The Demon Lover En Passante
Working my way through BTVS, and softening up somewhat on the issue of Angel's whinging. The Prom episode! Even with her ridiculous award (a raver toy umbrella??), things grow more subtle ("We're not close friends..."). I loved the reversal, in Angel's dream wedding: as they walk out into the sunlight, it's Buffy who burns, and he's helpless to stop it - an elegant metaphor for mortality and time. Poor kids.
Also: had an inspirational flash last night w/r/t the red-headed stepchild I like to call Chapter 5. Big flash, riled up, did not sleep at my usual depth, dreams (Spike and Angel fighting over me, except they're both my dad! Thanks unconscious!).
Anyway. Still working on it. In the section of the chapter in question about which my brain was so flashy, I'm discussing Sowana in relation to Baudelaire's poem "A une passante" and Claude Leroy's arguments about it in Le Mythe de la Passante.
Here's the poem for your reference:
À une passante
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair... puis la nuit! - Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
- Charles Baudelaire
At the point I start at below, I've just gotten done w/ a close reading of Sowana's Apostrophe to Night, in the scenes during the night of the eclipse (a snippet: "Et vous, cieux d’Espérance, - hélas! si je pouvais vivre! ...Pouvoir, seulement, mourir!"). And surprise, it's about the undead. It's not anything shocking, just a realization about Baudelaire's women, and a presentiment about what might still be interesting, wolodymyr, about vampires (having to do with something other than sexuality and repression, something about the experience of time).
----
What Sowana figures in her eternal transience is the sterility of the future and its reliance on the present - the future as vampire, the present its prey.
One of the most interesting claims in Leroy’s reading is that of the temporality of the myth: “the encounter with the passante plays out in the future anterior” [“La rencontre de la passante se joue au futur antérieur.”] (53). The future anterior (will have been), if I may remind the reader, is used to describe an event that has not yet happened but is expected or planned to happen before another stated occurrence. Leroy’s claim is correct in the sense that it tallies with Derrida’s framing of the concept in Of Grammatology, which is to say a turning to both the past and the future in such a way as to deaden the present.
The future [the à-venir] can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. (Derrida, 5).
The passivity of the present in the poem with regard to actual contact - he doesn’t follow her, he can’t follow her - is transformed into the activity of the writing. In the moment of her passing, the possibility of writing about the encounter is born.
But Leroy’s claim is not quite precise, if we reconsider the tenses of the two clauses that make up the last line: “O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi que le savais!” Here the temporality shades into the counterfactual conditional past (or the pluperfect subjunctive), which is generally expressed in “si clauses” for impossible or hypothetical situations: what’s distinctive about this last line is that the si-clause is implied and not stated. Had we met, I could (would?) have loved you. The future anterior, generally speaking, falls in the territory of the probable (would have loved) and what Baudelaire describes here hovers at the border of that probability, between could and would. What cements certainty in the first declaration is also the past tense of the second declaration, and not only, as Leroy argues, the location of knowledge in the passante: “ô toi que le savais!” To locate the knowledge of a would-have-been, a were-it-otherwise outside the poet, in the passante, is to instantiate the moment of writing: “she is a link [“passerelle”] between two orders of reality” (page cite??). It is also to materialize a lost future.
-----
Marx:
Suppose that we produced in a human manner; each of us would in his production have doubly affirmed himself and his fellow men. I would have: (1) objectified in my production my individuality and its peculiarity and thus both in my activity enjoyed an individual expression of my life and also in looking at the object have had the individual pleasure of realizing that my personality was objective, visible to the senses and thus a power beyond all doubt. (2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have had the direct enjoyment of realizing that I had both satisfied a human need by my work and also objectified the human essence and therefore fashioned for another human being the object that met his need. (3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species and thus been acknowledged and felt by you as a completion of your own essence and a necessary part of yourself and have thus realized that I am confirmed in both your thought and in your love. (4) In my expression of my life I would have fashioned your expression of your life, and thus in my own activity have realized my own essence, my human, my communal essence.
In that case our products would be like so many mirrors, out of which our essence shone. (“On James Mill,” McClellan, 132) (alternate translation: Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.)
This passage is one of the few frankly utopian moments in Marx’s writing, and one that surely resonates with Benjamin’s concepts of aura and auratic experience. Here, I argue, is a representation of aura in an undecayed state. The stateliness of the prose, with its closing simile (the first translation extends this to mirrors shining), no doubt gains much of its power from its setting in the conditional past, the counterfactual conditional past.1 Here we can see, expressed negatively, as fulfillment, recognition, and communion, some of the longing and loss that the auratic experience tends to carry with it.
