The determining impingement on most knowledge produced in the contemporary West (and here I speak mainly about the United States) is that it be nonpolitical, that is, scholarly, academic, impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief. One can have no quarrel with such an ambition in theory, perhaps, but in practice the reality is much more problematic.
- Edward Said, Orientalism
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So I finished Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson. I didn't think I'd finish it because I usually have trouble reading nonfiction but I will say that literary criticism and analysis is the only nonfiction that is engaging for me to read, and there are very few who make analysis more engaging than Carson herself.
Part One: What I Liked
The essay resonated most with my deepest struggles with art and with reading and with love. For me all three have always come from an irreconcilable desire to complete myself. To somehow find another half that will make me whole. To reach some complete divine understanding. And that is exactly what Anne Carson herself is trying to do, thus l'essai.
But "divine understanding" is a paradox and you can no more find any thing or any one to complete yourself than chase down the horizon. Carson argues that reaching one form of understanding always confronts us with the next thing we do not understand, with how much we might never understand. But that makes art, love, knowledge and the act of creation itself no less desirable. One could argue that that is what makes it so desirable in the first place.
Part Two: What I Didn't Like, or Hubris, or What Happens When Icarus Flies in the Face of Materialist Analysis
Carson, correctly, explains that this approach to desire is one to do with control, yet her severe misstep is her refusal to acknowledge the historical structures of control that are informing a culture's understanding of desire. That is how she persistently arrives to control as an inevitable definition of desire, rather than an understanding that power structures will have the power to define desire itself.
Carson's background being classicism, the texts that Carson uses to analyze desire are from Ancient Greek/Roman poets, plays and philosophies. These societies' understandings of desire were riveted to the dynamic between the lover and his beloved. A dynamic that was pederastic, patriarchal, and misogynistic at its core. You cannot claim an understanding of Eros without a thorough, incisive investigation of this fact.
I get so angry because Carson mentions Beauvoir, Carson mentions Foucault, Carson mentions Derrida, Carson mentions Saussure, and seems to acknowledge the Other in passing.
In doing so, her appraisal of the poetics of desire is completely blinsided to poetics of relation.