Figure 1. Damien Hirst, Away from the Flock
a. Eros and Phenomenology I
Jessica Rosenfeld (Washington University in Saint Louis), Organizer
Cary Howie (Cornell University), Presider
This paper will focus on a narrative “break” as well as a moment of “undoing” in Malory's Tale of Sir Balin: when Balin kills another knight Launceor, occasioning Launceor’s lover, an unnamed woman, to fall into a “sorrow out of measure” and to exclaim to Balin that he has killed “two bodyes . . . in one herte, and two hertes in one body, and two soules,” after which she kills herself with her lover’s sword. The scene is so ubiquitous in medieval romantic literature, it practically swerves toward the comical. But what is unexpected (for Balin in particular, as he is the epitome of rash action without remorse) is what Malory tells us happens next: Balin is so struck with wonder at the woman’s will to self-destruction over her love for the dead knight, and so ashamed of himself for causing that destruction, that “for sorow he myght no lenger beholde them, but turned hys horse and loked toward a fayre foreste.” It is only for a moment that Balin turns away, and the sight of his brother riding out of the forest toward him quickly breaks the scene, but in that moment of being struck with wonder at the power of eros and also turning away from it, and from the sight of a particular body pierced by her lover’s sword, Balin reveals his capacity for erotic empathy while also refusing a fuller engagement with an erotic attachment to two particular bodies in favor of “the fayre foreste,” which, in Malory’s world at least, is the classic route of escape as well as the domain of otherworldy affairs. It is also the image of an incorruptible beauty, because it is not really a beautiful forest, but an idea of one, seen at a distance: the very frame of the aesthetic. What I am most interested in exploring in this paper is how, in that momentary “resting point” of Balin’s astonishment and turning away, as well as in the sight of his brother riding out of the “fayre foreste” that breaks the intensity of his averted gaze, we can glimpse the staging of the momentary “undoing,” by eros, of the larger narrative frame, and by extension, of the trajectory of Arthurian romance itself. Or, to put it another way, and following the thought of Hans Gumbrecht in his book Production of Presence: What Meaning Can’t Convey, we can conceive, in this scene, “of aesthetic experience as an oscillation (and sometimes as an interference) between ‘presence effects’ and ‘meaning effects’.”
This paper will start by considering the intersection between Augustine’s representation of fallen sexuality as lack and alienation (City of God, 14.26) and his definition of sorrow as anti-desire or refusal (City of God, 14.6), which together point to a foundational bond between eros and sorrow rooted in the ontology of place, as the category to which the fact of cosmos is most proper (to be in a place is be in cosmos, the "place" of place). For Augustine, sexuality encapsulates the fallen condition of humanity as defined by the will’s simultaneous lack of itself and its object, the lack which lies behind the habitual condition of human nature (and nothing is more deeply habitual, as the Confessions show, than sex!). This lack equates, conceptually and representationally, with being ontologically "outside" of Eden, apart from oneself, in the regio dissimulitudinis, and so on. Similarly, Augustine understands sorrow, along with other forms of spiritual or mental suffering, as an expression of expressions of not-wanting, of the will’s disagreement with something that is. The conjunction of these two modes of the will, eros and sorrow, within contemplative mysticism become evident if we consider the mystic’s desire (Amy Hollywood’s readings of Bataille will here prove helpful) as total or totalizing desire, a desire to "be everything," not as a pantheistic desire to be in everything, but as absolute topographical or cosmic desire, that is, to be in the place where everything is, to be, in the midst of the locality of oneself, with God, in other words, to translate, via the reality of direct experience, the here into the Here. For what thus confronts the contemplative is precisely a kind superimposition or fusion of the objects of eros and sorrow, an experiential simultaneity of being where one does not want to be and not being where one more truly, actually, necessarily is, the topos of cosmos. My reading of these two texts will thus give special attention to the spatial metaphors they employ, for example, Julian’s representation of God as being within the landscape of the soul ("I saw the soule so large as it were an endles world . . . In the midds of that syte sitts our Lord Jesus" ch.67) and the Cloud’s preference for being nowhere: "For I telle thee trewly that I had lever be so nowhere bodely, wrastlyng with that blynde nought, than to be so grete a lorde that I might when I wolde be everywhere bodely, merily pleiing with al this ought as a lorde with his owne" (ch. 68). Above all, I hope to explicate the process whereby these two texts’ alternative representations of true sorrow reverse the spatial, prepositional phenomenology of sexual desire, namely, how the feminine text’s experience of sorrow achieves a spiritual penetration of one’s-being-in-the-other (compassion) and how the masculine text’s experience of sorrow achieves a correlative spiritual penetration of the-other-being-in-oneself (ravishing).
