Forsaking all Others: Marriage, Monogamy and Contamination
And when I call you
my love, my love, is it you I am calling or my love? You, my love, it
is you I thereby name, is it to you that I address myself? I don’t
know if the question is well put, it frightens me. But I am sure that
the answer, if it gets to me one day, will have come to me from you.
You alone, my love, you alone will have known it. We have asked each
other the impossible, as the impossible, both of us.
This essay will examine monogamy,
marriage and the third party as a deconstructive figure that disobeys
the opposition between inside and outside, presence and absence,
private and public. Its departure point will be a close reading of a
small section from a 2004 interview in which Derrida aligns
‘monogamy’ with the institution of “marriage,” and appears to
tacitly advocate a kind of ‘polyamory’ (love for many, as opposed
to ‘polygamy,’ which is marriage to many). The state of
subjectivity at the moment of an encounter with the other is bound up
in what preceded it, rendering its force cumulative, embroidered by
the collective thread of others: at the same time present and absent.
Through deconstructive analysis I will explicate the condition of the
one on one relation that bears the trace
of a third party, rendering every desiring relation contaminated.
The drive towards securing a
relation with the other is at the same time inherently insecure due
to constantly shifting borderlines that criss-cross the intimate
relation.
The move
between singularity and so-called union passes through the in-between
realm of dissimulation (concealment) and risk (of being unmasked).
‘Forcing himself to say who he is,’ writes Derrida, on the
subject of Nietzsche’s Ecce
Homo, ‘he goes
against his natural habitus that prompts him to dissimulate behind
masks…life is dissimulation.’
In this essay the figure of the third party in its various guises
will haunt, spectate and frequently interject. The third party will
constantly speculate on the potentiality of ‘the couple,’ it will
penetrate more or less deeply the borders of their apparent security.
The drive towards the other will be analysed in view of the possible
formulation of a new relational construct that rejects the
baggage-laden concept of “marriage” and supplements
a type of
monogamy that has been renamed.
In the films Exhibition (Joanna
Hogg, 2013) and Possession (Andrezej Zulawski, 1981), architecture
makes legible the idea of the third party, interpolating on the one
on one relation and insinuating itself into the spaces between
bodies, externally, and between subjectivities, internally. Both
films reveal disobedient oppositions between internal and external
and public and private. Both films also examine the condition of
marriage and the situation of the triangle, a form that elucidates
the true nature of one on one relation – teasing the so-called
monogamous party, threatening their security as singularities both in
a condition of constant flux and also conjoined, each supplementing
the other. In this context, and via the prism of psychoanalysis and
Derridean analysis, I will problematise the concept of
two-becoming-one that underpins both the notion of any ‘monogamous’
relation and, crucially, the institution of “marriage.”
In Learning
to Live Finally,
an interview in which the issue of marriage is raised as regards the
constitutional omission of homosexual couples, Derrida defends this
group and, in doing so, indicates a position of a generalised concept
of inclusion, in spite of his ambivalence toward “marriage”
itself. His theoretical support is ambiguously negated by the more
radical viewpoint that follows it: ‘If I were a legislator, I would
propose simply getting rid of the word and concept of “marriage”
in our civil and secular code.’
This statement, provisional and speculative in essence, reveals a the
multi-faceted arrow of his attack: the
legislative machinery of social control; the arbitrary articulation
of words and concepts (words, in an archaeological sense, bearing
multiple meanings; words ciphered according to the speaker’s own
intentions, whether conscious or unconscious); the situation of
secularity and the disintegration of a blanket faith-based system of
morality. To extend the reach of this dismantling process, one could
at this point
raise the issue sexual difference and a ‘civil code’ that is
supposed to afford equal rights to (marginalised) women; marriage is
a hangover from a patriarchal order that not only excluded women from
social life, rendering them second-class citizens, but also,
historically, used women and girls as currency (a practice that, of
course, continues to this day, but is prohibited in ‘our civil and
secular code’).
