Take it and Leave It: Medieval Castration, Part I

by KARL STEEL

Here's an old-fashioned blog post, a bit of an essay - the first half of a chapter for, of all things, an anthology largely focused on classical studies - but one that I can frame as also newly crucial in these awful times for America. Stories that enweird the Middle Ages, rendering it unsuitable for White Supremacist and Christian Dominionist nostalgia; stories that enweird masculinity: that's what I'm doing below, and although it's not as direct an action even as simply phoning one's representative - which I trust all of you in America are doing - it still might count for something.

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BnF, fr. 174 57v, Marriage of Adam and Eve

The seventh-century Visigothic Code called for sodomites to be castrated.[1] Norman nobles were infamous for inflicting this outrage on their noble prisoners, instead of granting them the expected, civilized quietus of execution.[2] Abelard famously suffered the same treatment when he ran afoul of Heloise’s uncle. It numbers among the civic punishments luridly illustrated in the bas-de-page of a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Coutemes de Toulouse.[3] And the surprisingly few medieval fabliaux that feature castration treat it as a grotesque joke: “Le prestre ki perdi les colles” [The Priest who loses his Balls] ends with “two dogs fighting over the roasted testicles in the ruins of the blacksmith's shop.”[4]

This is all, I trust, distressing, but none of it is particularly surprising, especially if we approach these cases, as is almost inevitable, under the influence of psychoanalytic storytelling.[5] Psychoanalytic models typically understand castration anxiety as the psychic origin of gender hierarchy and, by extension, idealizations of social dominance in general. When the male-identified child is taught that his mother has no phallus, he fears losing his too; bullied by this fear out of his claim to the mother, he invests the father with the phallus and imagines that he has let the child keep his own, lesser one, so long as he allies himself with this paternal tyrant against socially "castrated" women. With this, the child's primary family relationship shifts from one of care (between child and mother) to one of submission and obedience (between child and father). The child’s reward is being installed advantageously within prevailing social hierarchies. There is no need to take this narrative literally to recognize its operations across a host of relations in which castration, or symbolically analogous harms, become, as they are in my first paragraph, the sign of the ultimate humiliation, and its threat and practice what bonds dominant groups.[6]

Standard scholarly approaches to castration have therefore followed Jean de Meun in believing that its result is to rob someone “not just of his testicles” but “of the boldness in human ways that should exist in valiant men.”[7] Particularly with Abelard, they have tended to examine how castrates sought to reconstruct themselves as men despite the injury.[8] That “despite” is the problem: any approach to castration that preserves the supposedly natural fit between genitalia and gender is as prone to stumble as any other culturally specific “natural fit” when it encounters alien cultural material. For at least with the celibate Christian clergy of the Middle Ages, the promotion of chastity and bodily mortification meant that the possession of the male genitalia, not their loss, was the dilemma.[9] To be sure, this clergy did not seek castration, psychoanalytically speaking; they still wanted all the illusions of mastery necessary for the masculine theater of power. But they could participate in this power through gaining what we might call a “higher” phallus by losing the one below. If acquiring castration anxiety means giving up on one’s desire (for the mother, and so on) in exchange for two things—a phallus and social identity borrowed from the father, and a shifting set of always inadequate substitutes for a lost primary object—then clerical castration desire just follows this logic out to its end by giving up entirely on the false consolations of every faulty object. Excepting, of course, only the supposedly less faulty object of masculinity itself. Abelard drew on this very notion to make sense of his injury. To counter his contemporaries’ jokes—in 1118, Roscelin of Compiègne mocked Abelard as an “imperfecti hominis” (imperfect man), no longer deserving to be called “Petrus,” because of the name’s masculine grammatical ending, and as having two heads “unum viri, alterum mulieris” (one a man’s, and the other a woman’s)[10]—Abelard reframed his castration as a “just judgment” and “an act of divine mercy” that “me…mundavit potius quam privavit” (cleansed rather than deprived me).[11] Here, Abelard preserve his masculinity not despite but because of his castration. He has been purified, rendered coherent, and, we might imagine, been granted an immunity to any further castration, for, as Bonnie Wheeler observes, “this lack…makes the castrated Abelard whole.”[12] Roscelin and the other bullies simply did not understand the gift Abelard has been given. They mistook the mere penis for a phallus. At least here Abelard had come to know better.

My chapter explores this peculiar strain of medieval castration thinking, summed up by Jacqueline Murray – the leading scholar on the topic – with “the whole problem of the body was perceived to be located in the male genitals. Once they were removed, it was believed that the problem of lack of control of the flesh would simply disappear.”[13] This, however, is not the only story it will tell. Its second half considers an account of a tortured knight from Peter of Cornwall's Book of Revelations. The knight's nonsacrificial, meaningless genital injury, in which he gives up nothing and learns nothing, offers a route past the cultural significance of the phallus, preserved in both castration and penis anxiety, and ultimately past the outsized cultural significance which dominant social orders bestow on male pain. For the solution to the problem of the phallus is to lose it entirely.

