To say that Courtly Love is a version of the master-slave dialectic is getting it the wrong way round. Given that the Courtly Love machine emerged in the middle ages, it would be more accurate to say that Hegel's m-s dialectic is a garbled version of it. Historically speaking, there is no question that the modern notion of romantic love is a degraded version of Courtly Love. One of the most successful Courtly Love narratives was the roman de la rose (romance of the rose), and it is interesting that the word 'romance' originally meant "story of a hero's adventures," and "verse narrative," and only much later became solely associated with interiorised couple-passion. Courtly Love was entirely on the surface, about what Lacan calls ex-timacy, not the shared interiority of the modern domestic couple's 'four-eyed despotic machine.'
Besides, it's odd to invoke Bataille in opposition to Hegel. Much of Bataille's work was a reworking of Hegel's darkly pompous mystagoguery. But even that complicity with the Absolute Enemy is not the most troubling aspect of Bataille's (non) project. It is precisely his resolutely non-perverse, Catholic notion of perversion that is the problem.
Before I elaborate on that claim, a brief note on Catholicism. The problem with Catholicism is not excessive guilt. On the contrary, Catholics should be more guilty... for the Spanish Inquisition... for Bishop Landa burning most of Mayan culture in an afternoon... for systematically exploiting the poorest and most disenfranchised of the earth over two millennia and for encouraging them to breed indiscriminately (no-one mention Liberation Theology, please: that's only positive to the degree that it is Marxist, i.e. anti-Catholic)... for what Bergmann correctly identifies as its necessary, not accidental relationship to child abuse... 'Bergmann, ..., claimed that "the only rational view of the Roman Catholic Church" was that it was "a monstrous blasphemy of transcendent evil: incomparably more corrupt than the Mafia (if indeed it can be separated from organised crime, which of course it cannot)". His views, he said, were backed up by "hard sociological data which even they can't suppress now" concerning the – apparently endemic – problem of institutionalised child abuse amongst Catholic clergy. But Bergmann alienated any of the few supporters he had even within Protestantism by adding that "any religion that is serious about worshipping the Father-God will always be about child abuse; the only difference between the religion of the Paulites and that of the Abrahamites is that, in the Paulites' case, child torture spills over into child murder. Despite tying and binding Isaac, the Jewish God ultimately spares Abraham's son; but the Paulite God actually kills his own son."'
So, yes Catholics should be more guilty... not in that ooo, it is awful (so I'll do it) sense... but coldly guilty... so guilty in fact that they cease to be Catholics and really repent of their sins.
Bataille is as much a part of the despicable Catholic psychology of guilt and transgression as any other victims of this evil cult (you think I'm exaggerating? Tell me an institution that has done more evil on the planet? Nazism only lasted 10 years or so, whereas Catholicism is a still-existing, still-abusing two-thousand year reich). Everyone knows (but some continue to celebrate) that the deep sickness of Catholicism is that guilt ethically legitimates and pyschologically predisposes its victim-abusers towards destruction of others and self-destruction. Zizek has drawn our attention to Paul's observation that law produces (the desire for) transgression. The critique of this move is so well rehearsed that it scarcely seems worthwhile repeating it here. But suffice it to say that more or less the whole of Foucault and everything that is innovative about Lacan, Deleuze-Guattari and Burroughs is specifically designed to reduce that aren't we naughty transgresso-pantomimery to the interiorised, oedi-policed mummery that it is. And, needless to say, Spinoza could not have been less transgressive, less interested in urinating over the head of a priest to show how Bad he was. (Look at me, punish me... gaahhhhhhhhhh!)
'The whole Courtly Love/ Glamasochism thing stinks of a project with an infinitely deferred goal: "the act itself is unimportant/ boring". No. Far from it. Only in the climax-orientated, semen-drenched male libidinal economy which Bataille, far from escaping, produces yet another, academically titillating version of, is it is possible to defer goals. Nothing is deferred in Courtly Love, there is an almost unbearable plenitude, so that a breath, a sigh and a caress are enough to make your whole body shiver with intensely distributed libidinal charge. Nothing is deferred; what is positively avoided is anything that will terminate the plateau. Surely it's uncontoversial to note that the whole of, for instance, the Body without Organs plateau in ATP is about, not deferral, but a model of diffuse eroticism which can include sex and even orgasm, but which is not terminated by them. Deleuze-Guattari rightly take great pains to say that sex and even male emission phenomena need not end the plateau.
What then is this 'Act' of which the Sadeans (John and Glueboot) insist on maintaining the primacy? Only a Sadean sexualist (or a LLAD) could make a distinction between The Act and eroticism; for the Masochist, the distinction is meaningless; all gestures, all gameplay, is as fully erotic as any rutting. And that's because, though they will deny it, the Sadeans continue to have a model that is BOTH semiotically overcoded AND biologisitic. Semiotically overcoded because it privileges certain behaviours and activities as key signifiers ('we're having sex now, this is REALLY it, not foreplay....' and, conversely, 'it's over now, I feel disgusted, let's do it again....' There is no 'doing it again' for a Masochist (when did it stop?) Incidentally, when sexualists say 'they had sex five times last night' what is 'sex'?) Biologistic because, for all the mystificatory vagueness about what the Act involves, it is pretty clear that is sex understood in an absolutely straightforward way. And as I said before, the fact that this moves beyond genital copulation to orgasm doesn't mean anything. As Nina rightly says, there is nothing natural, but nevertheless there are biotic defaults, and there is nothing more biologistic than poking bits of yourself into holes or rubbing bits of yourself until they are sick. Look at dogs -- they'll fuck anything, any surface, any animal, any orifice will do. Are they 'perverse'? On the contrary, in their agitational drive to relieve tension by any means necessary one can see the whole Schopenhauerian torture chamber that is organic biotics absolutely exposed for what it is. Insofar as there is nature, insofar as there is biology, it is Sadean-Bataillean. I expect John and Siobhan will deny that this is what they mean by sex, but I suspect, and I could of course be wrong, that their defintion of sex is no more positive than the Trad Christian definition of the soul, i.e. it will proceed by negation, 'it's not x, it's not y': what is it then?
It it is precisely this drive to relieve tension - inevitably producing tristresse and therefore the need to relieve tension again and therefore etc... - that is what Masochism evades in its construction of a cold rationalist nu-earth hypersensuality. Unlike the pleasure principle drive to have done with tension, Masochism is literally in-tense, in that it takes its enjoyment from modulating tension
― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Thursday, 16 June 2005 12:47 (twenty years ago)