Intermission: The Captive?
"And yet if tomorrow I find that she has gone. My very anxiety must be founded upon something; why did she not kiss me?"
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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Diane,
I dedicate these three essays to you, given that you were extraordinary enough to inspire them, and to reveal that I too was extraordinary, having been able to write them because of you—I leave them as a memory of our dancing days.
Thomas
The Captive
“I, who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now to see many more again, reposing by my side.”
In Volume 5 of Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, the Narrator famously describes, with his typical extravagance as translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the peculiar process we bewilderingly undergo when we are in love; namely, that “We imagine that love has as its object a person whom we can see lying down before our eyes, enclosed in a human body. […] If we do not possess its contact with this or that place, this or that hour, we do not possess it. But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time upon absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.”
In other words, Proust illustrates the act of loving as being akin to a quest for the transparency of the Other, wherein the complete and utter knowledge of the Other is necessary for us to possess in order to satisfy our feelings of lonesomeness and desire for connection; or rather, that the specific and perfect knowledge of this particular Other, out of the figurative sea of other Others, mirrors our own desire to be understood in a similar and special way, and hence must be fulfilled: that we might be loved for, and not merely in spite of, who we are—with all of our wonderful, awful and unspectacular transparencies. But what the Narrator fails to appreciate and much less accepts, as Proust alludes to through the failure of his character’s tempestuous and paranoid love affair with the uncommonly-named Albertine, is the latter’s right to opaqueness, or to her immovable quality of being Other, to which no quantity of the Narrator’s knowledge can ever hope to wholly span.
This is to say, the Narrator cannot fathom nor begin to glimpse into the interior world of Albertine as a person. Anything less than an imaginable, and hence tolerable, omniscience over her life, her thoughts and her actions is taken to be an inadequate and dangerous limitation to him, for it risks a regression to the original state in which he first found her—as a mysterious but inviting Other—and thus would invalidate the progress he has made by the arcane knowledge he now knows, having shared so many singular moments with her. And thus to offset his ignorance, and to reassure himself of the product of their love, he becomes sensitive to every part of her which he cannot see and venerates every part which he can, while he quixotically admits that such omniscience would also ruin the very mystery of romance itself—thus condemning him to a superficial appreciation of love.
Hence, for the Proustian Narrator, the Albertine which he sees is a mere reflection of his own sight, his own situatedness in the world, and he makes little effort to broaden his mind to the possibility of a world in which he is not the protagonist of her life or to accept the inherentness of his ignorance and his selfishness. When he describes, so romantically, how “I crept without a sound upon the bed, lay down by her side, clasped her waist in one arm, placed my lips upon her cheek and heart, then upon every part of her body in turn laid my free hand, which also was raised, like the pearls, by Albertine’s breathing; I myself was gently rocked by its regular motion: I had embarked upon the tide of Albertine’s sleep”, the Narrator easily forgets how Albertine is separate from this experience altogether, and that the qualia she experiences sits across an impassable gulf—where the Narrator, with his supposedly special knowledge of her, still stands on the other side.
However, for the Narrator, this is the pivotal moment: “I chose, in gazing at her, this aspect of her face which no one ever saw and which was so pleasing.” In seeing the beauty of her sleep, he reaffirms the belief of his sole and exclusive knowledge of her, to which her personhood is defined and symbolised again by this frozen moment. But his knowledge is not enough; the gulf of her Other remains a division, for which the Cartesian cogito, accounting for the solo figure of I and not the unitary We nor the Other, cannot extend nor prove to know beyond.
His love for her is therefore an imposition of his worldview onto the symbol of her being, or his conception of the reality of her person as beknownst and significant only to him. As he recalls, “I relished her sleep with a disinterested, soothing love, just as I would remain for hours listening to the unfurling of the waves.” But it is the image of waves to which he imposes onto her, and not the quality of waves to which she inherently belongs to, and which he simply cites out of his imagination and from which he drafts her into its static image.
The abstract Albertine of his symbolic understanding is separate from the real Albertine as she is, living and breathing with her own thoughts and desires, and detached from the machinations of his gentle solipsism in the infinite slices of each moment she exists. If he thus cannot understand her completely, and if transparency is the ideal state of love he seeks, then he blindly invents out of himself a sense of Albertine and their relationship, so that the filled gaps might justify his exceptional effort of loving her Other. And this is what he deems an idea of love?