The problem of the genitals is a problem of being stuck with the embarrassing insistence of a desire that is neither our own nor quite not our own. The problem of desire, in short, inflicted upon us by the Fall, which meant that Eden offers a site for imagining our lost, mythical coherence. As with so much else in medieval thought, Augustine provides. Given his commitment to combating the quite literal demonization of the flesh by dualist heresies, Augustine had to argue that Adam and Eve could have had sinless sex, which required trying to imagine how we might have done it before sexual desire undignified us. Tellingly, his solution concentrates only on Adam's penis. Adam once would have been able move it "without lust,”[14] just as we can move our feet and hands by our own will. Augustine heaps up evidence to prove that such a thing could have been possible: even in this frustrating fallen world, where none can “live as he wishes,”[15] some people can wiggle their ears, some farters can “produce the effect of singing,” and one, at least, is a “man accustomed to sweat whenever he wished.”[16] Augustine seeks succor for what the apostle Paul complained of in Romans 7:23 as “another law in my members,” or what Freud called the “it,” in his famous promise to his patients “wo Es war, soll Ich werden.” All demonstrate that we could have once had the “ich,” in an Eden of deliberate farters, sweaters, and willed erections, in which no member would have been shameful, in which no part of us would have been a rebellious “slave,”[17] when we would not have needed mastery, because there would have been perfect consonance between the self and its obedience, so that mastery and the self were one.

GKS 1633 4º, 8v. The Beaver gives the Hunter what it wants.

Absent a return to Paradise, castration seems a straightforward solution to this world’s siren song. Effectively, the goal would be to become human beavers, the animal most famous in the Middle Ages for its neat solution to the problem of desire. Knowing that hunters wanted nothing from them but their testicles, beavers – castores in Latin – would bite them off, fling them in the face of their pursuers, and then scurry away with at least their life intact. The moralized natural history catalogs that flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries tended to explain that the hunter represents the devil, testicles the vices, and the beaver the holy man, who, to become fully himself, needed only to lose the organ that drew the devil on.[18] It is therefore unsurprising, if perhaps still somewhat shocking, that two sixteenth-century Italian humanists, Paolo Giovio and Giovanni Bernardino, used self-castrating beavers as their personal emblems.[19] Here we have the fantasy of mastery divested of the unbalancing perturbations of desire, excepting, again, only the indispensable desire for masculine perfection.

The beaver shows how at least the sexual perturbations might be cured; castration shows this desire as demonstrably resolved, because the absence of the male genitalia is evident to anyone who cares to check; and finally, castration retroactively presents the problem as having been solvable. That is, castration takes something away while also furnishing the myth that the genitalia really were to blame for desire’s disordering. For in losing the genitalia the castrate lost what Gerald of Wales called a “shameful part of the body.”[20] This can be taken further, for if the male genitalia are shameful, there to be mastered, then they must be recognized as the most female part of the male body. This only apparently paradoxical point is obvious once we recall the truism that medieval misogyny, namely, that the female body is disordered desire incarnated; in an example that here stands for the whole of this tradition, Osbert of Clare hectored the nun Ida of Barking with the following, “conquer the woman; conquer the flesh; conquer desire.”[21] Furthermore, sexuality, with whatever partner, could effeminize men; another example from the same century, an anonymous twelfth-century Christian commentator on Leviticus 22:24, who observes that animals with damaged or missing testicles symbolize those who are “effeminantur” not by the loss of their genitals, but rather by “turpitudinis.”[22] Given all this, for the celibate cleric, and for their imitators, castration can masculate. It becomes one of the surest routes to bestowing on men the illusory gift of the phallus, male power’s mythical thing, which should never be confused with the actual, always inadequate genitalia.

Origen in the Roman de la Rose, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 195 122v

But getting the phallus means submitting to the phallus. Recognizing this explains the last, peculiar aspect of this peculiar clerical desire for castration, namely, that castration was desired and forbidden all at once. Castration would have seemed to have had Christ’s own blessing: in Matthew 19:12, Jesus explains “sunt enim eunuchi, qui de matris utero sic nati sunt: et sunt eunuchi, qui facti sunt ab hominibus: et sunt eunuchi, qui seipsos castraverunt propter regnum caelorum. Qui potest capere capiat” [For there are eunuchs, who were born so from their mother's womb: and there are eunuchs, who were made so by men: and there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. He that can take, let him take it]. The original context of this sentiment, which appears only in Matthew, concerns the eschatological hopes of early followers of Jesus, and constitute an argument with contemporary rabbinic texts; the “eunuch” represents those who deliberately choose childlessness, because they know the world will soon be ending.[23] This radical hope would be lost with the verse’s first audience, but the verse itself would persist, circulating through the Latin Middle Ages uncensored and unemended, with only minimal differences between the Vulgate and other Latin translations, like the use of the synonyms “spandones” instead of “eunuchi” and “eunucizaverunt” instead of “castraverunt.”[24] What became mainstream Christians had other ways of neglecting or deflecting it.[25] The fourth century saw a new enthusiasm among Christians for the mortification of the flesh and, with it, a brief fashion for auto-castration. In response, Basil of Ancyra condemned it as a “perversion” that stirred up rather than quelled desire; the twenty canons of the First Council of Nicea lead off by prohibiting it; and exegetes threw up an interpretative cordon sanitaire around Matthew 19:12, which until then had received virtually no attention. Eusebius’s History of the Church (before 324) looks back a century to the theologian Origen’s auto-castration, mainly to sneer at it as an “absurdly literal” interpretation of Jesus’s words.[26] Some three centuries later, Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century Etymologies derives the word castus, chaste, from castratio, and then further overwrites any Christian history of castration by insisting that since the “veteribus” (ancients), castus means only anyone “who would promise perpetual abstinence from sexual intercourse.” With Matthew 19:12 tamed through a “spiritual” interpretation, mainstream, male-identified Christians had to find other methods to master themselves, and had to do so within the context of a “promise,” an institutional setting of oaths of submission to the authority of another. In the twelfth century, the English hermit Godric thus sought to tame his sexual desires by throwing himself repeatedly into brier patches. For all his efforts, still troubled, he sought numbness by lowering himself into a basin of icy water that he, like his contemporary Aelred of Rievaulx, had installed in the floor of his cell.[27] In all this, castration could be desired; it could be an ideal; it could be praised by Jesus himself; but no one could act on it himself, because the phallus itself still belonged to God.

