tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post6547546970837668610..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Art Reveals More of Life than Life Does: Heterosexuality, Erotohistoriograpohy, and Our Perverse Desires for a Pleasurably Queer Medieval StudiesCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-86105502824469457252007-10-17T01:14:00.000-04:002007-10-17T01:14:00.000-04:00i haven't really been posting here, but i have bee...i haven't really been posting here, but i have been following the discussions here for awhile. i was thinking about some things regarding this post specifically, and it got long, so i posted about it on my own blog: http://danaidean.blogspot.com. basically it's about dan and eileen's discussion of time fucking and some gestures towards how it might be able to work.sarah bagleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10674532163424405180noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-59363054555556977072007-10-10T06:38:00.000-04:002007-10-10T06:38:00.000-04:00PS MOR, good to have you back! Thanks for all thos...PS MOR, good to have you back! Thanks for all those references.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34147165003203095692007-10-10T06:37:00.000-04:002007-10-10T06:37:00.000-04:00I didn't mean to be so resounding in what I said a...I didn't mean to be so resounding in what I said about couples and coupling. Coupling always has queer potential, especially when it is kept an open space. What I was thinking about -- if you want a medieval text -- is Marie de France's "Eliduc," which opens up the sacred couple of romance to a threesome that includes some lesbian-like voyeurism (not unproblematically, but it's there, and it's queer). Or if you want a modern text, how about Octavia Butler's work, in which human "coupling" can occur only through the interposition of an alien third body -- and I mean literally, alien. As in a space creature. With tentacles.<BR/><BR/>Or to take an example from real life, my family is good friends with a polyamorous quad, two "couples" who live together and share ... everything. The way that they can maintain themselves as a mutually committed group of four has been very interesting to me, and challenging as well. Such an arrangement has its practical rewards (with four incomes, they own a small plane, a boat, and two houses) -- but it isn't about that for them. They love each other, and I suppose that's the beginning, the end, and the totality of the story.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-39285409112926370352007-10-09T22:54:00.000-04:002007-10-09T22:54:00.000-04:00Some quick thoughts in response to Eileen's excell...Some quick thoughts in response to Eileen's excellent post (it was me who forwarded it on to Beth Freeman):<BR/><BR/>1. On khorality and oscillation you should take a look at Sarah Kofman on Derrida. The theme of oscillation is prominent in her "Freud: Ca Cloche" in Hugh Silverman's Derrida and Deconstruction collection. Read alongside Derrida's long "Faith and Knowledge" essay you could be on to something important about a queer khora (I have written briefly about this before and I think Julian Wolfrey's gets near to it in his Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed. It is of course, everywhere, for a desertified non-place(!), in Caputo's Prayers and Tears)<BR/><BR/>2. Couples. Apart from Bersani and Dutoit on unforming couples (and ultimately reforming them) I'd spotlight Michael Cobb's essay "Lonely", a lovely little piece in the current issue of South Atlantic Quarterly. The tendency in Deleuze Studies at the moment is to uncouple Deleuze (usually from Guattari), to enisle or island him (via a reading of his own early desert island texts). This is what Zizek does in Organs without Bodies and Hallward does ,in his otherwise brilliant Out of this World. And its a strange move to pull on a philosopher who is so emphatic about connectivity, assemblage, conjugality. What JJC and Eileen are doing is, I think, much queerer, in that they are forming a new couple (Deleuze and Queer theory) in much the same way Liz Grosz does with Deleuze in her two most recent books. <BR/><BR/>3. Fucking Time. There's a cracking essay by Eugenie Brinkema on Bersani, Deleuze and Gaspar Noe's powerful film Irreversible called "Rape and the Rectum" in Camera Obscura. If I recall correctly it has a memorable line about time being "fucked up the ass".<BR/><BR/>MOR.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-56163585346224691382007-10-09T17:06:00.000-04:002007-10-09T17:06:00.000-04:00Elizabeth: I'm honored you read my post and liked ...Elizabeth: I'm honored you read my post and liked it, and yes, you should definitely read Anna's work [everyone should!]