“They pain us, coming from a person whom we love, and thereby enable us to penetrate a little deeper in our knowledge of human nature instead of being content to play upon the surface. Grief penetrates into us and forces us out of painful curiosity to penetrate other people.”
In his 1990 book, Poetics of Relation, the French-Caribbean philosopher, Edouard Glissant, offers two counter-arguments to the Western standard of transparency as the universal basis for understanding the Other: firstly, the right to difference and secondly, the right to opacity.
In the first case of difference, having concerned himself with the reconciliation between the postcolonial identities of the far-flung African diaspora and its historical subjugation by the colonial powers as the Other, Glissant argues that the Western demand for transparency is also a colonialist demand for the reduction of indigenous identities into starkly traceable essentialisms.
In other words, if the primitives cannot be understood, their differences can be permanently mistreated and hence dismissed as being Other—and can be justified as good cause for their domination. He explains the colonialist attitude as such: “In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.”
For Glissant, the historical call for transparency as a method of understanding hence lies in the reductive eye of the coloniser and not the colonised; it lies in the judgement of the civilised against the differences of the barbaric Other—the latter now abruptly held to the standards of Western civilisation, with its right to difference being violated and remembered as the historical root of its subjugation.
In the second case of opacity, having recognised that the right to difference is no preclusion to the imposition of judgement, Glissant argues that it is the right to opacity that better encompasses the value of our right to difference. As he writes, “I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) nor to "make" him in my image.”
It is no longer enough to speak of a right to our differences; for Glissant, we must also speak of the right to maintain our shadows and our opacities, to not have to give explanations for our differences and to hold the right of not being understood as another basis for understanding. The Western process of generalisation—to reduce the Other into a sensible and transparent horizon—is destructive and totalitarian, and contains a hidden violence or even hatred for the Other at the heart of its so-called understanding. The richness of human existence, and the diversity and plethora of human experience, is necessarily opaque; it is the same opaqueness of one culture that grants its distinction from another; it is the differences of one person which make them unique from someone else; and the recognition of the right to be opaque is likewise the recognition of the legitimacy of the right of the Other to exist too.
Glissant gives a neologism to describe his notion of Relations between Others: donner-avec, or in rough translation from French, to give-and-take or to yield-with. To live in Relation is thus to coexist—to live in the presence of the Other and to be likewise seen as Other too—as not simply between you and me, but as the ever-changing totality of our Relations between ourselves and everything else. This is what Glissant defines as the poetics of relation: poetics in the sense of the organic systems, expressions and relations between the opacities of co-existing Others and the Relations which arise from the mere presence of Others being different from one another. And might this, instead of transparency, offer a better idea of love too?
“Having thus asked that Albertine’s sleep should be respected, I was unable to sleep myself. I endeavoured to understand the true state of Albertine’s mind.”
In the first days of love, we often forget that the natural state of our Relations with Others is opaqueness; or rather, we ignore that we do not understand nor care to see deeply into the lives of most Others. Most of the time, this is our typical attitude: ignorance and disinterest.
However, there is a sudden, dire and almost comedic reversal when we meet the specific exception of our beloved Other, to whom we disportionately offer our affections, and to whom we suddenly wish to appear with bold transparency—gesturing to our own inner want of them to return to us a similar gesture of transparency as well.
But if each of us has a right to opacity and thus to difference, then love is often paradoxical between lovers: it is both an ongoing attempt to render the Self transparent to the Other while also acknowledging the Other’s right to opaqueness and thus difference, and vice-versa.
In other words, in opening our world to another person, we admit that opaqueness is the natural order of things; and yet, that opacity is not the preclusion of our understanding of each other, but part of the natural order of We, such that the shadows of your hidden self are still so complementary with the visible light of your spectrum. There is no contradiction in your opacity nor in mine; there is an expansive idea of duality that encloses the totality of your ever-changing being: and that that being is beautiful and worthy of understanding, acceptance and seeing in all of your shades of grand and dark colours. And to this, if you can accept my opacity and my differences too, is what we might call love—we become transparent again in this way.
