Theoretical Living

The Apostolic Father Ignatius’ letter to Rome is not the earliest account of Christian martyrdom but it is the first piece to describe it from the perspective of the victim, though victim may not be the right word for Ignatius. Indeed, the whole point of the letter is to tell Christians in Rome not to pray for his freedom as that would delay his opportunity to meet God. What are we to make of this curious letter that has come down to us over 2000 years? Ignatius’ desire for death and rebirth in Christ suffuses the letter, unmistakeably taking on a sexual air when he writes about “yearning for death with all the passion of a lover.” The personal destruction he imagines is absolute; not even his ashes should be left. Yet paradoxically this destruction will lead to an even fuller life in Christ. The nothingness of death will become the absolute of God.

Psychoanalytically Ignatius appears to desire the destruction of his own ego. Building off of Leo Bersani’s theory that the pleasure of sex is equivalent to the masochistic pleasure of death, then in the case of martyrdom this pleasure is also associated with transcendent faith. The pleasure Ignatius derives from imagining his own death is not, strictly speaking, sexual but instead the imaginative pleasure of a future absolute. When writing of his death Ignatius does fetishize the moment of death, the variety of creative tortures and hungry beasts he will submit to, but in his own mind this is all for the guaranteed pleasure of becoming one with God. In the paradoxical move from nothingness to the Absolute what Ignatius fulfills is his own personal lack, the gap at the heart of the self that characterizes our finitude in the world. Ignatius will never be completely complementary with the world and thus turns his desire to the promised fullness of God, a promise that can only be fulfilled through his absolute destruction.

This line of thought complicates Freud’s more traditional history of monotheistic religious faith. In Totem and Taboo he places the origins of monotheism in the death of the primal father by his sons, and through their guilt the image of the father is elevated to the place of all-knowing God-father. Freud supplements this social account in The Future of an Illusion where he states personal belief is born from the child’s recognition of their father’s mortality. Out of this recognition the child invents a more powerful father-figure (God) in order to fulfill their desires for security and justice in the world. I don’t know if Freud ever fully reconciles these different social and personal/familial accounts of religious belief. However, in both God-the-father is ultimately aligned with the super-ego as the enforcer of morality and punisher of sins.

In Ignatius’ account of his desire for martyrdom this association of God with the super-ego appears absent. There is some anxiety that he will not be worthy enough for God, but nothing along the overt lines of fear or punishment. In one sense Ignatius does desire security from God, but far from ensuring his own survival this desire drastically devalues his own ego. Instead of the super-ego God may become representative of Ignatius’ id, a primal place of return that fulfills Ignatius’ deepest desires for unlimited pleasure. Indeed, in his conception of becoming one with God it sounds as if Ignatius will experience unlimited pleasure, similar to the infant’s earliest desires for pleasure from what source it can find before recognizing the limiting barriers of reality. Ignatius’ imagined scenario of his own death crosses the desires of sexuality, death, and religion, in a way that makes all three indistinct from their individual expressions, with pleasure of fullness being the overriding concern.

Towards the end of the letter, in insisting to his friends that they try not to prevent this death, Ignatius writes “for I am not writing now as a mere man, but I am voicing the mind of God.” This is a rather amazing sentence for a man who has spent so much time insisting on his own humility and unworthiness before God. If those other moments signified Ignatius’ own devalued ego then here his ego appears to inflate exponentially, encompassing the very voice of God. Another corrective may be necessary of God’s representation in the unconscious. As opposed to Freud I posited that perhaps God is better positioned in the id, as a promised reserve of endless pleasure, yet God may also be able to take a position in the mind of the very faithful in the ego itself. At this moment there is almost a split in the ego, where the subject is dispossessed by an immeasurably greater ego, cathected with the subjects immense desire for God. The self would become, in effect, a prophet that spoke with God.

The difficulty of such a setup is whether this God-ego would be an independent part of the self or if it becomes equated with the subjects ego-ideal. If this is so then the subject would create in themselves a being that they desire to become, and thus belief in God would be the outcome of an immense narcissistic desire to see the self become God. Faith, far from being transcendent, would be the immanent expression of the subject’s own desires. Yet this runs into similar problems as Freud did. It still does not account for the social aspects of religious faith, how they become constituted, or the permutations that faith takes on. This may characterize Ignatius’ specific understanding of early Christianity but it would not apply to all religions. More work would need to be done to craft a proper psychoanalytic theory of religious belief. Yet it is enough to show that religious belief does not follow the simple concept Freud created for it, but that it is a rich concept that traverses all areas of psychoanalytic thought.

