Doubting Love

Butler's Doubting Love
"One knows love somehow only when all one’s ideas are destroyed, and this becoming unhinged from what one knows is the paradigmatic sign of love."

Love destabilizes what one knows, what Sontag calls "our gods today". The names we have for important things. Our name for and idea of love.

Butler's doubting love  is Foucault's curiosity- "a certain relentlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise..."
It is also what awaits further yet.
"People know what they do; they often know why they do it but what the people don't know, is what they do does".(DH&RP, 187)
It is love, Butler says, that always returns to us what we do and do not know.

"One finds that love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision. "
... love in flux, love which doubts itself into flux, out of 'comfortable', out of the known and the familiar idea of love, and any/every lesser thing then as well.

Butler reads Freud on doubting love as calling the most important thing into question, not letting assumptions go on unquestioned. Doubting as opening up of space, within and beyond the space already there.

"I cannot pretend to know myself at the moment of love, but I cannot pretend to fully know myself. I must neither vacate the knowledge that I have — the knowledge, after all, that will make me a better lover — and I cannot be the one who knows everything in advance — which would make me proud and, finally, lovable."

Finally, Butler's doubting love  is  Nietzsche's questioning, as Babette Babich writes about in Nietzsche's "Gay" Science, Nietzschean belief that everyone possesses a lust for questioning, and questioning at all costs (BB, pg.102). Doubting Love meets gai saber.

Nietzsche’s gay science is a passionate, fully joyful science. But to say this is also to say that a gay science is a dedicated science: scientific “all the way down.” This is a science including the most painful and troubling insights, daring, to use Nietzsche’s language here, every ultimate or “last consequence” ( BGE 22; KSA13, 14[79]). Doubting just as well as Montaigne, doubting in a more radical fashion than Descartes, and still more critical than Kant or Schopenhauer, dispensing with Spinoza’s and with Hegel’s (but also with Darwin’s and even Newton’s) faith, Nietzsche’s joyful, newly joyful, scientist carries “the will henceforth to question further, more deeply, stringently, harshly, cruelly, and quietly than one had questioned heretofore” (GS, preface, 3). Even confidence in life itself, as a value, of course, but also as such, now “becomes a problem.” The result is a new kind of love and a new kind of joy, a new passion, a “new happiness.” (BB, 99)

To Be Read in the Interrogative - Julio Cortazar

Have you seen

have you really seen

the snow the stars the felt step of the breeze

Have you touched

really have you touched

the plate the bread the face of that woman you love

so much

Have you lived

like a blow to the head

the flash the gasp the fall the flight

Have you known

known in every pore of your skin

how your eyes your hands your sex your soft heart

must be thrown away

must be wept away

must be invented all over again.

* * *
July 2013
...months go by, I forget about this doubting, reading in the interrogative, and settle in fixity of the idea of love. Comfortable because it has been repeated enough times to have become so familiar a truth that needn't be doubted. Safe. A god worshipped in unquestionable unquestioning repetition.

Then, a reminder:

Badiou, In Praise of Love:

“I am really interested in the time love endures. Let’s be precise: by endure, one should not simply understand that love lasts, that love is forever and always. One has to understand that love invents a different way of lasting."(Love Dog)

and another:

"An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us."
(Adrienne Rich)

The Inscription of the Body, Anal Eroticism, and Freud

Modern society is perverse, not because it has tried to repress sex and succeeded only  in producing deformed expressions of the sexual instinct, but because of the type of power it has brought to bear on the body. Far from limiting sexuality, it has extended its various forms, penetrating it with its power..... those identified with certain places (the home, the school, the prison - (my addition:Hollywood producers and actors) - all correspond to precise procedures of power. They are extracted from people's bodies, from the infinite possibilities of their pleasures, and frozen into a particular rigid stance (read Taylor Lautner). (Michel Foucault The Will to Truth-Alan Sheridan p. 175-6)

CaraNo's Bella in Soulmates feels marked, inscribed by Edward, and, as a virgin she is indeed imprinted. But Edward also thinks in terms of marking her, making her his, owning her, taking her, requiring her obedience. But more about that in another place. Meyer's Bella also feels the same, and becomes acutely aware of it when Edward leaves her in New Moon.

(On the left are anal toys from a very funny woman blogger on all things erotic. She lives in China and is Canadian. She blogs encouraging all women to try it with their partners and tells them there is a relationship with lower incidence of prostate cancer, but the real reason she is for it is it 

is great fun. So this post begins with Gentlemen... let a woman meet your rear ...  http://theworldaccordingtowoman.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/gentlemen-let-a-woman-meet-your-rear/As you read in CaraNo's  Isla de Cullen (Bella's initiation to anal sex) and especially in  CaraNo's Soulmates, Feeling, Belonging the bi-sexual Edward (with Jasper) and the porno writer Bella indulge with great pleasure.)

