Module 6: The Global 1960s
For this session, our point of departure will be Anne Carson’s reading of Sappho in Eros the Bittersweet:
Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up
Eros, this creature impossible to fight off, generates an anxiety amongst the men of Ancient Greece and Rome that we’ll follow like a red thread throughout the Western philosophical tradition’s attempts to yoke and master emotion, women, the body, and nature.
The witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries across Europe and the Americas mark a powerful expression of this drive towards mastery and prove foundational in rendering the bodies of women, colonized subjects, and the enslaved as particularly vulnerable to exploitation and extraction by the global capitalist machine. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues this is part of the process of primitive accumulation that provided the structural preconditions for the establishment and spread of capitalism as a social and economic form.
Here, in the late capitalism of the 21st century something is shifting in our relation to love, desire, and beauty through the ubiquity and speed of image and stimulation.
2600+ years ago, Sappho is wrecked by her beloved, rent open, burning:
He seems to me equal to gods that man
who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me
Today, we like like like like
We’ll read together Byung-Chul Han’s exploration of the degradation of love and desire, Chapters 1-3 of The Agony of Eros. Han argues that the world we live in today is best described as Burnout Society—a world of entrepreneurs of the self who struggle deeply to encounter and experience the kind of otherness that grips Sappho above.
Rather than leave us to wallow in our information-saturated, isolated existences, we’ll conclude next week by exploring one potentially revolutionary avenue. Engaging with the work of Isabella Mellado, we’ll explore queerness as a heretical practice of spiritual transformation and boundary breaking that refuses like, administration, isolation, and definition.
Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros