Sat Oct 21 09:12:12 1995
From: from InterScripta (Anne Clark Bartlett)
Jeffrey makes a very interesting argument. I just taught *The Knight of
the Cart* in my grad seminar, "writing the body in the middle ages," and
I've come up with a slightly different spin on this question of naming and
identity and self-negation. This class session was devoted to the topic
of "courtly bodies in community" (clearly, the questions one asks
determine the answers one gets). I would respond to your argument by
saying that Lancelot's (and Christ's) eagerness to be ritually humiliated
function to disrupt communal bonds from the inside, rather than the
outside (both L and C were born to be members of the corporate body that
their manipulation of language and identity fragments). Physical love and
the "ownership" of identity (both through display and disguise) are (or
threaten to be) assertions of self-interest which destabilize a cultural
formation. Of course, in the case of Christ and Lancelot, the communal
body is always already locked in a struggle between destruction and
definition--since both figures come from inside a system of power
relations that initiates and constrains those forces.
Just a circumlocuitous way to pose the question: can one "get outside" a
cultural formation, a structure of ideologies that makes it possible for
one to become a subject of discourse(s)? Wouldn't this lead to the most
impossible silence of all, the silence not of self-negation (which
implies a prior self available to negate) but of non-being?
Sun Oct 22 09:36:32 1995
From: Edwin Duncan (from InterScripta list)
Hi, Jeffrey.
My Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines masochism as
1) a sexual perversion characterized by pleasure in being abused
esp. by a love object; 2) pleasure in being abused or dominated:
a taste for suffering.
So, my question is this: when you say Christ was a masochist,
just what exactly do you mean? And might you not be oversimplifying
the issue a bit by assigning a fundamentally sexual motive to something
which may have been a little more complex than that?
Sun Oct 22 09:39:03 1995
From: Jeffrey Cohen
Edwin,
Thanks for the chance to clarify (yet again). If Christ and Lancelot are
masochists, they are not "masochists" as defined by Webster, or (more
importantly), by any kind of _Psychopathia Sexualis_. They are
masochists in the mode of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch as explicated through
the work of Gilles Deleuze. You can see that I'm using "masochism" in a
very special sense here, contiguous but not identical to its merely
sexual definition.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was horrified to discover that a perversion had
been named after him. His books are not about titillation (although
there's plenty of that) -- but are also a kind of philosophical inquiry
into the ways nationalism and imaginary history imprint sexuality.
Masochism has to do with enacting scripts taken from one sphere of
culture across a "personal" body that is pushed to its very limits ..
which turn out to be that culture's limits. It may or may not be
sexual, but is always (in this specific sense) revolutionary.
Lancelot, I like to argue, would be similarly horrified to discover that
a romance (Le Chevalier de la charrette) had likewise been named after
him (despite the best attempts of its authors). Thus the title of my
essay: "Masoch/Lancelotism." Chretien's romance is not simply about
adultery, not simply about sex, but rather explores through the bedroom
the operation of a power that is political and spiritual.
So, that's what I'm using "masochism" to convey: the suffering of a
single body that becomes the focal point for all kinds of cultural
energy. There's a real but paradoxical strength in that kind of
submission, and also a very real danger to the social order.
Mon Oct 23 07:29:49 1995
From: Edwin Duncan <E7E4DUN\@TOE.TOWSON.EDU> (from InterScripta)
Thanks for trying to make clear to me what you mean when you say
Christ is a masochist. Unfortunately, I'm afraid my thickheadedness
and lack of familiarity with the terminology of literary criticism
(or is it Freudian psychoanalysis?) are turning out to be serious
obstacles. Thus, I follow you up to a point when you say that you
are not using the term _masochism_ as Webster defines it but "in a
sense contiguous to but not identical to its merely sexual definition."
But does a sense "contiguous to but not identical to" include or
exclude the sexual basis of the term and/or the "thrill from pain"
sense of the term? If it includes the thrill, then who is getting the
thrill--Christ or someone else? If it excludes the thrill, then what
is left of the definition?
You may have been clarifying this when you said that "Masochism has to
do with enacting scripts taken from one sphere of culture across a
`personal' body that is pushed to its very limits...which turn out to be
that culture's limits." My problem is that I can't understand that
sentence, either. Maybe if you gave an example of an "enacted script"
and of a "`personal' body," then I might understand better what you mean
by masochism.
One final question: Which of the following would you consider masochists?
_X_Christ ___Socrates ___Gandhi ___M.L. King ___Custance (from
(Man of Law's Tale)
Sorry to be so dense about all this.
