![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Few contemporary scholars have explicitly discussed the relationship between love and rhetoric. This essay draws on the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that rhetoricians have been reluctant to theorize love for two reasons: first, it is already implied in the widely accepted concept of identification; and second, any explicit discussion of love tempts kitsch. Once we understand love and kitsch as homologous constructs, it is argued, we are better able to engage rhetoric more directly as a form of love or, alternately, as a form of deceit.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Diane Davis, Zack Gersh, Brooke Hunter, Brian Lain, John Lucaites, Jeff Rice, Shaun Treat, and the blind reviewers for their excellent advice and patience.
Notes
1. Barry Gibb and Maurice Gibb, “Islands in the Stream,” on Eyes That See in the Dark, performed by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. Castle Music, 1983. Compact disc.
2. “‘Islands’ Honored as Top BMI Song; WB Leads Pubbers,” Variety, June 20, 1984, 57.
3. Craig Shelburne, “‘Islands in the Stream’ Named Greatest Country Duet,” CMT.com, January 2008, http://www.cmt.com/shows/dyn/greatest_series/91715/episode_featured_copy.jhtml/.
4. For examples of the sentiment, see Roy Kasten, “Blond Ambition: That Titanic Contradiction Dolly Parton is a Whore, a Saint, a Poet and a Preacher Disguised as a Dumb Blonde Country Girl,” Riverfront Times, August 21, 2002 http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2002-08-21/music/blond-ambition/; and John Nova Lomax, “The Dirty Thirty; The Worst Songs of All Time from Texas,” Houston Press, April 29, 2004 http://houstonpress.com/2004-04-29/music/the-dirty-thirty/. The contemporary reaction is doubly ironic, for as I go on to argue, the song is regarded as kitsch precisely because hearers secretly identify with its transcendent concept of love as spiritual unity; see S⊘ren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 50–52.
5. See Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 89.
6. Perhaps the most famous theory of the love of interrogation is that of Jean-Paul Sartre, who characterized love as a strategy to undermine another by knowing him or her thoroughly, both “biblically” and intellectually. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), esp. 474–93. For an excellent overview of theories of love from the ancient Greeks to present-day thinkers, see The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991).
7. John Donne, “Meditation 17,” Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1924), http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/meditation17.php/.
8. Wayne Brockriede, “Arguers as Lovers,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 5 (1972): 1–11.
9. Jim W. Corder, “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” Rhetoric Review 4 (1985): 16–32.
10. Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2–18.
11. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William and Morrow, 2000); bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2002); and bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001).
12. Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), esp. 217–24.
13. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 351. See also Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Nicholas Brown et al., “‘Subterranean Passages of Thought’: Empire's Inserts,” Cultural Studies 16 (2002): 193–212.
14. Also see Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity within History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996); Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhácek (New York: Continuum, 2002); Heidi Bostic, “Luce Irigaray and Love,” Cultural Studies 16 (2002): 603–10; Judith Hamera, “I Dance to You: Reflections on Irigaray's I Love to You in Pilates and Virtuosity,” Cultural Studies 15 (2001): 229–40; and Della Pollock, “Editor's Note on Performing Love,” Cultural Studies 15 (2001): 203–5.
15. See Jay VerLinden, “Arguers as Harassers” (paper read at the 86th annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Seattle, WA, November 9–11, 2000), http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/∼jgv1/me/harassers.html/. For recent work that touches, however indirectly, on the relation between love and rhetoric, see Jeremy Engels, “Disciplining Jefferson: The Man within the Breast and the Rhetorical Norms of Producing Order,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (2006): 411–35; Eugene Garver, “The Rhetoric of Friendship in Plato's Lysias,” Rhetorica 24 (2006): 127–46; and Dave Tell, “Beyond Mnemotechnics: Confession and Memory in Augustine,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 233–53.
16. Dana Cloud, “Not Invited: Struggle and Social Change” (paper read at the 90th annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Chicago, IL, November 11–14, 2004); Nina M. Reich, “Invite This! Power, Material Oppression, and Social Change” (paper read at the 90th annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Chicago, IL, November 11–14, 2004); and Julia T. Wood, “The Personal is Still Political: Feminism's Commitment to Structural Change” (paper read at the 90th annual meeting of the National Communication Association, Chicago, IL, November 11–14, 2004).
