I am teaching The Life of Christina of Markyate tomorrow and this passage catches my eye as incredibly relevant to much that was said at the friendship panel:
"The virgin of God lay prostrate in the old man's chapel, with her face turned to the ground. The man of God stepped over her with his face averted in order not to see her. But as he passed by he looked over his shoulder to see how modestly the handmaid of Christ had composed herself for prayer, as this was one of the things whic he thought those who pray ought to observe. Yet she, at the same instant, glanced upwards to appraise the bearing and deportment of the old man, for in these she considered that some trace of his great holiness was apparent. And so they saw each other, not by design and yet not by chance, but, as afterwards became clear, by the divine will [divino nuto]. For if they had not had a glimpse of each other, neither would have presumed to live with the other in the confined space of that cell: they would not have dwelt together : they would not have been stimulated by such heavenly desire, nor would they have attained such a lofty place in heaven. The fire, namely, which had been kindled by the spirit of God and burned in each one of them cast its sparks into their hearts by the grace of that mutual glance [gratia mutue visionis]: and so made one in heart and soul in chastity and charity in Christ, they were not afraid to dwell together under the same roof" (ed. and tr. Talbot, 101-3, my italics).
Cf. a passage Eileen cited here: "Claustrophilia . . . names the love that lights up a body, building, or book, from within, acknowledging what is discrete and irreconcilable in the beloved as the effect of one's own appropriative, organizing gaze. Relinquishing that desire for appropriation, one sees each former object in light of another, and thus beyond the logic of objectification: a light, hermeneutic and mnemonic, always refracted, always coming from elsewhere" (Howie, Claustrophilia, 151-52).
Claustrophiliac friendship, the love of/in enclosure, is ocular, a mutual dwelling housed in the projection of the eye's, our eyes', containment of the world.
Information and discussion related to the club's activities and medievalist life around the city.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
In Memory of Elaine Block
Elaine Block passed away on Friday. Judith Bronfman has kindly sent along this notice:
"I know that many of our Saints' group and the Medieval Club knew Elaine Block, who passed away last night. The funeral service will be private, but a memorial service is being planned for later in the spring.
"I know that many of our Saints' group and the Medieval Club knew Elaine Block, who passed away last night. The funeral service will be private, but a memorial service is being planned for later in the spring.
For those who didn't know her, Elaine was an amazing woman, who probably knew every misericord and choir stall in Western Europe (and had photographed all of them). Her projected five-volume Corpus of Misericords, published by Brepols, was underway; two volumes (France and Iberia) were out and a third was in its final proofing stage. With Frederic Billiet, she had just published the Lexicon (also Brepols), a dictionary of the terms for misericords and choir stalls, regularizing usage among languages.
If anyone wishes to make a donation in her memory, checks should be made out to Misericordia International and mailed to Randall Block, 45 Lafayette Road, Newton, MA 02462. The funds may be used to help with the Misericordia International colloquium scheduled for June in France.
Thank you for helping to communicate this sad news to those who knew and loved Elaine."
Here is a link to the Misericordia International website.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Friendship, Continued
Eileen, Franco, Yoshihisa, thanks again for a very enjoyable conversation last night. As a response, some prose: "To live in intimacy with a stranger, not in order to draw him closer, or to make him known, but rather to keep him strange, remote: unapparent -- so unapparent that his name contains him entirely. And, even in discomfort, to be nothing else, day after day, than the ever open place, the unwaning light in which that one being, that thing, remains forever exposed and sealed off" (Agamben, The Idea of Prose, 61). And a poem.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Upcoming Event: The Subjects of Friendship, Medieval and Medievalist
Friday, March 7, 2008, 7:30 PM
CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Ave. @ 34th St.)
Room 4406.
Room 4406.
Reception, with wine and cheese, follows.
The Subjects of Friendship, Medieval and Medievalist
Panel presentation and discussion
Panel presentation and discussion
"Thomas Aquinas on the Ontology of Amicitia"
Yoshihisa Yamamoto
"Between What is Ours, and What is Not Ours: Claustrophilia, Anachronism, Friendship"
Eileen Joy
Yoshihisa Yamamoto
"Between What is Ours, and What is Not Ours: Claustrophilia, Anachronism, Friendship"
Eileen Joy
"Notes on Dante's Poetics of Friendship"
Franco Masciandaro
Yoshihisa Yamamoto is Associate Professor of philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Chiba University (Japan). He is currently Visiting Scholar at the School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Tokyo. He was also visiting scholar at the Warburg Institute (University of London). He has published on Aquinas's ethics and metaphysics as well as on medieval Arabic Philosophy.