Mon Oct 23 07:32:44 1995
From: Jeffrey Cohen
Edwin,
I'm not sure what is gained by creating a checklist for masochism and
then classifying famous historical and literary figures according to it.
In fact, I would argue against a transhistorical phenomenon called
"masochism" at all: I'm speaking of a specific context (Chretien's
romance, and its blurring of Lancelot into Christ), and wouldn't want to
divorce my theoretical framework from that context. An analogue might be
reconstructing the grammar of a medieval dialect: you wouldn't want to
conflate the morphology of forms proper to, say, eighth century West Saxon
with similar but not identical forms from Northumbria a century
later. Words attain their meaning through their relation to a specific
field (though, of course, that field doesn't assure singular or
unambiguous meanings).
Yes, comparative work is useful, but there are obvious limits: one
doesn't grid temporally distinct morphogeneses (of bodies or of phonemes)
as if they were ahistorical, unembedded in a cultural moment.
It would be interesting to explore the power of Custance's
"masochism" (or to investigate if one should use the term "masochism" of
her at all; my inclination would be to use it, but I would want to think
through the argument at greater length). The argument I've made in my
essay may or may not be generalizable to Chaucer (or to Socrates, for
that matter); I would like to think that I've laid the ground work
(shaky as it may be) for such an investigation. So, yes, I can give off
the cuff assessments and so forth, but the only argument I'd really stick
behind is the one I've thought through about Lancelot.
Could I suggest that you reread the essay, and see if that
doesn't clear up some of your confusion? I'd be happy to talk with you
at further length about my methodology, but don't want to merely summarize
what's easily available in more reasoned form. Meanwhile I'll go back to
the longer version of the essay, especially to the part that explicates
the mapping of the passion narrative across the body of Lancelot, and see
if posting some of that might help further; mainly it was excised to
shorten the essay to conference length.
Cheers,
Jeffrey
Mon Oct 23 07:34:51 1995
From: NORDOFF-PERUSSE,TERRY <B2MX\@MUSICB.MCGILL.CA> (from InterScripta)
I very much appreciate Jeffrey's attempts to clear up his notion
of Christ as masochist, but also appreciate the confusion that
the language of theory/cultural studies can cause. In a sense,
words/terms/categories lose their meaning and take on whatever
meaning the user intends. Which may be very different from
what the reader/hearer understands.
Is there a possibility that by utilizing language that has
such a multiplicity of meanings that any meaning at all
disappears? And is it also possible that by using language
that is exclusionary - in that it only has meaning for
those apprenticed in decoding it - that what started out
as a democratic movement is becoming progressively more
undemocratic? In other words, are we creating yet another
ivory tower from the shards of the one that CS was supposed
to shatter? To put it more bluntly, can the intellectual
debate about, say, contextualizing trans-gender eroticism
have any real effect on the fifteen-year-old drag hooker
boy from Minneapolis? Or are we fooling ourselves as
to how inclusionary and democratizing and "opening-up"
any movement that starts in acdemia can be?
Just more thoughts at random from the north.
Mon Oct 23 07:42:21 1995
From: Edwin Duncan (from IS)
I was trying to figure out why you had labelled Christ a masochist,
so I offered the names of some other famous non-violent martyrs in an
effort to ascertain how your system of labelling worked. I was guessing
that if you considered Christ a masochist, then you might also consider
one or more of these others a masochist, too.
>In fact, I would argue against a transhistorical phenomenon called
>"masochism" at all: I'm speaking of a specific context (Chretien's
>romance, and its blurring of Lancelot into Christ), and wouldn't want to
>divorce my theoretical framework from that context.
Does this mean then that you are not calling Christ the historical figure
a masochist since he is beyond the context you are confining yourself to?
>Could I suggest that you actually read the essay, and see if that
>doesn't clear up some of your confusion?
I read the essay. My big problem there is that I am not familiar with _Le
Chevalier de la Charrette_, the literary text on which all your theorizing
is based. But I didn't see Christ discussed in the essay, nor any
specific discussion which addressed your designating him a masochist--so
I'm not sure how he fits into the picture.
Is it not possible for you to explain in a paragraph or two what you
consider a masochist to be and why you think Christ fits that description?