This paper will examine the popular medieval topoi of the "mounted Aristotle" and the clumsy Thales (falling into a well while looking at the sky) as a means of investigating late medieval ideas about the vulnerability of the intellect to the physical world, and especially to eros. While these tales were typically used in sermons to demonstrate the extreme weakness of all mankind, made manifest by the fall of the archetype of the wise philosopher, they were also used to explore the vulnerability of the intellect itself as it ignores the force of the physical world and human desire. This latter reading, I argue, is the more subversive and compelling, and one that animates Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” among other texts. While medieval moralists were drawn to interpret these tales in terms of the dangers of wily women, or excessive intellectual/sexual desire, the poets were equally drawn to dissect the assumptions that render us willing to accept that an intellectual should be considered least susceptible to erotic compulsion. These tales offer rich material for an investigation of the inherent connections between philosophy and eros, and the way that medieval anti-intellectual discourse roots itself not only in a theology of Augustinian grace, but in convictions about the intractability of the material world.
As philosophers fall into wells, so do lovers. Lancelot nearly drowns, Aucassin dislocates his shoulder, and theirs are mild cases considering the ravages (chiefly, death and eternal damnation) that the sight of a loved one causes in medieval romance and lyric. This paper draws up a typology, topography, and seismic scale of the moment of frightful clarity that so completely erases self, narcissistically (or is it?) absorbed in another. A part of an investigation in the premodern genealogy of the individual and political subject, the paper is in dialogue with recent investigations into the role of empathy in the concept of individual and universal human rights (“after,” as the fashionable phrase goes, Rancière, Agamben, Foucault, and Lacan).
b. Eros and Phenomenology II
Jessica Rosenfeld (Washington University in Saint Louis), Organizer
Jessica Rosenfeld, Presider
Following Elizabeth Grosz's call to understand erotic desire as a "continuous excitation of surfaces" rather than a condition based on lack, this paper will discuss the sense of touch, particularly its place in practices of reading. We tend to think of reading as an exercise ofmind, but, as I have argued, it is a complexly embodied practice that medieval audiences understood as directing sensory experience. I want to explore the erotic possibilities that appear when we put the exercise of touch back into the practice of reading. Consequently, I'll discuss medieval ideas about touch and the hierarchy of the senses, visual andverbal representations of touch, and ways in which we might reanimate the touching of books and other artifacts.
Even in the current era of dissolving period boundaries, the poetry written at the English court between 1485 and the Petrarchan incursion of the 1530s has caused readerly difficulties, commonly dealt with through the assumption that the erotic is simply a mask for politics. My paper aims rather to suggest that poets like Skelton and Hawes apprehend their position through an erotics shaped by the remnants of earlier forms (love allegory, dream vision). Their language regulates the distance from the traumatic object through "vain incantation and fruitless connection" (Lacan); substitutively identified with that object's appalling inscrutabilities, their texts themselves inspire terror.
Waiting is what bodies do, much of the time. I wait for other bodies (to come close, to go away, to let me in or block me out). And I wait for my own body (to become mine at all, to be given me, to be taken away). This waiting can happen in the mode of a slow anticipation--will it come? I mean, really, will he? will she? this is taking forever--or in the mode of retrospection, when suddenly some skin hits mine, inside or out, and I think: that's what I was waiting for. I want to begin to give an account of how this waiting happens. From the bride of the Song of Songs to the malleable men of Marie de France's Lais, to be embodied is to expect something, to wait for one's own body across the bodies of others. And not just across these but with them: for all the singularity of this tension--it's written into the heart of some of our vocabularies of waiting, as attente, for example, or attesa--it remains impossible to wait alone.
c. Bodies in Between
Liza Blake (New York University), Organizer
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Presider
d. The Place of the Medieval in the Present
Myra Seaman (College of Charleston), Organizer
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Presider
e. Excrement, Ingestion, and Meat
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University), Organizer
Michael Johnson (University of Texas at Austin), Presider
f. POSTSCRIPT: A Meditation on the Medieval (and Other) Faces