Comments on: Looking for Mr. (W)Right

By: elena

elena — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:52:08 +0000

‘Kamikaze girls’ by monogatary offers a wonderful
alternative answer to the political chick flick…

By: Ignacio

Ignacio — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:03:20 +0000

This is wonderful stuff. It’s funny. Earlier I was reading, rereading, Jean-Luc Nancy (“Hegel: the Restlessness of the Negative”); when I looked here your posts especially interested me because of their relevance to something I’m working on about sexual infatuation and “impossible” love.

The politics was secondary insofar as this did not feed my own work. Whereas much of what you said “the crush” feeds my project and sent me off to productive 2nd and 3rd and 4th thoughts.

“When one does not love the impossible, one does not love anything,” Antonio Porchia said. But is this, however lovely a thought, in real life rather too ideal?

By: cathy davidson

cathy davidson — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:03:50 +0000

Great posting. “Optimism of the will” from Gramsci happens to be exactly what I need to think about this morning. Thank you!

By: Matthias

Matthias — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:09:06 +0000

I love this piece! I hope the truncated, weak rhymes of these couplets will suggest the curtailement of aspiration that accompanies my political depression at this point in the campaign season.

The System Works!

A few months into the race
& McCain is building his base;
Clinton’s numbers, never high
are lower than when she cried
& Obama’s are down to where
In New Hampshire, hers were.
In other words, the donkey’s been
Hobbled–let the race begin!

By: supervalentthought

supervalentthought — Sat, 10 May 2008 15:29:34 +0000

Great post. You’re right that the anxieties are related. A few responses:
1. I like how in your version of reciprocity the evidence of its functioning isn’t in a literalizing practice (you give me what I give you) but the transmission of some mimetic economy of experience (here’s an affective or emotional experience like what you’ve given me). But I also think most reciprocity doesn’t function that way. That model is too hypervigilant, organized by the genre of the act, and modeled on [child-parent] dyads. Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story is a great performance of the need to develop a more expansive view of the practice of the reciprocal—I write about the nightmare of recalibrating reciprocity in her work a bit in chapter 1 of The Female Complaint.
2. Most reciprocity is in a formal call and response relation where what one gets back is not in the register of what one gives out, let alone in the register of a deep, substantive recognition, as you suggest in your Lacanian reference. The formal fact of getting back feels like evidence of having had an impact on the world that confirms one’s existence (which is why little kids act out negatively to get love, because the formal fact of response has the formal property that love should provide, an environment-suffusing reliable activity of recognition that one mattered). This is the hardest thing to learn about the intimacies one needs for survival, I think, that they’re not about economies of like affective experience but about the sense generated by formal evidence of impact.
3. This is why people stay in relationships that don’t feel like pleasure or the holding sense of love, because (among other things) those relationships still register the evidence of impact, which is the foundation for being able to endure in the world optimistically. It is hard to measure all of this in terms of the singular event or the totality of the relationship to a person or an environment, so one is stuck managing the muddled middle and wishing one could call it intention.
4. In attachment one demands that one’s intimates return to the scene where one’s impact will be registered at best generously, and therefore where dependence can be felt not as loss or being dominated but as an intimate collaboration (or, to be precise, an extimate collaboration that feels intimate). One’s demands for others’ “reciprocity” (performance of the evidence of your impact, of you having been imagined and felt) have nothing to do with one’s sense of obligation to act reciprocally to them, either. When I write I want to have impact on an idea, more than on people. I want to feel the potentiality of opening up that I can then use to connect to persons, to make worlds. But that optimism comes later.
5. My anxieties about being a journalist of political emotion have little to do with reciprocity, therefore. As Roland Barthes writes, people are partial, inconstant readers and listeners at best, but they’re interesting and enlivening precisely because of how surprising it is where they take what you put out. (This is why teaching is so interesting.)
6. I think my anxieties have to do with the problem you also mention, of translation. To have something to translate, one must have had time to work out a thought, an argument, evidence, an explanation, testing. To me that means that you have to have had time to think, to posit, to take it back, to wonder about things. I don’t always know what I think. And I don’t want only to resolve that problem in some projected out normative form. I cringe when I write “we,” when I participate in the efficient projection of generality. One has to do that a lot in political journalism; also, “they” and “some people” and etc. There’s an ethics to generalizing, that haunts me, as it should. The rhythms of political journalism force one to make quick decisions about the state of things, with little empirical but the senses to go on, because one is living in the crisis economy of the fragile now that (phantasmatically) might be reshaped if we say the right things.
7. I’ll read the book on irrationality. Thanks for the cite!! I think it’s absolutely right to say that affect has aims without intentions and part of the plan of Detachment Theory is to think about that.

By: ashtor

ashtor — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:29:25 +0000

Your recent series of posts make me think a lot about the possible relation between anxiety as it manifests in the question of participating in the gratifying but possibly distracting activity of political journalism and the anxiety surrounding the expression of political optimism. Trying to avoid extrapolating these distinct expressions of anxiety by sacrificing their structural and experiential specificity, I am wondering about the function of reciprocity in this discussion. When I say reciprocity, I am thinking of the attempt to meet someone where they are, socially, politically, emotionally, intellectually and to create for them a version of the experience they are transmitting outward (and that you are potentially grateful for and therefore wanting to recreate/respond to).
In some sense, the anxiety about political journalism and political optimism seem to share the promise of reciprocity. At least that’s what I think of when I hear of your invitation to do more of what you did in “Against Sexual Scandal” – that is, provide an intellectually compelling and pedagogically clear version of complex material that opens up conversation to people who might otherwise not engage in having those kinds of thoughts in that kind of way. This invitation seems to me to be equally an invitation to the writer, in this case you, to be reciprocated. Did all the responses in the Nation and blogs feel like the experience of being met (in whatever sense) where you were/are? And if so, why not repeat that space of reciprocity and if not, then what is being salvaged by not doing so? Does reciprocity inhere the experience of not being fully met (Lacan?). Is it the anxiety of ‘almost’ being met or being met ‘enough’ that is also implicitly *not* really reciprocal in a way that’s desired? How can we understand reciprocity in relation to (mis)recognition? And so, does the anxiety around potential reciprocal exchange (as imagined in scenes of political journalism and political optimism) reflect the impossibility of being met in the right way or the possibility of being met and therefore having little left that is beyond/outside reciprocity.
Also, as per your comment on “irrational attachments” and Sedgwick’s response of there being no other kind, I just read a great book by Sebastian Gardner called “Irrationality & Psychoanalysis” that wonderfully explains ways of understanding the unconscious as being simultaneously strategic and yet without intent…maybe one can theorize a similar structure for desire as it relates to attachment theory?