The narrative result of this clerical double consciousness is predictable: a set of castration miracles in which God himself, or some other miraculous agent, provides some lucky cleric with the grace of castration or its equivalent. On the one hand, Guibert of Nogent’s twelfth-century memoirs provide one of several versions of a story of a Santiago de Compestella pilgrim overwhelmed with self-loathing because of his irrepressible sexual desire. Prompted by a demon in angelic garb, the pilgrim first castrates and then kills himself. Soon thereafter, he is miraculously resurrected, his wounds turned into mere scars, but, as Guibert puts it, “where his penis had been cut off [God] left a little perforation, if I may put it that way, for passing urine.”[28] The only partial repair of the cleric’s self-injury suggests that God had kept the genitals for himself, so transforming a forbidden auto-castration into a divine gift. The other, most angelic half of the tradition is thicker with examples. These flow from the account of the monk Elias in the Greek of Palladius’s early fourth-century Lausiac History, and especially through a similar story in the Latin of Gregory the Great’s sixth-century Dialogues.[29] There Equitius prays that his “carnis incentiva” [carnal temptation] might be tamed; at night, in a vision, “assistente angelo eunuchizari se vidit” [he sees himself castrated while an angel attends him]. From that point onward, all genital movement of his members was severed, “ac si sexum non haberet in corpore”[30] [as if he had no genitals {or gender} in his body]. In the eighth century, the layman Walfred, dismayed by the sexual desire that had given him five sons, was likewise blessed with mystical castration.[31] Gerald of Wales’ twelfth-century Gemma ecclesiastica has Hugh of Avalon (also known as Hugh of Lincoln) cured of his sexual desire through a similar remedy,[32] while in the thirteenth, William of Tocco provides this solution for Aquinas himself, who is miraculously visited by angels, who bind his genitals so he abhors and avoids women.[33] Not everyone received this treatment so calmly or gently: Caesarius of Heisterbach recalls a monk unable to live without women’s company; his prior convinces him to spend one more night in the cloister, whereupon:

Vix tenuiter obdormierat, et ecce! conspexit eminus virum horribilem in effigie carnificis ad se venientem, cultellum longum tenentem in manu, et sequebatur eum canis magnus et niger....Ille vero multum impetuose arreptis eius genitalibus abscidit canique proiecit, que ille mox devoravit.[34]

Scarcely had he fallen into a light sleep, when Behold! He saw at a distance a horrible man, in the likeness of a butcher [or executioner] coming towards him, carrying a long knife in his hands, and following him, there was a great, black dog … this man, with great fury, snatched his genitals, cut them off, and threw them to the dog, which quickly devoured them.

When he wakes up thinking that he had been “eunuchizatum,” he delights in finding himself whole, and settles into remaining a monk. In this mostly angelic side of the tradition, in which the happy castrate just watches approvingly as the offending part is tamed, we have a perpetuation of dynamics of submission, trust in authority, and idealizations of self-mastery on behalf of an unimpeachable father figure. Not that this is different than the usual model of castration. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the clerical castration fantasy, then, is that it gets us back to the same old story. It does not circumvent, but rather extends, the regime of the phallus, demonstrating, yet again, how the ideal of the phallus can persist even in the absence of the penis.

Circumvention needs to be sought elsewhere, through the path of indifference.

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[1] Karl Zeumer, ed. Liber iudiciorum, sive Lex Visigothorum, MGH Leges nationum Germanicarum I (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1902) III, 5, 7, p. 165; Samuel Parsons Scott, trans., The Visigothic Code (Boston: Boston Book Company, 1910), 111, is a standard English translation.

[2] Klaus van Eickels, “Gendered Violence: Castration and Blinding as Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo-Norman England,” Gender & History 16.3 (2004): 588–602.

[3] Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 9187 32v, readily available online through the Gallica website. For discussion of the images, see Barbara Morel, Une iconographie de la répression judiciaire: le châtiment dans l’enluminure en France du XIIIe au XVe siècle (Paris: Éd. du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2007).

[4] Mary E. Leech “The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee,” in Larissa Tracy, ed., Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 219.

