STAYING ALIVE A SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE LIBERAL ARTS STAYING ALIVE A SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE LIBERAL ARTS L.O. Aranye Fradenburg edited by Eileen A. Joy with companion essays by Donna Beth Ellard, Ruth Evans, Eileen A. Joy, Julie Orlemanski, Daniel C. Remein & Michael D. Snediker punctum books ✶ brooklyn, ny STAYING ALIVE: A SURVIVAL MANUAL FOR THE LIBERAL ARTS © L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, 2013. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academ- ic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume. For any reuse or distri- bution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. First published in 2013 by punctum books Brooklyn, New York http://punctumbooks.com punctum books is an open-access independent publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual in- quiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities as- semblage. punctum indicates thought that pierces and disturbs the wednesdayish, business-as-usual protocols of both the generic university studium and its individual cells or holding tanks. We offer spaces for the imp- orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds. We also take in strays. ISBN-13: 978-0615906508 ISBN-10: 0615906508 Cover Image: Nauerna — ladder (2010), by Ellen Kooi; with permission of the artist. Facing-page drawing by Heather Masciandaro. Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ http://punctumbooks.com/about/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad/venture is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490-1500) V for Chuck Young V ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank Eileen Joy and punctum books for the care and atten- tion they gave this book, and the BABEL Working Group for inspir- ing its more adventurous features, such as they are. Julie Carlson and Laurence Rickels have helped me with so much of the thinking in Staying Alive that I can never thank them enough. I’m also grateful to the Literature and the Mind community at the University of Califor- nia, Santa Barbara, especially Dominique Jullien, Ken Kosik, Vera Tobin, Jan Caldwell, Kay Young, Cheryl Lynn, Jonathan Forbes and Paul Megna, for their support, encouragement and tutelage. Noelle Batt has been a friend to this book in more ways than she knows. I began learning about neuroscience and evolutionary psychology while in training at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, and especially want to thank Mark Leffert and my instructors Regina Pally and Harry Brickman for pointing me in so many fruitful direc- tions. Finally, loving thanks to Meiram Bendat and Dahlia Russ for giving me many good reasons to stay alive. Aranye Fradenburg The Publisher wishes to thank Aranye Fradenburg for her courage in climbing aboard punctum’s ship of fools, and for her tireless advoca- cy for the humanities and the artful life of the mind. We are happy to toil in the vineyard of her glow. We are also indebted to her for the contributions she made to the design and editing of the book. From beginning to end, Staying Alive was a true collaboration, the work of many hands, and we wish to thank A.W. Strouse, especially, for his help with the Index and with proofreading the volume. Thanks are also due to Donna Beth Ellard, Ruth Evans, Julie Orlemanski, Dan Remein, and Michael Snediker, for agreeing, in the midst of terrifical- ly busy schedules and other writing commitments, to co-compose with us. Eileen A. Joy TABLE OF CONTENTS V PRELUDE // i Hands Off Our Jouissance: The Collaborative Risk of a Shared Disorganization Eileen A. Joy CHAPTER ONE // 1 Driving Education: A Crash Course FUGUE 1 // 51 An Army of Lovers Julie Orlemanski CHAPTER TWO // 75 Living the Liberal Arts: An Argument for Embodied Learning Communities FUGUE 2 // 135 Human-Tongued Basilisks Daniel C. Remein CHAPTER THREE // 163 Breathing with Lacan’s Seminar X: Expression and Emergence FUGUE 3 // 193 The Object Breath Ruth Evans CHAPTER FOUR // 223 Life’s Reach: Territory, Display, Ekphrasis FUGUE 4 // 263 Ekphrastic Beowulf: Defying Death and Staying Alive in the Academy Donna Beth Ellard CODA // 287 Fuzzy Logic Michael D. Snediker INDEX // 297 Prelude Hands Off Our Jouissance The Collaborative Risk of a Shared Disorganization Eileen A. Joy v Do we really mean to take shelter from our jouissance in the order of utility, to become “a branch of the service of goods,” in the mistaken hope that the “human sciences” will be rewarded for doing so? L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “Group Time, Catastrophe, Periodicity” As for what motivated me, it is quite simple . It was curiosity—the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of ii JOY: HANDS OFF OUR JOUISSANCE himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely nec- essary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. [W]hat is philosophy today . if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, in- stead of legitimating what is already known? Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure We are beings who can neither live nor die without art- ful signification. L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, “The Liberal Arts of Psychoanalysis” I SIT IN ONE OF THE DIVES / ON FIFTY-SECOND STREET / UNCERTAIN AND AFRAID In 1981, Michel Foucault gave an interview in the French gay press, Le gai pied (he had mistakenly believed his identity would be cloaked, but the interview concluded with “Merci, Michel Foucault”), in which he freely sketched out what he saw as homosexuality’s “historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the instrinsic qualities of the homosexual, but due to the biases against the position he occupies; in a certain sense, diagonal lines that he can trace in the social fabric permit him to make these virtualities visible” (Foucault 1996a, 311). More important, Foucault believed, than the ques- tions of “who am I?” and “what is the secret of my de- sire?” would be to ask, “What relations, through homosexu- ality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?” (Foucault 1996a, 308). It is important to note that, for Foucault, the possibly utopic potential of homosexuality would be available to anyone, gay or straight or whatever, who might experiment with new “affective intensities,” new friendships, and new modes of living that could “yield intense STAYING ALIVE iii relations not resembling those that are institutionalized” (Fou- cault 1996a, 310). It was at this same time, and following from his ongo- ing work on the history of sexuality (but with what can be described as a significant, and often overlooked, detour within that work),1 that Foucault became interested in re- habilitating ascesis, and ascetics, as a practice of the care of the self: the work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself or make the self appear which, happily, one never attains. Can that be our prob- lem today? We’ve rid ourselves of asceticism. Yet it’s up to us to advance into a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and in- vent—I do not say discover—a manner of being that is still improbable. (Foucault 1996a, 309– 310)2 Foucault was at pains in many of his lectures to distin- guish care of the self from knowledge of the self (i.e., the Delphic dictum: “know thyself”), partly because he did not believe in an ascetic praxis in which the ultimate aim was to “discover” and perhaps also regulate, surpass, and even renounce a self that was always already there (a pre- occupation of later Christian culture, to be sure); rather, ascesis would name a set of practices or daily exercises (as in late classical Stoicism) aimed at what David Halperin 1 See, for example, Davidson (1994), Deleuze (1986), and Tuh- kanen (2005/06). 2 In 1981, when Foucault gave this interview, he had already embarked on a series of lectures that he would continue (until his untimely and tragic death in 1984) at the Collège de France, the University of Vermont, UC-Berkeley, New York University, and other sites on the hermeneutics of the subject, technologies of the self, care of the self, and freedom; see Martin at al.