File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2004/lyotard.0411, message 137


From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: sideways - incapacity
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 21:39:20 -0600


Geof,

I really can't do justice to your earlier post tonight. I'm too drunk
and tired, but I'll try. You mention Rilke in connection with love. I
think his poetry has an interesting connection with the theory of the
multitude and the general intellect.

Rilke spoke of humanity as becoming 'bees of the invisible'.  At first
this seems like quaint and eccentric metaphysics, until you begin to
realize how apt a description this really is for immaterial labor in a
post-Fordist age. 

Despite the pious references to Nietzsche, Rilke seems to be on more of
a Hegelian path when he posits an alienated humanity in migration away
from nature (joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up even in
marriage, for everything is womb) towards the terrible angels who
subsume opposition and negativity with themselves.

I agree with you when you say:

"Love is thus not, as the dialectic of desire suggests, the affirmation
of the self in the negation of the loved object; it is, instead, the
passion and exposition of facticity itself and of the irreducible
impropriety of beings.  In love, the lover and the beloved come to light
in their concealment, in an eternal facticity beyond."

However, it is necessary to be more concise about what is meant by this.


In an essay entitled "The Ambivalence of Disenchantment", Virno speaks
of the fact that "alienation, far from eliminating the feeling of
belonging, empowers it. The impossibility of securing ourselves within
any durable context disproportionately increases our adherence to the
most fragile instances of the "here and now". What is dazzlingly clear
is finally belonging as such, no longer qualified by a belonging to
something."

This is also what Rilke observes in connection with the sublime Angel.
It is not merely that the lover realizes the negation of the loved
object, but rather that in this recognition of the negation of love, the
lover realizes something else, "no longer qualified by a belonging to
something". 

As Rilke writes:

"But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;
for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing 
of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)
who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified. 
Begin again and again the never attainable praising;
Remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was
Merely a pretext for achieving his final birth. 
But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back
Into herself, as if there were not enough strength 
To create them a second time."

What I am trying to suggest is that in mythic terms, Rilke has already
realized the basic homelessness of the multitude ("Alas who is there we
can turn to, not angels, not men") with the recognition that a new form
of love is necessary; neither the Christian love of agape or duty nor
the romantic love of possession of the desired beloved, but a new kind
of love, which like the angel, feeds upon death and the very loss of the
beloved.

"Have you imagined Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl
deserted by her beloved might be inspired 
by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love
and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her"? Shouldn't this
most ancient of sufferings finally grow 
More fruitful for us?  Isn't it time we lovingly 
Freed ourselves from the beloved, and quivering, endured:
As the arrow endures the bowstring's tension. So that 
Gathered in the snap of release it can be more than 
Itself. For there is no place were we can remain."

Or, as Virno puts it, 

"Today defection and exodus express the feeling of pure belonging that
is typical, in Bataille's terms, of the community of all of those who
have no community."

Such is the homeless love of the multitude. 

Is this what you meant by a love that is capable of its own incapacity?

eric


   

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