From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: love and difference
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 19:52:38 -0500


Steve, Geof, Karen, all:

I'm not sure what I have to add to this conversation. Please regard
these note as more a series of notations than actual arguments.  

The whole nature/culture divide strikes me as very problematic and it is
interesting that either side of the / can be used to legitimize
particular positions. Thus, at one time gays tended to appropriate the
'gayness is biological' argument in order to argue against
fundamentalists who argued that it was merely a lifestyle choice.  In a
similar way, feminists have argued against biology in more cultural
terms to extend the elasticity of gender definitions.  To the extent
that both the gay and feminist positions are progressive, what kind of
aporia is it when contradictory modes of argumentation are used to
support their respective positions?  Is there another way to legitimize
these things without falling into the nature/culture divide?  And will
the current genome project serve to mandate a kind of genetic
essentialism that is really more political than biological?

On love, most of what I have read tends to place it's origins in the
middle ages rather than the nineteenth century.  The so-called 'courtly
love' tradition was certainly a revolution of the sensibility when it
first emerged.  

Two brief points:

1. Since marriage among the nobility tended to be based on property
relationships and power alliances, courtly love usually was adulterous
or transgressive.  Consider as examples - Lancelot and Guinievere,
Tristan and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise.

2. Perhaps on account of 1, courtly love could not easily be
consummated.  Thus, it led to a strong fantasy component which tended to
be productive of the imagination's latent tendencies.  Dante was married
to someone other than Beatrice, but his wife never once appears in
either 'The New Life" or the 'Commedia.' Similarly, Petrarch never
consummated his love for Laura. 

What does it mean that an anima figure who does not exist in reality
becomes the 'muse' engendering the great poetic tradition of the West?
Subtract Dante, Petrarch, the minnesingers, and much of what we call
Western literature disappears.  The ironic thing about this, of course,
is that historically, one of the major sources for this tradition
appears to have come from Islam.  

eric