[5] Cultural studies of medieval castration can be found in Tracy, Castration, and Laurence Moulinier-Brogi, “La Castration dans l’occident médiéval,” in Corps Outragés, Corps Ravagés de l’Antiquité Au Moyen Âge, ed. Lydie Bodiou and Véronique Mehl (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 189–216; for a global framework, Kathryn M. Ringrose, “Eunuchs in Historical Perspective,” History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007): 495–506; for early modern and Enlightenment Europe, Katherine Crawford, “Desiring Castrates, or How to Create Disabled Social Subjects,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2016): 59–90. My chapter uses “castration” to refer either to the removal of the testicles or the penis. For more nuanced treatments of terminology, see Mathew Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism in the Middle Ages,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 285-6, and Robert L. A. Clarke, “Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Fèvre's La Vieille,” in Tracy, Castration, 290.

[6] Forced tonsuring, for example, was a key form of “castration” for the long-haired nobles of the Merovingian kingdoms; Robert Mills, “The Signification of Tonsure,” in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 109–26. Representation psychoanalytic frameworks include Julia Reinhard Lupton and Kenneth Reinhard, After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Cornell University Press, 1993), 57 -- "the melancholic relation to the phallus is...the only relation to the phallus, which is defined precisely by the inability any subject, male or female, to possess it without being dis-possessed by it" – or, similarly, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 85.

[7] Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 329.

[8] For example, Juanita Feros Ruys, “‘Ut Sexu Sic Animo’: The Resolution of Sex and Gender in the ‘Planctus’ of Abelard,” Medium Aevum 75, no. 1 (2006): 6, which reaffirms Martin Irvine, “Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and Remasculization,” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1997), 87–106. In the same volume, see as well Bonnie Wheeler, “Origenary Fantasies: Abelard’s Castration and Confession,” 107-28. Also see Tracy, "Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration," in Tracy, Castration, 12-19.

[9] The last twenty years have produced many studies of the masculinity of medieval celibate Christian clergy. In the introduction to her anthology Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Claire Lees established the field’s methodology by emphasizing the “multifaceted dynamic of male experience” that operated dialectically, rather than as a static hierarchy, in relationship to femininity (xx). More recently, Ruth Mazo Karras, “Thomas Aquinas’s Chastity Belt: Clerical Masculinity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives,” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe, ed. Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 52–67, argues that the “heroic chastity” (57) of clerics was a genre of masculinity rather than, as R. W. Swanson claims, a third gender; the same volume, Jacqueline Murray extends this discussion of the clerical sex/gender continuum in “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?”, 34-51. For specific attention to the twelfth century and castration, see Jennifer D. Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity, and Reform in England and Normandy, 1066-1300 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 33–35.

[10] Jacques Paul Migne, ed., Patrilogiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, 217 vols. (Paris, 1844) [hereafter PL] 178:372B.

[11] PL 178:207A. For the English, Betty Radice, trans., The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (New York: Penguin, 1974), 148.

[12] Wheeler, “Castration and Confession,” in Cohen and Wheeler, Becoming Male, 111.

[13] Jacqueline Murray, “‘The Law of Sin That Is in My Members’: The Problem of Male Embodiment,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (New York: Routledge, 2005), 17. Murray discusses this aspect with particular attention to Abelard in “Mystical Castration: Some Reflections on Peter Abelard, Hugh of Lincoln, and Sexual Control,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York: Garland, 1999), 76-80.

[14] Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), XIV.23, 470.

[15] Ibid., XIV.24, 473.

[16] Ibid., XIV.24, 473.

[17] Ibid., XIV.23, 471.

[18] Aberdeen University Library MS 24, f. 11r provides a representative example, easily accessible through the Aberdeen Bestiary website. For an extended discussion of medieval beaver lore, see Ellen Lorraine Friedrich, “Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris’s Romans de la rose,” in Tracy, Castration, 264-74.

[19] Kenneth Gouwens, “Emasculation as Empowerment: Lessons of Beaver Lore for Two Italian Humanists,” European Review of History/Revue Européene d’histoire 22, no. 4 (2015): 536–62.

[20] From his Gemma Ecclesiastica, quoted in Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest, 1, and discussed at more length in 36-37.

[21] Quoted in Murray, “One Flesh,” 43.

[22] PL 175:669A, cited in Sean Eisen Murphy, “The Letter of the Law: Abelard, Moses, and the Problem of Being a Eunuch,” Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004): 177.

[23] Jack Collins, "Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity," in Tracy, Castration and Culture, 73-86.

[24] See the Vetus Latina Database, available through Brepols.

[25] For the history of the exegesis of this verse and canon law on castration, Collins, “Castration as Symbol and Practice,” Daniel F. Caner, “The Practice and Prohibition of Self-Castration in Early Christianity,” Vigiliae Christianae 51, no. 4 (1997): 396–415, and Murphy, “Problem of Being a Eunuch,” 168–69.

[26] Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. Andrew Louth and G. A. Williamson (London: Penguin, 1989), 186.

[27] For these stories, see Murray, “Male Embodiment,” 15.

[28] Guibert of Nogent, A Monk’s Confession, trans. Paul J. Archambault (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 204. For further context, Ryan D. Giles, “The Miracle of Gerald the Pilgrim: Hagiographic Visions of Castration in the Liber Sancti Jacobi and Milagros de Nuestra Señora,” Neophilologus 94 (2010): 439–50.

