Guess work

Posted on | July 21, 2010 | 5 Comments

‘Lovers are like detectives: they are trying to find something out that will make all the difference.’ — Adam Phillips, On Love

Probably the least useful thing to do after getting married is to have to go back to work and put together a course reader for “Intimacy, Love & Friendship”. I haven’t changed the structure too much since last year, but this time I have some teaching relief, so there will be a couple of guest lectures.

This week I’ve been revisiting some long standing recommendations – Laura Kipnis’ Against Love and Adam Phillips’ On Flirtation (it was funny – or uncanny? – that while doing so, I saw Kipnis being quoted in a weekend newspaper feature on adultery… it sounds as though she may have softened her position with time.)

It’s hard to teach students about love when so many of them claim to have never felt it before. Of course, this proves that they already have clear ideas about what “it” is; that they are already convinced they will know it when they see it.

When we talked about this in class last year, it was only a brave few – those who admitted to having mourned lost loves – who felt confident enough to identify the experience “accurately”. It worried me that so many others seemed fixated on epistemology over ontology. They mostly seemed concerned about being marked down in the course if they hadn’t experienced “authentic” love… yet.

The course was originally written (not by me) to explore erotics, but a significant number of students were only comfortable talking about love when it was devoid of sex/romance: sibling or parental love, for instance – and I realize that isn’t a clear distinction in this context. The point is they would do this without any attempt to understand these relationships according to cultural narratives, Freudian or otherwise.

On romance, Phillips is useful because he shows how ‘our languages of love are versions of theology and epistemology, they are relentlessly redemptive and enlightening.’ Part of his project is to force us to question the psychoanalytic ‘romance of disillusionment’:

in which falling in love is the (sometimes necessary) prelude to a better but diminished – better because diminished – thing; a more realistic appreciation of oneself and the other person (to which the rejoinder of the aesthete can be: If this is ‘real’, then let’s make something else).

Like Lauren Berlant’s essay, “Love, A Queer Feeling”, Phillips explains how ‘the fluency of idealization’ that we feel in the falling of falling in love comes to be ‘replaced by the halting of ambivalence’.

In his view:

…it may be that in this twilight home of disappointment, which psychoanalysis promotes, people are not suffering from their knowledge, but from losing a more ruthless capacity for self and/or reinvention. It is not truth that they have gained but their versionality, so to speak, that they have lost.

In several different essays, including an amazing one on the paradoxes of “success”, Phillips makes us aware of the many lives we could be, indeed already are, living. Right now I find this a comforting kind of ethics because it forces me to pay attention to contingency. The stories that have been dominating my life to this point do not need to stay in the spotlight for good.

In coming weeks, though – particularly when it comes to talking about the changing function of marriage – I want to think more about:

the senses in which knowing people – or certain kinds of knowledge about people – can be counter-erotic; that the unconscious intention of certain forms of familiarity is to kill desire.

For Philips, at least:

certain ways of knowing people diminish their interest for us and… this may be their abiding wish. So we have to watch out for the ways people invite us – or allow us – to know them; and alert ourselves to the possibility that knowing may be too tendentious, too canny, a model for loving.

Category: Teaching

Comments

5 Responses to “Guess work”

  1. Glen
    July 21st, 2010 @ 2:10 pm

    “the unconscious intention of certain forms of familiarity is to kill desire”

    oh noes!!!!!11

  2. Sarah
    July 21st, 2010 @ 3:13 pm

    Really interesting observations about your students, particularly as I remember Linnell Secomb (who previously taught the course – for others who might not know) saying that she experienced students being really conservative and pro-marriage (or at least, not seeing a problem with marriage). It is funny given your respective subject positions in relation to sexuality and marriage (you = heterosexual marriage, and Linnell = queer & critical of marriage).

    My point being, that I wonder if it is just “too personal” to talk about love in a peer policed context without eliciting defensive responses that then get directed in certain ways depending on the subject position and political sensibility of the person doing the eliciting? But then again, perhaps you and Linnell just got very different students, and asked very different questions of them.

    When you say – “It worried me that so many others seemed fixated on epistemology over ontology. They mostly seemed concerned about being marked down in the course if they hadn’t experienced “authentic” love… yet.” – do you mean that you were worried by students caring only about their ‘marks’ and their ‘success’ on the course, rather than using the ideas you were teaching to work through their own experiences? And is it only their own ontologies that they were recalcitrant to examine, or the ontologies of loving/being in love?

  3. melgregg
    July 23rd, 2010 @ 1:50 pm

    Um, I would refute the synopsis of Linnell and my respective identities *and* politics here.

    But that’s beside the point of your question, which I would answer as yes. It did worry me that students cared more vocally about their marks and success than they did the ideas. It’s hard to generalise though, and this problem isn’t confined to my course.

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  5. Kristian
    July 26th, 2010 @ 6:59 pm

    @Sarah

    I found your comment, in particularly this part:

    “(you = heterosexual marriage, and Linnell = queer & critical of marriage).”

    somewhat troubling as it seems to make significant and unhelpful assumptions about the relationship between marriage and one’s identity (and though it should be obvious, I must say I’m speaking strictly for myself here).

    So, what I read in your statement (and my reading could be wrong!) is that being in a heterosexual marriage somehow forecloses the possibility of being critical of marriage, and indeed, that queer identity forecloses the possibility of being non-critical of marriage.

    I feel there is something deeply conservative about the conjunction of the identities “conservative” and “pro-marriage” as it seems to require a certain ahistoric construction of marriage to make sense, and it evokes a whole lot of baggage around conservativism that may or may not be applicable to those who find themselves on the “pro-marriage” side of the equation.

    For example; The social movement for same-sex marriage is, as far as marriage goes, a pretty conservative movement. What it demands is access to a conservatively defined historically contingent institution. In this manner of thinking the “you” of “you = heterosexual marriage” and “you = homosexual marriage” is one and the same. What marriage is, what it means, it’s political/ ethical/ social uses and misues are left aside.

    I’d also want to quickly suggest that criticism of marriage might come not from rejection of it, but from within it – in the sense that one could take marriage too seriously (in the same way Mouffe, Laclau etc critique democracy by taking it too seriously, by demanding more than mere democracy from democracy). I see this kind of radical critique being excluded in your comments (Marriage is too important to be reduced to a mere legal codification of sexual/financial relations between two consenting adults!).

    Anyway, I’d be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on this. As I’m very imminently about to enter into the whole marriage institution myself (although not a State-sanctioned one), I guess your comment struck a nerve… or a chord… or something.

    (And apologies in advanced if I completely misread you or seem to have read you in a less than generous manner.)

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