Provisionally, beginning at the
beginning, Derrida proposes ‘getting rid of the ‘word and concept
of “marriage,”’ which interpenetrate: the word entwined around
the concept. Derrida employs Saussurian linguistics to dislocate the
langue (Latin –
‘tongue’), which
is the abstract system of a particular speech act, from the parole
(Latin – derived from ‘discourse’; ‘parable’),
meaning the most
commonplace speech acts. Through utterance of the word, the
signifier, one
summons the concept, the signified.
Every utterance is marked, imprinted, connoted (from the Latin
connotare, ‘to
mark along with’). Every speech act is linked by an invisible
thread to its etymological origin, that is to say the concept in the
service of which it was originally appointed. In order to ‘get rid
of’ the concept, which is heavily loaded with historico-political
valences, one would have also to ‘get rid of’ the word and its
echoes that reverberate retroactively, with which it is burdened and
to which it is forever beholden.
‘“Marriage” as a religious,
sacred, heterosexual value – with a vow to procreate, to be
eternally faithful, and so on – is a concession made by the secular
state to the Christian church…’
“Marriage” is a ritual
traditionally sanctioned by the church. Many of those who practice it
today (marriage both an event and a practice) do so with sincerity,
in the belief that it has been sufficiently ‘modernised’ through
cultural re-inscription over successive epochs: ‘modernisation’
being predicated on the values of the time with which it is
contemporaneous: ‘modernisation,’ ostensibly, echoing the times
in which one lives. The primary shift has been the transplanting of
the ceremony from the church (consonant with the religious code) to
the register office (consonant with the legislative code). For many
this shift seems significant enough to, essentially, extricate the
religious undertones
completely. But the
heavily connoted state of marriage, ‘as a religious, sacred,
heterosexual value,’ persists in many forms, from the exclusion of
homosexual marriage to the persistence of the idea of monogamy, or
‘marriage to one,’ which are foundational values. The ‘vow to
procreate, to be eternally faithful, and so on’ – I might add ‘to
co-habit,’ – are inseparable from the codes, practices and values
of the Christian church, from which Derrida seeks to conclusively
diverge, cleaving a clearly delimited alternative for those who would
choose to ‘marry,’ (that is, to ritualise their commitment to the
other through event and practice) without interception, and
infestation via trace, by the church and its values: even if only by
echo through the ages. Derrida argues that it is thus the
responsibility of the secular state to formulate a genuine
alternative that diverges at
root, at the
subterranean stems that define and maintain it, the profoundly
codified practice of “marriage.”
Discourse around ‘the scared’
is prominent in both in religious and more colloquial discourse, via
the mass absorption of ideology. The monistic tradition, reifies a
hallowed singularity – but secondarily this notion is transplanted
onto the common conception of ‘The One.’ One’s ‘other;’ the
other that would make one complete. To pursue one’s ‘other-half’
is an activity that is hugely over-determined in our culture via
culturally naturalised depictions of romantic endeavour, love songs
and anecdotally via the mass-internalisation of myth and a nostalgic
return to a past, in which couples married young and married forever:
divided only by death. Clearly this idea(l), illusion, or, indeed
fantasy is reproduced in the discourse that pervades “marriage.”
‘The sacred’ as a category with its intimations of privacy,
exclusivity and reverence – values which transcend the ordinary
expectations of human interactions – thus place the ‘sacred’
condition of monogamy on an ideological/idealistic metaphorical
pedestal.
As for heterosexuality, a value
that is intimately entwined with the ‘word and concept of
“marriage,”’ one is led to the contentious issue of
procreation, and the prescriptive, written, law of Christian (though
far from exclusively) ideology that renders sacred the union of one
man and one woman, irrespective of their desire or biological
capability to procreate. It is outside of the scope of this essay to
interrogate the particularities of this issue, but the current debate
explicitly illustrates a socio-political division between those who
wish to conserve (and simultaneously exclude marginalised couples)
from the institution of marriage, which in spite of gestures in the
direction of ‘modernisation,’ remains the last bastion of
homogenised political ideology.