[29] Caner, “Self-Castration,” 411; Giles, “Miracle of Gerald the Pilgrim,” 443.

[30] PL 77:165C.

[31] Ross Balzaretti, “Sexuality in Late Lombard Italy, C. 700-800 AD,” in Medieval Sexuality: A Casebook, ed. April Harper and Caroline Proctor (New York: Routledge, 2010), 23.

[32] Cited in Giles, “Miracle of Gerald the Pilgrim,” 444.

[33] Murray, “Mystical Castration,” 84.

[34] Die Wundergeschichten des Caesarius von Heisterbach, ed. Alfons Hilka (Bonn: Hanstein, 1933), 75.

Like a Radio Left On / On the Outskirts of Identical Cities: Living (with) Fradenburg

Figure 1. Aranye Fradenburg delivering her plenary address at the 1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, Austin, Texas [Nov. 2010; photo by Christine Neufeld]

by EILEEN JOY

Do we really mean to take shelter from our jouissance in the order of utility, to become "a branch of the service of goods," in the mistaken hope that the "human sciences" will be rewarded for doing so?

~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, "Group Time, Catastrophe, Periodicity"

If we let ourselves become enthusiastic over it, psychoanalytic work can help contemporary medieval studies to an ethics that does not bind, nor bind itself to, the past as dead weight, but lets it loose in the historical signifiers that still trace their way through our passions.

~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer 

We are beings who can neither live nor die without artful signification.

~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, "The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis"

. . . the work is to keep moving, but also to keep living . . .

~Aranye Fradenburg, "(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming"

What enables us to risk change is the feeling that we are understood and (therefore) accompanied.

~L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, "Living Chaucer"
 
. . . obscure

forces are at work

like a radio left on

On the outskirts of

identical cities.

~Ben Lerner, "Doppler Elegies"

Like a radio left on, in the poet Ben Lerner's parlance, on the outskirts of identical cities -- and also, like the strains of a Lushlife Project downtempo "Budapest Eskimos" soundtrack emanating from a diamond mine -- Aranye Fradenburg's work has operated as a groovy and "obscure force" in medieval studies for the past 20 or so years as a powerful and palpably explicit influence upon work in Middle English literary [especially Chaucer] studies, especially those inflected by psychoanalytic and symptomatic and "discontinuist"/non-alteritist historicist approaches to the Middle Ages. Her work has also operated as a potent and insistent voice [not always fully registered or acknowledged as such in our field and beyond] on the "arts" of living, on eudaimonia [flourishing], on the importance of pleasure/enjoyment [in its lighter and darker valences], on sentience/sensation + the "feeling" arts, on techniques of living + care of the self, and most especially, on the "living on"-ness of the always-traveling, transitive, open-ended, and non-linear signifiers and processes of signification that enable [and sometimes disable] the inter-subjective formations between various actors, living and dead, past and present, so crucial to our desires, to our sufferings [passions], to our ability to affiliate with and relate to others, and thus, to living our [shared] lives, for better and worse. It should be mentioned, too, that one of the "obscure forces" that Lerner speaks of in his "Doppler Elegies" [in addition to death and catastrophe] is love, a subject which has played no small role in Fradenburg's intellectual, and I would also say, political-humanist concerns. One could go further and say that, like Lerner, Fradenburg has been our scholarly poet of the "obscure forces" at work, not only in our field, but in our lives.

Fradenburg has been a particular hero of mine for insisting, over and over again throughout her writings, that, in all times and places, we misunderstand ourselves, and therefore, unknowing -- and the self-fictionalizations [some constructive, some destructive] predicated upon that unknowing -- have to be taken into account, whether we are studying the past or just trying to understand ourselves and our own experiences. As she put it so eloquently in Sacrifice Your Love, with regard to medieval studies, we “cannot confine the work of knowing the Middle Ages to replicating, however hopelessly and/or heroically, medieval cultures’ self-understandings. We also should explore how medieval cultures, like all others, may have misunderstood themselves” [pp. 77-78]. And with regard to our own self-understandings, and in a way that is resonant with many of the discourses circulating in the university today under the aegis of object-oriented philosophies and various strains of post/humanist thought, Fradenburg wrote in the same book,

. . . the effect of subjectivity is produced by the interplay of insentience with sentience.
        The telescopes that help us see the stars, the buildings that house the shelters that are our bodies, are insentient; and yet we extend sentience through them. But the more we make the machines and products that extend subjectivity into the world, the more insentience is part of us, or we are part of it. Forces are at work within us that do not "mean" anything; parts of ourselves cannot account for themselves. The work cannot account for itself, or disclose anything about itself, or even be questioned. [p. 13]

