Introduction 1
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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. C. P. Cavafy, “In a Town of Osroini,” 1917, in his Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed. George Savidis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 66. The Greek text appears in Cavafy’s Ta Poiemata, ed. G. P. Savidis, 2 vols. (Athens: Ikaros, 1963, repr. 1997), vol. 1, p. 80. 2. Plato, Charmides, trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague, in his Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp. 640–663, at p. 641, 154a. 3. Ibid., p. 641, 154d. Sophrosune is translated variously as “prudence,” “temper- ance,” “wisdom”; it suggests “a well-developed consciousness of oneself and one’s legitimate duties in relation to others (where it will involve self-restraint and showing due respect) and in relation to one’s own ambitions, social standing, and the relevant expectations as regards one’s own behavior”: John M. Cooper, headnote to Charmides, in Plato, Complete Works, p. 639. See also Matthias Vorwerk, “Plato on Virtue: Definitions of sophrosune in Plato’s Charmides and in Plotinus’ Enneads 1.2 (19),” American Journal of Philology 122 (2001): 29–47. 4. C. P. Cavafy, “In a Town of Osroene,” in Complete Poems, trans. Rae Dalven (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976), p. 68; “In a Town of Osroini,” in Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, trans. Theoharis C. Theoharis (New York: Harcourt, 2001), p. 61. The Greek term is “to erotiko tou prosopo [το` @ερωτικó τou πρóσωπο].” 5. Plato, Charmides, p. 642, 155d. 6. See Savidis’ note on this poem in Cavafy, Collected Poems, p. 216. 7. David Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). For another major work of historical synthesis, see Byrne Fone, Homophobia: A History (New York: Metropolitan, 2000). 8. Scholarly work on Plato’s use of the dialogue form is voluminous. For some use- ful guidance, see Michael C. Stokes, Plato’s Socratic Conversations: Drama and Dialectic in Three Dialogues (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), especially the bibliographical survey, pp. 1–3; Kent F. Moors, “Plato’s Use of Dialogue,” Classical World 72 (1978): 77–93; Kenneth M. Sayre, Plato’s Literary Gardens: How to Read a Platonic Dialogue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1995); and the essays collected in Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings, ed. 236 Notes Charles L. Griswold (New York: Routledge, 1988), especially Rosemary Desjardins, “Why Dialogues? Plato’s Serious Play,” pp. 110–125. Also inform- ative is David Sedley’s lecture “The Dramatis Personae of Plato’s Phaedo,” in Philosophical Dialogues: Plato, Hume, Wittgenstein, ed. Timothy Smiley (Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 1995), pp. 3–26; Francisco J. Gonzalez, “Introduction: The Need for a Reexamination of Plato’s Dialectic,” in his Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 1–16. 9. I am not the first to consider these three Platonic dialogues as a group: see Lysis, Phaedrus, and Symposium: Plato on Homosexuality, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. Eugene O’Connor (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1991). 10. See the discussion below. 11. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 15. 12. See Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 58–59. 13. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures 17 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 180. 14. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 21. 15. “Their Beginning,” trans. Rae Dalven, in Complete Poems, p. 109. In Theoharis’ version, it is in their “lawless pleasure” that “the lines of power” originate: “Their Origin,” p. 118. 16. See the discussion in chapter 2. 17. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 33. 18. Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), pp. 283, 305–311. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl turns the accusation of narcissism back against the accusers, defining “narcis- sistic” homophobia as intolerance for “the idea that their exist people who are not like them”: Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 33. She also understands homophobia as the desire to preserve sameness, p. 36. 19. Steven Bruhm, Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) reads the myth of Narcissus as a figure for male–male desire that does not represent a fear of otherness but is rather “con- tinually destroying the political safety promised by sameness,” p. 178. 20. Cf. David Halperin, “How to Do the History of Homosexuality,” in his How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 104–137, especially his discussion of the category “paederasty,” pp. 113–117. Halperin rightly distinguishes between the tradition of pederasty and those of male–male friendship (pp. 117–121), of inversion (pp. 121–130), and of modern homosexuality (pp. 130–134), but for my purposes here it is more important to point out that deviance—an interplay of sameness and difference—is an essential component of the relationships that fall into most, if not all, of these categories, as the remainder of this book suggests. Notes 237 21. Mixail Bakhtin, “Discourse Typology in Prose,” trans. Richard Balthazar and I. R. Titunik, in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978), pp. 176–198, at p. 176. This essay first appeared in the original version of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Leningrad: Priboj, 1929), pp. 105–135. A somewhat different version of this essay appears in the revised version of 1963 as a por- tion of ch. 5, “Discourse in Dostoevsky”: see Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 185–203. 22. Ibid., p. 189. 23. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” (1969), in her Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 64–91, at p. 81. For Bakhtin’s own comments on Socrates and the Socratic dialogue, see M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 3–40, at pp. 24–26, and his Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 121, 168–169, 286. But cf. Julia Annas, “Many Voices: Dialogue and Development in Plato,” in her Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 9–30, which argues that the polyphonic quality of Plato’s dialogues masks a unitary ethical doctrine. 24. Martin Buber, I and Thou, 2nd ed., trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), p. 133. 25. Ibid., p. 53. 26. Ibid., p. 150. 27. Ibid., p. 151. 28. “[I]n truth language does not reside in man but man stands in language and speaks out of it,” ibid., p. 89. 29. Ibid., pp. 115–116. 30. On dialogue with the self, see ibid., p. 152. 31. Ibid., p. 151. 32. Ibid., p. 182. 33. Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism,” in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 4–19, at p. 10. See also ibid. “Apropos of Buber: Some Notes,” in pp. 40–48. 34. Ibid., “Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, and Philosophy,” pp. 20–39, at p. 21. 35. As is evident throughout Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. In the passage from “Epic and Novel” cited above, “Bakhtin comes very close to naming Socrates as the first novelist” (Michael Holquist, “Introduction” to The Dialogic Imagination, pp. xv–xxxiv, at p. xxxii). 238 Notes 36. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), especially pp. 17–49. 37. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 1–37, at pp. 2–3. The revised version of this essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is about You,” in Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedogogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 123–151, omits this passage. 1 EROTICS OF FRIENDSHIP: FROM PLATO’S LYSIS TO AELRED OF RIEVAULX 1. For Cicero’s Greek influences, see the Introduction to Laelius de Amicitia, in Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, ed. and trans. William Armistead Falconer, Loeb Classical Library 154 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), p. 106, and the Introduction to Cicero, Laelius: On Friendship, in Cicero: On the Good Life, trans. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 13–20. 2. David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 53; this entire chapter, pp. 53–92, is helpful in this context, and see also Aspects of Friendship in the Greco-Roman World, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 43 (Portsmouth, RI, 2001); Lynette G. Mitchell, “Friends and Enemies in Athenian Politics,” Greece and Rome, sec- ond series 43 (1996): 11–30. Alfons Fürst, “Freundschaft als Tugend: Über den Verlust der Wirklichkeit im antiken Freundschaftsbegriff,” Gymnasium 104 (1997): 413–433 traces what he sees as a decline in the classical understanding of friendship (judged from a modern point of view). 3. Konstan, Friendship, p. 73. On the social functions of friendship in Athenian democracy, see Konstan’s “Reciprocity and Friendship,” in Reciprocity in Ancient Greece, ed.