Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (review)

Henry Staten, who teaches literature and philosophy at the University of Utah, is the author of two earlier books that also explore the boundaries between these disciplines. In Eros and Mourning he claims a much larger historical scope for his terrain, nothing short of the entire field of all affective phenomena occasioned by loss of a beloved object, at least as these feelings have been articulated in certain influential texts in the Western tradition. These phenomena Staten calls in general “libidinal relations,” and they include strategies of deferral, avoidance, or transcendence that arise in response to the threat of loss—“strategies by which the self is ‘economized’ against the libidinal expenditure involved in mourning” (xi). The strong thesis of this book is that there is a logic or dialectic of desire that may be traced through the canonical tradition of Western literature and philosophy from its inception to the present—that there is thus, in Derrida’s phrase, “the coherence of a textual web” if not to the entire tradition, at least to an important subset of this tradition. The problematic of Eros may thus be transposed into the key of mourning, which is the horizon of all mortal desire.

Staten argues that this “dialectic of desire” is fundamentally determined by the fear of the mortal object of desire as something that by its “erotic allure” draws the subject into “the abyss of mourning.” A key passage, connecting Platonism to Augustine and his Christian successors, is the assertion in the Symposium that only an object that is immortal and ideal can truly fulfill desire. Staten tests his thesis by a series of brilliant readings that demonstrate “how literary history may be reconstituted in terms of a poetics of mourning.” After a consideration of the structure of unassuageable mourning in the Iliad, which stands as his example of a poem preceding the articulation of an “ideology of transcendence” and yet a poem of striking postmodernity, Staten with heroic range and rare literary sensitivity explores a formidable gallery of texts. These extend from the Gospel of John, Dante, the troubadours, and Petrarch to Hamlet, Paradise Lost, La Princesse de Clèves, and The Heart of Darkness.

In the concluding chapter, “The Bride Stripped Bare, or Lacan avec Plato,” Staten argues that Freud and Lacan, who are currently so influential in literary criticism and theory, specifically on the question of desire, must themselves be read in the context of the dialectic of mourning that dominates their text milieu. Thus Lacan, in his reading of Hamlet, explicitly links the notion of the objet a (the object of desire) to “what is called a vanitas in the religious tradition”; and, in the discussion of Plato’s Symposium in Seminar XI, he argues that the objet a represents “immortal life” as “what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction.” Lacan’s example thus demonstrates that the classical discourse on Eros and mortality remains essential to the contemporary discourse on desire.

The itinerary of Eros in Mourning is vast, the readings nuanced and persuasive, and the learning relevant and impressive. In its interplay between an enduring tradition and individual invention, this book reminds us of the paradoxical aptness of a mourning poem by Wallace Stevens: “The ear repeats, / Without a voice, inventions of farewell.” The author takes a refreshing stand against recent historicist criticism in its tendency toward radical periodization as well as against too clearly demarcated epistemes; he develops his own philosophical and literary argument, however, without rejecting the possible relevance of materialist or Foucaultian insights. (Although Staten alludes briefly to Anders Nygren’s pioneer historical study of Eros and Agape—whose treatment of the question of Eros is certainly at odds with his own—, he might have also mined fruitfully Irving Singer’s more recent trilogy, The Nature of Love.)