 104, 107, 113n17 analogy, 76, 122 anamnesis, 118 Anatheism, 39n28, 66n6 anesthesia, 103 animality, 72–73, 75, 79, 81, 85, 103, 105–106, 114n35 anthropology, 14, 60, 62, 91 anxiety, xi, 87, 140, 144, 146–150, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161n2, 165, 177–178, 184, 194, 197, 211 Aphrodite, 88, 132 appetite, 2, 36, 49, 129, 163, 184, 193, 196 Aquinas, Thomas, 38n6, 76, 79, 82

Aristophanes, 75 Aristotle, 38n6, 41–42, 43, 45, 47, 51, 80 Artemis, 131 Ascension, 78 atheism, 66n6 Athena, 130 Athens, 130 attunement, 149, 155–156 Augustine, 112, 115n48, 159 authentic/authenticity, 29, 145, 146–147, 166 Bachelard, Gaston, 47, 83 Bacon, Francis, 33, 105, 114n34 baptism, 82, 84, 87 Bataille, Georges, 201–202, 207, 208 beauty/beautiful, xi, 102, 111, 120, 122, 125–126, 130, 132, 134n13, 144, 170, 172, 184, 186, 188, 190, 195–196, 197, 202, 203–204, 204, 206–207, 209n7 Begierde, 13, 14 being-there, 92, 97, 98, 101, 107–108 being-with, 97, 108 beloved, xi, 85, 118, 120, 124, 125–126, 128–129, 133, 135n32, 208 Bernet, Rudolph, 3, 21n2 biology, 4, 5, 11, 189 Blanchot, Maurice, 96, 113n12, 183, 196–197, 200n50 Bonaventure, 78 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 77 213

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Bowie, Malcom, 184, 188, 199n32 bread, 15, 49, 76, 80, 82, 164, 165 Butler, Judith, 64, 65, 81 caregivers, 95, 98, 99, 110, 113n14, 113n17 caress, 110 carnal/carnality, vii–x, 25, 27, 29, 29–30, 31, 33, 38n4, 38n8, 38n14, 41, 44, 45, 47–48, 51, 53–54, 63, 79–80, 81–82, 122, 211 Catholic Church, 74, 80 Cebes, 122 chaos, vii, 76, 79, 81, 86, 86–87, 92–93, 101, 103, 107, 109, 144 Char, René, 198 Charmides, x, 119–122, 125, 129, 130, 130–131, 134n13 chasm, 91–92, 109 chastity, 131 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 72, 76 Christianity, 69, 73, 74, 79–80, 81–84, 85–86, 88, 122 Clement of Alexandria, 133 cloak, 118–120, 121, 122, 125, 133, 134n13 conatus, 63, 108 conscience, 146–147, 150–151 consummate, 74, 131 corpse, xi, 105, 128–130, 130–132, 204, 205, 207 cosmos, 79, 144–145 culture, 27, 29, 30, 33, 88, 208 Dasein, 50, 107, 145–147, 148–149, 157, 159, 161n2, 178 Daudet, Alphonse, 95, 99 decodification, 163 Deleuze, Gilles, 100, 102, 105, 114n40, 165, 196, 199n32 Descartes, René, vii–viii, x, 43, 48, 76, 96–97, 100, 103, 122, 131 disappointment, 183, 188–190, 195, 198n5 disinterestedness, 190, 206 dissatisfaction, 183, 187, 190, 192, 195 dissolution, xi, 154, 169 distance, 34, 52, 97, 107, 143, 165, 196, 207 dogma/dogmatic/dogmatism, 34, 72