Thinking some more about Tim Dean’s “Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking” I keep trying to think if the more heterosexual hook up culture would fit Dean’s definition of public sex culture, or does it rather expose the realities of power relations that Dean dismisses a little too easily. Dean clearly considers “barebacking” a near universal practice if it is just considered as sex without protection. In this case heterosexual couplings could engage in barebacking as often as homosexual couplings. However, in terms of the specific practice of “barebacking” that Dean mainly focuses on, that is with the intention of being infected with HIV, he does not make any analogies to specifically heterosexual/genital acts. Though again this gets tricky when one considers there’s no real limitations when it comes to gender or acts in “barebacking” or hook up culture, so some of these thoughts will be unfortunately reductionist. As with any writing about gender/sexuality I’ll apologize ahead of time for any gross generalities or mistakes I make, and that I am not able to consider all kinds of sexual cultures in this necessarily short analysis.

Now, out of his analysis of “barebacking” culture Dean valorizes gay cruising and public sex culture as a possible ethics open to the strangeness of alterity. Dean is hardly the first queer theorist to valorize gay public sex culture, as Michael Warner and Leo Bersani have also written on this. All of them see in gay public sex culture a certain openness to the world, a means for strangers of all classes and races to come together in brief yet intimate encounters. As these public sex cultures have been destroyed, through urban redevelopment and homonormativity, then sex itself has become more privatized, less open to the strangeness of others. Drawing on Samuel Delaney, Dean makes the paradoxical yet fascinating claim that a society with more public sex is probably a safer, closer one.

For me it is interesting to think of this long writing on gay public sex culture and connect it to contemporary debates on the hook up culture, another topic vociferously written about though I have never seen any direct connection made between the two. A definition of hook up culture is itself very difficult, though in my own experience I will tentatively say it is a culture where people come together with the expectation of fleeting sexual encounters, often facilitated by alcohol and other drugs. For the purpose of this comparison I will also assume that hook up cultures are predominately heterosexual in nature, though I’m sure that people of all genders can participate or have their own subcultural practices that would fit this definition. In order to understand if the hook up culture could lead to a similar kind of ethics of contact as gay cruising we first need to consider if they are similar at all. The questions are: is hook up culture a kind of public sex, does its predominately heterosexual participants make it significantly different from gay cruising, is it intimate, and does it encourage an ethics of contact?

1. Is hook up culture public sex? On the one hand yes. The people hooking up often come together in public-like places - parties, concerts, large events, etc. However, this is not the same as the old bath houses, gay bars, and theaters that Dean defines as public. For him any limitation or exclusion of a certain class of people, such as through cost of tickets or membership, starts to privatize a space. In hook up culture the sexual acts are also not often done in a public space. One of the main intentions of participants in hook up culture is often to get another person somewhere else in order to engage in sex. Sometimes this can be a public venue but that doesn’t appear to be a dominant characteristic. In the end hook up culture does not appear to be a kind of public sex culture then, more a kind of liberalized search for private sex that dominates certain populations, like college students, and sexualizes the whole space without actual sexual acts taking place.

2. In the case of hook up cultures predominately heterosexual participation I would say this has to make a difference. As many feminists have noted women seem to often be at a disadvantage in hook up culture, whether in the risks of sexual violence or public shaming. This is not to say women shouldn’t have access to the possibilities of casual sexual encounters, but that hook up culture often does not seem the place for that. It appears to often work instead for the benefit of men, as a way for them to easily obtain sex with women or compete with their friends over sexual conquests. Indeed hook up culture could be said to be an exclusively masculinist affair, with a competition between men facilitated by the exchange of women’s sexual favors (ala Gayle Rubin’s “Traffic in Women”).

3. Hook up culture could also be said to not be intimate in the same ways Dean characterizes “barebacking.” One of the dominant values of hook up culture is the denial of emotional intimacy. It is expected that the participants only seek pleasure physically (even though psychoanalytically pleasure can never be dissociated from our emotions and unconscious) and are not interested in intimacy. This would be the opposite of Dean’s interpretation of “barebacking,” which he sees as a wholly intimate act with strangers that destroys the boundaries of individuals. It is not meant to instrumentalize the other. However, with hook up culture the goal does appear to be to instrumentalize the other for your own pleasure, often from men using women.

4. does hook up culture encourage an ethics of contact then? Perhaps for some participants they can bring their own individual ethics to hook up culture, values of consent and an openess to the other, but these do not appear to be values embraced by the culture as a whole. Hook up culture does not structurally encourage an ethical participation with the other. Indeed when it comes to men relating to women it often appears to encourage unethical behavior. But the same could be said that Dean never fully describes if the “barebacking” subculture encourages ethical behavior, only that one can derive a model of ethical behavior from it. Perhaps the same is possible with hook up culture but it appears to be a much more difficult task.

