I think the first step has to be dealing with what it means to know. I want, for present purposes, to divorce knowledge from meaning, the former being dynamic and indeterminate, the latter being negative and prescriptive. Meaning comes from a "that means," which dictates the limits of the object, presenting an end result--I'm reading Nancy's Listening, from which we might take that meaning is a result of hearing (entendre). Knowledge, as I mean the term (sorry) here, is an intimate caressing, a dynamic exploration.
(Of course, the two do not really exist separately--"as I mean the term," for example--and are both themselves each other: meaning is never so static as we mean it to be, nor does knowledge exhibit the flexibility I romantically attribute to it. But the reason I want to tease them apart is to purify knowledge--I'm looking for the logos, I suppose--and in so doing I am implicated in a search for meaning, which has already begun by trying to avoid meaning. In fact, I've considered starting this by not starting this way, since it is a bit of a track that I might not be tall enough to step out of. So I'll leave off where we are, and willfully pragmatize. Let's talk about knowing.)
The reason for separating meaning from knowledge is allow for the non-existence of divinity/fate. It is one thing to run in semantic circles and talk of chains of signifiers; nowadays it is hardly Earth-shaking to say words don't mean anything (in a concrete sense) but only point, more or less vaguely, at other words. I don't want to talk of words, but of people (even if it is, as Bloom says Stevens says, " 'a world of words to the end of it' "). I want to talk about knowing a person, and not about what a person means. And we'll return to how the former bleeds into the latter, tearing a gash. So I'll dismiss for now, strategically, that people mean anything. We're not meant for each other; no one is meant for anyone or anything. This isn't depressing; it doesn't mean there is no happiness or love, etc. Indeed, it is the opposite of depressing: no fate means freedom to love as love happens, not out of necessity or obligation, but out of love.
So whom do we know? I'm going to risk absolutes again, and say I know only one person. In touching, there is feeling on both sides. If I touch you, I feel what you feel like, but I don't feel what you feel. You react, and I feel your reaction, but I don't feel what makes you react, and I don't feel why you react. But, I do feel me feeling your reaction, and can feel how I react to your reaction and reacting. You exist on the other side of a membrane that doesn't let messages pass. The only membrane of which I can feel both sides is my own. I can feel myself feeling myself, like two lips in Irigaray's metaphor, and can become my own site of knowledge. What passes colloquially as knowing you is me getting to know myself better. You, like everything, are radically exterior, and our mutual existences comprise of mutual alienations, the negotiations of which constitute the experience of knowing oneself. In this conception, I have not moved beyond Schopenhauer's first sentences:
It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself.
But then there's love. The preceding makes it impossible to talk about love. First, because it follows necessarily that even if I know what love is, I only know what it is for me. Love runs the risk of being the insufferable banality of the Universal. Indeed, even in saying "love" I recapitulate the prescriptive role of Man, explaining to you the quest upon which you're meant to embark. So I will step back from this just a bit, though will, for better or worse, retain the age-old narrative of woman/truth that will underpin most of what follows. And in this respect, maybe talking about love along side an exploration of the limits of knowing is perfectly appropriate--or at least scrupulously self-interested. Maybe I can sublimate after all; perhaps my longing for knowledge (and truth) is intimately interwoven with my longing for love, which is, for better or worse, directed toward a longing for woman. But I won't get too Freudian here. Suffice it to say that in searching for the truth about knowing, it can hardly be seen as coincidental that I must now turn to love, and that the problematic between the two orbits around knowing/loving a woman.
Let me take a moment to be more specific about what I mean by love (there it is again). Agamben says, and people grow tired of me reciting this, that we don't love for the particular: I love your eyes, your kindness, your lameness (his choice, not mine). Nor, however, do we love for the universal: this is not a story of Universal Love, etc. So while might love your flowing brown hair, or your mercurial, arresting eyes, I do not love you for those (or in spite of them). Nor would I love you for the sake of loving. Love exists in such a peculiar, particular position that it seems best suited when it eclipses the rest of the lexicon and grammar. Love. And in so being, as if isolated but of course always with a tacit context (I've been assuming a subject/object complex, but that is primarily for rhetorical simplicity; there is no reason to presume that love needs only two, or even two), love presents the fallacy of the absolutism of the membrane that prohibits inter-subjective knowledge. Love. By erasing the two-way subject/object relationship of the verb, it is no longer clear where lines are crossing, which direction the intensities are flowing. That is to say that love, by existing neither in terms of the specific nor the general, effects a re-evaluation of the limits of knowing.
Love, at the risk of being a romantic, is the condition of knowing someone else. But this is not to say that it is true that we can know someone. I would suggest that these two conditions--love and not-knowing--exist in constant tension. They are not extremes of a continuum, for to be so, we would then have to talk of degrees of love, and love would no longer be non-specific, nor non-universal: it would be both specific and universal. To say that love is the extreme of a continuum is to suggest that one love could be replaced with another, in the interest of maximizing utility. And though I have not loved much, I am sure I've never had one love that I would exchange for any other, under any circumstances. The continuum with love on the horizon universalizes a "pure" love, and at the same time assigns a specific value to the less than ideal love you might experience at any given time.
Not a continuum, but also not a dialectical tension. Love is not the negation of not-knowing. The latter condition does not pre-exist the former, nor does it cease to function when love "comes along." And most importantly, regarding the dialectic, there is no synthesis of the two opposed conditions.
It is because of the non-dialectical tension between love and not-knowing that we bleed. (I need to go to bed soon) When I love, I also still don't know--even while knowing. This still-knowing in the face of not-knowing is not to be viewed as self-delusion. That the two coexist is the condition of love: we both know and don't know each other. This constant tension is what leads to jealousy, as well as to reasons for jealousy. It can breed distrust, insecurity, and, in the opposite direction, a certain wanderlust: how do I know what I'm missing (if I don't even know what I have)?
But these are trivial matters. We will or won't work through or around cheating. What is much more grave is the gash that is torn when love and not-knowing bleed together. When loving and not-knowing become having-loved and (still) not-knowing. When the ignorance resulting from the impossibility of inter-subjective experiences shocks the system and disrupts the knowing of love. The sweet dissonance of the affair becomes the unconditioned dissonance of alienation--and not the continual alienation from one another we always feel, but a self-alienation. The love that defied not-knowing now become the not-knowing of the self, as one must now wonder how or why one thought one knew, when clearly one did not.
Of course, even as the gash bleeds, one must remember that even while one did not know, one knew.
Now I'm too sleepy to keep things straight, and will hopefully re-read this soon to see if I left anything out or got stupid :)
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