Donne, John, 80, 87 doxa, 163, 168 drives, vii, 4, 43, 45, 61, 69, 75, 79, 85, 87, 117, 119, 128, 189 dualism, 6, 8–9, 21n16, 28, 38n16, 42, 44, 50, 79, 81, 85, 123 Duns Scotus, 80 eidos/eidetic, 16–17, 172, 201 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 33 emotion, ix, 34, 44, 149, 154, 166, 169, 184, 188, 208 endurance, 174, 178 enjoyment, xi, xii, 19, 25, 110, 198 enthusiasm, 166, 169, 175–176 environment, ix, 6, 9, 25, 29, 207 epistemology, 67n22, 93, 102, 113n5, 122, 190 epoché, 16 ergon, 176 Eriugena, John Scotus, 73, 80 eros, x, 1, 43–44, 45, 47, 49–51, 63, 69–70, 71, 73–75, 77–82, 84, 85–87, 105, 109–110, 114n35, 121, 124, 128–129, 131, 140, 190 erotic, x, 10, 18, 43, 49, 70, 72, 74–75, 77, 86, 87, 114n35, 145, 154, 157, 159, 170, 184, 189–190, 202 Eschaton, 79 ethics, x, 49, 70, 76, 83, 91–93, 94, 99, 101–103, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112n4 ēthos, 101, 103, 109, 110, 111, 176 Eucharist, x, 72, 73–76, 79–82, 84–88, 106, 110, 114n35 existential, 44, 50, 65, 91, 105, 113n17, 167, 171 Exodus, 79, 86, 118 exteriority, 5–6, 85, 128 family, 93, 98, 99, 103, 110 feminine, 52, 75 Fichte, J. G., 165 fidelity, x, 74, 80, 84, 206 finitude, 78, 85, 98, 113n18, 139, 178 food, 4, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18, 25–26, 29, 49, 84–85, 164, 167, 170, 211 Foucault, Michel, 165, 190–192 Freud, Sigmund, 43, 45, 47, 51, 60–62, 67n22, 79, 82, 85–86, 86, 131, 190,

Index 199n32; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 43, 79, 85; pleasure principle, 128–129, 131 Freydberg, Bernard, 176 fundamental ontology, 4 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 27 Geist, 168, 176 Genesis, 48, 76, 80, 86, 122–123 Genet, Jean, xi, 140, 202, 202–206 genital, 44, 75, 76, 81–82, 134n7 gift, 44, 65, 102, 103 givenness, 6–8, 51, 52 gnosticism, 77, 79, 81, 85, 208 Goldstein, Kurt, 144, 153, 154, 156 Gospels, 79 Greek Fathers, 88 ground/grounding, xi, 5, 8, 13, 47, 51, 65, 94, 101, 148–149, 156, 157, 159, 164, 167, 171–172, 173–175, 175–178 Grund, 94, 164, 176, 178 Guardini, Romano, 78 Guattari, Félix, 114n40, 165 guest, 82, 84 haecceitas, 17, 81 Hamlet, xi, 129, 140, 144, 149, 150–153 happiness, xi, xii, 183, 186, 188, 204, 207 harmony, 145, 177 health, 38n9, 92, 96, 98, 99, 102, 105, 107–108, 110, 172, 187 Heidegger, Martin, xi, 5, 6, 26, 50, 63, 71, 72, 73, 76, 92, 94, 115n47, 140, 144–147, 148–149, 150, 157, 159, 160, 161n2, 165, 176, 177–178, 180n73, 197 Henry, Michel, 80, 92, 101 Hera, 88 hermeneutics, ix, 1, 26–28, 33, 34, 37n3, 38n4, 38n14, 39n19, 39n28, 46, 47–50, 53, 59–62, 66n13, 80, 92, 93, 94, 99–100, 119, 165; carnal, ix, ix–x, x, 41–42, 51, 53, 57, 58–68, 64–65, 71, 211; Catholic, 88 Herod, 131–132 Hinduism, 72 Holy Thursday, 72, 74 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 80, 83 hospitality, 82, 84–85, 105 host, 59, 82, 84, 85

