Eros and the Argonauts

ABSTRACT

Taking its cue from Lynne Huffer’s paper on the politics of eros, this paper focuses on the relational dynamics such a politics might entail. The paper thereby suggests that the project of reimagining politics should be linked to a hermeneutics of intersubjectivity by (1) assessing Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts as exemplary in this regard; and (2) comparing what Nelson’s account of the erotics of parenting and partnering might contribute to theoretical discussions of intersubjectivity in works by Judith Butler and Amy Hollywood.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics of eros
• hermeneutics
• intersubjectivity
• Judith Butler
• Amy Hollywood
• Maggie Nelson

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Constance M. Furey is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University. The author of two books, Erasmus, Contarini, and The Religious Republic of Letters and Poetic Relations: Faith and Intimacy in the English Reformation, Furey focuses on the theology and literature of early modern Christianity and the relational dynamics of knowledge as well as faith.

Notes

1. Huffer, “Strange Eros,” 103–14, 104.

2. Nirenberg, “The Politics of Love and Its Enemies,” 573–605. See also Furey, “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies,” 7–33.

3. On the allure of the subversion/repression paradigm in relation to scholarship on Christian mysticism specifically see Furey, “Sexuality,” 328–40.

4. Huffer, “Strange Eros.”

5. Aristotle, Politics, 1281a1.

6. Huffer, “Strange Eros” (paper presented at the AAR, 2015).

7. Hamner, “Askesis as the Logic of the Spiral.”

8. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 17, cited in Huffer, “Strange Eros,” 113.

9. Furey, Poetic Relations.

10. Nelson, The Argonauts.

11. Ibid., 13.

12. Ibid., 3.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 4.

15. Ibid., 45.

16. Ibid., 46.

17. Ibid., 60.

18. Ibid., 47.

19. Joy, Women and the Gift.

20. Butler, Giving an Account, 20.

21. Note that this is closely related to neighbor love theory as in Kristeva 1991 and Zizek 2006.

22. Butler, Giving an Account, 23.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 28.

25. Ibid., 27–8.

26. See, for example, ibid., 28–9.

27. Ibid., 34.

28. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 29, quoted in Butler, Giving an Account, 34.

29. Butler, Giving an Account, 110.

30. Butler, Undoing Gender, 19.

31. Butler, Giving an Account, 82. See also Michel Foucault's essay, “What Is Critique?” and Butler's commentary on it in “What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue.”

32. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 208.

33. Hollywood finds in Luce Iragaray's writings a modern counterpart to the beguines. Irigaray's focus is on the embodied subject, and the body itself – as Hollywood notes, the speaking body – subverts the opposition between the all and the not-all. Instead of this opposition there is the dynamic of sexual difference, of the necessity to engage in and through difference. And yet Irigaray then fetishizes the female body and sexual difference, Hollywood argues, failing to see that it is not sexual difference per se but instead the “shared fact of mortality” that makes it possible to imagine “finitude as possibility rather than lack.” Ibid., 5.

34. Ibid., 209.

35. Irigaray, “Belief Itself,” 226.