Here then there are clear power relations that determine the shape of hook up culture. Power is something Dean often dismisses in his analysis. He briefly notes the possible dangers of gay cruising and public sex, but says the pleasures are worth the risk and as long as it is done with an ethics of contact in mind then the participants will be safer. However, in a patriarchal culture it is not clear how women could relate to men on the kind of equal plain that Dean presupposes for the ethical encounter. an entire shift in how men see women would be necessary in order for women to fully enjoy the pleasures of casual sex with men. Or perhaps it is the risk inherent in current relations that Dean thinks makes casual sex worth it. In this case Dean would be reducing the possible risks different genders/sexualities face when it comes to a casual sex culture, not recognizing the specificity of risk that power relations create.

Unfortunately then the dominant values of hook up culture do not appear to be ethical, even though individual participants can certainly bring a sense of ethics to their encounters. This comparison highlights the degree to which Dean does not consider power relations when it comes to cultures of casual sex. I don’t think this disproves his idea of an ethics of contact - an idea I wholly support and want all genders/sexualities to be able to participate in - but that in a patriarchal/heteronormative world the actual casual sex people are having may not yet fit this ethics of contact. This should not stop us from elaborating new ways of being and relating - a task Foucault first gave us that has been taken up by both Tim Dean and Leo Bersani - but that we should still recognize the degree to which practices are enmeshed in power relations and that not all practices can be universalized. Indeed, perhaps the strongest, most ethical practices will be those developed for specific situations and cultures.

I’ve recently finished Tim Dean’s “Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking” and overall it is a fascinating book that I think I will be contemplating for the next couple of weeks. Dean’s main objective in this book is to analyze the gay subculture of “barebacking” - HIV+ men having protection-less sex with each other, often with the intention of being infected - and out of this developing an ethics of contact. This ethics of contact would encourage an openness to the other and recognize the pleasure that comes from the risk of the unknown, a vital pleasure for any functioning democracy.

One fascinating aspect of “barebacking” Dean notes is the way its participants consciously, and unconsciously, desire the overcoming of boundaries, the destruction of neat categories that safer sex and risk reduction are meant to create. These participants appear to desire a shattering of themselves at the moment of their overcoming limits. This is very similar to, and Dean makes this explicit, Leo Bersani’s notion that sexuality is already a primary masochism, that the pleasure of sexuality is the way it shatters the ego. This masochistic pleasure, developed in infants to protect them from being over stimulated, is the actual pleasure of sexuality which itself does not require actual genital pleasure and is even connected with death.

Looking at this definition I cannot help but be struck by the similarities between the sexual imagination and the religious imagination as theorized by some people. I’ve encountered in the work of scholars like Jonathan Smith and Robert Orsi a characterization of the religious imagination as that which destroys boundaries, collapses categories, and in general defies limitation; all aspects that make the definition of religion so notoriously difficult. It would appear that the religious imagination has an interest in shattering conceptions of reality, of overcoming the limits of what is perceived. If the sexual imagination derives its pleasure from its ego-shattering then the religious imagination would appear to be the pleasure of shattering the world, though I am not sure yet whether this outer reality would be identified with the Other or the superego.

Still even this categorization is probably too neat and I would think there is a significant interaction between the sexual and the religious. Bersani already makes this connection in his short book with Adam Phillips “Intimacies”, where he shows the similarities between “barebacking” and certain forms of Catholic asceticism. Indeed, the pleasures derived form religious and sexual practices often seem very similar. Both desire a certain overcoming of boundaries and a connection with something transcendent to the self, again disturbing a simple dichotomy of self/world and sexuality/religion. I wonder if there is a particular drive then deeper than both, or perhaps following Bersani these are both variations of a libidinal death drive, a reaction towards the finitude of life.

It would be very interesting to me to explore this idea of a religio-sexual imagination more. I’ve already thought of possible connections that could be made between Bataille and his work on surplus and sacrifice, Satanic practices and contemporary black metal theory, and “barebacking” as Foucauldian Askesis. One potential outcome of such a study would be to find ways that the religious imagination can keep itself open to otherness without becoming dogma. Orsi in “Snakes Alive” notes how in the history of religious studies “bad” religion is often seen as those practices that explicitly use their imagination, while “good” religion in the Academy became a form of liberal universal Protestantism. The problem with this though is its dogmatism, its refusal to acknowledge, study, and learn from other ways of religious being. Obviously there are many other religious practices that also become dogmatic, some not as nice as the liberal Protestant ethos. Still, seems worth investigating if the value of religion is in its imaginative potential for ways of living, ways that we don’t want to dismiss so easily.