. I'd like to think my utopian university would have an annex that included an opium/ecstasy den and various salons, actually. Great idea. Your essay on erotohistoriography is fantastic, and I plan to make great use of it in a project I am currently ensconced in on the narratives of the life of St. Guthlac. Cheers, EileenEileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34004610247153723892007-10-09T12:04:00.000-04:002007-10-09T12:04:00.000-04:00Jeffrey: thanks for your comments. As to whether o...Jeffrey: thanks for your comments. As to whether or not we need to "get over" the couple as much as we need to look beyond heterosexuality for a framing device through which we look for the queer, I agree, but I also wonder how we could ever get over, in our analysis or readings, let's say, of romance literature, the couple, or even, coupling. The "sacred twosome" may, as you say, be reductive; at the same time, it may be the very site through which the idea and fact of "sacred twosomeness" could be transcended, or even deconstructed, if that makes sense. It may be that it requires a twosome, willing to de-couple itself while still coupling that would produce the most powerful "queer" and liberatory affective effects. I realize that's abstract, but I think I could make it more clear, given some time, and um, a few texts! Or real-life examples, even. Like Sartre and Beauvoir? [Okay, that was just my lame joke. Seriously.]<BR/><BR/>As the Edelman quotation I included in my original post, you really can't win with that guy. He's such a tear-down artist.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-36603211499778118682007-10-09T11:24:00.000-04:002007-10-09T11:24:00.000-04:00Eileen, Michael passed along the link to this post...Eileen, Michael passed along the link to this post and I'm honored that you think my work is useful (especially in Medieval Studies, a field in which I feel woefully ignorant). Thank you for turning me on to Anna's book, as well as for taking my own thoughts in new directions. I have nothing brilliant to add, sorry to say, as I am completely shot from a long day of teaching! I love Utopia U., though; I fantasized one of my own in grad school but it looked more like a literary salon/opium den.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-71530201314083744892007-10-09T08:35:00.000-04:002007-10-09T08:35:00.000-04:00I don't think you can fuck time the way you're thi...<I> I don't think you can fuck time the way you're thinking about it. I think it fucks you. Literally.</I><BR/><BR/>I think this may be my fear. Why this is a "fear" I am not sure. But for now I can say this much: That I'm not sure the body so much contains time as produces it and/or <I> maybe </I> (and this is not very Deleuzian either) experience it. <BR/><BR/>And yes, I am trying to think also your point about always dying. I have long been taken by Derrida's "economy of death" and more, but his narrative of sur-viv(al). And in this case, I absolutely agree. <BR/><BR/>But, one thing I am trying to incorporate here is what happens when we as medievalists concern ourselves, with C. Dinshaw, with things that were prevented from being thought--which are "not-yet"s. Ok, I need to go teach. I'll come back.dan remeinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-49279201286129520842007-10-09T00:11:00.000-04:002007-10-09T00:11:00.000-04:00Dan: it's late and I need to go home and crash, an...Dan: it's late and I need to go home and crash, and I want to say quite a few things in relation to your provocative questions, but I guess first I want to ask you how you might situate your desire for non-linear, secular histories in the body? What kind of temporality or temporalities might the body contain and/or make available to us? I am, of course, thinking of Jeffrey's comments on "intertemporality" as he discussed that via the container of a pig's body, but I am also thinking of it in relation to Elizabeth Freeman's thinking, following Cesare Casarino, that "we need to understand and practice time as fully incorporated, as nowhere existing outside of bodies and their pleasures." If a body can *contain* various intertemporalities but is also itself caught in a trajectory between life and death, or rather, is always dying, can we really tell the history of any one body without taking account of both states of affairs? Perhaps I'm not being a very good deleuzoguattarian in this respect, because I'm thinking too much about "lines" and "points" and not enough about de- or re-territorialization: I don't know. I wish I could fuck time, but I'm not sure it's possible. Although: maybe it is [?] possible in the terms set by Barthes' "biographemes" whose "distinction and mobility might come to touch, like Epicurean atoms, some future body, destined to the same dispersion"? But I know that's not what you meant, exactly. I don't think you can fuck time the way you're thinking about it. I think it fucks you. Literally. [More tomorrow!]Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-17081558033309631762007-10-08T17:36:00.000-04:002007-10-08T17:36:00.000-04:00thanks Eileen! This is pompting more thoughts on t...thanks Eileen! This is pompting more thoughts on this subject which eileen, you repsonded to a while back on which I commented a long while back about linear time and the secular. Eileen, you cogently suggested the problems with using secular and relligious as categories in said discussion, but also pointed out the problem of ever writing history without some sense of causality or at least, the movement from then to now, from living to dead. And this drives me bonkers. I feel sometimes like we are all bound by the narrative of time and history, when, with Jean-Luc Godard, we ca say "I am my own historian," that self-fashioning or life or whatever you want to call it, ends up as some kind of comulsion to belief. (possibilties: this isn't such a bad thing?)<BR/><BR/>One of the problems that emerges re that previous discussion, in this post, is that, (agreeing with JJCohen), the queer is intertemporal. The queer, I might even contend, fucks linear time. But here's the rub: So we all go into the archive with C. Dinshaw and H. Allen and M. Kempe or into a text with M. Foucault or into a physiologically "living" body or [onto, next to, around, approaching that body ] and have a pleasureable time and fuck time along the way, (and with that messing with that compulsion to morality or religion or what have you i mentioned). Secular or not (I think, actually, it will be specifically on this issue that the terms may be abandoned by me if i am ever to do to--on the absent edge or that khoral queer cutting and re-folding time). <BR/><BR/>But then, how do we write about it? Even a body bending time can only be narrativized. I should think that further thought on the "sameness" of the middle ages might help. And on that I might suggest that Dinshaw's take is interesting, (I am thinking of the long intro to <I> Getting Medieval </I>) in that i would not categorize it as either ascribing to sameness or difference exclusively, but rather toa kind of simultaneity. I want to stress this, because of its temporal element which maybe puts a stress on Eileen's "fluidity," and even my own interest in the term "oscillation."dan remeinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13011645541207076650noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-65442670130044447842007-10-08T15:50:00.000-04:002007-10-08T15:50:00.000-04:00That's fine, Tim.That's fine, Tim.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-39795639827551590322007-10-08T14:29:00.000-04:002007-10-08T14:29:00.000-04:00Thanks for the image! Would you mind if I reproduc...Thanks for the image! Would you mind if I reproduced it on my blog?Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13026955797817424956noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-46014396291611824992007-10-08T08:41:00.000-04:002007-10-08T08:41:00.000-04:00Just a drive-by comment as I dash off to visiting ...Just a drive-by comment as I dash off to visiting day at my son's school: wow. Thanks for this Eileen. So much to chew over. Schultz might have stressed that modern interpreters need to move beyond the domination of the couple as much as it does the looming presence of heterosexuality. Marie de France, for example, queers desire by removing it from the reductive power of the sacred twosome.<BR/><BR/>Eileen, I think you get right to the heart of the limits of Schultz's approach when he puts a limit on Dinshaw: she was not arguing that the queer is to be found necessarily against the normative power of medieval structures, but in the brush of the contemporary against the medieval -- that is, the queer is inherently intertemporal. KÅ‚osowska is, as you say, excellent at drawing this point out. Edelman, not so much: it is interesting to me how in that roundtable his observations keep coming back to the same, without much movement (or history, or intercutting of temporality, or -- as you say -- fluidity) at all.<BR/><BR/>This is a great post Eileen and I will be thinking about it for a long time!Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-17093917895692292612007-10-07T19:32:00.000-04:002007-10-07T19:32:00.000-04:00Thanks for your comment, Tim. I do have that pictu...Thanks for your comment, Tim. I do have that picture around here somewhere, bound with a bunch of index cards and note-pads from when I was composing my dissertation: I'll locate it, and if possible, take a digital pic of that and post it here. Cheers, EileenEileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-86188265491989628552007-10-07T17:52:00.000-04:002007-10-07T17:52:00.000-04:00Terrific post. There's a lot to chew over, but tha...Terrific post. There's a lot to chew over, but that anecdote about the Musee Fedora leaps off of the page. (I would love to see an image of the sketch, if you still have it.)Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13026955797817424956noreply@blogger.com