Apparently my last blog didn't post. I'm still getting used to this. I just cutting and pasting something doesn't work. Here's what I'll be discussing on the first day of class. It's about love and hate and how they co-exist within the same phenomenon.

Each of the thinkers we will read this quarter conceives of the erotic experience as being shot through not only with pleasure but pain as well. They wish for us to dwell in the space in which eros throws us, a space that is beyond discursive thought and reason. The most originary thinkers. the Greek poets, write on a this experience. Perhaps the best places to start are Hesiod and Sappho.

Hesiod--"Theogony" lines 116-122:

"Now surely, Chaos came to be very first. Then

broad-breasted Earth, the ever steadfast dwelling-space

of the immortals, who has the snowy peaks of Olympus

and hazy Tartarus in the innermost place in the subterranean broad-path

and Eros, who is the most beautiful among the immortal divinities,

the limb-loosener, of all the gods and all of human-beings

he overpowers thought and prudent council in their breasts.

Sappho--"Fragment 130"

Eros, the limb-loosener, once again shakes me,

Sweet-bitter, un-manipulateable, a creeping thing.

In these passages, the god Eros is given the name the "limb-loosener." Eros melts the body, lessening the resistance to the world and the beloved. According to the epithet, Eros makes us the site of the experience of the beloved by melting and erasing the boundaries of one's own body, opening a hole or lack. However, Eros exist only because of boundaries; it makes its abode within the space between the lover and the beloved. The activation of Eros calls for three structural components--lover, beloved, and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch by not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by Eros. When the circuit point connects, perception leaps. And something becomes visible, on the triangular path where volts are moving, that would not be visible without the three point structure. The difference between what is and what could be is visible. The ideal is projected on a screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscope. In this dance the people do not move. Desire moves. Eros is a verb.

As the limb-loosener, Eros makes us aware of our lack, of our bodily boundaries and the distance between myself and the object of my desire. I become aware of my erotic desire through the intense desire for there not to be a boundary between myself and the beloved. When I love, I realize something of myself is lacking. Eros does not occur without a vital loss. Hesiod tells us of Aphrodite's birth through the castration of Ouranos. The lover loses. Eros indicates a lack. To love means to lose something of the self, it is to bring pain to the self. You, as an individual, are not whole; you lack something vital, something external to yourself. But as external I cannot anticipate the exact character of that which I lack, it remains unknowable to me, forever, for if I were to fully grasp that which I desire not only would the eroticism dissolve but both myself and the beloved would be annihilated. Yet is this not exactly what I want? Is not the source of my joy and pleasure also the source of my destruction? The moment when we understand these things--when we see that we are projected on a screen of what we could be--is invariably a moment of wrench and arrest. We love that moment, and we hate it. We have to keep returning to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible. But this also entails watching it disappear. Only a god's word has no beginning or end. Only a god's desire can reach without lack. Only the paradoxical god of desire, exception to all of these rules, is neverendingly filled with lack itself. Sappho drew this conception together and called Eros sweet-bitter. The Greek is difficult to translate. "Sweet-bitter" sounds wrong, and yet our standard English rendering "bittersweet" inverts the term. Should that concern us? In her ordering has a descriptive intention, Eros is here said to bring sweetness, then bitterness in sequence: she is sorting out the possibilities chronologically. But it is unlikely that this is what Sappho means. Her poem begins with a dramatic localization of the erotic situation in time and fixes the erotic action in the present tense indicative. She is not recording the history of a love affair but the instant of desire. One moment staggers under the pressure of Eros; one's mental state splits. A simultaneity of pleasure and pain is at issue. The pleasant aspect is named first, we may presume because it is less surprising. Emphasis is thrown upon the problematic other side of the phenomenon, whose attributes advance in a hail of soft consonants. Eros moves or creeps upon its victim from somewhere outside of her. No battle avails to fight off the advance. Eros, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of enmity. That would be hate.

Nicharchos writes,

"If you hold be dear, you hate me. If you hate me, you hold me dear/If you do not hate me, my dearest, do not hold me dear."

Love and hate originate from a common source. That which is loved or held dear is that which engenders both love and hate. To love one's friends and hate one's enemies is a standard archaic prescription for moral response. Love and hate construct between them the machinery of human contact. Does it make sense to locate both poles of this affect within a single emotional event of Eros? Presumably, yes, if friend and enemy converge in the being who is it occasion. The convergence creates a paradox. Moral evaluation also fractures under the pressure of the paradox, splitting desire into a thing good and bad at the same time.

Let us return to the question of the meaning of Sappho's adjective "sweet-bitter." Sweet-bitter Eros is what hits the raw film of the lover's mind. Paradox is what takes shape on the sensitized plate of the poem, a negative image from which positive pictures can be created. Whether apprehended as a dilemma of sensation, action, or value, Eros prints as the same contradictory fact: love and hate converge within the erotic moment.

The exact character of Eros is unclear. Hesiod's passage makes clear that Eros, the limb-loosener, overwhelms rational thought. It discombobulates us, throwing us out of our everydayness. It fills us with unease. This introduces an ambivalence and paradoxical structure of Eros. After all, Sappho explains Eros as something external, "a creeping thing," un-manipulateable, and shakes us. It comes from the outside, spontaneously. It appears that it is not necessary a friend to us. Hesiod tells us that Eros has a genesis but that it is not generated. It has no mother or father, its origin cannot be known, it lays outside of human thought. The experience of Eros is not rational, it is non-propositional, communicating nothing rational or discursive. And yet it still grabs hold of me, makes me shutter. If and when it arrives, it arises unexpectedly and suddenly. It explodes one's pre-conceived notions of the world. It drives one into ecstatic frenzy. Eros, in other words, carries with it, and carries us into a state of paradox. When under the influence of Eros, the lover is held outside of him or herself, beyond the traditional dichotomies of rational thought, beyond his or her conceptions of the world.

In fact, Anakreon cries out,

"I love, and now I do not love/I'm mad and am not mad"

Whatever this experience is, its content is non-rational. The discourse used to describe it cannot be propositional. It does not represent the object of experience but rather emanates directly from the condition in which the lover is placed.