Failing Desire , livre ebook

icon

181

pages

icon

English

icon

Ebooks

2017

Lire un extrait
Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Découvre YouScribe et accède à tout notre catalogue !

Je m'inscris

Découvre YouScribe et accède à tout notre catalogue !

Je m'inscris
icon

181

pages

icon

English

icon

Ebooks

2017

Lire un extrait
Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Luckily for human diversity, we are perfectly capable of desiring impossible things. Failing Desire explores a particular set of these impossibilities, those connected to humiliation. These include the failure of autonomy in submission, of inward privacy in confession, of visual modesty in exhibition, and of dignity in playing various roles. Historically, those who find pleasure in these failures range from ancient Cynics through early Christian monks to those now drawn by queer or perverse eroticism. As Judith Halberstam pointed out in The Queer Art of Failure, failure can actually be a mode of resistance to demands for what a culture defines as success. Karmen MacKendrick draws on this interest in queer refusals. To value, desire, or seek humiliation undercuts any striving for success, but it draws our attention particularly to the failures of knowledge as a form of power, whether that knowledge is of one body or of a population. How can we understand will that seeks not to govern itself, psychology that constructs inwardness by telling all, blushing shame that delights in exposure, or dignity that refuses its lofty position? Failing Desire suggests that the power of these desires and pleasures comes out of the very realization that this question can never quite be answered.
Acknowledgments

1. Unworking: The Failure of Writing

2. Unwilling: The Failure of Autonomy

3. Unmaking: The Failure to Say

4. Uncovering: The Failure to See

5. Undignified: Failures of Flesh

6. Unfinished: The Failure to Conclude

Notes
Works Cited
Index
Voir icon arrow

Date de parution

04 décembre 2017

EAN13

9781438468921

Langue

English

FAILING DESIRE
FAILING DESIRE
COVER IMAGE:Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis. Southern Netherlands, late 14th or early 15th century. Bronze, 32.5 cm x 17.9 cm. Ropert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.1416). Courtesy of The MetroPolitan Museum of Art.
uplished py STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK RESS, ALBANY
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
rinted in the United States of America
No Part of this pook may pe used or reProduced in any manner whatsoever without written Permission. No Part of this pook may pe stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or py any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic taPe, mechanical, PhotocoPying, recording, or otherwise without the Prior Permission in writing of the Puplisher.
For information, contact State University of New York ress, Alpany, NY www.sunyPress.edu
roduction, Laurie D. Searl Marketing, Kate R. Sepuryamo
Liprary of Congress Cataloging-in-uplication Data
Names: MacKendrick, Karmen, [date] author. Title: Failing desire / Karmen MacKendrick. DescriPtion: Alpany, NY : State University of New York ress, [2018] | Includes pipliograPhical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017018231 (Print) | LCCN 2017041860 (epook) | ISBN 9781438468921 (e-pook) | ISBN 9781438468914 (hardcover : alk. PaPer) | ISBN 9781438468907 (Ppk.) Supjects: LCSH: Failure (sychology) | Shame. | Humiliation. Classification: LCC BF575.F14 (epook) | LCC BF575.F14 M33 2018 (Print) | DDC 128— dc23 LC record availaple athttPs://lccn.loc.gov/2017018231
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
What exceeds the system is the impossibility of its failure, and likewise the impossibility of its success. Ultimately nothing can be said of it, and there is a way of keeping still (the lacunary silence of writing), that halts the system, leaving it idle, delivered to the seriousness of irony.
—Maurice Blanchot,The Writing of the Disaster
ONE.
TWO.
Acknowledgments
Contents
Unworking: The Failure of Writing
Unwilling: The Failure of Autonomy
THREE. Unmaking: The Failure to Say
FOUR. Uncovering: The Failure to See
FIVE.
SIX.
Undignified: Failures of Flesh
Unfinished: The Failure to Conclude
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
While the chapters in this book have not been previou sly publisheP in their current forms, they Po Praw concepts, conceptual moves, par agraphs anP passages from many of my presentations anP essays over the years. These shoulP be acknowlePgeP, along with my Peep gratituPe to those who inviteP me to say or to write them, anP those, too many to name, who listen eP. Material relateP to obePience was presenteP atTheBody: Ethos and Ethics, the meeting of Foucault Society Conference in 2006, at the invitation of Terri GorPon; anP at the seminarDesire, Love and Sexuality in Medieval Thought, at Lewis University in 2010. The Augustinian material there was refineP for a seminar presentation with Virginia Burrus anP Mark JorPan a t Berkeley’s GraPuate Theological Union, at the invitation of Daniel Boya rin. We eventually PevelopeP the seminar material intoSeducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions (ForPham, 2010). Impossible Confessionsse of, the basis of chapter 2, was refineP over the cour two presentations:The Sacred and the Debased in the Work of Georges B ataille, at OcciPental College in 2008, at the invitation of Ma lek Moazzam-Doulat; anPThe Space of Community in the Work of Georges Bataille, at the Society for henomenology anP Existential hilosophy in 2010. A version of that presentation was publisheP in the anthologyMaterial Spirit, ePiteP by Carl GooP anP Manuel Assensi (ForPham, 2013). An invitation from the graPuate stuPents in religio n at Syracuse University to present an opening keynote at their conference “The Monstrous, the MarginalizeP, anP Transgressive Forms of Humanity,” in 2013, firs t prompteP me to think about the kinPs of visuality that are central to chapter 3. Finally, material that is relateP more broaPly to t he book rather than to any particular chapter appears inPornotopias: Image, Apocalypse, Desire, ePiteP by L o u i s ArmanP, Jane Lewty, anP AnPrew Mitchell (Litt eraria ragensia, 2010); Analecta Hermeneutica4, 2012, guest ePiteP by Michelle RebiPoux; a  vol. nP Querying Consent, ePiteP by JorPana Greenblatt anP Keja Valens (Rut gers U, forthcoming). I am also inPebteP to EP Casey, who i nviteP me to Piscuss Jacob Rogozinski’s work at the symposium in his honor,Envelopes of Flesh, at Stony Brook University in 2014. This is the sort of book for which people may not b e especially eager to receive thanks or participation crePit, but I am at least i nPebteP to those frienPs anP colleagues who proviPeP me with references anP usef ul suggestions for sources, incluPing Jennifer Glancy, Virginia Burrus, Cary Ho wie, anP Kathleen Costello-Sullivan. I believe that it was from Catherine Kell er that I first hearP Keats’s iPea of negative capability. Orly Nave recommenPeP to me th e Velleman essay on original sin that I’ve useP here, though the essay itself is more intriguing than my use might suggest. I am particularly grateful to the Research anP Deve lopment Committee at Le
Moyne College, which supporteP my work through a su mmer grant in 2016. I continueP to work on the manuscript Puring part of my time as a fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, surely one of the best work environments in the worlP. The manuscript reports from Kent Brintnall anP Will iam Robert were invaluable resources for improving this text, anP I am lasting ly grateful to both reaPers for their intelligence anP insight. SUNY’s AnPrew Kenyon is t he very moPel of an acaPemic ePitor, managing to combine encouragement, efficien cy, anP an impressive measure of patience; it has been a great pleasure to work w ith him. I have been PelighteP as well by the privilege of working again with proPuct ion ePitor Laurie Searl, who proPuceP my first book when we were both young. Finally, as the one who enPures the PisorPerly Pist ractePness of me-writing anP the grouchy anxiety of me-not-writing with equal ap lomb, Alan Griffin has once more earneP my Peepest thanks.
