Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Chapter 8: The Howl of Oedipus, the Cry of He´loı¨se

8 The Howl of Oedipus, the Cry of Héloı̈se From Asceticism to Postmodern Ethics Asceticism is a complex of widely varying practices, beliefs, and motives that have appeared in particular historical and cultural contexts . It is, to use the language of art criticism, site-specific. If the historical and phenomenological integrity of asceticism’s many manifestations is to be preserved, it is beyond dispute that ascetic phenomena must be allowed to emerge in discrete material and psychosocial meaning constellations.1 Yet, I want to argue, there is also for every psycho-social practice an episteme, a cluster of often invisible ideas, that is both the conceptual backdrop and the enabling mechanism for the emergence of ascetic life in situ. Thus, I shall allow myself to speak in more sweeping terms of Western asceticism and a Western episteme, with the understanding that neither term implies theoretical or practical unity but that both point toward a loosely linked, open-ended chain of mythemes and philosophemes. These are narrative and conceptual units that acquire meaning through their relation with one another and, taken together, constitute a tradition. I sometimes refer to the linkage of these units as a chain of signifiers. Concrete practices do not lie outside a tradition but feed back into it in a loop that may overturn a formation or render it more supple. Within this episteme, there are discernible discursive formations—lesser patterns of signification. Thus, no essence of asceticism will be specified. I shall argue that the discursive formations within the episteme of asceticism are bound up 125 with the self-imposition of corporeal and psychic pain or privation; but I shall also argue that not all pain and privation, even when selfgenerated , is ascetic. In what follows, four interrelated claims are considered. First, in order to understand the cluster of notions that enter into asceticism as an episteme, two prior and competing discourses, that of erōs (‘‘love’’) and of dikē (‘‘justice’’), especially as Plato interprets them, must be distinguished. The concepts of body associated with each need to be sorted out, as well as the way in which these views of body are taken up or rejected in ascetic discourse. Second, Western asceticism demands the devaluing of the world, the turning of the world into vanity. In order to see this, the type of negation involved in world negation will be analyzed. Third, within the structure of asceticism , gaps or fissures appear in its understanding of love, pleasure , and pain in the form of an eroticism that asserts and denies itself. This is especially evident in the correspondence of Héloı̈se and Abelard. The view of the body that emerges presages a new, postmodern understanding of asceticism and its relation to ethics. Finally , this new conception of body will allow asceticism, love, and justice to intersect without integrating them heuristically or dialectically. The Howl of Oedipus In one of Greek tragedy’s most powerful passages, a messenger recounts the cry of Oedipus upon discovering Jocasta hanged, a cry that gathers into itself the cumulative pain of incest and patricide. And with a dread shriek, as though someone beckoned him on, he sprang at the double doors, and from their sockets forced the bending bolts and rushed into the room. There beheld we the woman hanging by the neck in a twisted noose of swinging cords. But he, when he saw her, with a dread deep cry of misery, loosed the halter whereby she hung . . . Then was the sequel dread to see. For he tore from her raiment the golden brooches wherewith she was decked and lifted them, and smote full on his own eye-balls.2 The howl of Oedipus is followed by a remarkable act of automutilation : Oedipus tears out his eyes. Why, it might be asked, is it so unthinkable, so counterintuitive to consider this self-infliction of pain and deprivation an ascetic practice? Perhaps Oedipus’s cry of pain 126 Training Bodies is simply the spontaneous response to powerful emotions, whereas asceticism involves a nexus of beliefs and practices that must be consciously set in place and should have a specific aim. I want to argue that the cry of Oedipus, far from being akin to a scream uttered in response to physical injury, a biological reflex, as it were, is a distillate of a certain telos (‘‘purpose’’) and of a...