This excerpt is part of a much longer and very complex discussion having to do with the alienation produced by labor, modes of production [scholarly and artistic], aesthetics, courtly love, desire, libidinal economies, the Law, enjoyment, sacrifice/loss, political ethics, and community, and I can't do justice to all of that here. In any case, Fradenburg's theoretical project in this book, especially with regard to, say, Chaucer studies and medieval chivalric literature and culture more broadly [in its broadest temporal dimensions, then to now], is well known and registered across so much scholarship that has been done since this book and under its influence. My own continual return(s) to the passages cited above have more to do with my own interest in and use of Fradenburg's thinking, which, of unconscious necessity or intention, is highly idiosyncratic and personal. So, for me, these passages have long operated as watch-phrases for my own work, where I have striven to always keep in mind the unavoidable blind spots and "obscure forces" of everyone's understanding of everything, including ourselves. Scholarship of medieval literature, or any literature, really, for me, becomes a valuable project of tracing productive errancies and sites of incoherence and crafting creative critical approaches that, in Eve Sedgwick's memorable formulation, aim to be "additive and accretive," desiring "to assemble and confer plenitude on an object [such as a text or textual object or author-object] that will then have resources to offer an inchoate self" ["Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, pp. 27-28]. This has something to do as well with what Bryan Reynolds has called a transversal poetics that defies “the authorities that reduce and contain meanings,” and that seeks to “understand and empower fugitive elements [in texts and other artifacts, and in particular spaces] insofar as doing so generates positive experiences” ["Transversal Poetics and Fugitive Explorations: Theaterspace, Paused Consciousness, Subjunctivity, and Macbeth," in Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations, pp. 1-26]. And this sort of work might be crucial for the future, if we agree with Frandeburg [and I do] that,

To be able to anticipate, plan, project a future or into a future, we have to not know for sure, because we have to suspend judgment even while exercising it, knowing that we don’t know (everything). Ethics—and ultimately psychoanalysis—emerges from a willing of this suspension, a paradoxical knowing of non-knowing. ["(Dis)continuity: A History of Dreaming," in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Frederico, p. 96]

I must admit that I was drawn to write this post because, partly due to my own personal project to spend some time over the next few years re-visiting Foucault's late writings on the "care of the self" and biopower [because of THIS, THIS, and THIS], I have been returning [a lot] recently to Fradenburg's 2002 book Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer, where I have been struck both by how apropos to our moment and compelling this book still is [10 years later, and gee, 10 years isn't that long ago, anyway, but we have a tendency to "forget" stuff all of the time in our scholarship] and also by how Fradenburg's entire oeuvre seems to continuously circle back [with important renovations of thought] to this earlier book's project to draw attention to the important inter-relations between embodiment and signification, between pleasure and virtue [where "virtue" is seen to have something to do with world-building], between subjectivity and Otherness, and between art and what she calls, in her essay "Living Chaucer," the "living process" [p. 64; see below for full citation]. It feels timely to me, therefore, to spend some time now thinking about Fradenburg's trajectory of thought over the past ten years or so, especially as it culminates, or expresses itself, in this essay.

I offer one cautionary note here, therefore, to say that I am not attempting in this blog post to offer a comprehensive account of Fradenburg's whole body of work, nor to assess all of its merits [of which there are many] in relation to the larger field of medieval studies. As with other blog posts I have written in the past, here I merely celebrate the originality and importance of a scholar who has urged me [successfully] to think, and also to feel, differently -- about my field, yes -- but more importantly, about the world in which I live. Over the years, I have come to value and to gather close to me, with a certain ardor, the work of scholars who have helped me, not just to think, but to live more creatively [more on which, below], and in this sense, Fradenburg joins Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Lauren Berlant, Jane Bennett, Leo Bersani, Kathleen Biddick, Judith Butler, John Caputo, Thomas Carlson, Iain Chambers, Jeffrey Cohen, Michel de Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Carolyn Dinshaw, Michel Foucault, James Earl, Cary Howie, George Kateb, Anna Klosowska, Jonathan Lear, Emmanuel Levinas, Michael Edward Moore, Martha Nussbaum, Bill Readings, Joan Retallack, Claude Romano, Eve Sedgwick, and Simone Weil as writers who always hover nearby in my study. This list is highly personal, of course [I admire and am influenced by many scholars beyond these, but these authors stand out for providing to me what, for lack of a better term, I will call my spiritual reservoir, or my traveling scholar-gypsy companions]. The work of some of the scholars in this list also stands out -- for me, anyway -- for their attention to and care for the role of the humanities and the university, and of creative thought more generally, in relation to personal and social life, and thus has also been crucial to me and others in relation to the projects of the BABEL Working Group. Fradenburg, along with Bennett, Nussbaum, and Readings, is particularly noteworthy in this regard. When reading Fradenburg closely, no matter what the specific texts or subjects under close scrutiny [Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, the Knight's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, whatever], what she seems to always be talking about is something she says more explicitly in her essay, "Group Time: Catastrophe, Survival, Periodicity" [in Time and the Literary, ed. Karen Newman, Jay Clayton, and Marianne Hirsch], that "enjoyment is the matrix of knowledge, and knowledge is not diminished thereby." Further, "Interpretation and explanation are activities central to libidinal structuration and vice versa. . . . We thereby reclaim our technical work [the humanities] as the work of desire, and desire as that which makes the world" [p. 232]. I feel an important link here as well with the work of Jane Bennett, who has written so eloquently of the importance of enchantment and affective propulsions for ethical life [see, especially, her book The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, Ethics].