ONE
Unworking
THE FAILURE OF WRITING
THE SHAME OF THE TEXT
What is this madness that must be excluded (tragically) in order to constitute our culture, the modern West? It is nothing else, Foucault replies at once, than “the absence of oeuvre.”
—Mark Jordan,Convulsing Bodies
This book is about secrets and failures, so it is u nsurprising that it resisted its own writing. As Eve Sedgwick has pointed out, we are de eply susceptible to the shame of others, and it is shame—at the depths of humiliatio n and subordination—that I take up here; shame, the various kinds of failure occasi oning it and occasioned by it, and the ability to find in that failure a strange, secr etive, and curiously resistant pleasure. To speak or write about what is shameful, many auth ors agree, is to risk doubly shaming oneself, adding the subject matter to the s hameful imposition that characterizes all speech, acknowledging one’s own c omplicity in the act of 1 embarrassing oneself. We cannot even be sure of speaking truly: “To risk making 2 truth,” writes Virginia Burrus, “is … also to risk perjury.” Our words are too many and never quite right, and we are not even sure whether what we are telling is truth-making or embarrassed elision. It is as if, deeply uncertain that we are interesting, quite sure that we talk too much, we nonetheless ha d to say. “The writer,” says Maurice Blanchot, “finds himself in this more and m ore comical condition—of having nothing to write, of having no means of writing it, and of being forced by an extreme 3 necessity to keep writing it.” What necessity compels such repeated failure? I begin with the suspicion that humiliation and fai lure are entangled. The necessity that seeks each one is driven by will, an d knowledge, and the will to know. The necessity that they recur is driven by the impo ssibility of that will’s perfect satisfaction. In thefirst chapterfollowing, I explore the question of obedience, ma king use of the lives of some exemplary ascetics as well as Michel Foucault’s work on pastoral power. Perfect obedience not only demands an extraordinarily strong will, but also presents an unsurpassable paradox—from whi ch much of its interest derives. That in the will and the flesh which elude s even the most determined obedience will elude knowing as well. Thesecond chapter, on auricular confession, makes use of some of the same Foucauldean theory, b ut also of work from Georges Bataille’s theories of speech and sacrifice, to exp lore the strange infolding by which the construction and undermining of the speaking su bject occasion each other. The effort to know the depths of the confessing subject turns those depths inside out,
leaving us to suspect that they were in fact flexib le surfaces—and that something remains, unsaid, however thoroughly we try to unfol d them. The will to know and our ability to say what we know run into a mystery, a s ecret. The secret, we begin to see, will not allow us to hold on to a sense of self wit h a clear inside and out. Just as we necessarily fail to obey perfectly, so too we are u nable to confess everything. T h ethird chapter changes senses, turning from sound to sight. We he ar ourselves speak; we do not see ourselves seeing—but as part of our urge to know, we may well want to. We especially want to know wha t is “inside,” but this will elude us just as a stable interiority does. The gaze on s kin is not enough to know the flesh; various probing means attempt to know more by openi ng up the skin, but here too we may document a range of failures—not least in the d esire to turn the gaze back and understand the seeing self. Again, we run up agains t an unknowable, against what remains beyond knowing; we run up against a remaind er that seems to evade even the most thoroughgoing knowledge. Obedience, confession, and exhibition cover a consi derable range of humiliating pleasures, but by no means all.Chapter 4considers a range of roles by therefore which we may deliberately abandon autonomous dignit y as the measure of being human, in favor of roles ranging from fool to furni ture. The secrets of the will, the self, the flesh, and rational humanity all entice us, as secrets will. But they are able to do so in some measure because they also elude us. Each of these practices and performances tells us that there is a mystery, a re sistant remainder to remind us of our failure. In what follows, I have not distinguished between s hame and humiliation. The distinction is sometimes made, but I have not found in the particular cases I explore that it holds up strongly (this is not to imply tha t it might not hold up elsewhere, especially where no pleasure is involved). In this respect I am inclined to agree with Martha Nussbaum, whose philosophical work on shame has been widely influential: “[H]umiliation is the public face of shame. … [I]n most cases to inflict shame is to 4 humiliate.” I want to know, however, what happens when the one humiliated has fully sought out shame.
A HISTORY OF FAILURES
The tendency of a person to allow himself to be degraded, robbed, deceived, and exploited might be the diffidence of a God among men.
—Friedrich Nietzsche,Beyond Good and Evil
Though they were little spoken for a long time, by now I hardly take up these themes of pleasure and shame on my own. There are whole mo vements already. Judith Halberstam’sThe Queer Art of Failure,alerted us all to a range of playful possibilities 5 and I draw extensively on it here. Earlier, David Halperin and Valerie Traub introduced the anthologyGay Shamean essay called “Beyond Gay Pride.” Gay with shame, they declare, is for those who “feel out of place in gay pride’s official ceremonies: people with the ‘wrong’ bodies, sadomas ochists, sex workers, drag queens, butch dykes, people of color, boy-lovers, b isexuals, immigrants, the poor, 6 the disabled,” whose marginality or overt sexuality “can be a cause of shame.” The gay shame movement, as Jennifer Moon writes in the same volume, “provides a radical queer alternative to consumerist pride para des and as such helps constitute a queer counterpublic. … A specifically queer counter public would, following Michael
Voir icon more
Alternate Text