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hovering, 100, 178 humanism, 73, 79, 83, 171 Husserl, Edmund, ix, x, 2, 3–5, 7–10, 12–13, 13–18, 21n6, 22n42, 42, 43, 47, 48, 50–53, 52, 54n2, 59, 71, 76, 78–79, 92, 93–94, 97, 100, 101, 144, 201 hylē, 12–13, 102 idol, 70, 124–126, 130, 131, 178 Ignatius, 80 illness, x, 44–45, 63, 69–70, 96, 97, 98, 99, 102–103, 105, 107–108, 110–111, 187, 211 imagination, 47, 64, 66n13, 131, 158, 163, 168, 170, 175, 178, 184, 184–186, 188, 192 incarnation, vii, 43, 45, 49, 64, 80, 81, 83, 86, 109, 196 individuality, ix, 11–12, 16, 17–20, 147 infancy, 91, 112 insatiable, 3, 6, 172, 188–189 intellect, viii, 10, 12, 25, 28, 32, 53, 155, 158, 159, 172, 184, 190, 192–194 intentionality, xi, 3–5, 6, 8–9, 10, 12–13, 14, 92, 97, 125, 154, 155, 157, 158–159, 160 intimacy, 25, 50–51, 128 intruder, 194–195 Iranaeus, 80 Janicaud, Dominique, 71 jealousy, 187, 188–189, 190, 199n32, 205 Jew/Jewish, 17, 80, 84, 85, 103 John the Baptist, 131–132 jouissance, 130 joy, 38n16, 70, 108, 184, 190, 193–194, 197–198, 202, 206–207 Joyce, James, 82 Kant, Immanuel, 7, 86, 120, 163, 166, 171, 177 Kojève, Alexandre, 167, 199n17 Körper, 49, 50, 51, 59, 76, 93, 97, 103, 104, 105, 124 Lacan, Jacques, 120, 125, 126–129, 134n9, 199n17 lack, 2, 8–10, 19, 49, 77, 99, 108, 114n40, 140, 143, 146, 150, 153, 154, 155, 158,

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Index

164–166, 169, 170, 171, 172–173, 174–178, 183, 184, 190, 195 Lacoste, Jean-Yves, 72, 85 Leben, 6, 44 Lebenswelt, 26, 94, 110 Leib, 49, 50–51, 59, 76, 93, 96–97, 100, 103, 104, 105, 119, 123, 172 Leontius, 129–130 Levinas, Emmanuel, 48, 50, 52, 53, 71, 76, 84, 85, 103, 122 libido, 44, 129, 154, 159 life-world, 8, 94, 110 linguistic, 27, 30, 38n4, 47, 48, 52, 58, 59, 60, 60–61, 64, 66n13, 78, 99 literature, ix, xi, 70, 93, 105, 123, 133, 139, 192–196, 198, 211 lived body, x, 48, 50, 57, 59, 65, 76, 92, 97, 100, 103 logos, 1, 46, 49, 50, 63, 86, 112, 121, 163, 176, 178 lust, 18, 25, 133 Lyotard, Jean-François, 165 Lysias, 118 madman, 163 madness, xi, 172, 173, 173–175, 176, 178, 187, 199n19, 204 Mallet, Donatien, 92, 107, 113n5, 113n17 Marcuse, Herbert, 79 Marion, Jean-Luc, 71, 74, 76, 77–79, 120 marriage, x, 49, 74, 80–81, 84, 87–88, 110 masculine, 75 Matthew, 81, 84, 85, 131 meat, 12, 104, 105–106, 110 mechanical, 100 medicine, 44, 92, 94, 98, 102, 104, 108, 111, 113n5, 113n17 medium, ix, 41, 43, 45, 80, 165 melancholy, xi, 140, 144, 149–151, 153, 154, 156, 156–157, 159, 160, 183, 205 Memorial Wall, 128 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, ix, xi, 2, 6, 21n16, 27, 38n16, 41–48, 49, 52–53, 76, 82, 83, 93, 140, 143–144, 147, 149, 154–155, 156, 157–160, 165 metaphor, 27–28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38n14, 39n19, 47, 59, 60, 61, 66n13, 81, 124, 125

metaphysics, viii–ix, 11, 43, 91, 94, 124, 126, 130, 140, 176–177, 190, 201 metaxu, 41, 45, 80 Mohanty, Jitendranath, 17 monism, 6 mood, 110, 145, 146, 156, 160, 161n2, 177 morality, 101, 103 morphe, 12 morphine, 94, 101, 103, 104, 106 mortality, 140, 148 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 129 mystics, 80 myth, xi, 36, 47, 50, 70, 76, 111, 117, 176 naked, x, 109, 121–123, 130–132, 155, 208 narcissism, 128–129 narrative, 58, 59, 66n13, 92, 93, 94, 95, 112, 131, 163, 168, 170, 175, 176 necrophilia, 70, 130, 131 negation, 6, 7, 166, 167, 169–170, 172–173, 173, 176, 192, 197, 211, 212 nerves, 93, 130 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 31, 76, 91, 98, 99, 100, 102, 130, 163, 166, 178, 207 noesis, 12 nourishment, viii, 5, 15, 18, 170, 171, 175, 176 nursing, 94, 95, 101, 105 Nygren, Anders, 74 objectivity, 5, 124 Odette, 184, 187, 189, 199n17, 199n19 Oedipus, 129 ontology, vii, 3, 16, 50 organic, x, 49, 76, 79, 82, 85–86, 86, 91, 92–93, 96–97, 100, 101, 105, 109 orientation, 5, 26, 27, 29–32, 34–36, 38n8, 38n14, 53 Origen, 82, 123 pain, x, 36, 63, 70, 92, 93, 95–96, 97, 101, 107, 108, 109, 125, 130, 172, 186, 188, 190, 192, 199n19, 206 palinode, 118, 119 palliative care, 92, 94, 96, 100, 101, 103, 104–105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113n5, 113n14, 114n20, 115n50 paralysis, 169, 171, 173 Paré, Ambroise, 99