Eileen Joy is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and her main interests are in Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, and ethics. She has published articles and book chapters on: "Beowulf" and suicide terrorism; Tony Kushner's play "Homebody/Kabul" and the Old English poem "The Ruin"; eros and the Old English legend "The Seven Sleepers"; the Anglo-Latin "Wonders of the East" and the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, India; and the intellectual history of early modern bibliography. She is the co-editor of "The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook" (West Virginia University Press, 2007), "Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and "Premodern to Modern Humanisms: The BABEL Project" (special issue, Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 [Summer 2007]), and is also working on two monograph projects, tentatively titled "Postcard from the Volcano: Beowulf, Memory, History" and "We Must Speak What We Feel: Eros, Love, Regard and the Humanities."
Franco Masciandaro is Professor of Italian and Director of the Italian Program at the University of Connecticut. A specialist in Dante and medieval and Renaissance literature, he is the author of La problematica del tempo nella Commedia (Longo, 1976), Dante as Dramatist: The Myth of the Earthly Paradise and Tragic Vision in the Divine Comedy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), La Conoscienza Viva: Letture fenomenologiche da Dante a Machiavelli (Longo, 1998), as well as many articles on Dante, Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Boccaccio. He is currently writing a book on the poetics of friendship.
p.s. a pre-event conversation is already well under way over at In The Middle.
Eileen Joy is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and her main interests are in Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, and ethics. She has published articles and book chapters on: "Beowulf" and suicide terrorism; Tony Kushner's play "Homebody/Kabul" and the Old English poem "The Ruin"; eros and the Old English legend "The Seven Sleepers"; the Anglo-Latin "Wonders of the East" and the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, India; and the intellectual history of early modern bibliography. She is the co-editor of "The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook" (West Virginia University Press, 2007), "Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and "Premodern to Modern Humanisms: The BABEL Project" (special issue, Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 [Summer 2007]), and is also working on two monograph projects, tentatively titled "Postcard from the Volcano: Beowulf, Memory, History" and "We Must Speak What We Feel: Eros, Love, Regard and the Humanities."
Franco Masciandaro is Professor of Italian and Director of the Italian Program at the University of Connecticut. A specialist in Dante and medieval and Renaissance literature, he is the author of La problematica del tempo nella Commedia (Longo, 1976), Dante as Dramatist: The Myth of the Earthly Paradise and Tragic Vision in the Divine Comedy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), La Conoscienza Viva: Letture fenomenologiche da Dante a Machiavelli (Longo, 1998), as well as many articles on Dante, Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Boccaccio. He is currently writing a book on the poetics of friendship.
p.s. a pre-event conversation is already well under way over at In The Middle.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
. . . and the Baby-Chopper
Thank you Laura Smoller for a very interesting lecture. Here is a continuation of some post-lecture thoughts.
I was particularly struck, as I mentioned last night, by the consistent withholding of judgment on the wife's butchering of her baby in the narratives. Following the lead of the symbolic/allegorical significance of the dismembered and reintegrated body in light of the Schism, one possible reading is that this withholding has to do with the preservation of the literal as a mere container for the symbolic, or more simply, with maintaining the proper hagiographic focus on the miracle. In these terms the woman is very simply the means of getting the baby chopped up so that it can be healed and in a sense spiritually birthed by the saint (Gloria Steinem gave a nice description of this patriarchal function in a recent lecture recorded at Yale, listenable here).
Yet the possibility that the narratives’ withholding of judgment on the mother is more deeply a way of preserving something significant in the literal act of butchering her baby is hard to ignore, especially in comparison to the Mary of Jerusalem story where cooking your baby equals self-condemnation in an irreversible and extravagant way. Even to speak of this and notice it as “withholding” seems to acknowledge that there is something else going on, that the intention to serve up one’s child may be following a logic that the meaning of the story somehow requires. One possibility, to follow Karl Steel’s paper last Kalamazoo on the (mostly virtual) deliciousness of manflesh as an index of the discursivity of the human (available to read here), is that the baby butchering has to do with a transgression of the animal/human boundary which only serves to maintain it, precisely because the intention to transgress it acknowledges in a profane/literal/material way that very superiority, namely, through the fact that the dead human body is not only meat but the choicest meat and that the serving of baby flesh, whether as sacrifice or gourmandise or an interrelationship of the two, is really the perfect way, in the sense of an impossible limit (like death), to follow your husband's meal orders or honor the saint who is coming to supper.
Which means that I am now fixated on the ape in the painting (see previous post, source?), who is placed above the regeneration miracle narrative and opposite the human in the other window, who is above the kitchen. Where the ape is looking downward and eating, the man is looking upward at/through something (anybody know?) and, maybe, knowing. I will resist the historicistically irresponsible temptation to spell out a detailed reading of this painting as representing a kind of factory for the production of transcendent human identity, but I think it could be captioned very productively with this statement from Agamben's The Open: "The anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human -- and thus, his being always less and more than himself" (29).