‘[“Marriage”] is a
concession made by the secular state to the Christian church and
particularly with regard to monogamy.’ In proposing the elimination
of ‘the word and concept of “marriage,” and thus the ambiguity
or hypocrisy with regard to the religious or sacred – things that
have no place in a secular constitution,’ Derrida suggests a
startlingly radical option: an alternative that strikes at the very
source of pervasive common conceptions on the subject of fidelity,
love and the intimate relation. That he strikes at the root is of
utmost import when one considers the extent of what lies invisible,
subterranean, beneath the surface, threading around and binding the
visible shoots. In pinpointing “monogamy” –– ‘particularly
with regard to monogamy’ – Derrida’s position, unequivocally
anti-Christian church, implicates through opposition non-monogamy: a
condition that is more or less inevitable depending on the depth of
ones interrogation of the third party, which will be returned to
later. This being Derrida, however, one must approach oppositional
thinking with extreme caution and resist reifying the (nearest known)
binary opposition – ‘polyamory.’ The simple gesture of binary
reversal, says deconstruction, is merely a manipulation of terms and
fails to forge to a genuine break from the thinking that produced
both poles of the opposition. Again, circuitously, perhaps, but
necessarily: these issues will be returned to.
The word and concept of
“monogamy,” the pulse that reverberates through of this essay,
should be studied under the lens of the deconstructive microscope.
“Monogamy,” the word itself, rooted in ecclesiastical Latin, is
not merely steeped in religiosity, with its attendant notions of the
sacred union and so on, but is constituted by and therefore
inseparable from the sanctified condition of marriage (‘gamos’).
When one claims to practice ‘monogamy’ one inadvertently
(perhaps) invokes a condition hugely codified, burdened by the ‘word
and concept of “marriage,”’ whether or not the couple is
“married” in the proper sense of the term (though the verb ‘to
marry,’ of course, signifies a more generalised conjoining). The
‘mono’ contained within the word ‘monogamy,’ describes an
exclusively one
on one relation, an exclusivity that is pronounced by ‘marrying
together’,
into a sacred unity, two, presumed, mutually
singular entities,
‘forsaking all
others,’ according
to the traditional vow: “marriage” exclusifies the one on one
relation. As a prerequisite for ‘marriage,’ the word and concept
of “monogamy,” is ‘over-determined by ethico-political norms.’
The so-called ‘sacred union’
is permeable, rendering it inherently adaptive, from the inside, to
outside forces. The word and concept of “divorce,” is fully
naturalised into the collective consciousness: a clear and present
hypocrisy. If marriage is such a sacred state how can its severance
be possible? If its severance is possible then “divorce”
legitimises, reifies and makes provision for the interjection of the
third party, rendering “marriage” potentially temporal, divesting
it of all that sacred rhetoric, the backbone of which is the scared
union of one to the other, forever. The
word ‘divorce’
is derived from the Latin ‘divertere,’ meaning ‘to turn aside:’
‘di’ – apart, ‘vertere’ – to turn. The existence of
“divorce,” this turning against the other with whom one was once
“married” radically challenges the so-called sacred, profound
unification into one whole of two singularities, and, significantly,
extinguishes the core concept of ‘the one.’ That is to say, ‘the
one’ who would complete the other in a unity of faithfulness
(sexual fidelity, indubitably, but also emotional? experiential?),
‘forsaking all others.’
The notion of
the hermetically sealed, mutually self-sustaining – one could argue
mutually cannibalising
– couple is a
conceit that disavows and even proscribes the various and, greater or
lesser intense varieties of (sexual and/or non-sexual) encounter. The
subject is constantly being penetrated by multiples ‘others,’ who
affect (‘touch’), destabilise and mark, which brings us to the
precarious, shifting status of fidelity.
