Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom

3. Authorizing Desire: Erotic Poetics and the Alsthesis of Freedom in Morrison and Shange

oppression/makes us love one another badly/makes our breathing mangled/while i am desperately trying to clear the air/ in the absence of extreme elegance/ madness can set right in like a burnin gauloise on Japanese silk. though highly cultured/ even the silk must ask how to burn up discreetly. —Ntozake Shange, “a photograph: lovers in motion” Oppression has at least two existential characteristics: (1) it aims to reduce the oppressed to the status of an object, and (2) it excludes the oppressed from the community of those regarded as having the capacity and the authority to make meanings and establish values. In The Ethics of Ambiguity , Simone de Beauvoir specifically identifies manipulation of desire as a primary mechanism through which oppression is exercised and finds its most destructive effects. If desire, or passion as Beauvoir and Sartre call it, is important for the realization of freedom, incapacitating it—extinguishing desire or mutilating it in some way—would have detrimental consequences for the pursuit of making a life of meaning and purpose. Similar ideas are advanced and further developed in the work of Drucilla Cornell (1998 and 1995), who, as discussed later, makes the case for what she describes as imaginative agency. This chapter develops the outlines of a 59 3 Authorizing Desire Erotic Poetics and the Aisthesis of Freedom in Morrison and Shange Christa Davis Acampora theoretical framework for considering the relation between freedom and desire for applications in investigations of artistic practices of resistance that aim at producing transgressive expressions of desire and what I shall describe as the aisthesis (or felt quality) of freedom. The poetics of desire, or erotic poetics, provide a vehicle for formulating an answer to the question , What would it be good for me (or for us) to want? rather than address the question, What should I (or we) do? which is the context in which imagination has been explored most often in the area of moral psychology . Erotic poetics allows us to conceive, formulate, and reformulate affiliations that enhance our participation in a social eroticism, an economy in which our energies are oriented toward forging significant relations with each other and striving together toward creating a social order that cultivates and enhances capabilities. (See also Ferguson 1989 on social eroticism.) To illustrate some cases in point, I open a discussion of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “Spell #7” and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Both works exemplify concern with the problem of revaluing what oppression denigrates . Both seek meaningful agency emerging out of a situation that is affectively incapacitating. I read Shange’s work in particular as endeavoring to open different possibilities for loving—as producing an erotic poetics —and I look to Morrison’s work for insights relevant to moral psychology and for an invitation to contemplate what difference it makes in having experience (or a lack thereof) of the felt quality of freedom. DESIRE AND FREEDOM IN BEAUVOIR In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir casts her own light on the situation of human existence—neither god nor thing, we live as liminal creatures who often find themselves drawn toward one or the other end of this pole. Sartre, of course, names that desire—longing to be either god (for Sartre, pure transcendence, absolute subjectivity) or thing (pure immanence , absolute objectivity)—bad faith. For Sartre, the temptations of bad faith are numerous, nearly ubiquitous, and it becomes difficult to see how we are anything but damned or how a meaningful social existence is possible. Beauvoir is similarly wary of bad faith. Her Ethics of Ambiguity operates largely within a Sartrean ontological framework, but for her the trap of bad faith is not inevitable: she distinguishes the desire to disclose being from the wish to possess or coincide with the object of desire. 60 CHRISTA DAVIS ACAMPORA According to both Sartre and Beauvoir, projects of bad faith fundamentally aim at fleeing our freedom. We pursue it in order to mollify anxiety in the face of freedom and to avoid the metaphysical risks involved in what Sartre describes as “making ourselves a lack of being” or exercising transcendence. Beauvoir also recognizes this tendency, which she describes as a desire to flee freedom that stems from our nostalgia for the security and cheerfulness of childhood. The child’s world is a serious one, but it is one for which she or he bears no responsibility. The serious world, characterized by what both Sartre...