Mon Oct 23 08:09:17 1995
From: Jeffrey Cohen
Will it be shocking to say
that I'm not talking about a transhistorical, acultural phenomenon called
"Christ" either, but a specfic version of Christ derived from the passion
narrative in Mark commingled with the apocrypha and distilled through
Chretien's own peculiar lens? That the Middle Ages had many, many
versions of Christ is hardly a new thing to say; anyone who has read
"The Dream of the Rood" and (say) the Matthean *passio* in the Vulgate knows
that. Yes, Christ is
*supposed* to always, everywhere have a coherent and unchanging identity
(that's what salvation history is all about), but in cultural practice he
does not. The thread on Mary on the InterScripta discussion bears this insight (truism?) out in the
cultural history of another religious body. I'm not making a profound or
even Derridean comment on the nature of truth here, but offering an
observation based on common sense.
So, was Christ a masochist? Well, before anyone answers that question,
they would do well to ask: whose Christ? whose "masochism"? We return
to that first observation about necessary definition of terms, only to find that even
theological absolutes need their precise elaborations, too.
Does that help, Edwin?
Tue Oct 24 04:58:32 1995
From: Weisweiler\@mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de
Cologne (Germany), October the 24th 1995
Dear Mr. Cohen!
In your essay I read on the net you are writing: "Like Lacan,
Chrétien was fascinated by this double signification for ‘non’ [...]."
This argument has no evidence for me: one single rime in a text with
thousands of them does not prove anything. But there is something else
that surprises me in this sentence. How do you know that Chrétien was
fascinated by the words ‘nom’ and ‘non’ like Lacan? Perhaps because
Chrétien told you so after having read the books by Lacan ...
Umberto Eco writes in his ‘Postille’ to The Name of the Rose that
postmodern scholars are always looking for the beginning of their epoch;
does postmodernism start in 1968, in 1945 or in 1900? Every postmodern
scientist is discovering another ‘first’ postmodern author that lived
even earlier than the authors found by his colleagues. One day, Eco
claims, postmodern scholars will say that the name of the first
postmodern author is Homer. You do not go so far, but you are
maintaining that a 12th century author is thinking the same way as
a man living in the 20th century.
Your last sentence makes your method clear: "I conclude, after a long
process, substituting Lancelot 's masochistic desires, which are
Chretien's masochistic desires, for their origin, for my own." You are
projecting your own psychological structure onto a medieval man we only
know by his romances. This is in fact a biographical approach to
literature. But you must not forget that cognitive structure and even
the Freudian term of the Ueber-Ich (superego) are determined by the
social structure. (Cf. the psychological studies by Luria (1976),
Olson (1994); the anthropological studies by Goody (1963),
Denny in Olson/Torrance (1991); the sociological study by
Norbert Elias: Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und
psychogenetische Untersuchungen. 2 vol., Frankfurt on the Main 1976
etc.) So, please, talk more about the Middle Ages, try to understand
their specific modes of thoughts and stop projecting the structures of
postmodern psyche onto every book you read.
Yours sincerely
Jochen Weisweiler
Tue Oct 24 13:23:39 1995
From: Jeffrey Cohen
I am tempted to say, "OK Jochen Weisweiller, I'll stop projecting my own psychoses back onto medieval texts now. Thanks for scolding me." But that would be masochistic, and only prove your point.
Allow me to elucidate an allusion that I'm fairly certain you didn't pick up on. The non (= nom, "name, noun") / non ( = "not, none") jeu de mots that both Chretien and Lacan return repeatedly to is not to be taken as conclusive evidence that Chretien had in fact read Lacan, but rather that, at least in French, one assertive signification is always about to slide into another negational one. The allusion to Lacan is to the notion of the "nom du pere" in its double sense: the Name of the Father (nom propre, for Chretien) that lancelot refuses in his self-identity, and the non du pere, the NO of the father that triggers through its prohibitional power the entry into the Symbolic (that is, the structure of Law that orders culture and renders the world [illusionarily] coherent). Is it so surprising that both Lacan and Chretien explore similar themes through similar wordplay .. and that theory becomes romance even as romance actively theorizes identity? (Check out Lacan's essay on the Mirror Stage and you'll see that romance is behind his theorization of "immured" subjectivity).
Tue Oct 24 16:30:43 1995
From: Edwin Duncan (from InterScripta)
If I'm reading you correctly, your use of the term stems from Christ's
refusal to "assert his identity to a power whose punishments he embraced
as an act of supreme defiance." Whether he "embraced" the punishments
as an act of "supreme defiance" (does Chretien imply this?) or endured
the punishments because he had to so that the scriptures might be ful-
filled (Matt.26:54), is a point I won't quibble over. However, I still
have trouble seeing how either interpretation makes him a "masochist"
unless he somehow relishes (or derives personal pleasure from) the
punishment itself. Socrates also "embraced" his punishment as an act
of "supreme defiance" against his accusors, and a couple of months
before his assassination, MLK acknowledged that his "defiance" would
probably result in his death. But in none of these cases do I see
pleasure in pain or masochism in any sense of the term as I understand
it. But I realize that you have already stated that you weren't using
the dictionary definition of masochism--but if you aren't, then why use
the term at all? Or if you are, then why not briefly define it? Other-
wise, people may misread you.