‘Fidelity’ is derived from
‘faith’,
which has wide-ranging connotations from the religious to the ‘leap
of faith’ that is the signifier of any encroachment into risk –
risk looming large in any one on one relation that is accompanied by
an erosion of physical and emotional borders. Fidelity has
transmogrified into a predominantly sexually proscriptive term in
modern usage. It has thus come to align itself with “monogamy,”
which is itself sufficiently removed from its etymological roots to
denote a sexual
as opposed to
matrimonial
relation.
Fidelity is multi-directional, functions simultaneously and has many
faces. There is fidelity to the cause,
in the case of
marriage, accompanied by notions of duty, role and position within a
relational unit (that I dispute as a foundation for the integrity of
the transformative relation.) This type of fidelity disavows fidelity
to oneself and to the other, by neutralising subjectivities into
positions: it problematises the condition of flux to which all
subjectivities are by their very nature prone. There is fidelity to
the other, which suggests a subjection of self, an obfuscation of
self behind or in opposition with the other. And there is fidelity to
the self, under which one could justify any action: a relativist
position, in which disparity is produced when one attempts a
connection with the other. Subjectivity congealing into a parallel
state of relation, with inevitable dissimulation, rendering one
obscure to the other: detached. Common conceptions of fidelity occupy
non-negotiable positions that are fixed and therefore at odds with
the state of union Derrida proposes.
‘Loyalty’ and ‘fidelity’
are intimately linked. My interest in loyalty is the way it winds its
way through multiple intimacies, usually both non-sexual and sexual.
Loyalty is bound to trust. One can trust many, and to those one
‘gives’ oneself via the shedding process of disclosure and
exposure of inner-selves: the private as opposed to the public self
or persona (which
means ‘mask’). That is, the ‘hidden’ selves that one reserves
for the trusted ‘other.’ Language, communication, handles
trust as
trusting communication relies on a shared language: a close proximity
to meaning that is ciphered specifically for the other. To speak
approximately the same language minimises, but by no means diminishes
the risk of mistranslation, misinterpretation, which in turn
minimises the speaker’s dissimulation or obfuscatory flights that
would alienate the other. To speak the same language is to be free to
spontaneously extemporise, that is, improvise one’s subjectivity in
speech without preparation, and for this there must be trust. To
trust is to allow the fragilisation
of ones borders so that the ‘inside’ comes ‘out’: the inside
that is masked by internal personas – the stripping of masks to
reveal more masks. This type of profound trust, this necessarily
partial disclosure, on the ellipse, can and does lie in multiple
persons.
In closely considering fidelity,
or loyalty to the other, the figure of the third party emerges;
protruding obscenely from the word itself that needn’t exist if it
wasn’t for its omnipresence. I shall alight from the passage in the
interview from Learning
to Live Finally in
which Derrida radically reformulates and expands the perimeters
around the notion of “marriage.”
‘By getting rid of the word and
concept of “marriage,” and thus this ambiguity or hypocrisy in
regard to the religious or the sacred – things that have no place
in a secular constitution – one could put in their place a
contractual “civil union,” a sort of generalised pacs,
one that has
been improved, refined and would remain flexible and adaptable to
partners whose sex and number would not be prescribed.’
Here Derrida negotiates the
waste-land, or the wall, between “marriage” as it stands, opaque
and over-determined by prescribed conditions, and the endorsement of
mere
pleasure-seeking,
or hedonism. I use the word ‘opaque’ deliberately, to denote a
condition that obscures the smorgasbord of potential transparencies
that are marginalised by the marriage contract (which will be
returned to later). He reifies the momentousness of the intimate one
on one relation – the urge within each of us to fuse with the
other: to connect – but abhors the socio-cultural imposition of
boundaries with their attendant quasi-religious overtones – ‘things
that have no place in a secular constitution’ – and circumscribe
the full potential of inter-subjectivity. Derrida refers to the
French ‘pacte
civil de solidarite’ (PACS),
albeit with a radical twist that can be traced back to his previous
statement on monogamy – ‘[“Marriage”] is a concession made by
the secular state to the Christian church and particularly with
regard to monogamy.’ He advocates a version of PACS that has been
‘improved, refined and would remain flexible and adaptable to
partners whose sex and number would not be prescribed.’