Fradenburg has become one of our most important advocates for the importance of the "liberal arts" [and of literature/the fine arts/creativity/confabulation/play, especially] to personal and more broadly social "thriving" [this goes way beyond medieval studies, I might add, which is why I also think she should be read more broadly outside of our field] and thus, Fradenburg's recent essay, "Living Chaucer," published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer [and originally presented as a plenary address at the 17th Biennial Meeting of the New Chaucer Society in Siena, Italy in 2009], feels like both the consummate culmination of her career's various theoretical trajectories thus far, while it also offers [within the context of her more recent forays into neuroscience and evolutionary biology] a striking and enlivening departure for a couple of reasons -- first, because she moves closer than she has in previous work to embracing the value and necessity of shared minds [and thus, for all of their precariousness and dangers, somatic-affective community-assemblages], and second, because she also articulates more forcefully than she has before that literature/language is not ONLY a signalling system that only-always defers/devolves to other signalling systems [which are therefore in a continual Derridean slippage that, perhaps, never admits of a Real, or is always pointing to the ways in which language can only ever be falling away from that Real -- blah blah blah, I'm so tired of/bored by these theories of lack/non-coincidence between language and everything else], but may actually have the power to change history, and even more so, possesses a presence that is not negligible with regard to how we are affected by the past [or even to how we understand and negotiate our "selves" and our experiences in the present; with respect to aesthetics, I am also reminded here of Hans Gumbrecht's beautiful little book, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey]. As Fradenburg herself puts it in "Living Chaucer,"

undead life seems more apt a description of the signifier’s mode of existence (as Derrida himself thought) than does simple absence or nonexistence. I wrote in Sacrifice Your Love about this form of ‘‘being-as-signifier’’: given how susceptible we are to the signifier’s designs, there is more connectedness than we think between living subjects and dead letters. Nature’s signifiers vary in their realizations, but something, a shape, insists. [p. 44]

There is some resonance here with what Anna Klosowska writes in Queer Love in the Middle Ages, that,

all fiction corresponds to an absolute reality—not of existence, but of desire that calls fiction into being, performed by the authors and manuscript makers; and continuing desire for it performed by the readers, a desire that sustains the book’s material presence across the centuries. That desire is incorporated in an existence. It is the backbone of an identity. It is an essential part of the bundle of motives that lie behind all that the body does. A part essential because it is retrievable, but also because it is privileged: art reveals more of life than life does. [p. 7]

I am reminded of when I was at University College Dublin in June of 2009 for a 3-day seminar devoted to the work of Leo Bersani, and on the first day, when we were revisiting the span of his career's writings prior to Intimacies [reading Bersani "retrospectively"], at one point, I got extremely excited during the discussion of Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit's essay on Terence Malik's film The Thin Red Line [in their co-authored book Forms of Being], an essay I absolutely love and have made use of in my own scholarship [see HERE], and one of the seminar's participants said something to me that, in my memory of it, went something like this, "But, Eileen, why are you getting so excited about this? After all, we're talking about a text, and what we do is talk about texts, and this is not about life. You're acting like we're supposed to read Bersani for life." And I was like: um, we're NOT supposed to read Bersani -- and let's face it, theory more generally -- for LIFE? Fuck: how come no one TOLD me that? It was a funny moment [and one that, serendipitously, led to a marvelous friendship-bonding moment with Michael Snediker, who was also there], but also one that convinced me more than ever: um, yeah, theory is for life: DUH! We read theory -- whether Derrida, Foucault, Bersani, Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, Roland Barthes, Fradenburg, and I could go on -- for life: for LIFE, bitches! So I relate this anecdote to also say: Fradenburg's scholarship isn't just about Chaucer or medieval literature or even psychoanalytic approaches to literature more broadly; it's about life, it's about how we, in her own words,

need knowledge of how to do things every day in every way in our real environments; and we are not yet very close to eliminating the contingency and changefulness of living.  When it comes to talking, listening, courting, negotiating, playing basketball, playing the violin, making peace, leading an organization, the humanities teaches us how to live successfully—how to adapt to, and (re-)create, our circumstances, by seeing more keenly, hearing more polyphonically, interpreting more humbly, richly and carefully, speaking to each other more persuasively, and much, much more. ["The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis," The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry 39.4 (2011): 589-609]

Relationality, intersubjectivity, aliveness, resilience, care of the [confabulated] self and also of others, playfulness, healing, the arts of living, and thriving seem, increasingly, to be the key watchwords and concerns of Fradenburg's work, and at the same time, the so-called "literary" mode is still central to these concerns, such that,

Interpretation and relationality depend on one another because all relationships are unending processes of interpretation and expression, listening and signifying.  In turn, sentience assists relationality: we can’t thrive and probably can’t survive without minds open to possibility, capable of sensing and interpreting the tiniest shifts in, e.g., pitch and tone. ["The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis"]