Index particularity, 14, 15 Passover, 75 Pasteur, Louis, 99 perception, 3, 27, 33, 39n19, 39n22, 42, 43, 46–47, 107, 110, 143, 144, 149, 155, 158, 159, 160, 193 personality, 20, 103 Pfänder, Alexander, 16, 18 phallus, 119, 130, 132, 133, 136n61 pharmakon, 118–119, 120–121, 134n13 philosophical anthropology, 14, 60, 62 physicians, 91, 94, 98, 106, 110, 115n50 physiology, 102, 147, 148, 149, 156, 157, 189 pietism, 163 pity, 100, 105, 107–108 Plato, 10, 29, 37n2, 41, 47, 85, 120, 123, 125, 127, 130, 134n2, 134n9, 163, 176; Charmides, 120, 134n13; Phaedrus, 117, 120, 123, 128, 176; Republic, 129; Symposium, 76, 120 poiesis, 178 predispositions, 29 presence, 5, 9, 18–19, 59, 65, 73, 80, 84, 97, 101, 120, 121, 132, 165, 166, 174, 176–178, 183, 186, 194, 205 Proust, Marcel, xi, 47, 140, 184, 187, 188, 190–193, 195, 196, 199n17, 199n19, 199n32 proverbs, 84 Pseudo-Dionysius, 77, 79, 87 psychoanalysis, 3, 44, 61, 86, 114n40, 124, 128, 136n61, 211 purposiveness, 169 Raphael, 173 recognition, x, 36, 58, 64, 64–65, 75, 109, 166, 167, 169–170, 173, 184, 193, 196, 199n17 redemption, 171 reduction, 16, 51, 61, 144, 163, 174 regret, 98, 100, 107–108 representation, 154, 160, 171, 174, 184, 195 resistance, 31, 45, 77, 97, 172 resolution, 151, 188, 190 resurrection, 72, 78, 86, 203 Ricoeur, Paul, vii, ix, 2, 27, 39n19, 39n28, 41–42, 46, 48, 48–53, 57, 59–65,

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66n13, 67n22, 71, 76–78, 80, 83, 91, 94, 99–100 Riviére, Jacques, 192 Sacrament, x, 80–81, 84, 87, 103, 106 sacred, 31, 69–70, 72, 87, 109, 110 sadness, 96, 108, 187 Sallis, John, 176 salvation, 85 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 42–43, 47, 78, 80, 83, 148, 166–168, 170 sarx, 41, 123, 127, 133 satisfaction, 12, 25, 164, 167, 170, 173, 175, 183, 188 Scheler, Max, 14, 16, 20, 43 Schelling, F. W. J., xi, 165, 176–177, 178 Schn./Schneider, xi, 44, 140, 144, 150, 153–159, 160 science, 16, 58, 92, 93–94, 98, 102, 113n5, 190 scroll, x, 118–119 self-consciousness, 3, 150, 164, 166–168, 169–171, 173, 174, 178 self-deception, xi, xii, 163, 164, 169–170, 174, 175 sēma, xi, 119, 127, 129, 133, 135n37 semantic, 60–62, 66n13, 119, 121, 127 separation, 53, 129, 166, 167 Serres, Michel, ix, 2, 27–28, 29, 32, 33–35, 36, 37n3, 38n14, 38n16, 39n36 Shakespeare, William, xi, 140 sharing, 73, 82, 85, 87, 98 shelter, 10, 13, 18, 164 shrapnel, xi, 140, 144, 155, 159 sickness, x, 44, 69, 93, 98, 102, 111, 124 silence, 47, 91–92, 97, 107, 121, 152, 202 solitude, 110, 203 speech, viii, 21n3, 42, 44, 61, 76, 91, 98, 99, 112, 118–119, 132, 155, 156, 167, 174 Spinoza, Baruch, 63, 76, 100, 101, 102, 107–108, 114n40 spirit, 76, 81–82, 102, 208 spread body, x, 70, 76, 81, 83, 92, 94, 97, 105–104, 109, 176–101 Stein, Edith, 16, 17, 18, 43 stomach, 76, 82 stranger, viii, 51, 52, 59, 65, 84, 85, 164, 165, 170, 194