Derrida’s vision of PACS has
been transformed at root. He does away with monogamy, which is the
most insidious element, the most naturalised; like Western
Metaphysical binary thinking it is the impossible element, and that
is where he makes his move. He does away with circumscription, which
imposes conditions on subjectivity with which the willing participant
might very well concur, under culturally prescribed duress, one might
argue, but the deconstructive tendency abhors, replacing it with
‘flexibility.’ He emphasises ‘adaptability,’ that is, he
would embed the thing that is merely implied in the extant system of
‘marriage’ and ‘divorce’ – that the couple is not literally
sealed off from the world, that subjectivities in constant flux
require an adaptive structure in which they can flourish. He
advocates the de-tabooing
of same-sex couplings and, indeed, poly-sexualities.
And given its spatial and temporal
dimensions, its structure of relays and delays, no human being is
ever safe from AIDS. This possibility if thus installed at the heart
of the social bond as inter-subjectivity. And at the heart of that
which would preserve itself as a dual inter-subjectivity it inscribes
the mortal and indestructible trace of the third-party.
Any desiring relation brings
infection; one is always (already) contaminated by the other. In
being ‘touched’ – a multi-sensorial event that can take place
in the absence of proximity – one is transformed. In the figure of
the third party one can decipher the one on one relation, integrating
multiple ‘others’ into the illusory sacred union and fully occupy
the situation of the social being in flux, continually marked and
transformed by multiple forces, whether human or object, without
mortally wounding the profundity of the encounter. In the language of
monogamy, such forces are a threat to the (constructed)
‘whole’ that
constitutes the couple; these forces gather against the ‘couple’
in their purportedly conjoined solidity as a single entity, seeking
fissures in their armoury; an armoury that is in fact a collection of
porous membranes. One bears (or is burdened by) traces of multiple
‘others,’ past and future, and these intrusions have many forms
and manifestations. As will be shown in the next section of this
essay, architecture is polyvalent; it is at once anchoring,
reassuring and imprisoning. Walls, in the films ‘Exhibition’
(Joanna Hogg, 2013) and ‘Possession’ (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981),
embody literal and metaphorical interlocutions into the more or less
sealed unit of the married couple. Walls also function as
deconstructive figures; they disobey the opposition between inside
and outside, public and private, whilst at the same time functioning
as symbolic and actual boundaries. Walls keep one in and,
correlatively, keep others out.
One could
even imagine denouement of the subject into
a wall:
sealed-off, sealed-up: sharing with the wall a condition of apparent
impenetrability.
‘Exhibition’ emphasises the
relative permanence of the architectural frame in relation to the
inherently destabilised humans that inhabit it. The film depicts the
anxious realisation of the instability of architectural annexation,
for the couple intend to abandon the house. D and H, both visual
artists, have inhabited their starkly contemporary home for eighteen
years, their marriage exhibited
within the
confines if its walls, which have absorbed the domestic
choreographies contained within them. In lieu of offspring –
conscious, reflective products of their relationship – the walls
are witnesses to the fluctuations and ruptures of love, mutual
dependencies and desire. In the absence of offspring the walls are a
constant, unchanging presence: their clean, ordered stillness
juxtapose sharply with the destabilising force that the presence of
children would impose.