17. See Elizabeth Ervin, “Love Composes Us (In Memory of Jim Corder),” Rhetoric Review 17 (1999): 322–23.
18. Or, as Milan Kundera eloquently puts it, kitsch “is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.” The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: HarperCollins/Perennial Classics, 1999), 248. Also see Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “kitsch.”
19. Jacques Lacan, Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 32; hereafter cited as Book XX.
20. Lacan, Book XX.
21. Lacan, Book XX, 17.
22. Ronell, Stupidity, 89.
23. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 103.
24. Quoted in Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 103.
25. See Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000), esp. 115–51.
26. See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essay in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. 3–19, 102–41; and Ronell, Stupidity.
27. Lacan, Book XX, 12.
28. The illusory character is directly related to its position in the imaginary, and, hence, it is fundamentally a narcissistic structure. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 186, 253, 268. Hereafter cited as Book XI.
29. Lacan, Book XX, 86. “Fantasy” is a technical term in Lacanian psychoanalysis that refers to structures that coordinate our desires, and should not be confused with the more popular understanding of fantasy as “fancy.” Not all fantasies are illusory; love is an illusory fantasy because it is impossible. See Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 3–44. Also, I mean “supplement” in the Derridian sense fetched from Rousseau; see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 141–64.
30. The term “disjunction” is Badiou's. My reading of Lacan on love is heavily informed by Badiou. See “What is Love?” in Sic 3: Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 263–81. Also see Daniel Cho, “Lessons of Love: Psychoanalysis and Teacher–Student Love,” Educational Theory 55 (2005): 79–96.
31. Lacan, Book XX, 45.
32. Badiou, “What is Love?” 266.
33. This “choice” is a paradoxical one: “We can see … that anatomy does not determine the destiny of eros,” says Colette Solar, “even though for every speaking being it is an a priori handicap: in other words, there are males and females according to civil status who are not men or women as sexuated beings, hence the choice.” Obviously as post-operative transgenderism makes plain, one can undo the choice in a sense; one cannot, however, undo the “handicap.” See Colette Solar, “The Curse on Sex,” in SIC 3, 42.
34. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 98.
35. See Geneviève Morel, “Psychoanalytical Anatomy,” in SIC 3, 28–30.
36. See Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 289–90; and Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 158–59. Space limits any thorough discussion; however, it should be noted that for Lacan sexuation is a process of identifying with, or not identifying with, phallic jouissance.
37. For a helpful explication, see Badiou, “What is Love?” 266–67.
38. Badiou, “What is Love?” 267.
39. It is possible for some to conclude that my extension of the heterosexual binary to “people in general” is a heteronormative move. What Lacan would stress, however, is that all difference (e.g., race) is based on this fundamental binary; it is only through the symbolic differentiation of “male” and “female” that we first learn of difference. Consequently, Lacan's remarks on love still apply to same-sex difference: the yearning for the One, although established in a binary disjunction, begins with a fundamental distinction between one and then another. For a discussion of a similar pickle, see Bostic, “Luce Irigaray and Love,” 603–10.
40. Lacan, Book XX, 45.
41. Lacan, Book XI, 268.
42. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 142. For readers familiar with Lacan's three registers, love is, in fact, situated in the imaginary order; however, it has effects in the symbolic.
43. Lacan, Book XI, 253.
44. Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 103. The phrase is from Lacan's eighth seminar on the topic of the transference, which has yet to be translated into English.
45. Lacan, Book XI, 268. To this phrase Lacan adds, “I mutilate you,” which I have excised for simplicity. The idea here is that in loving that quality or element “in you more than you,” in a sense your person, body, and so on become mere objects for me to get at this “something more.” In loving, then, I disfigure my love to resemble something she is not; I mutilate him.
46. Strictly speaking, love is born of demand. For a clear and helpful discussion of the distinctions between need, demand, and desire, see Philippe Van Haute, Against Adaptation: Lacan's “Subversion” of the Subject; A Close Reading, trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk (New York: Other Press, 2002), 103–25.
47. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 148.
48. Copjec, Read My Desire, 148.
49. Casey Spooner, Jimmy Harry, Susan Sontag, and Warren Fischer, “We Need a War,” on Odyssey, performed by Fischerspooner. Capital Records, 2006. Compact disc. For a more detailed explanation of this argument see Joshua Gunn, “Hystericizing Huey: Emotional Appeal, Desire, and the Psychodynamics of Demagoguery,” Western Journal of Communication 71 (2007): 1–27.