Gentlemen… let a Woman meet your rear…

In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud here and elsewhere has deconstructed toilet training, one of the basic requirements for a civilization, and what the child must sacrifice to attain it. I am sure people reading the above fanfics will get curious, want to try anal fucking, which is why I am linking you to well thought out sites for it.

Before you go out and spend a few hundred dollars in toys before you know what you want, go to the grocery store instead. This is the season for cucumbers and Zuchini and you get get bags full at a neighborhood stand for a couple of dollars. Go home and experiment before indulging with your partner. 

As a child you gave up all your sensuousness in your nether parts (they are dirty, bad you know) and you are going to find out just what you gave up in order to shit in the right place. In order to be civilized. In order to be normal. In order to be organized. It was painful for you to learn and it can be painful to unlearn. So go slow, prepare to spend days or weeks unlearning and dealing with what was done to you. If you go fast and furious with a partner first, you will not be able to do this, and your partner will re-inscribe you. Of course that's going to happen anyway, but know yourself first and deal with the feelings. They are early and deep. And it will take awhile for the pleasure to mirror the deeply sensuous being you really are that you were forced to give up. So check out the veggies, pick some sizes. Carrots are OK because you can scrape them and contour them. Cucumbers are soothing. Choose a water based lubricant and be generous with it but not overly so. You want to feel the resistance of your body, and you want to work and play gently with this resistance. Your tissues are fragile and narrowly separated from your bloodstream. Wash the veggies carefully, buy organic if you can. This is NOT about producing pleasure. It IS about surrendering to it.

And then you can introduce your partner when you feel secure. Men particularly are opposed as that means they are gay or bi and not me they say, not me. So go slow with him or her. And undo the damage that was done to you to "make you clean". It could have been accomplished otherwise, just as horse whisperers know that you don't have to jump on a virgin horse and BREAK it.  

                                      

The Album: Two Virgins

Remember John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Neither were virgins when they met, but they produced an album born of their meeting and their collaboration and marriage. The name: Two Virgins.

As Foucault demonstrated at length in "Surveiller et Punir" it is these micro-mechanisms of power that, since the late 18th century, have played an increasing part in the management of people's lives through direct action on their bodies: they operate not through a code of law, but through a technology of normalization, not by punishment, but by control, at levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its machinery.... We must free ourselves from this image of power as law and sovereignty, says Foucault, if we are to understand how power actually operates  in our technologically advanced societies. Foucault has two aims in this proposed series of studies: to show that sex - an area where, above all others, power seems to function in terms of prohibition - is not, in fact, subjected to power in this way and, second, to formulate an alternative theory of power, 'another grid for deciphering history'. 'We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law and power without the king.'(Sheridan MFTWTT 183)

An so the Foucauldian grid of power/knowledge came into existence

Power is everywhere: not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere...One should probably be a nominalist in this matter:  power is not an institution, nor a structure, nor a possession. It is the name we give to a complex situation in a particular society. (Foucault's History of Sexuality 93)

This inscription of the body penetrates the organs, the muscles, tendons, cellular structure, skin, blood flow, heart rate, in fact, the entire body outside and in.

The Oscars Have become a Simulacrum - Cloning - The Inscription of the Body My blog at focus free

Reading Bel Ami Through Marx, Foucault, Baudrillard and The Inscription of the Body another blog at focus free - The Inscription of the body here is horrible and it is one of the last pics. De Maupassant has described it perfectly in his description of Duroy's mother.

Stephenie Meyer has fictionalized it through Bella. She hypervenilates, her heart beats faster, she swoons, her stomach tightens, her legs tremble and she collapses, she blushes, she trembles, she shakes. And then in New Moon she shuts down and becomes a "zombie". And in the character of Bella you read perfect understanding of Freud's Studies in Hysteria, so if you are studying Freud, read Twilight and Meyer's Bella.

And in the fanfic Isla de Cullen we see a different Bella. A Bella who is a virgin, who has surrendered her will to an Edward who is dominant and in control of her sexuality as he initiates her in all different ways, including ass fucking. Which is why the butt plugs above. And below (no pun intended).

The Sensuality of Butt Plug Design part 1

I refer you to this blog by ScottA as it is very tech savvy on this subject. He is personally well informed and says when he is not. 

Postscript 5-24-2012: The mind's real power (what else can we call it?) is its ability to distinguish a particular nerve, fibre or infinitesimal articulation of the body and invest or disinvest it at will (a sudden thought produces pain in an unknown muscle, or makes a particular line of the face smile, but not some other). The mind can exert itself upon a particular fraction of the body which cannot be located anatomically, as it can on a particular particle of language which cannot be located linguistically, or a particular fraction of time which cannot be located chronologically. 

And if one ever saw a performance by Grotokwski or Yoshi Oida, then you will know this to be true.

Yoshi Oida