of sneaks, peeks, and rosy cheeks

Music: Burnt Friedman: Dub to the Music I've been working on my talk for tomorrow, currently titled: "Rhetoric: What's Love Got to Do with It? Part II, or, Islands in the Stream and the Second Hand Emotion." Here's a teaser.

I've opened by playing a portion of Dolly Parton and Kenny Roger's duet "Islands in the Stream" for two reasons. First, the opening two lyrics must be some of the stupidest ever penned in the name of love: "Baby, when I met you there was peace unknown/I set out to find you with a fine tooth comb." Now, if you think about it, such romantic prose is like telling your partner you found her or him much like one does fleas on a dog, or the hidden evidence of a crime scene. In this instance love is an examination, a search for minutiae, an obsession with the intricate details of another. Let us call this the obsessive love, or the love of interrogation.

The second reason I've opened with "Islands in the Stream" is that it evokes the most powerful conception of love that resides in the popular imagination. That the title of the song is lifted from Hemmingway novel about a lonely, hard drinking man in search of reconciliation with himself and his lover is not coincidental. Islands in the stream betoken the other side of love, which is not hate, but rather, loneliness. "Islands in the Stream" evokes the 17th Mediation by John Donne, who, upon hearing a bell tolling softly for another, recognized that it what the bell really said was "Thou must die." In meditating on they way in which the death of others portends our own, Donne wrote: "No man is an island, entire to itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." Now, to return to our pop stars, the sentiment is the same as that of Dolly and Kenny, who sing, " Islands in the stream/That is what we are/No one in-between/How can we be wrong." The islands are connected or mediated as one by the common substance of love. Let's call this the love of the one or transcendent love.

I want to begin by suggesting that these sentiments, the argument that we are One or the argument that we can become as one if you let me interrogate you, as well as the underlying notion of both, that in solitude we are lacking--ultimately that lovers can be united in knowledge of each other, is the essence of rhetoric as we have received it in the West. In other words, today I will argue that rhetoric is love, but I will suggest that it is nevertheless a false love. I want to suggest that, in the pop song repertory of U.S. culture, Tina Turner is right in the end: rhetoric is a second hand emotion, or rather, a supplement to a more fundamental, ontological division between two subject positions.

As a supplement--as opposed to, say, an affect--love is more often used to obscure or hide or even obliterate difference in the name of the same. This hankering oneness in the same is what we rhetoricians have termed "identification." Identification or identitarian logic is the most powerful fantasy of human kind, and the center of our understanding of persuasion. In short: as Nietzsche has suggested, rhetoric traditionally conceived, is a lie. But I will not agree that this like is amoral, as we shall see.

In order to make the argument that rhetoric is false love, I'll be taking us, first, to Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou's psychoanalytic understandings of love, then swing back through work on love in rhetorical studies, and then, finally, I'll close with a few suggestions about true and false love and the uses of each.

WHAT IS LOVE? (Roxbury boys joke)

In what is his last and perhaps most famous seminar of 1973 and 1974, Lacan introduced his theory of love. Now, this stuff is complicated and I won't pretend to understand it with any sense of mastery, but it two important observations are key.

First: Love and hate are two sides of the same coin of human desiring. In other words, the traditional assumption that love and hate are apposed is only partially true, insofar as BOTH are born of desire for the other--a desire to be completed by absorbing or negating the other. A perfect illustration of this was Dr. Vangelisti's clip from The War of the Roses last week, when Barbara told Oliver that she felt happiness over the fantasy that he was dead. "Love Hurts" is the better motto here, since the opposite of love is clearly not hate, but indifference.

Second: Love is a supplement, not an affect. For Lacan love is a function or, as he says, a consequence of a radical disjunction between two people. Although we associate affect with this function, the function as such is the epiphenomenon of an impossible relationship; it is a makeshift bridge, as it were. So let me focus just a bit on this idea of love as a supplement to radical disjunction.

To better get at this notion, that love is a supplement to radical disjunction, we have to wrestle with what seems to be a patently absurd statement of fact. In the twentieth seminar, in respect to the domains of love and knowledge, Lacan proclaimed, "there is no sexual relationship." Now this statement, that "there is no sexual relationship," seems patently absurd. "Sure there is a sexual relationship," you may be thinking about last night (YOU may be thinking that, but not me, alas, not me). But what is key here is the many senses in which Lacan means "sex."

First and foremost, by "sexual relationship" Lacan is referring to the categories of male and female, which in psychoanalysis is not so much a biological facticity as much as it is a fundamental cultural binary: as my colleague Amber Rademacher put it last week, "this society machine only computes ones and zeros," meaning that in our culture difference concerns two boxes. In the Lacanian universe, incidentally, the biological and the psychical are radically distinct--so while there are bodies that matter, to harp with Butler, . . . [time for class; to be continued]