As a strong supporter of the humanities, and a broad education in general, in some ways it pains me to write that. However, after sitting through another graduation ceremony and some lackluster speeches it suddenly crystallized for me that maybe the liberal arts aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. By its teachings the liberal arts education is meant to instill democratic values, tolerance for diversity, and a desire of education for its own sake; in short it is meant to be egalitarian, anti-materialistic, and transformative.

Unfortunately, in my own experience of a liberal arts education and anecdotal evidence from other sources, in practice these are the very values that most colleges hate. The corporitization of American Higher Ed is very much a fact, but at all levels of education. In a way liberal arts colleges have always been about money, the production of rich alumni, but it seems now that this once implicit goal is a mandate cloaked in the language of future” leadership” potential or other euphemisms. When it comes to a decision between college or corporation it seems clear that many schools are now comfortable with sacrificing the former to the latter.

The decline of the humanities is inextricably linked to this corporitization of the liberal arts. The humanities, at their best, teach the art of living. They are against the instrumentalist view of knowledge, its measurement and quantification. Indeed, they often instill actual values, ones that allow students to directly critique their institutions decline and vanity. A continuing focus on career education and the exact economic value of the liberal arts shows how much liberal arts colleges are willing to give up the actual value of education for the long term promise of rich alumni willing to donate.

In some ways this may explain why exactly it is so hard to defend the liberal arts. Yes, part of the explanation is this moment of economic crisis, of a desire for a secure job, but it has not actually been shown that a liberal arts education hurts one jobs prospects. Even an arts graduate is probably going to be ok graduating from a Harvard or Williams. This does point to the other difficulty though, that to defend the liberal arts may be actually to defend an elite education rather than a liberal one. Elite liberal arts colleges have always been a means of reproducing the elite class, historically through the unwritten exclusion of undesirable peoples and now through financial cost. The liberal arts then was not just a philosophy of education but also an ethos for the ruling class, a way of living that connected those at the top and cemented their difference from those below.

To this end at the heart of the liberal arts education is actually a certain desire for the status quo. This status quo is at best a technocratic paternalism. The elites who have been trained to know what is best will lead, while everyone else should follow. Like liberalism itself this ethos is an abstract universalism, wary of particulars and thus incapable of responding to concrete demands made on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, immigrant status, violence, etc. These “others” are told to stay in their place, make nice, be productive and then maybe someday they will be given the full equality that they have always deserved. This just brings into relief the degree to which, today, the liberal arts education is a structure of exclusion and hierarchy, its mission to educate premised on the wage subordination of immigrants, low-class workers, and adjunct professors.

The paradox is that, beside this dominant strain of an liberal arts ethos, the Academy has also become the site of engaged scholars and fields such as ethnic studies, gender studies, English, History, and others that have a sustained focus on the kind of radical social change that would disrupt the status quo represented by the values of the liberal arts. The right wing attack on the Academy certainly has these disciplines in mind more than the liberal arts education in general, though certainly that sometime comes under attack as well. This divide can best be summed up by the view that while a liberal arts education encourages dialogue - no matter how much one side is willing to deny the humanity of the other side - a more radical education questions the very dynamics of dialogue in the first place, questioning if it can even happen at all.

It is hard to explain why exactly this odd division in the Academy has occurred, though I’m sure there are good structural explanations for it. It does show that even if we abandon the liberal arts as the sham it has always been we are not completely out of options. A robust, critical field of humanities and social science disciplines has developed a pedagogy of transformation, on both the social and individual level. I think my prior confusion over defending the liberal arts education had to do with this mistaken connection that these transformative disciplines are often housed in institutions officially devoted to a liberal arts education. Still, a new kind of education is possible, one not based on the implicit hierarchies of the liberal arts but open to all. This can be seen in Occupy Wall Streets new emphasis on public and open education, both as a means of addressing the student loan crisis and creating radical public spaces.

Indeed, one of the most damning aspects of the liberal arts is the way it has facilitated making the Academy the privileged site of knowledge production. Colleges and Universities of Higher Ed hold the monopoly on education, to the extent that when they start deciding that they no longer need qualified teachers - again slashing the humanities - then there is no other place for someone specifically trained in these fields to go. This should no longer be the case. Just become someone is outside of Higher Ed does not mean they should be denied knowledge, in all its breadth and depth, nor should others be expected to become debt peons to pay for it. New scholarly institutions, both for research and teaching, need to be developed. The liberal arts model no longer works and probably never has. Let’s start thinking about what it would actually mean to have an educated society, in every sense of the word, and start designing our institutions for those goals instead.