50. Lacan, Book XX, 6.
51. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 55.
52. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 45.
53. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 45.
54. Barbara Biesecker, Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 46; also see Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 130.
55. Slavoj Žižek's latest book is devoted to explaining the character of this gap. See The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
56. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 43.
57. See, for example, Kenneth Burke, “Ausculation, Creation, and Revision: The Rout of the Esthetes; Literature, Marxism, and Beyond,” in Extensions of the Burkeian System, ed. James W. Chesebro (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), esp. 103.
58. Diane Davis, “Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38 (2008) (in press).
59. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 275.
60. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 274.
61. “[B]iologically it is of the essence of man to be sated,” says Burke. “Only the motives of ‘mystery’… are infinite in their range, as a child learns from himself when he first thinks of counting to the ‘highest number.’“ Such counting is the measure of desire. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 275.
62. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 276.
63. See Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968; originally published 1931), 29–44.
64. Perhaps the more provocative claim is that Burke's hierarchical principle is Lacan's Big Other, although length constraints prevent making the argument. Regardless, Burke is guilty of ignoring the disposition of the people in a rhetorical encounter, which is the opening corrective of Brockriede's “Arguers as Lovers” essay.
65. Fink, Lacan to the Letter, 142.
66. Alternately stated in Lacanese, Burke's theories of rhetoric could be said to privilege the “subject of the signifier” at the expense of the “subject of jouissance.” See Fink, Lacan to the Letter, 141–66.
67. Corder, “Argument,” 24.
68. Corder, “Argument,” 31.
69. Brockriede, “Arguers,” 1–2.
70. See Thomas S. Frentz, “Towards a Rhetoric of the Interior,” Communication Monographs 60 (1993): 83–89; and Joshua Gunn and Shaun Treat, “Zombie Trouble: A Propaedeutic on Ideological Subjectification and the Unconscious,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 144–74.
71. Ervin, “Love Composes Us,” 322–23.
72. Les Claypool, “Seas of Cheese,” on Sailing the Seas of Cheese, performed by Primus. Interscope, 1991. Compact disc.
73. Lacan, Book XI, 268.
74. Although Lacan does not typically capitalize “the Real,” in this essay I will do so to distinguish Lacan's sense from the more mundane understanding of “the real” as opposed to illusion.
75. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 173.
76. Žižek, Metastases, 178.
77. Žižek, Metastases, 179.
78. Žižek, Metastases, 179.
79. Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 248.
80. One could also easily argue that the fear of kitsch has motivated a focus on canonized texts in rhetorical studies in the past. This focus has become fuzzy with the now established permissibility to study the popular. See, e.g., Barry Brummett, Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991); and Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 19–46.
81. Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 251.
82. Foss and Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion,” 5.
83. Foss and Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion,” 13 (emphasis added).
84. Wood, “Personal is Still Political.”
85. Bonnie J. Dow, “Feminism, Difference(s), and Rhetorical Studies,” Communication Studies 46 (1995): 110–11.
86. Cloud, “Not Invited”, 1–3.
87. Quoted in Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 38. Also see Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 6.
88. Oliver, Witnessing, 4.
89. Lacan, Ecrits, 3–9.
90. Oliver, Witnessing, 138–42.
91. Oliver, Witnessing, 4.
92. Recent work in rhetorical studies on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas has begun to explore non-Hegelian forms of identification and pre-representational relations; see Diane Davis, “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 38 (2005): 191–212.
93. For a nuanced approach, see Davis, “Identification.”
94. Ronell, Stupidity, 150.
95. Davis, “Identification,” (in press) (emphasis in the original).
96. Oliver, Witnessing, 222.
97. See Irigaray, The Way.
98. Davis, “Identification,” (in press). Also see Benjamin D. Powell, “Neural Performance: Reconsidering Agency as the Embodiment of Neural Nets,” Text and Performance Quarterly 27 (2007): 107–23.
99. Davis, “Identification,” (in press).
100. Ronell, Stupidity, 150.
101. I mean to indicate solidarity here with the ironies advanced by Richard Rorty and James P. McDaniel. See James P. McDaniel, “Liberal Irony: A Program for Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 297–327; and Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).