Oh, well, I will leave it at that. I have enjoyed the interchange and
hope I have learned something.
Sincerely,
Edwin Duncan
Tue Oct 24 16:35:11 1995
From: Laurie Finke<finkel\@kenyon.edu>, from InterScripta
>I very much appreciate Jeffrey's attempts to clear up his notion
>of Christ as masochist, but also appreciate the confusion that
>the language of theory/cultural studies can cause. In a sense,
>words/terms/categories lose their meaning and take on whatever
>meaning the user intends. Which may be very different from
>what the reader/hearer understands.
>Is there a possibility that by utilizing language that has
>such a multiplicity of meanings that any meaning at all
>disappears?
This strikes me as the very basis of all language. That meanings are always
contested they are not predetermined in advance. We cannot have recourse to a
dictionary definition of any term in our debates, because dictionaries are
simply a way of hypostasizing what is a much more contested, more fluid
process. In this I am very much a
Bakhtinian (or a Volosinovian, though that rolls less easily off the tongue).
As Volosinov writes (in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) "What is
important for a speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a stable and
always self-equivalent signal, but that it is an always changeable and
adaptable sign" (68). Or paraphrasing Derrida (who says it in a more
complicated way) meaning is context bound but context is boundless (that's
perhaps why we can't say, pace earlier posts, where our examination of say
possible influences of Beowulf should stop). The term masochism doesn't have
a stable pre-determined meaning, it is a term around which those interested in
the control of sexuality or its liberation from control struggle. In fact
the original use of the term, as I understand it, was not intended to apply to
women. Women couldn't be masochistic because masochism was a perversion and
since women were by nature masochistic, it couldn't be a perversion. I think,
though I could be wrong, Freud was the first to apply the term to women. For
the reasons I outline here I have no problem with Jeff's use of the word in his
essay. I think he's try to stretch the word to look at a fascinating cultural
practice, but very much grounding his analysis in the contingency of a
particular historical moment; he is not, I think, offering a methodology that
should be applied wholesale to any and every text. Perhaps that is the
problem we keep coming around to. We keep assuming that there should be one
method that could be applied to each and every text. But perhaps we could
shift our thinking and think of CS as a heuristic device. That we are
attempting to explore culture through a variety of devices, but that our
material very well might shift how we use those devices. That is our
texts--the material we work with--might very well be interacting with our
methodologies and exerting some kind of influence on them. Our texts are
themselves "agents" in this process, as are our methods. (I'm not sure this
makes sense. I think I'm trying to draw here on Bruno Latours notion that
agents aren't just people;sometimes they are the non-human objects of our
study).
Wed Oct 25 16:07:09 1995
From: slhi\@troi.cc.rochester.edu
I take to heart Terry Nordhoff Perusse's comments way above about the
confusions inherent in theoretical language and their potentially
de-democratizing power. But I have also never really been under the
impression that the academic humanities is a "democracy"--in the sense
that it couches its terms to the layman, or brings all of society into
its discussions. Its obscurantism, its reveling in paranomasia and
ambiguity, its resistance to totalizing structures and monolithisms,
the JOUISSANCE, to get hep here, that it takes in the transgression of
boundaries (customizing the meanings of words-- try to understand Lacan
with a dictionary in hand), with double-entendres. . . this seems to
be the Zeitgeist of theoretical argumentation right now. It's a kind
of poetics of discourse which excludes outsiders. So I don't think
that academic arguments are out to impact on "the fifteen-year-old
drag hooker from Minneapolis." Thus none of us are really fooling
ourselves about our undemocraticness. And to address the other polemic,
that was raised above-- the judiciousness of reading an ancient text
through the lens of one's own contemporary psychology. . .can anyone
escape that? What's original about criticism today is that it explodes
the myth that we can. And so it allows us to take hermeneutic liberties
that would not have been the fashion twenty years ago. Yes, masochism
needs to be carefully defined, if you're going to depart from dictionary
definitions, because not all of us, indoctrinated as
we are into various inner circles, speak the same language.
Jeffrey, this is a marvelous forum you've provided for us no shows.
I'm new to the web, so I'll cut my silk short.
Sarah Higley
slhi@troi.cc.rochester.edu
Wed Mar 27 09:17:52 1996
From: kara
What is the difference, really, between a masochist and a martyr?