Here are two passages I came accross in my reading this week. The second seems relevant to the first; perhaps not. I've also added a third passage from the records.
Science--
beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,
every time I make love for love's sake alone,
I betray you.
(Katherine Larson, "Love at Thirty-two Degrees")
And so I insist on promoting the dea that, whether grounded or not in biological observation, instinct--among the modes of knowledge [connaissance] required by nature of living beings so that they satisfy its needs--is defined as a kind of [experiential] knowledge [connaissance] we admire because it cannot become [articulated] knowledge [un savoir]. But in Freud's work something quite different is at stake, which is a savoir certainly, but one that doesn't involve the slightest connaissance, in that it is inscribed in a discourse of which the subject--who, like the messenger-slave of Antiquity, carries under his hair the codicil that condemns him to death--knows neither the meaning nor the text, nor in what language [langue] it is written, nor even that it was tattooed on his shaven scalp while he was sleeping.
(Jacques Lacan, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire.")
"This is what it is to go aright, or be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.
"And there in life, Socrates, my friend," said the woman from Mantinea, "there if anywhere should a person live his life, beholding that Beauty."
(Plato, Symposium)
Posted by pjaussen at March 8, 2006 05:11 PM | TrackBack