When people are about to die, all they want to do is fuck. People in jails and hospital, all they want to do is fuck. The helpless, the impotent, the castrated, all they want to do is fuck. The seriously injured, the suicidal, the impenitent disciples of Heidegger. Even Wittgenstein, the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, all he wanted to do was fuck. Even the dead, I read somewhere, all they want to do is fuck. Sad to say and hard to admit, but that’s the way it is.

Roberto Bolano’s essay “Literature + Illness = Illness,” collected in English inThe Insufferable Gaucho, is probably the purest formulation of his life philosophy, a searing examination of the trinity of death, evil, and literature. Written near the end of his life as Bolano knew he was dying from liver failure, Bolano still finds the energy to ruminate on dying, bad films, Latin American, and 19th-century French poetry. In this essay there can be no doubt that Bolano saw himself as heir and disciple to the literary tradition of Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, and Mallarme. Thus it is possible to see in a few lines of Baudelaire the whole truth that Bolano was constantly circling around, the kernel from which that massive tome2666undoubtedly sprung.

It is a bitter truth our travels teach!

Tiny and monotonous, the world

has shown-will always show us-what we are:

oases of fear in a wasteland of ennui!

Oases of fear in a wasteland of ennui! Is this not a profound truth for the 20th-century? Where Man, and always Man and not his excluded others, discovered the greatest horror that came from being bored, that even the file clerk at his desk could still kill millions? How removed he must be to not even feel hatred but only boredom at his terrible task. In the face of such a truth Bolano reasonably asks what would it mean to go on living. Bolano the exile, the man who had traveled all of Latin America and Europe, chased by the shadow of dictators and detectives, knows better than any contemporary writer (except maybe W. G. Sebald) the omnipresence of horror.

In an oasis you can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it’s an oasis of horror, if that’s the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting toward the condition of horror.

Is there a solution to such a problem? Of course there is, even after all the horror and boredom. Drawing on a poem by Mallarme that is too long to quote here, Bolano writes:

Mallarme wants to start all over again, even though he knows that the voyage and the voyagers are doomed. In other words, for the author ofIgitur,the illness afflicts not only our actions, but also language itself. But while we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, thenew, which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.

To find hope you first must give up hope. The study of Bolano’s influences has yet to be done, and for a man who had read the entire corpus of Latin American and European literature it will probably be some time before it can happen, but I wonder if that might not be some Jewish sources in there. At the very least Bolano knew Kafka, the Jewish writer par excellant, and Kafka’s message has undoubtedly slipped down through Benjamin, Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida. Is not writing the ability to stare into the horror of the abyss and still say “you cannot deny me my imagination?” In its purest form this is Bolano’s answer to the problem of evil, to both recognize suffering and continue the work, for in the moment of creation the poet and God are the same as they dispel evil from the cosmos together.

Mallarme wrote that a roll of the dice will never abolish chance. And yet every day the dice have to be rolled, just as the vertical-fingers test has to be taken every day.

Domesticating dogs clearly improves humans’ hunting success and efficiency—whether the game (or the dog) is large or small. The same must have been true in the Paleolithic. If Neandertals did not have domestic dogs and anatomically modern humans did, these hunting companions could have made all the difference in the modern human–Neandertal competition.

I can’t help wondering whether the process of domesticating dogs was connected to changes in human anatomy and communication abilities. Domestication is a two-way street, as we know from examples such as the genetic changes that make adult humans able to digest milk. Those mutations arose several times in different human populations after the domestication of cattle. I have no evidence that the change I am about to discuss did or did not occur between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago. But it might have.

Imagine that. What allow early humans to survive and thrive was their better ability to adapt and communicate with their environment, and respond to objects in their environment. Truly gives a new spin on Donna Haraway’s use of “companion species” to describe the human/dog relation.

Source: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.15294,y.0,no.,content.true,page.4,css.print/issue.aspx

1. The World Bank is too large/bureaucratic to change anything effectively and can’t be seen as similar to other actors in Africa.

2. People politicize money too much and don’t think enough about debt/other ways of organizing resources. If you have too much inflation then why not just get rid of money.

3. Twilight may be popular because more people want their sex to be meaningful, but sex has always alternated between being scary and meaningful for people. If anything people have run away from meaningful sex because they are terrified of it. Sex and death are connected.