Desire and paradox
To review the progress of a love affair is to recast Paul: “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; and what I hate, that I do.” Paul’s emphasis upon the inward condition of all men demands the same intense scrutiny that love produces; Paul requires that all men continually examine themselves in their spiritual love, that they unceasingly note the contradictions in each human nature: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox · Rosalie Colie · p. 30
I read a short Borgesian story about a fiction writer who felt that no matter what he wrote, Kafka had beaten him to it. I feel that way about Ovid. When I read this section from Colie, I went back through all of notes on desire and sure enough, there was Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
Some strange new force draws me against my will. Desire pulls one way, but my mind another. I see and praise what’s right, yet want what’s wrong.VII. 20
Desire is paradoxical in that it is self-referential and negative—desire is what is lacking, and it is unstable because of this negativity.
The subject relates to itself as a non-natural entity, an entity no longer bound by the limits of finitude. The subject is infinite because it fully takes up contradiction as the form of subjectivity itself. As a result, contradiction no longer undermines the subject from the outside as it does finite entities like the birch tree. In a way that the birch tree cannot, the subject grasps that it itself is contradictory, that it undermines itself and recognizes that what negates it is actually the product of its own desire. (Location 1431) Emancipation After Hegel
I’m not sure that I always grasp the contradiction in myself, that my desires undermine myself. But on reflection I believe that it is possible to recognize this. I think this phenomenon of desiring what’s wrong is tied to another moment in Metamorphoses, when Narcissus sees his reflection in the water’s surface and laments
quid faciam? roger anne rogem? quid deinde rogabo? quod cupio mecum est: inopem me copia fecit.
“What should I do? Ask or be asked? What then shall I ask? / What I desire, I already have; I am poor amidst plenty.” Narcissus is mixed up between active pursuit of his desire, and being the passive object of desire. The mirror presents both sides at once. And at the same time, he is aware that his desire can’t ever be satiated. In that moment of complete fullness, when he is both lover and beloved, and when his desire is perfectly matched by the intensity of the other’s desire—what Lacan would describe as that it-moment of desire when the infant gazes up and desires only that its mother is consumed by desire for it—in that moment is also the complete contradiction of desire. Neither side succeeds at getting what it wants. The mother turns away from the infant, distracted for just a moment, but that moment is all that is needed to destroy perfection. The mother has a body, too. She has her own desires that lead her away from the infant. The infant is just a mote in the breeze of the mother’s desire. Complete desolation.
But desire is contradictory that way. If the infant’s desires were met, it would mean the destruction of the mother. She could not drink or sleep or eat or turn her head to speak. She would perish, and the desolation would become real. Nonetheless we want what we shouldn’t. The intellect isn’t enough to counterweigh.