Re: Longing

Despite the fact that the adjective longus can be used to express lack (longe esse ab aliqua re, i.e. distance as lack), there does not seem to be any Romance equivalent to Germanic and English long as verb meaning to yearn for (as across distance). BUT, there is the fascinating possibility that desire (de-sidero) is originally related to a sense of uncrossable distance in the sense of being away from the stars (cf. considerare). Elena Lombadi's Syntax of Desire goes into this.

Would love to hear more thoughts about how desire itself and in general may be con-sidered as containing a reference to distance, place, space. Or as Erin Labbie put it last night at the beginning of her paper: "Courtly love is always already elsewhere."

Upcoming Lecture - Erin Felicia Labbie - Oct 17

"The Long Drive of Courtly Love: The Distance/Time Ratio of Amor de Longh."
Erin Felicia Labbie
Bowling Green State University

Courtly love is always already elsewhere. Characterized by longing, the stubborn maintenance of the obstacle, sublimation, and the refusal of synthesis, the enigma of courtly love offers a stratified concept of history as well as a critical methodology that relies on distance and a particular queerness that is at the heart of temporal and historical play. What Jacques Lacan calls the ‘meteoric brightness’ of courtly love has the potential to offer a way of thinking about space as time and to extend a layer of temporality to the long history of poetic drives. In the context of a developing queer historiography that has become a refuge for non-linear histories, the long drive of desire and the play between the Middle Ages and instances of modernity that it performs offers a way of viewing the distance and proximity of the politics of literature. This paper seeks to contribute to dynamic conversations about the processes of becoming, textual and identity politics, the vicissitudes of reading the traces of Medieval poetics, the rise of the rules of love, and finding a way of knowing the unknowable elements of desire.

Erin Felicia Labbie is Associate Professor of English at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of Lacan's Medievalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Friday, October 17, 2008, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.)
Room 4406.
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.