tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post8846608789992365146..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: The Arrested Deployment of the Orgies of Childhood: Bersanian Relationalities, Part ICord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-16129220089645422822009-06-23T15:39:07.109-04:002009-06-23T15:39:07.109-04:00EJ,
Thanks for your thoughts here. They propelled...EJ,<br /><br />Thanks for your thoughts here. They propelled me to consider what an Antigone Complex would be, in a thread of posts. Given the appeal of the play and of Bulter's treatment, perhaps you (or others would be interested in the notion):<br /><br />1. http://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/what-is-the-antigone-complex-posthuman-tensored-agency/<br /><br />2. http://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/more-on-the-antigone-complex/<br /><br />3. http://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/the-transvestive-signifier-and-the-antigone-complex/<br /><br />As someone with a vested interest in Antigone, I would wonder how you would conceive of an proposed Antigone Complex, and if indeed it would be a no-one-gets-out-alive kind of syndrome of subjectivity. Is there a way for you to read her project as freeing?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-61177755171326200992009-06-19T13:44:14.470-04:002009-06-19T13:44:14.470-04:00EJ: " Could it be, following Bersani, that in...EJ: " Could it be, following Bersani, that in the disciplining of the ‘orgies of childhood,’ the ‘whirlwinds of desiring mobility’ that could have been Anna and Emma are betrayed in the denial, over time, of the polygamous conditions that gave rise to all of their desires (and destructive desires at that)? According to Tolstoy and Flaubert, it is literature—which is to say, art—that is the real villain, even the novel itself, especially the romantic novel. And Tolstoy and Flaubert had the notion, I suppose, of giving to their readers something from which their tragic heroines were supposedly bereft: social realism, albeit, and this point is really worth emphasizing, in the form of . . . yet another romantic novel."<br /><br />Kvond: I'm not quite sure that I follow. You seem to be making an equation which says that the novel performs some kind of discipinary action upon the "orgies of childhood" or what not. That the reader is somehow both betrayed and disciplined. How is it that (lets stick with Bovary) you see Flaubert disciplining the whirlwinds of desiring mobility? Or am I not understanding you?<br /><br /><br />As to the Oedipus Complex (story) and who gets out. It is actually inaccurate that no-one gets out, though there is certainly quite a bit of death to go around. If we eliminate Kreon who suffers the great rending of his world, it really is the forgotten Ismene (I believe the most misunderstood and neglected figure in the entire play) who gets out. And it is not through forgetting. Her person presents a very interesting, if painful, solution to the Antigone Complex (which itself is an answer to the Oedipus Complex).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-16612936801632495032009-06-19T06:07:23.783-04:002009-06-19T06:07:23.783-04:00Thanks for posting about this, Eileen. And a big p...Thanks for posting about this, Eileen. And a big public thanks to Michael O'Rourke and Noreen Giffney for The(e)ories, which I personally regard as -- despite not getting $1.5 million grants -- one of the most important interventions into critical theory we've had, as well as a needed catalyst to its de-Americanization.<br /><br />As Karl has pointed out, a useful thing you have done Eileen is to bring to D&G into the mix. It's interesting how so many of the phenomena Bersani discerns in his beloved Freud have parallels in Deleuze: so cruising as a kind of transversality, disaggregation of the self as psychoanalytic version of the molar/molecular, anti-monogamy as another way of saying anti-oedipus.<br /><br />Looking forward to post #2.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-44838456293641086702009-06-18T19:17:36.791-04:002009-06-18T19:17:36.791-04:00Thanks for this post, and thanks very much for the...Thanks for this post, and thanks very much for the excerpts from Bersani. With these, I wonder what he's doing in these articles that he's not already doing in his books? In other words, what's the--cough--relationship between these and his longer form explorations of these ideas?<br /><br /><i> Is the aim, perhaps, to still have love, but to forsake the crippling and destructive desires to which we have historically cathected ourselves? [Or, as Bersani himself put it in another of his writings, and I am paraphrasing: nothing is more banal than the phrase 'I love you' and yet we have some hope for its meaningfulness.]</i><br /><br />Thanks so much for bring Deleuze into this mix, since my BIG question here is: who is this I who says I love you? I think 'I love you' is a promise rather than just a statement of emotional investment. Classically, it's a promise of one subject to another, wherein the loving subject promises to cherish (if not exclusively than at least especially) the other subject over time, perhaps over all the time that the loving subject has remaining to itself. But once we've disaggregated, un-monadized the subject into sociability, then what happens to the I--let alone the You--of I Love You? If the subject is only a certain coalescence, constantly shifting, I think that love has to be swapped out in favor of, oh, pseudopodial, strategic attachments.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.com