“Forgive me, my little Albertine, I am ashamed of my violence, I don’t know how to apologise. If we are not able to get on together, if we are to be obliged to part, it must not be in this fashion, it would not be worthy of us. We will part, if part we must, but first of all I wish to beg your pardon most humbly and from the bottom of my heart.”
In the 5th issue of the legendary French public review, Acephale—published in June 1939—the French philosopher, Georges Bataille, writes in the text, College of Sociology, that “When a man and a woman are united by love, together they form an association, a being that is completely closed in on itself,” such that the “need to lose themselves exceeds their need to find themselves” and that more “than the common being they encounter in their embrace, they seek an immeasurable annihilation”.
For Bataille, the gift of reason and hence the Enlightenment is not emancipatory; the assemblage of the Modern world into tidy formulae, codified doctrine, and thus a hermeneutics of the head is a prison from which we must escape. As he writes in the 1st issue of Acephale, most famously in The Sacred Conspiracy, “A world that cannot be loved to the point where it is worth dying for—in the same way that a man loves a woman—represents only financial interest and the obligation to work. If we compare it to worlds long past, this world is hideous and appears as the most failed of all.”
For Bataille, our potential emancipation lies in the annihilation of such a world, for the sterile conditions of Modernity are antithetical to the wild conditions of love, and more broadly, of greater and deeper human experience, but that love and its desire for annihilation are one of the last and remaining instances of messy and untamed human life—from which, we might possibly escape to a better place. The Modern world is marshalled by the top-down order of a universal head, to which the Nietzschean death-of-God breaks the circle of, and renders the tragedy of human life as a cold game of chances and death. But love must not be understood in terms of a head and neither must human beings; instead, we might envision bodies without heads or human movements without thinking reasons—other ways to imagine our lives, for instance, based on connection instead of logic.
Hence, what comes together in the annihilating embrace of two lovers, and thus two human lives for instance, is not the consummation of logic nor a set of universal principles of attraction, but instead, the near mythic discharge of a specific and thus real instance of love and thus life and its joys in the faces of potential death. For Bataille, that is a world worth dying for: not a cohesive world of material convenience and its labouring drudgery, but a tumultuous yet warm world in which, if lived in its full glory, compels us to fanatically dance as a means to understand it, and to annihilate ourselves in its experience as if we were in love—and thus superhuman—to exist in it.
In Proposition 16 of his Propositions on the Death of God, Bataille explains that “Human universality […] cannot attain true and living existence in abstract forms that, are not able, in universal terms, to survive the disappearance of the specific, concrete existences of those states they have proposed to destroy. Revolutionary parties cannot preserve their universal character once they have assumed, as a result of their success, the task of organising the material resources of a given territory; their mode of existence then begins to resemble that of any other particular mode of existence, and the revolutionary state becomes a state like any other. […] There is thus forever and ever an annihilation of God and the explosion of time: nothing is stable in the universe any more, which is just one huge mockery of everything that seeks to establish eternal domination.”
Hence, for Bataille, we must eschew any head-like and thus definitive understanding of the Other while we are in love; this is to say, that we when speak of our beloved, or their right to opacity and difference, and hence the visible and invisible colours of their being, we are potentially impelled to a deeper understanding of them as shifting together—beyond a basic acceptance of opacity and difference—within and by our mutual and new right to annihilation, and away from them or ourselves as a universal or abstract symbol but as a new and unfolding real of We.
As he writes in his 1943 book, Inner Experience, “love is possession for which the object is necessary, and at the same time possession of the subject, possessed by it. There is no longer subject-object, but a ''yawning gap" between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence. The questions of the subject, its will to know are suppressed: the subject is no longer there; its interrogation no longer has either meaning or a principle which introduces it. In the same way no answer remains possible. The answer should be "such is the object", when there is no longer a distinct object.”
In the act of our mutual love, we annihilate each other—essentially and utterly—such that our rights to opacity and difference are subsumed by our unified right to annihilation now and over time, such that we now become opaque and different together, now a composite individual on the deeper plane of two bodies, now entwined in motion, in the authentic and palpable experiences of loving embrace.