D negotiates space as ‘other,’
with consideration and care, as if the architecture was receptive as
flesh is receptive: yielding. She manipulates the sliding doors to
her studio with particular reverence; her body articulates a synonymy
with the architecture. Internal
walls not only represent the third party interpolating on the
matrimonial dyad, but also impose themselves on D spacio-temporally,
articulating a frequent blurring of the boundary between self and
other, whilst at the same time supplementing and supporting her very
body. The walls are her confidante and her other secondary, intimate
‘other’ – the third party that deconstructs the opposition
between self and other; inside and outside. Her trust is invested in
the architecture of her surroundings, she is loyal, and the walls
that contain her also ‘hold’ her: their tactility is an embrace
that is returned. D’s singularity (which is of course divided) on
the domestic stage is frequently disturbed and she moves through
spaces with a nervous tension one recognises as a symptom of love –
preciousness, a fear of harming the other: a fear of loss.
If ‘Exhibition’ takes on the
third party architecturally, then ‘Possession’ (1981) digs into
it archaeologically, disobeying the comfortable opposition between
preservation and destruction. A disturbing depiction of one man,
Marc, his descent into madness and the psychotic disintegration of
his marriage, ‘Possession’ also makes use of the rich tapestry of
domestic unbliss,
internal walls pushing/punishing the inhabitants to the limits of
their sanity, domestic roles inculcated by marriage diminishing the
potential for inter-subjective development and the enslavement of one
to the other. Additionally, and crucially, the film is set (and
filmed) in West Berlin, the presence of the Berlin Wall producing a
meta-narrative intensity, not to mentions the armed sentinels (do
they protect or do they threaten?) who often come into focus,
witnessing both the film’s production and the involuted narrative
unfold. One has a sense of presence in absence and absence in
presence throughout, and a rapidly diminishing opposition between
inside and outside.
Most scenes take place in confined
interior spaces (rooms in an apartment, an underground station, an
office, a bar) and yet deconstruct the opposition between inside =
safety/outside = risk. Outside, in spite of the situation of
incarceration its inhabitants endure in a walled-off sector, seems
oftentimes preferable to the destabilised condition of bodies
negotiating domestic spaces. The opposition is deconstructed via the
mirroring of inside/outside in terms of their equivocal devastation.
A position is thus adopted by the director against the ‘family
unit,’ “marriage” and especially in regards to the inherent
porousness of these states that are ordinarily considered to form an
impenetrable whole, constituted and nourished by the circulatory
feeding system of its composite parts. The traditional ‘triangle’
formation that emerges in ‘Possession’ positions the character of
Anna’s lover as the third-party. Heinrich is the antithesis of
Marc. Where Marc’s libido is domesticated, Heinrich seems liberated
(indeed, he has abandoned his wife and child). He embodies the
panoply of attributes of which Marc is devoid – athletic,
open-minded, ‘sexually liberated,’ all of which are dismantled as
the narrative progresses, sexual liberation being a ‘modern
delusion.’
Inter-subjectivity, whereby a
thing exists ‘between
conscious minds,’ that is, ‘shared
by more that one conscious mind,’ [OED, my italics] makes legible
the situation of fluidity in relational connections, abandoning the
possessive and sacred overtones of the extant discourse around
‘monogamy.’ In applying Derrida’s theory of the text to the
social being in flux, marked by traces of multiple forces, one can
recognise the inherently porous character of subjectivity, and thus
the fallacious nature of the one-that-is-two as an inter-subjective
construct, as opposed to the condition of the subjectivity itself,
‘the text produced only in the transformation of another text:’
[Whether in the order of spoken or
written discourse], no element can function as a sign without
referring to another element which
itself is not simply present...
