loveless

Music: Patrick Wolf: Wind in the Wires (2005) As many of you know, holidays for academics are times to get "caught up" on work . . . so I have spent today, and will spend the better part of the weekend, doing "work." I get scare quote-y with "work" because even though I do a lot of it, it's kinda fun (and shouldn't that scare anyone?). It's also often a solitary fun, something the only child-cum-adult appreciates, but something that is also a little alienating, which is why it is good to have a little fun with other people on working holidays (owie; my head is still hurty from last night . . . good times, but hurty times).

The title of today's post is topically trine, in part an homage to the last, great album by My Bloody Valentine (the only thing better is Blonde Redhead's most recent masterpiece), in part my holiday expectations for intimacy, and---you guessed it---in part a reference to Lacan. So here is the problem for the weekend in a gif(t), Lacan's sexuation formulae. I know, I know: I'm supposed to pretend I know what it means. Before two days ago I had no effin' clue, and a reviewer of my work was calling me on the carpet for not having a clue, and so I'm working on my un-cluelessness. Suffice it to say sexuation (the choice of sex-identification) concerns where one aligns oneself in respect to phallic jouissance, here represented in the bottom quadrant of the chart, the third register of sexual differentiation (the first two at the top are previously introduced formulae). It's complicated, and I'm not sure it's satisfying in a way that helps me organize the world better, certainly not satisfying in any way that will appear in my work except in footnotes, but we'll see. I have more reading to do. Oh, and I have to say that Lacan oddly comforts me in his arrogance: "After what I just put on the board," he begins the seminar in which he introduces this chart, "you may think you know everything. Don't."

I like that opening sentence for a number of reasons. For starters, Bruce Fink translated it from the French, so it's probably close to what was said in spirit and letter. Second, the contraction "don't" is deliciously ambiguous: don't what? Do not know everything or do not think you know everything? Or is this a more vernacular omission: you don't know everything, you don't know Jacques! But, the beauty of the statement is that it means independent of what it is set against, the impossibility of writing the difference between the two sexes. On the one hand is an ethic (of humility and hubris; you cannot have one without the other), an ethic I try to teach myself: give up! That is, lets give up on the quest for mastery---of having this or that definitive reading on Lacan, for example---and instead see knowledge in the form of an unanswerable question. On the other hand, that statement is meant to denote a certain deadlock or impasse, a "parallax view" if you're down with the latest Zizek idiom, a certain embrace of lovelessness: that grand rapprochement, it ain't coming.

You don’t understand this chart? Give up! Ben Gibbard figured it out (and then forgot he did after Transatlanticism, cause you have to admit Plans kinda sucks with its happy "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" sentiments). I think I've finally reached that point, now, where Eastern religious thought makes more and more sense. As does my penchant for writing love letters.

I have folders full of love letters that I have written, that I started writing on a typewriter when I was 14. I remember writing the first ones to C-W, my first true love (she still sends me valentines, but there is never a return address), I remember writing a tortured one at two in the morning after being turned away from her apartment by her brother because she was in bed with another young man (a magazine model, of course), and my mother catching me in there typin' and cryin', and then she decided to go to bed and let me alone because I was determined to hammer out this relationship, to write a relation, to impress the impression, that dogged teenage reckoning with . . . disjunction. Like the romance in The Age of Innocence, the fruitless attempts to write a relation are either with the promise of love, or its disillusion, but never in the sustained fantasy of having it (desiring therein is truly dead). Lovelessness is the real deal; a reason to live; a reason for Daniel Johnston to stay alive.

I think I know everything. Don't.