Enemy/Friend Distinction: Babylonians/French, Laban/Charlemagne
- “One problem with this [Schmitt’s] account of the political, where we divide the world into friends we identify with and enemies we define ourselves against, is that it is fragile, liable to break down or even to invert and oscillate in the face of complex situations [. . .]A world not anchored by the ‘us’ and ‘them’ oppositions that flourished as recently as the Cold War is one subject to radical instability, both subjectively and politically” (Reinhard 16-17).
- “On the other hand, to refuse to testify, for the sake of saving the other person’s life, is to treat him as my ‘fellow man,’ mon semblable, whose good (self-preservation, satisfaction of needs) I imagine in the mirror of my own ego. And this is to fail to encounter him as ‘my neighbor,’ mon prochain, whose jouissance I cannot presume to know and which I may in fact betray along with the moral law in not testifying against him” (Reinhard 48).
- “What prevents us from ‘freely enjoying sexuality’ is not a direct repression, the so-called internalization of inhibitions, but the very excess of enjoyment coagulated into a specific formula which curves/distorts/transfixes our space of enjoyment, closes off new possibilities of enjoyment, condemns the subject to err in the closure of a vicious cycle, compulsively circulating about the same point of (libidinal) reference[. . .]the aim of psychoanalysis is to get the subject to come to terms with the sinthome, with his specific ‘formula of enjoyment.’ Lacan’s insight here is that of the full ontological weight of ‘stuckness’: when one dissolves the sinthome and thus gets fully unstuck, one loses the minimal consistency of one’s own being – in short, what appears as obstacle is a positive condition of possibility” (Zizek 175).
- “[. . .]the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary. Every preempting of the Other in the guide of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus on the faceless Thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it ‘embedded’ in a particular situation” (Zizek 183-84).
- “These new sets can be unnatural sets or communities that depend on nothing to hold them together and which cannot even be perceived from any position outside the set – neighborhoods, we might say, that exist within the political without being determined by citizenship, nationality, or any other legal or authchthonous [indigenous, occurring naturally] status[. . .] the logic of the not-all suggests an infinite set of possibilities of social inclusion and association. . .” (Reinhard 63).
Thinking about these passages again in light of the monstrous figures in "Floris and Blancheflour", I was wondering about the place of Estragot in that portion of the narrative. It seems to me that Estragot is the ultimate nightmare for the Christians in the story. He's bestial ("With bores hede, blake and donne" 347), a foreigner (Ther was none suche in Europe/ So stronge and so longe in length" 353-354), and apparently exists purely to torment Christians (358-359). In one sense he's faceless--he's named, but he doesn't speak, and he behaves more as an oppositional force (almost a force of nature) than as a human being.
ReplyDeleteHe's the first one to break into the gates of Rome, and the text seems to enjoy that moment heartily--only to derive even more enjoyment from the moment when "the portecolis on him thai lete falle" (432). Excessively, the text describes how "It smote him through heret, lyver and galle./ He lai cryande at the grounde/ Like a develle of helle..." (434-436). And then the text suddenly backs away from this very vivid image to a platitude, "Gladde were all the Romaynes.../ And sorye were al the Sarsyns..." (439-442).
So I'm wondering why and/or how the text directs our understanding of this character and our enjoyment of the violence against him, particularly as it chooses these very strange moments to focus on, his bestial physical appearance and his grisly death. Why does it then jump back from those moments to lines that sounds so pat? Is it playing with us, the reader, forcing us to step back from our own enjoyment of these excessive descriptions?
This is a great question. This moment might be an excellent place to think about the questions of "enjoyment" and universality" that Trevor and Emilie C. have been discussing in the next post.
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