This interweaving results in each ‘element’ – phoneme or
grapheme – being
constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements
of the chain or system. This interweaving, this textile, is the text
produced only in the transformation of another text. Nothing,
neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever
simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and
traces of traces…the gram as ‘differánce,’ then, is a
structure and a movement no longer conceivable on the basis of the
opposition between presence/absence. [My italics]
This essay has considered the
affects of multiple, simultaneous ‘inter-subjectivities,’ how and
what type of negotiations are required in a more generalized
deconstruction, or dismantling, of terms such as ‘monogamy’ and
also the highly codified practice of “marriage.” My proposition
is that there is no such thing as a purely
one on one
relation and that there are necessarily more than two people present
(even through absence) in every desiring relation. The difficulty is
in definition, and the expectations that are bound up when one takes
on a particular ‘role’ in relation to the other. I have looked at
the hypocritical condition of “marriage” in our secular, civil
code through a close-reading of Derrida’s text. The next section
will analyse the condition of the one on one relation and the drive
toward the other as a complementary subjectivity: the intense one on
one relation whose connective tissue (be that intellectual and/or
sexual stimulation and gratification) binds self to other and has the
potential to re-orient the ‘couple’ onto a trajectory that is
marked by past experience. Of central importance to this
investigation are the risks inherent in a radical openness that will
be proposed, explored and explicated.
I follow Freud, Nietzche and Sade
in my view of the amorality of the instinctual life. At some level,
all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts. We are only for
something by
being against
something else.
People who believe they are having pleasant, casual, uncomplex sexual
encounters, whether with friend, spouse, or stranger, and blocking
from consciousness the tangle of psychodynamics at work, just as they
block the hostile clashings of their dream life.
‘Polyamory,’ a preference for
multiple lovers that is spelled-out unambiguously in the word (a vast
improvement on ‘monogamy,’ which is infested with the word and
concept of “marriage”), in its equivocal tendency, describes the
condition of most relations, most accurately (albeit divested of the
implicit simultaneity). An unmarried state of connection to the other
with an active openness to outside influence and a flexibility, in
terms of others: their ‘number or sex,’ as Derrida remarked. In
the absence of equivocality, a potential so-called ‘primary’
relation could form an orbit around which others enter and exit, like
electrons, marked by fluidity and flux, coming in and out of orbit,
supplementing the ‘couple.’ Regarding the concept of monogamy and
its hypocrisies, ‘polyamory’ seems too simple a construct: too
oppositional, as if in its obvious radical criticality it doesn’t
go far enough beyond the binary.
Peggy Kamuf writes,
The idea will have to be
approached that even if it is essentially preservative, love (but
also deconstruction) is nevertheless no stranger to destruction to
loss and to ruin…we will be approaching the figure of love as
affirmation that deconstructs the opposition between preservation and
destruction, of love, therefore, as that which like deconstruction
takes place along the divided, ruined border of this alternative.
Perhaps polyamory’s failing is
enshrined in its Utopian disavowal of ‘destruction,’ ‘loss’
and ‘ruin:’ equivalence creating libidinal plenitude and
resistance to crisis, which after all is a force of nature that is
creative. Perhaps, in the final analysis, what is cultivated is a
generalised, multiplied dampening-down of desire. A state of
relativism that avoids intensity and the risks associated with a
mutual exchange of strengths and weaknesses in a constellation of
mutually binding elements that overlap and construct
inter-dependencies out of which profound depths of trust and intimacy
are born. Loss, after all, is embedded not only on the marriage
contract, but any loving relation – if not by severance then by
death. I can imagine a socially acceptable practice in which, through
the supplementary application of ‘radical transparency,’ multiple
intimacies could flourish without the diminishment of each relation’s
unique (potential) intensity. I propose ‘radical transparency’ as
a solution to the problem of opacity that constitutes the ‘monogamy’
contract. ‘Radical transparency’ functions within the confines of
a never fully open openness: an external openness that always
recognises its internal closures, its multi-directional varieties of
accessibility. It emerges at the threshold, on the borders of the
visible or perceptible space available for translatability between
self and other. It recognises the fludity of borders, the necessity
of perpetual negotiation with the other (inclusive of all the other
‘others’) and the unresisting, yielding nature of productive
intimacy. The condition of possession, of central import in the
marriage contract, could thus be gotten rid of, in addition to the
mythical safety net that was never anyway existent.
And this contact without contact,
this barely touching touch is unlike any other, in the very place
where all it touches is the other.