Once more in College of Sociology, Bataille offers a summary for this act of loving: “Two beings of opposite sex lose themselves in one another, and together form a new being that is different from both of them. The precarious state of this new being is obvious: it is never such that its parts can be distinctly its own; and in its brief moments of darkness there is nothing more than a tendency to lose consciousness. Yet if it is true that the unity of the individual stands out far more obviously, it is also just as precarious. […] Love expresses a need for sacrifice: every unity must lose itself in some other unity which exceeds it. Yet these joyous movements of the flesh work in two directions. Just because passing through the flesh—passing to the point at which the unity of the person is torn apart in it—is necessary if we wish in losing ourselves to find ourselves again in the unity of love, it does not follow that the moment when that tearing apart occurs is itself meaningless in terms of the existence that is torn apart. It is difficult to know what part is played during copulation by the feeling of passion for another being, the part played by erotic frenzy; so too the extent to which this individual is seeking life and power, the extent to which he is led to tear himself apart, to lose himself, at the same time as tearing apart and losing the other person.”
Therefore, returning to the earlier case, if the Proustian Narrator is unwilling to acknowledge the rights of Albertine to her own difference and opacity, then there can be no deeper love between them, much less the mutual process of annihilation that might deeper exist after such an understanding is first reached, for the idea of love remains an abstraction or a figment of the head in his head. But if he might substitute for transparency an idea of opacity and hence difference, as a means to understand her as she really is and changes, insofar as what the Cogito can know, instead of her as a means to satiate his own ego, then we might have the potential for a real and selfless love which sublimates the mere rights of opacity and difference—a headless romance and the seeing and losing of each individual Other so as to become Other together over time.
“Now that Albertine no longer appeared to be cross with me, the possession of her no longer seemed to me a treasure in exchange for which we are prepared to sacrifice every other. ”
From the first stanza of Herbert Mason’s famed translation of The Epic Of Gilgamesh, I am reminded of a particular pair of lines that, when combined together, become this: “It is a story of their becoming human together.”
In the epic tale of the King of Uruk, Gilgamesh, and the former wildman, Enkidu, in their fabled slaying of Humbaba, the guardian giant of the Cedar Forest, and Gugalanna, the Bull of Heaven, and the former’s quest to seek the means of immorality to revive his beloved friend, one finds the right to annihilation in both of these human figures: in the annihilation of Gilgamesh by his grief and in the annihilation of Enkidu by his death. Each one is transformed by their love and experience of meeting each Other; each one loses their Self in the living act of their love, such that afterwards, they are forever changed by the encounter of their mutual and loving annihilation.
And what unites them together in this story is love, whether out of understanding or companionship, and this love transcends the bare figure of themselves alone, and produces by virtue of their being together, a unified tale with a power that transcends its time and which has lasted for thousands of years to reach us and which still connects because of the weight of its message: the idea of love is annihilation between the Other and the Self—we lose ourselves in its process, but in doing so, become that which we could not otherwise reach alone or before.
I reflect on this, and pray that my thoughts will strengthen this meditation; or rather, that I think of my own loves and exercise my right to be annihilated by them too, because in the annihilation of my precious sense of self—of the cogito of my solipsistic mind—I find the potential for an existence which could most fittingly be called “becoming human together.”
As Bataille reflects too in his 1937 essay, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, “full existence is linked with any image which arouses hope and dread. In this world of dissolution, the BELOVED has become the only power that has retained the ability to return us to the warmth of life. If this world were not being endlessly criss-crossed by the convulsive movements of individuals in search of one another, were it not transfigured by the face ‘whose absence brings pain', it would appear a joke to those who have been born here: human existence would resemble only a memory, or a documentary film about ‘primitive’ countries. […] What remains in our innermost being as regards loss, tragedy and that ‘blinding marvel’, can only now be found in bed.”
And now I begin to understand what he means: that the Bacchanalian frenzy of life, or our Dionysian will-to-live, best exemplifies itself not in the image of Apollonian intellect—or by the image of the head and its abstractions—nor in the edifice of our reason and systems of logic and our methods of crystalline justification, but sublimely in our moments of annihilation, when we lose our heads and thus ourselves and become free from the universe of its prison, in the sheer, pure and immanent act of loving the Other of someone else, and becoming a new Other by the new reality of our annihilation of loving together.
So whisper in the ear of your beloved: let us annihilate each other—you and I—together.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.