During yesterday's class meeting I was intrigued by our discussion of the poetry in John of the Cross. First, I'm wondering if anyone can explain why the stanzas on p. 55-57 are numbered the way they are. Why does the selection on 55 start with stanza five if we get stanza one on the next page? Also, are these numbers editorial additions or part of John of the Cross's original manuscript? Maybe it's a bit ridiculous to focus so much on those details, but I'm thinking that the oddity in numbering, if intentional, may point toward some sort of breakdown in the poem, undercutting its polished appearance since it ends with what appears to be its beginning.
While reading the selection for Thursday, I came across the odd prayer on p. 274-275. The incessant repetition here reminded me of that passage we were puzzling over today on p. 78-79, which appears to explode (or at least question) Reinhard's neat diagram of relationship to language. This passage reminded me of Gertrude Stein (dare I mention her name!) and other non-referential poets who use accretions of language and free association to point to that which is beyond language but, perhaps, more concrete than language. An ineffable that can never be said in language but which language nevertheless attempts to convey, albeit in ways that are totally frustrating to the reader or hearer (or writer or speaker).
So now, of course, what does all this have to do with R/S/Z and neighbor-love? Maybe we could take John's language to build up the point that Patty made at the end of class yesterday, that there are relationships beyond the symbolic order, ones that cannot be neatly categorized by neighbor-love theorists? Is this repetitive, confusing language neatly in the feminine position, the not-all? Or does the attempt to know the unknowable in this way with/through/against/beyond language rework the masculine and feminine positions?
Just very quickly, because I have to run off to class, I wanted to say: what a great way to take us back into the key questions raised by Tuesday's discussion! On the one hand, it seemed to me that the neighbor-love theorists were all intent, each in their own way, in using neighbor love to think a relationality that is not bounded by or necessarily contained within the symbolic order (or that undoes it from within). On the other hand, it does seem that this mystic language stands in a different relation to the symbolic order, and insofar as it positions the (im)possiblity of the God relation as its goal, imagines something other than the disturbance of the divine that, according to R's schematics, creates the possibility of the neighbor relation. On this, Kristeva's suggestion at the outset of the piece we read for today is suggestive: "Did the mystics not, right from the outset, attempt such an experiment, in a kind of internal exclusion from the 'canon'" (2). I really like that phrase, "internal exclusion". My own sense is that mystic language can then, as Evelyn says in that wonderful final sentence of the post, rework, or at least unsettle, the masculine and feminine positions.
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