Philosophy and Desire

Hugh J. Silverman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317827955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy and Desire, the seventh book in the well-known Continental Philosophy series, examines questions of desire--desire for another person, desire for happiness, desire for knowledge, desire for a better world, desire for the impossible, desire in text, desire in language and desire for desire itself. The theme of desire is explored through readings of contemporary figures such as Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Levinas, Irigaray, Barthes, Derrida, and Derrida. A hot, timely topic in philosophy today Expands the contemporary debates

Notes

Chapter 1: Aletheia, Poiesis, and Eros: Truth and Untruth in the Poetic Construction of Love

1. Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 111.

2. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (The History of Sexuality, volume 2) trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 225.

3. Stendhal, Love, trans. Gilbert Sale and Suzanne Sale (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 275-78.

4. The Poems of Sappho, trans. Suzy Q. Groden (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 20.

5. Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Horace Gregory (New York: Viking Press, 1958), Book XV, p. 421.

6. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Henceforth cited as LW.

7. “Just as the simple taboo created eroticism in the first place in the organized violence of transgression, Christianity in its turn deepened the degree of sensual disturbance by forbidding organized transgression.” Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), p. 127.

8. “In the psychiatrization of perversions, sex was related to biological functions and to an anatomo-physiological machinery that gave it its ‘meaning,’ that is, its finality [i.e., reproduction], but it was also referred to an instinct which, through its peculiar development and according to the objects to which it could become attached, make it possible for perverse behavior patterns to arise and made their genesis intelligible.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (volume 1): An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 153.

9. “It is evident… that every emission of semen, in such a way that generation cannot follow, is contrary to the good for man. And if this be done deliberately, it must be a sin. Now, I am speaking of a way from which, in itself, generation could not result: such would be any emission of semen apart from the natural union of male and female. For which reason, sins of this type are called contrary to nature.” Thomas Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, III, I, trans. Vernon J. Bourke, quoted in Sexual Love and Western Morality, ed. D. P. Verene (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 121, emphasis added.

10. “A law being that which is laid down, law not too surprisingly comes, through Middle English lawe, earlier laghe, from Old English lagu, law, akin to and probably from Old Norse log, law, originally the plural of lag, a layer or stratum, a due place, synonym Old Saxon lag, Old Frisian laga.” Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modem English (New York: Greenwich House, 1966), p. 353. Pokorny (the American Heritage Electronic Dictionary) and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary give similar accounts.

11. See M. G. Dillon, “Sex, Love, and Natural Law Morality,” in The Ethics of Postmodemity: Contemporary Continental Perspectives, ed. G. B. Madison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998).

12. The lived body provides an ambiguous but nonarbitrary measure for modes of erotic regulation. Castration of preadolescent males preserves the soprano range in their voices. Clitoridectomy may or may not dampen the development of erotic interest among preadolescent females. Circumcision seems to have salubrious effects, but perhaps at the expense of pleasure. The list goes on: Some cultures tattoo the bodies of the youth; others pierce earlobes, nipples, penises, noses, tongues; some bind feet, and others elongate necks or flatten heads. No culture leaves the body intact, unaltered, unadorned, unpainted, unstyled. Call it mutilation or enhancement, we modify the bodies of our youth in order to adapt them to our purposes and usually without soliciting the consent of the individual. I take bodily motility or functionality as a paradigm of freedom, and freedom as a measure of civilization. The point here is tenuous and might be defended better than I have, but it is worthy of consideration: The lived body provides a measure of the deployment of power lurking behind social construction.

13. See M. C. Dillon, Semiological Reductionism: A Critique of the Deconstructionist Movement in Postmodern Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). Chapter 6, in particular, offers a critical exegesis of Derrida’s account of desire.

14. André Malraux, La Monnaie de Vabsolu, p. 125. As quoted by Merleau-Ponty in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 57.

15. “Of Don Juan we must use the word seducer with great caution. … This is not because Don Juan is too good, but because he simply does not fall under ethical categories…. [Don Juan] does not seduce. He desires, and this desire acts seductively. … I suppose he is a deceiver, but yet not so that he plans his deceptions in advance; it is the inherent power of sensuousness which deceives the seduced, and it is rather a kind of Nemesis.” Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), p. 97. Tell that to Donna Anna, Søren, or to her father, the Gommandatore, who sends Don Giovanni off to hell in a triumph of moral outrage.

16. “As letting beings be, freedom is intrinsically the resolutely open bearing that does not close up in itself.” Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” trans. John Sallis, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 133. Gf. endnote 9. Henceforth cited as ET.

17. “The inordinate forgetfulness of humanity persists in securing itself by means of what is readily available and always accessible. This persistence has its unwitting support in that bearing by which Dasein not only ek-sists but also at the same time in-sists” (ET, 135).

Chapter 2: Bataille’s Eroticism, Now: From Transgression to Insidious Sorcery

1. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 43.

2. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. xxiii. Henceforth cited as VE.

3. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1988), pp. 93-97. Henceforth cited as IE.

4. In situating this discussion in the discourse of desire, I insinuate Foucault’s notion of “discourse” such that we might consider the ways by which it constitutes bodies, subjects/authors, and social relations. Thus I intimate Bataille’s position vis-à-vis the development of a post-modern critical social theory, and the questions I raise here are akin to issues raised by Poster in his inquiry about the “mode of information.” I do not, though, flesh out a critical theory here, nor am I focusing on electronic media, but I am asking about a certain “mediated eroticism.” See Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

5. This phrase, and the chapter’s epigraph, are from Georges Bataille, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in The College of Sociology, 1937-39, ed. Denis Hollier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 21. Henceforth cited as SA.

6. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, vol. VI. La Somme athéologique IL Sur Nietzsche. Memorandum. Annexes, eds. Henri Ronse and Jean-Michel Rey (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 429.

7. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, ed. Robert Kastenbaum (New York: Arno, 1962; reprint, 1977), p. 17. Henceforth cited as DS.

8. Michele H. Richman, Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 70. Henceforth cited as R.

9. Georges Bataille, My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London: Marion Boyars, 1989), p. 222.

10. Hélène Gixous, Souffles (Paris: Des femmes, 1975), pp. 9-10. Henceforth cited as S.

11. Georges Bataille, The Impossible, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991), p. 9. Henceforth cited as I.

12. Georges Bataille,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Introduction TWENTIETH-CENTURY DESIRE AND THE HISTORIES OF PHILOSOPHY
• I. Erotic Practices / Erotic Transgressions
• II. Desire for the Other: Levinas
• III. Desiring Subjectivity: Sartre and de Beauvoir
• IV Reading Feminine Desire: Irigaray
• V Writing Desire: Barthes and Derrida
• VI. Productive Desire: Deleuze and Guattari
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• About the Editor