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Index

Strauss, Richard, 131 Streben, 171, 172, 174, 176, 178 striving, 13, 15, 66, 163, 164, 171, 172–175, 175, 177–178 subjectivity, 1, 5, 25, 50, 58, 65, 110, 124, 164, 168, 171, 178 sublimation, 153, 192 substance, 39n21, 43, 46, 73, 76, 102, 106, 108, 111, 167, 202, 207 surgical unit, 92 sustenance, 29, 171 Swann, 183, 184–186, 187, 189, 199n17, 199n19 symbolic, x, 47, 64, 82, 119, 199n17 Talmud, 71 temporality, 85, 113n17, 148, 149 the Bible, 72 theology, 71–72, 78, 79, 83, 111 theoria, 122, 176 Thoreau, Henry David, 33, 38n18, 39n36 thrown, 146, 147 tomb, 119, 133, 163 trace, 11, 12, 52 transcendence, 5–6, 9, 50, 52, 54, 85, 168, 189 transubstantiation, 76, 108

tumor, 96, 100, 101, 104 ugly/ugliness, xi, 122, 188, 202, 203, 204 uncanny, 51, 120, 122, 178 unconscious, 45, 62, 85, 102, 110, 134n9, 155, 186, 197, 208 univocity, 74 Valéry, Paul, 47, 110, 115n43 Vatican II, 73 Venus, 130 Vietnam War, 128 violence, 62, 190, 205, 211 virtual, 111, 157, 158, 194 visible, 42, 47, 94, 158, 160, 203 vital, 5, 9, 10, 34, 63, 143, 157, 160 Vorstellung, 13, 62, 67n22, 171 watchfulness, 172, 174–175, 176, 178 weakness, 33, 134n13, 139 weaver, 123 Wilde, Oscar, 130, 130–132 Wille, 171, 176, 178 wine, 15, 49, 76, 80, 132, 151, 152 withdrawal, 6–8 wound, 82, 95, 98, 110, 155, 156, 157, 203 Wunsch, 13–14, 197

About the Authors/Editors

Miguel de Beistegui is professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. His latest books include The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject (2018), Proust as Philosopher: the Art of Metaphor (2012), and Aesthetics After Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor (2012). Emmanuel Falque is professor and honorary dean of the Philosophy Department at the Institut Catholique de Paris. He specializes in medieval and patristic philosophy, phenomenology, and philosophy of religion. His works that have been translated into English are The Metamorphosis of Finitude (2012); God, the Flesh, and the Other (2015); Crossing the Rubicon (2016); The Wedding Feast of the Lamb (2016); The Loving Struggle (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018); The Guide to Gethsemane (2018); and Saint Bonaventure and the Entrance of God into Theology (2018). Christina Gschwandtner teaches Continental Philosophy of Religion at Fordham University. She has translated Jean-Luc Marion’s On the Ego and on God, The Visible and the Revealed, Believing in Order to See, The Rigor of Things, and On Descartes’ Passive Thought and articles by many French thinkers, including Michel Henry, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean Greisch, and Emmanuel Falque. Sarah Horton is a writer and a teaching fellow in philosophy at Boston College. Her areas of interest include twentieth-century and contemporary French philosophy, desire, and philosophy of literature. Her current research project is a phenomenology of friendship.