1The passage continues in the present indicative, stating just as clearly the opposite to what he describes above: "My labour can appear in my object only as what it is. It cannot appear as something which by its nature it is not. Hence it appears only as the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness that is objective, sensuously perceptible, obvious and therefore put beyond all doubt."
Also: had an inspirational flash last night w/r/t the red-headed stepchild I like to call Chapter 5. Big flash, riled up, did not sleep at my usual depth, dreams (Spike and Angel fighting over me, except they're both my dad! Thanks unconscious!).
Anyway. Still working on it. In the section of the chapter in question about which my brain was so flashy, I'm discussing Sowana in relation to Baudelaire's poem "A une passante" and Claude Leroy's arguments about it in Le Mythe de la Passante.
Here's the poem for your reference:
À une passante
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair... puis la nuit! - Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!
- Charles Baudelaire
At the point I start at below, I've just gotten done w/ a close reading of Sowana's Apostrophe to Night, in the scenes during the night of the eclipse (a snippet: "Et vous, cieux d’Espérance, - hélas! si je pouvais vivre! ...Pouvoir, seulement, mourir!"). And surprise, it's about the undead. It's not anything shocking, just a realization about Baudelaire's women, and a presentiment about what might still be interesting, wolodymyr, about vampires (having to do with something other than sexuality and repression, something about the experience of time).
----
What Sowana figures in her eternal transience is the sterility of the future and its reliance on the present - the future as vampire, the present its prey.
One of the most interesting claims in Leroy’s reading is that of the temporality of the myth: “the encounter with the passante plays out in the future anterior” [“La rencontre de la passante se joue au futur antérieur.”] (53). The future anterior (will have been), if I may remind the reader, is used to describe an event that has not yet happened but is expected or planned to happen before another stated occurrence. Leroy’s claim is correct in the sense that it tallies with Derrida’s framing of the concept in Of Grammatology, which is to say a turning to both the past and the future in such a way as to deaden the present.
The future [the à-venir] can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue. (Derrida, 5).
The passivity of the present in the poem with regard to actual contact - he doesn’t follow her, he can’t follow her - is transformed into the activity of the writing. In the moment of her passing, the possibility of writing about the encounter is born.
But Leroy’s claim is not quite precise, if we reconsider the tenses of the two clauses that make up the last line: “O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi que le savais!” Here the temporality shades into the counterfactual conditional past (or the pluperfect subjunctive), which is generally expressed in “si clauses” for impossible or hypothetical situations: what’s distinctive about this last line is that the si-clause is implied and not stated. Had we met, I could (would?) have loved you. The future anterior, generally speaking, falls in the territory of the probable (would have loved) and what Baudelaire describes here hovers at the border of that probability, between could and would. What cements certainty in the first declaration is also the past tense of the second declaration, and not only, as Leroy argues, the location of knowledge in the passante: “ô toi que le savais!” To locate the knowledge of a would-have-been, a were-it-otherwise outside the poet, in the passante, is to instantiate the moment of writing: “she is a link [“passerelle”] between two orders of reality” (page cite??). It is also to materialize a lost future.
-----
Marx:
Suppose that we produced in a human manner; each of us would in his production have doubly affirmed himself and his fellow men. I would have: (1) objectified in my production my individuality and its peculiarity and thus both in my activity enjoyed an individual expression of my life and also in looking at the object have had the individual pleasure of realizing that my personality was objective, visible to the senses and thus a power beyond all doubt. (2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have had the direct enjoyment of realizing that I had both satisfied a human need by my work and also objectified the human essence and therefore fashioned for another human being the object that met his need. (3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species and thus been acknowledged and felt by you as a completion of your own essence and a necessary part of yourself and have thus realized that I am confirmed in both your thought and in your love. (4) In my expression of my life I would have fashioned your expression of your life, and thus in my own activity have realized my own essence, my human, my communal essence.
In that case our products would be like so many mirrors, out of which our essence shone. (“On James Mill,” McClellan, 132) (alternate translation: Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.)
This passage is one of the few frankly utopian moments in Marx’s writing, and one that surely resonates with Benjamin’s concepts of aura and auratic experience. Here, I argue, is a representation of aura in an undecayed state. The stateliness of the prose, with its closing simile (the first translation extends this to mirrors shining), no doubt gains much of its power from its setting in the conditional past, the counterfactual conditional past.1 Here we can see, expressed negatively, as fulfillment, recognition, and communion, some of the longing and loss that the auratic experience tends to carry with it.
1The passage continues in the present indicative, stating just as clearly the opposite to what he describes above: "My labour can appear in my object only as what it is. It cannot appear as something which by its nature it is not. Hence it appears only as the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness that is objective, sensuously perceptible, obvious and therefore put beyond all doubt."