Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer

4. Sacrificial Desire in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale

The justice which began with the maxim, “Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,” ends with connivance . . . at the escape of those who cannot pay to escape—it ends, like every good thing on earth, by destroying itself. . . . The selfdestruction of Justice . . . ! we know the pretty name it calls itself—Grace! . . . it remains, as is obvious, the privilege . . . of the strongest, better still, their super-law. —Friedrich Nietzsche Sacrifice the sacrifice . . . —Slavoj Žižek The discourses of charity that proliferated in medieval culture sought to determine what it meant to be “poor in spirit” and gave to the powerful a remarkable ally and model in the figure of the poor. The practice and casuistry of charity offered multiple points of crossover between poverty and power—between, as Nietzsche puts it, “those who cannot pay to escape” and those determined not to.1 The “super-law” of grace; the hypereconomy of sacrifice that seeks, as in mourning, to keep that which it gives up; the absurd and infinite love of a God who plays “scapegoat for his debtor”—these concepts, as Derrida has argued, accredit 155 4 Sacrificial Desire in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale T the believer who must believe in the unbelievable, who must give credence to that which is beyond instruments of credit, submit to an incomprehensible law.2 We know who is left out of, indeed, who is corrected by, the hypereconomy of sacrifice, except of course insofar as they subsidize it: those who can or must pay—the Jew, the sodomite, the usurer, the infidel, the heretic, those figures whose sacrifices Christian culture did not want to pay for, and who disturbed for centuries Christian calculations of forgiveness, of the love of the neighbor that refuses requital.3 The logic of sacrifice structures the militant European Christian subject (Derrida, Gift of Death, 29–33). This logic, the function of which is to recuperate aggressivity and loss, includes the infinite compassion that requites and corrects, and the renunciation of life, for example, the penitential subject’s gift, without hope of reward, of one “broken heart” (far more satisfying to God than the rectitude of many just men), as a gift submitted to an inscrutable and incalculable divinity, whose response (the gift of ultimate enjoyment) is assured in the apparent indeterminacy and infinity of the hypercontract of mercy. The logic of sacrifice must be taken into account if one wishes to consider the history of European militancy, of the knights of faith; and it lies at the heart of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. As we have seen, the psychoanalytic notion of the dependence of “the subject’s experience of satisfaction . . . on the other suggests why desire and sacrifice are tightly bound together.4 Lacan’s “mirror stage” imagines the infant taking on “her” image through the mediation of an “other” image, the image in the mirror or the face of the mother. A subject founded on the image of an other will never be full, or fully be; it is and will always be other to itself. And because of this, its ability to help or to be helped is finite, as is its access to enjoyment.5 The O – ther that structures the subject also has its limits. The symbolic order is open to change, it offers no absolute guarantee of meaning or redemption or enjoyment, and its import is the finitude of powers and of the subjects who take shape through their workings. And if the power of the O – ther is limited, then nothing can help human beings rid themselves of finitude; nor can ultimate enjoyment be attained any more than absolute power, because desire is “change as such” (Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis , 293). We need, for the sake of our jouissance, which also means for the sake of the other within and without us, to break the lethal promise of ultimate rescue. No other, divinized or abjected, can make us whole. 156 Sacrificial Desire in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale The logic of sacrifice seeks to occlude that the O – ther itself lacks, desires, and is transitory. Let us recall that when the subject posits the demand of the Other, she cannot translate this demand into a positive or specific mandate, a clear mission, a signifier that would be her “own.”6 In place of this impossibility she puts the demand of the Other, through the figure...