Levine, 'Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9601
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9601-levine-eros
@@@@96.1.12, Staten, Eros in Mourning
Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Pp. 231. $34.95. ISBN
0-8018-4923-3.
Reviewed by Steven Z. Levine -- Bryn Mawr College
At the end of Henry Staten's breathtaking Eros in Mourning
we are left to stare blindly into the awesome face of that
"thanato-erotic anxiety" (pp. xii, 102, 165) which is said to
transfix the canonical avatars of Western man from the grieving
hero Akhilleus (Achilles) in Homer's Iliad to the
death-driven psychoanalyst in The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan. Between these two paradigmatic transcriptions of
mournful oral speech comes the unfolding of our own tradition's
relentless narrative strategies of transcendence whereby the
devastating loss of the loved object, itself a premonitory
glimpse of the inevitable death of the self-loved subject, may be
ritually attenuated or overcome. The recurrent point of
reference of Staten's powerful readings is Plato's
Symposium where the prophetess Diotima turns the lover
away from the mortal body of the beloved toward the immortal
beauty of the soul and, still further beyond, toward the divine
beauty of the idea: "And since divine eros is rooted in mortal
eros, since, before it is the love of Ideas, eros is the sexual
attraction of bodies, Plato/Diotima's eroticization of thought
points toward Freud" (p. 3).
Freud's theory of the transcendence, or sublimation, of the
libidinal affection and autoaffection of the human body furnishes
the stage on which Staten struggles with the texts of our
tradition in the aim of peeling away "every transcendental
mystification of our erotic and organic fate" (p. xii). In the
synoptic statement of his argument that is chapter one and in a
series of seven deftly sequential chapters thereafter Staten
steers us through the perturbations of the philosophical,
religious, and literary strategies of transcendence from the
agapetic abjurations of eros in Plato's dialogues and the holy
conjurations of death in The Gospel of John to the
self-abasing lover's lament of Dante, the melancholy soliloquys
of Hamlet, the morbid ruminations of Adam in Milton's Paradise
Lost, and the jungle shriekings and civil grievings in The
Heart of Darkness by Conrad. The gathering darkness of one's
own potentially unmourned death is what the masculine tradition
that Staten here condenses already espies in the carnal demise of
the erotic love for a woman who can be lost--from Achilles'
Briseis to Dante's Beatrice to Hamlet's Beatrice and Ophelia to
Adam's Eve to the Intended of Kurtz to the objet petit a,
das Ding, the ever-lost M/Other of Lacan and Freud. The
great fear is of the Cruel Lady, "she who refuses to mourn me
mourning myself for my inability to possess her" (p. 97).
The mournful sublimation of grief for the losable object-subject
of the Platonic-Augustinian-Freudian tradition is the constant
scenario Staten discerns in the foundational texts he critiques
(p. 81). As an antidote to this dark obsession with melancholy
gloom and mournful transcendence Staten offers the foudatz
or erotic folly of the pre-Nietzschean "gay science" of the
thirteenth-century troubadours (pp. 11, 78, 97), for Staten the
best literary approximation we have to a fully corporeal,
nontranscendent embrace of the irreducibly particularized pains
and joys of mortal love. A Derridean deconstruction of all of
these texts, however, an uncanny grafting of one upon the other,
reveals under Staten's acutely probing gaze privileged moments
not only of melancholic and manic denigration and idealization of
the ever losable object-subject of affective attachment but also
of rupture with these same "thanatoerotophobic metaphysics" (p.
16) of the transcendence of mortal love. In these rare moments
in John or Milton or Lacan the organic body of natural
dissolution is acknowledged as identical with the ideal essence
of divine love--or, rather, almost.
Staten self-consciously writes his book from the standpoint of
erotic rapture (pp. 14, 97, 129), and he rages particularly at
the Western tradition's "thanatoerotophobic misogyny" (pp. 108,
175), the vengeful violence done to women by male warriors and
writers unable to abide with the narcissistic wound of their
beloved's and their own impending deaths. One's own immortality
(p. 166), one's own psychological and corporeal unity, is here
the prime possession whose loss can never be made good, but in
the "thanatoerotophobic tradition" (pp. 161, 182) traced by
Staten the infliction of mourning on the women whom the hero
leaves behind is the cruel consolation grasped at by our
autogrieving authors from Homer to Lacan.
In The Iliad, at an historical moment that is still
"before transcendence," Staten finds that Achilles' "penetration
beyond the warrior ethos [of due compensation for aggrieved
honor] unleashes the darkness of illimitable mourning in a way
that sums up the stance toward death that Platonism and
Christianity will come to relieve" (p. 21). Rejecting his
community's conventions of conciliatory reparation for the loss
of his beloved Briseis and Patroclus, Achilles inflicts upon Troy
a disproportion of killing--and hence of mourning--that is at the
same time a resentful act of automourning for the one loss he no
more than any man can ever avenge--the loss of his own life (p.
38). Foiled in the achievement of immortality by the mortal mark
on his heel of his mother's grasp, Achilles visits on the women
of Troy the full force of his vengeful rage, but this attitude is
by no means characteristic of Achilles alone: "As Nestor says,
each Achaian must bed a Trojan wife in vengeance for Helen" (p.
37). For Staten the plight of Helen is the merest pretext for
the imagined outrage done to the man's own sense of self. Staten
traces the vicissitudes of this "thanatoerotophobic complex" (p.
11) across a splendid series of readings of our most canonical
texts down to the present. Alas we continue to see the selfsame
strategies of aggrieved honor and retaliatory murder and rape not
only in literature but in that other Troy that is Bosnia today.
Staten's Eros in Mourning helps us divine the undying
dynamics of this lethal despair. We all will die, he repeatedly
reminds us, so let us love one another while we can: "Eternal
life is this very life that we live" (p. 63).