Platonic eros and deconstructive love.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University

In your name you are my destiny, for me you are destiny. Everything began, you remember, when I pronounced it, you had your hands on the wheel, and I know that I am writing this, my destiny, fate, my chance, when on the envelope I risk, which is indeed how I feel the thing, when I risk the first word of the address. I address myself to you, somewhat as if I were sending myself, never certain of seeing it come back, that which is destined for me. And when I am able to pronounce it, when I softly call myself by your name, nothing else is there, do you hear, nothing else, no one else in the world.

--Jacques Derrida (1)

MY LOVE IS DESTINY, IS WRITTEN INTO MY STORY FROM THE BEGINNING. But despite that, because of that, I am vulnerable, vulnerable in and as my love for her. There is simultaneously an indeterminacy and a force of determination. "My story," told by me, should be of my love, its verbal force directed towards another object, which is receding away somewhere else. But call it "her," and it is at once decisively feminized, substantialized. The suggestion of an object for my verbal power is now its entirety, and washes it away. My love is now my love, my beloved. She is everywhere, and I can find nowhere for myself. My love is destined to be the one who alienates "my love for her." Because she occupies all its possibilities, all the possibilities of my love, I am vulnerable, alienated in the midst of determination. This is also the condition of Wordsworth's Blessed Babe in The Prelude, who holds "mute dialogues with my mother's heart" by "intercourse of touch," and by sight "does gather passion" from her eyes. It is the "birthright" of his being, a "discipline of love" that is at his poetic origin. His "being" is undefined, and must first make contact with "an earthly soul," the touch of which is the breeze which vivifies, combines and organizes the elements of his mind, makes them into a mind. This bond enables him to return to her nature, but with an active, original force, mind as poetic imagination, nature as new creation. (2) Andrzej Warminski shows that this origin, however, is difficult, does not coincide with itself as original. Poetry is the elaborated, linguistic bond of self-consciousness, yet here it comes from a glance, a touch, merely perceptual sensations:

In other words, unlike the Babe's reading of the Mother, [this] phenomenalizing, phenomenological interpretation cannot read "passion"--because it wants to think it in naturalistic, perceptual, preconscious, prelinguistic terms; i.e., as a need--and hence cannot understand the origin of language. As Paul de Man puts it in a footnote on the erotic in "Hypogram and Inscription": "Rather than being a heightened version of sense experience, the erotic is a figure that makes such experience possible. We do not see what we love but we love in the hope of confirming the illusion that we are seeing anything at all." (3)

The origin of poetry is not poetic, forcing Wordsworth into an illegitimate imposition which makes "dialogues" of touch and an articulated gathering of "passion" out of sight. In the passage from Derrida, the speaker is constituted by his love for a love who, once she is reached, dissolves the possibility of that trajectory away. In the same way, Wordsworth seems to formulate the erotic as art loving nature, the empirical perception of the feminine the desire of masculinity's transcendentality of mind. Yet that transcendency, as transcendency, to be itself must have constituted feminine nature from the start and so cannot have been itself--which of course also means that nature cannot be entirely natural either. The discipline of love is language making itself into language at the point where it precisely cannot have been linguistic. My passion for my beloved, at the point she appears, washes me away. As de Man puts it in the footnote quoted by Warminski, the beloved does not make us love, but we love in order to make the beloved the beloved, to make love possible. From this, Warminski concludes that love or language are impossible, or that their conditions of possibility are exactly the conditions of their impossibility. Yet Derrida, Wordsworth, even de Man love all the same.

De Man's comment on the erotic occurs in the context of reading Michael Riffaterre's analysis of Victor Hugo's poem, "Ecrit sur la vitre d'une fenetre flamande," which for him describes a chiming bell (le carillon) in Flanders as a vivacious Spanish dancer, spilling out time's measure of death over sleepy, unsuspecting Belgians. But the poem as a whole is conditioned by a figure opened in the first line--"J'aime le carillon"--and closed at the end by "l'esprit," the "je," that hears its chime, barely noticed by Riffaterre. Time is the imperceptible perception of which the chiming bells are the only legible sign, just as the Babe's significant perceptions constitute the phenomena which allow those sensations to take place. And in the same way, the hstening mind's registration of the chimes is the initial movement which enables it to listen in the first place. As de Man says, all language relies upon an "arbitrary" moment, a vertiginous reversal of cause which makes it both possible and impossible. "A consciousness or a mind (l'esprit) is figurally said to relate to another abstraction (time) as male relates to female in a copulating couple" (4): mind copulates, has sex with time, which is the bizarre movement of the erotic itself. That structural disjunction of mind in time, which returns US to time itself as its possible impossibility, is the problem of love 'with which we are concerned.

Time will eventually be refound in Wordsworth as a figure of desire. But copulation with it, as we have seen, will always be disjunctive, a productive determination that cannot coincide with itself and will always miscegenate. In the same way--and this temporal displacement of the ancient Greeks within romanticism will prove to be important--the figure of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium is divorced from that of Socrates, but he is also one the latter desperately wishes to reincorporate. Conversely, Aristophanes shows that, precisely because lovers begin united, they have always been divided, brokenly constituted within themselves. His bifurcated, vulnerable creatures are not merely combined, but doubled. Their essence, their singularity is constituted by binary complementarity: two pairs of ears, two faces, two genitals. So when that "essence" is "split in two" by vengeful Zeus, (5) it is only an articulation of original binarity, their singular twoness. That singularity, or passionate uniqueness, provides the emotional intensity which Plato gives to the lovers recovering their lost halves, who "threw their arms around each other and longed to be grafted together," just as surely as, in Phaedo, it explains the philosopher's movement from "seas of desire," (6) the alternating pressures of pleasure and pain, to the apparent permanence and clarity of reason. That path between the vulnerability of chance and the violence of determination, the shifting seas of chaos which were always defined as an absolute, is again to formulate the problematic of love. (7)

This difficulty is a strange complication, even a confusion between the physical and the intellectual, and the manner of their articulation in and through love. Plato's Diotima, however, addresses it most precisely with her argument on love in Symposium. Her initiation of Socrates "into the ways of love" begins with the advice that he, as a young man, start "by focusing on physical beauty ... to love just one person's body and to give birth in that medium to beautiful reasoning" (210a). The goal, the objective is to produce something non-physical, purely intellectual, but its necessary condition, the very medium in which it is produced, is precisely physical, the love of a beautiful body. There is a contradiction here, but one Diotima never directly addresses. Instead, she requires us to carefully trace the course of her argument, identifying its terms as they work themselves out. Its next stage then proceeds by isolating the set of references that pertain to the beautiful body, observing "that the beauty of any one body hardly differs from that of any other body, and that if it's physical beauty he's after, it's very foolish of him not to regard the beauty of all bodies as absolutely identical." Now "loving every single...

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