Although it may seem, that in some of her recent writings, Fradenburg has been turning more toward psychoanalysis + cognitive studies and away from a concentrated focus on medieval literature, per se, her essay "Living Chaucer" tells a different story about a long and warm relationship with Chaucer in which the "literary friendship" Fradenburg feels for Chaucer "is an attachment his work actively solicits, to a degree and in ways unique to his corpus but consistent both with premodern and contemporary understandings of the signifier and its role in intersubjective, hence also political and social, process" ["Living Chaucer," p. 41]. Therefore, Chaucer's poetry is central to Fradenburg's thinking on something she has written eloquently about before in numerous pieces, and expressed in her recent essay "(Dis)Continuity: A History of Dreaming," where she writes that, "we all live in many different times; different times live on in us and our practices" [p. 88], and therefore, with regard to literature [Chaucer's poetry, for example] and its role in personal and social mental life, we might say, following Fradenburg, that it enables a "shared attention," which is a form of sociality productive of progressive change in history. Literature is also, by its very nature, playful, and thus crucial, as Fradenburg writes, to the sorts of becomings that enable important psychic transformations:

Play values experimentation. When we play, we are more open to the new, from within and without. We become ‘‘neophiles’’ and innovators, making active use of our imaginations. Playing and pretending are crucial to the becomings of living creatures, to adaptation and behavioral flexibility; . . . Play teaches ‘‘vital skills’’; it is transformative and transforming. We can neither thrive nor survive without it. And it is highly contagious, a powerful medium of affect transmission. ["Living Chaucer," p. 57]

This resonates with Joan Retallack's argument -- with which I am in hearty agreement -- that, “To become adult in our culture (which for most of us means to become compliantly productive) is . . . to be increasingly disabled for the kinds of humorous and dire, purposeful play that creates geometries of attention revelatory of silences in the terrifying tenses that elude official grammars” [The Poethical Wager, p. 62].

Perhaps the most important aspect of Fradenburg's "Living Chaucer" essay is its emphasis on the idea that authors, texts [and the textual objects enclosed and projected therein], and readers form somatic-affective [and thus, inter-subjective] assemblages and signifying networks over time, and what this means is,

Chaucer’s words ‘‘live on’’ because the patterns they create really do change our minds and bodies. I believe this viewpoint to be a helpful alternative to our perennial question about whether we are representing the past rightly. Whatever representations of the English past we fashion, they are all in part the result of changes wrought in us, consciously and nonconsciously, by living with Chaucer. The signifiers of the past are in us, whether we understand them ‘‘rightly’’ or not; we will never be certain what they mean, but we will certainly have been possessed by them. And our possession by (and of ) past signifiers further transforms their range of meanings. [p. 45]

Further, "symbols enable living process. Or, to put it another way, living is an art" [p. 45], and literature forms one very important component of what might be called shared sentience [something I argue for myself in work on reading vis-a-vis various object-oriented philosophies], one that would be [and this is the more implicit thrust of the essay, I believe] woefully impoverished and less able to transform itself in positive, open-ended ways, without poetry, without literature and other fine arts. Those of us who work in the humanities, it seems to me [and urged by Fradenburg's and others' thought], must never stop laboring and fighting to stress this point, which might also be put like this: Living is an art; the arts are crucial for living. Our scholarly work, also -- and this cannot be stressed enough -- is also an art, if we could just better grasp and practice this fact. We do not just study and write about the literary arts, but rather, extend and reinvent and multiply them in "our own words" [at least, I want to believe this and have written more about this HERE, HERE, and HERE].

"Living Chaucer" is extraordinary for the way in which it brings together neuroscience [with its concepts of neuroplasticity and mirror neurons], evolutionary/behavioral biology, studies of animal communication, psychoanalysis [Freud on mourning and melancholia, Winnicott on play], and medieval philosophy, among other subjects, to ultimately argue for literature, and Chaucer's poetry especially, as a form of therapeutic care and counter-melancholic "working through," enabled through a shared attention that is always about the process more so than the end, or finish, of anything. Chaucer himself, through his poetry, is a kind of "premodern psychologist" whose continual suspension of so-called final meanings creates what Fradenburg describes as a "friendly" liminal clearing in which so-called self-knowledge can really only be accessed communally, or in the company of good listener-conversationalists with a predisposition to welcome the Other [like Chaucer and his narrators!]. Through Chaucer's art, we undo our isolation and move closer to the sort of fellowship so crucial for living, and for thriving [together]. As Fradenburg herself puts it, in what for me is the most moving line of the essay, and worth bracketing here [twice! -- see above],

What enables us to risk change is the feeling that we are understood and (therefore) accompanied. [p. 60]

In the final analysis, as Fradenburg herself avers, play and shared attention are so important to so many species, including humans, that they may even be an end in themselves. We might also call this learning, or the university: the endless [playful, but also at times, sorrowful] processes we must commit ourselves to, with their open-ended [Chaucerian] mutliplicity of perspectives, and their cultivation of the [non-utilitarian] arts of life which may have more to do with personal and social well-being than we have previously imagined. For this, and many other reasons, Fradenburg's work hails us to this inter-temporal pedagogical-artistic project, and asks us, not just to innovate our scholarship accordingly, but to reclaim the humanities itself as the site of care and healing, and thus, of love itself, especially when we understand love [as I do], in Lauren Berlant's terms, as a form of "emotional time," where "it is possible to value floundering around with others whose attention-paying to what's happening is generous and makes liveness possible as a good, not a threat" [Lauren Berlant, "Starved," South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3 (2007): 440]. Fradenburg's work is itself that sort of generous attention-paying, by which we are enriched, and yes, enlivened.