Last night, we were discussing the hotness of theory. I’m amazed at how many people don’t agree with me on this. (Aside from my usual amazement that people disagree with me, that is.) I know all the “why do you need to know this stuff” folks don’t see it, but neither do many of my fellow students. They’re totally missing out. Granted, some theory is boring, but there’s a lot that’s just plain lascivious. Obviously they haven’t read Barthes, who first comes to mind for me:
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is 'I desire you,' and releases, nourishes, and ramifies it to the point of explosion...”
A Lover’s Discourse
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There’s Foucault, of course, with the Histor(ies) of Sexuality. Too much Foucault to list here. And Luce Irigaray:
“Who or what the other is, I never know. But the other who is forever unknowable is the one who differs from me sexually. This feeling of surprise, astonishment, and wonder in the face of the unknowable ought to be returned to its locus: that of sexual difference.”
An Ethics of Sexual Difference
Which plays right into Descartes, whom Irigaray quotes:
“When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new, or very different from what we formerly knew, or from what we supposed that it ought to be, that causes us to wonder and be surprised; and because that may happen before we in any way know whether this object is agreeable to us or is not so, it appears to me that wonder is the first of all the passions; and it has no opposite, because if the object which presents itself has nothing in it that surprises us, we are in nowise moved regarding it, and we consider it without passion.”
The Passions of the Soul
And then there’s McGann, whose quote comes via Visible Darkness:
“Both the practice and the study of human culture comprise a network of symbolic exchanges. Because human beings are not angels, these exchanges always involve material negotiations. Even in their most complex and advanced forms—when the negotiations are carried out as textual events—the intercourse that is being human is materially executed: as spoken texts or scripted forms. To participate in these exchanges is to have entered what I wish to call here 'the textual condition.'
“The sexual event itself-which is, as the poets have always known, a model of the textual condition—involves far more than the intercourse of reproductive organs. The climactic marriage of our persons is most completely experienced as a total body sensation almost mystical in its intensity as in its meaning. In those moments we realize (in both senses of the word) that to be human is to be involved with another, and ultimately with many others. Beyond that great and strange experience of immediacy the sexual event organizes a vast network of related acts of intercourse at the personal as well as more extended social levels: courtship rituals, domestic economies, political exchanges, and so forth. All of these activities take multiple particular forms. Love, even romantic love, is a social event, as Romeo and Juliet or Werther will always remind us. As such, love is and has ever been one of the great scenes of textuality.
“These elective affinities between love and textuality exist because love and text are two of our most fundamental social acts. We make love and we make texts, and we make both in a seemingly endless series of imaginative variations.”
The Textual Condition
Of course, I’ve always been accused of reading for smut, but I would submit that a fair percentage of my Lit/Rhet compatriots do the same thing. I won’t say that’s been the driving motivation for all of my degrees, but one can always use a little curve thrown into the day, can’t one? How can people think this stuff is boring?
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