In these terms the miracle story, as about the unmaking and remaking of a human, has interesting similarities to the late medieval story about the origin of the apes, which later made its way into Grimms' Tales. The story goes, according to Janson's paraphrase: "Christ and St. Peter stop at a blacksmith’s shop, where they were hospitably received. To show His gratitude, Christ took the blacksmith’s old and ugly wife and placed her in the fire of the forge, from which she emerged young and strong as a girl of fifteen. As soon as the two travelers had taken their leave, the blacksmith tried to rejuvenate another old woman by the same procedure, but when he thrust her into the flames she screamed so pitifully that he had to take her out again. Two pregnant women, who witnessed all this, were so shocked when they saw the old woman hideously blackened and shriveled like an ape that shortly thereafter they gave birth to two apes. These escaped into the forest, where they multiplied and thus became the progenitors of the entire simian tribe" (H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 97). Here the craftsman's labor is a medium of likeness between man and the divine Artifex as well as a means of transgression that, when it overreaches its limit through an impossible copying of what is beyond it, produces the greater unlikeness of the hyper-mimetic hybrid as a secondary, grotesque creation. Does the Ferrer story incorporate a comparable principle regarding the differently structured domestic labor of the wife who, rather than doing what she wants without understanding, which is the manner of the blacksmith, does what she must with a kind of superb animal rationality?
I was particularly struck, as I mentioned last night, by the consistent withholding of judgment on the wife's butchering of her baby in the narratives. Following the lead of the symbolic/allegorical significance of the dismembered and reintegrated body in light of the Schism, one possible reading is that this withholding has to do with the preservation of the literal as a mere container for the symbolic, or more simply, with maintaining the proper hagiographic focus on the miracle. In these terms the woman is very simply the means of getting the baby chopped up so that it can be healed and in a sense spiritually birthed by the saint (Gloria Steinem gave a nice description of this patriarchal function in a recent lecture recorded at Yale, listenable here).
Yet the possibility that the narratives’ withholding of judgment on the mother is more deeply a way of preserving something significant in the literal act of butchering her baby is hard to ignore, especially in comparison to the Mary of Jerusalem story where cooking your baby equals self-condemnation in an irreversible and extravagant way. Even to speak of this and notice it as “withholding” seems to acknowledge that there is something else going on, that the intention to serve up one’s child may be following a logic that the meaning of the story somehow requires. One possibility, to follow Karl Steel’s paper last Kalamazoo on the (mostly virtual) deliciousness of manflesh as an index of the discursivity of the human (available to read here), is that the baby butchering has to do with a transgression of the animal/human boundary which only serves to maintain it, precisely because the intention to transgress it acknowledges in a profane/literal/material way that very superiority, namely, through the fact that the dead human body is not only meat but the choicest meat and that the serving of baby flesh, whether as sacrifice or gourmandise or an interrelationship of the two, is really the perfect way, in the sense of an impossible limit (like death), to follow your husband's meal orders or honor the saint who is coming to supper.
Which means that I am now fixated on the ape in the painting (see previous post, source?), who is placed above the regeneration miracle narrative and opposite the human in the other window, who is above the kitchen. Where the ape is looking downward and eating, the man is looking upward at/through something (anybody know?) and, maybe, knowing. I will resist the historicistically irresponsible temptation to spell out a detailed reading of this painting as representing a kind of factory for the production of transcendent human identity, but I think it could be captioned very productively with this statement from Agamben's The Open: "The anthropological machine of humanism is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human -- and thus, his being always less and more than himself" (29).
In these terms the miracle story, as about the unmaking and remaking of a human, has interesting similarities to the late medieval story about the origin of the apes, which later made its way into Grimms' Tales. The story goes, according to Janson's paraphrase: "Christ and St. Peter stop at a blacksmith’s shop, where they were hospitably received. To show His gratitude, Christ took the blacksmith’s old and ugly wife and placed her in the fire of the forge, from which she emerged young and strong as a girl of fifteen. As soon as the two travelers had taken their leave, the blacksmith tried to rejuvenate another old woman by the same procedure, but when he thrust her into the flames she screamed so pitifully that he had to take her out again. Two pregnant women, who witnessed all this, were so shocked when they saw the old woman hideously blackened and shriveled like an ape that shortly thereafter they gave birth to two apes. These escaped into the forest, where they multiplied and thus became the progenitors of the entire simian tribe" (H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 97). Here the craftsman's labor is a medium of likeness between man and the divine Artifex as well as a means of transgression that, when it overreaches its limit through an impossible copying of what is beyond it, produces the greater unlikeness of the hyper-mimetic hybrid as a secondary, grotesque creation. Does the Ferrer story incorporate a comparable principle regarding the differently structured domestic labor of the wife who, rather than doing what she wants without understanding, which is the manner of the blacksmith, does what she must with a kind of superb animal rationality?
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