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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