The Japanese dance theatre ‘Butoh’
is motivated by the play of inter-subjectivities on the bodies of the
performers, though a conscious and deliberate deferment of contact.
“We dance completely separately,” utters choreographer Tatsumi
Hijikata’s translator in the documentary, ‘BUTOH: Body on the
Edge of Crisis,’ (1990), “yet our hearts are dancing in unison.”
Isolation from the other, for Hijikata, creates a greater depth of
feeling, so his dancers “work in isolation” His hypothesis
stretches beyond performance and categorisation, into the more
generalised relational scene, jarring with the familiar “marriage”
contract that contaminates most loving relations: “This kind of
independence between dancers should exist between [married] partners
as well,” he proclaims. Intimacy has many facets, and not least
presence in absence – one only has to look at the word itself;
intimate is
derived from Latin ‘intimare’ – to bring into, to impress, to
make familiar – and ‘intimus’ – innermost. So the word is
closely acquainted with a co-existence of interiority. Derrida writes
in ‘Envois’: ‘It is curious to see that generally I do not
answer your letters, nor you mine or are we delirious, each alone,
for
ourselves? Are we waiting for an
answer or something else?’
Sharing and disclosure come into play, but physical proximity is not
a prerequisite, and after all one is isolated inside one’s body and
the other is always outside of oneself, but never simply.
When one speaks of the other
having been ‘made’ for us, a common idiomatic expression, my
contention is not with the utterance itself, but the archaeology of
the word ‘made’ and its mistranslation in terms of the production
of the self. The conceit is produced from the fully naturalised idea
that people are born and then ‘find’ each other on a fateful
parallel trajectory that converges, finally. However, this narrative
disavows the affects of the third party in producing the self,
invoked by the word ‘made’ (or might the word ‘constructed’
be more useful?) It also disavows the extent to which singularity is
translatable,
meaning being
ciphered, always, and, like Derrida’s approach to the ‘text,’
singularity coming apart during translation. We
invoke the spectre,
the echo and the
imprint of multiple others when we admit we have been ‘made,’
since one can only hypothesise ones needs through experience,
failure, negation; multiple others leave their imprint on the subject
through inclusion and exclusion: their vestigial presence is in
absentia. Hence the third party, its trace, alongside the other,
(equivocally) – a presence ‘conspicuous by its absence,’
performs, defines, refines – co-exists.
To conclude, I cite a passage from
one of Derrida’s performative love letters from the book within a
book, ‘Envois,’ in which the third party weaves its way around
the desperate mutual desire of the couple, who must negotiate daily
with the ‘truth’ of their situation, beyond which lies the
possibility of monogamy supplemented by ‘radical transparency.’
And these inexhaustible words,
these days and nights of explication will not make us change places
or exchange places, even though we ceaselessly try to do so, to got
to the other side, to swallow the other’s place, to move our bodies
like the other’s body, even to swallow it while drinking its words,
mixing the salivas little by little, wearing down the borders…but
there are others, the others within us I grant you, and we can do
nothing about it, that is the limit. There is a crowd, right, such is
the truth.
Bibliography
Derrida, J, Learning
to Live, Finally: The Last Interview, (Hampshire,
Palgrave, 2007).
Derrida, J, On
Touching – Jean Luc Nancy, (California:
Stanford UP, 2005).
Derrida, J,
Positions,
(London:
Continuum, 2004).
Derrida, J, ‘Envois’, in The
Post Card,
(Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987).
Derrida, J, ‘The Rhetoric of
Drugs,’ in Points…Interviews
1974 – 1994, (California,
Stanford UP, 1995).
Kamuf, P, Book
of Addresses, (California:
Stanford UP, 2005).
Paglia, C, Sex
and Violence, or Nature and Art, (London:
Penguin Books, 2006).
BUTOH: Body in Crisis, (dir.
Michael Blackwood), 1990.
Exhibition, (dir. Joanna Hogg),
2013.
Possession (dir. Andrezej
Zulawski), 1981.
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