kill 'em all, or, blue-balls for Jesus!
Music: Mansun Kleptomania It was an amazing week for teaching the rhetoric of religion. In class this week we are reading Plato's Phaedrus dialogue, which concerns the madness of love. In the dialogue Socrates flirts with that famous teen hottie Phaedrus, and offers up a thinly veiled allegory of the wings of one's soul as a penis getting erect and "throbbing" at the sight of beauty (eros). The moral of the story Socrates weaves, however, is that erotic love is merely the mimetic inferior of the transcendent love of The Good/God, agape. That's right, Socrates bascially proclaims, "blue-balls for Deity!"
Just as the class was getting to the key allegorical passage of climax on Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI releases his first encyclical, Deus Cartias Est, in which he laments that erotic love has eclipsed philia and agape the world over, and recommends a return to the ancient Greek health craze of enkrateia, known in our times as being "Master of One's Domain" thanks to Jerry Seinfeld. The newest papal discourse on "blue-balls for Jesus" makes for an excellent class discussion about the persistence of the human condition and the fantasies that orbit death, and provides a very nice justification (I think) for the relevance of studying ancient philosophy. I would also argue that the Pope's message is potentially a positive one--especially all the stuff he says about charity--were it not the case that the priestly caste he shepherds is incapable of following the example of Socrates, mixing an ancient eros with a contemporary philia that has little to do with loving one's neighbor or community charity.
Speaking of love, yesterday Oprah Winfrey spanked James Frey for lying to her and millions of readers in his largely fictional memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Following a Smokinggun.com expose, Frey appeared on Larry King Live and Oprah phoned in to defend the man and his book, arguing that both were models of "redemption" that helped many people. We could make the same argument about the Catholic Church (sorry Jeezy), of course. Nevertheless, after a fury of bad press and countless letters Oprah decided to change her tune and skewered Frey on her program (it was uncomfortable to watch . . . the man can fabricate a good story but he cannot stand up for himself).
Platonic righteousness for "the Truth" was displayed for all, as Oprah followed the "redemption" script, crucifying herself for misleading millions and making Frey into a national Judas. Again, Oprah retreats to the individualism of redemption in lock-step with the therapeutic fantasy that localizes all goods and ills in the bosom of the singular individual: "I feel that you conned us all." I was delighted to see Oprah's embarrassment, and the only thing that keeps me from calling for her demise a second time in the blogosphere is that she stayed mad and did not venture forth at the end with the love of forgiveness. No agape here! Just unbridled eros, the violence of redemption made so starkly plain by Mel Gibson in The Passion of the Christ.
You know, at least when Plato writes about eros and the relation between sexual intercourse and agape (that is, one can achieve a tantric-style agape at the moment of climax, remembering, albeit fleetingly, the face of God), he doesn't try to repress the violence of ecstatic mania (nor does Jane's Addiction, you know, "Sex is Violent!"). Of course, we mean violence here as a metaphor for the death drive, not necessarily killing people. The problem with the Pope's encyclical is that it writes out the violence of love altogether, the hallmark of the Church's two-hundred year retreat from true agape. I mean, c'mon: "God is Love" was oft heard during the heyday of the Inquisitions, was it not? Nevertheless, at the risk of tempting the fallacious "repressive hypothesis," as Foucault has termed it, how else does one explain Oprah's public evisceration of Frey, or child abuse scandals, or Gibson's Jesus porno?
As I type this Mansun's ill-fated song (cause it never got released on the fourth album that never was) "Cancer" is playing and the chorus goes, "I’m emotionally raped by Jesus, I'm emotionally raped by Jesus now/but I'm still here/yes somehow I'm still here . . . ." Mansun was one of the best bands of the last decade; it's a pity no one stateside knows of them, and that the band has dissovled. Gosh, I LOVE this band!