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About the Authors/Editors

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of more than twenty books on philosophy and literature, including Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, On Stories, The God Who May Be, and Anatheism: Returning to God After God, as well as two novels and a volume of poetry. In addition, he has edited or co-edited sixteen books, including Carnal Hermeneutics, Reimagining the Sacred: Richard Kearney Debates God, and The Art of Anatheism. In 2008 he launched the Guestbook Project, an ongoing artistic, academic, and multi-media experiment in hospitality. Alphonso Lingis is professor emeritus of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization are in phenomenology, existentialism, and ethics. He often engages with literature and visual arts in his published works, in an attempt to uncover a more holistic approach to questions of the person, and the body. Desire, corporeality, and psychoanalysis are almost always present in Lingis’ writing and thinking. In addition to translating many of Emmanuel Levinas’ works, including Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, Lingis is author of over fifteen books, most recently Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality (forthcoming 2018), Violence and Splendor (2011), and Contact [photographs] (2010). He also has published many books concerning the desire and the body, most notably Body Transformations (Routledge, 2005), Dangerous Emotions (1999), Foreign Bodies (1994), and Excesses: Eros and Culture (1983). John Panteleimon Manoussakis is associate professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA), and chief co-editor of the Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion (Brill). His publications focus on philosophy of religion, phenomenology (in particular post-subjective anthropology in Heidegger and Marion), Plato and the Neo-Platonic tradition, Patristics (Augustine, Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus) and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan). He is the author of God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic (2007, translated into Russian and Romanian), For The Unity of All (2015, translated into Italian), and more recently of The Ethics of Time: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change (2017). He is the editor of six volumes and he has published over thirty articles in English, Greek, Italian, French, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian. Gonçalo Marcelo is a lecturer at Universidade Católica do Porto and a postdoctoral researcher at Universidade de Coimbra, where he is working on a critique of reason, in partnership with Columbia University in the City of New York. He has written on several topics in the fields of hermeneutics, ethics, and political and social philosophy, such as recognition, subjectivity, identity, narrativity, and the notion of crisis, and on the philosophies of Paul

About the Authors/Editors

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Ricoeur and Axel Honneth. His recent publications include a guest edition of Philosophy Today on “Ricoeur, Justice and Institutions” and a co-edited book on selfhood in French: Du moi au soi: variations phénoménologiques et herméneutiques. He is now in the process of editing a book on Ricœur and the Body, due to be published by Lexington Books. Stephen Mendelsohn is currently a university fellow in philosophy at Boston College. His chief philosophical interests are in ethics and epistemology, particularly in the Platonic and contemporary continental schools of thought. He is a native of the central Massachusetts area. He received his BA in philosophy and political science from Providence College and his MA in philosophy from BC. Christine Rojcewicz is a teaching fellow at Boston College. Her areas of interest include philosophy of embodiment, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, Plato, and philosophy of education. She is currently working on the problem of sophistry in ancient Greek philosophy, particularly in relation to the figure of Socrates, through the lens of philosophy of education. Richard Rojcewicz is scholar-in-residence at Duquesne University. His research work is in phenomenology, hermeneutics, theories of bodily intentionality, and Plato. He received his PhD in philosophy from Duquesne in 1976. He was the director of the Simon Silverman Center at Duquesne and taught philosophy at Point Park University. He is the author of The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger (2006) and the translator of multiple volumes of Heidegger and Husserl. Andrea Staiti is the Rita Levi Montalcini Professor of Philosophy, Dipartimento di Discipline Umanistiche, Sociali e delle Imprese Culturali, University of Parma (Italy) and a distinguished visiting scholar at Boston College. His area of research is in phenomenology, especially Husserl, ethics, NeoKantianism, philosophy of life, and theories of personhood. Recent publications include Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Spirit, and Life (2014) and Geistigkeit, Leben und geschichtliche Welt in der Transzendentalphänomenologie Husserls (2010) [Trans. Mentality, Life and Historical World in Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology]. Brain Treanor is Charles S. Casassa Chair and professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. His scholarship revolves around hermeneutic engagements in a variety of fields, chiefly in environmental philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of religion. He is the author or editor of six books as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Most recently, he is author of Emplotting Virtue (2014) and co-editor of Being-in-Creation, with Bruce

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About the Authors/Editors

Benson and Norman Wirzba (2015), and Carnal Hermeneutics, with Richard Kearney (2015). Christopher Yates is assistant professor of philosophy and art theory at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts and research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, the University of Virginia. He specializes in twentieth-century continental philosophy, aesthetics, and German Idealism and is the author of The Poetic Imagination in Heidegger and Schelling (2013).