Abstract
Love for the Lost: The Peculiar Ethics of Sleeping and Reading
As practices through which we explore the implications of our own liminality, the negations of sleeping and reading are surprisingly understudied. Sleep scientists and philosophers from Heraklitus to Maurice Blanchot remind us that we habitually reverse the active dynamics of sleep to describe it as a largely passive experience charged with our recovery from, and readying for, another day. The fantasmatics of reading work similarly. When we read, it is our own imaginative construction of an internal fictional world that we occlude or fail to register, much as we occlude ourselves from the scene when in the act of sleep-sustaining dreaming. Or in a formulation perhaps more familiar to those of us who read and write about literature for a living, it takes two kinds of easy-seeming labour to get us into the happy realm of comfort reading: that of the writer who expends her labour to make a highly artificial, and so real-seeming, world, and that of the reader who expends his on harbouring this world, his own active presence blanked out, leaving him free to move around invisibly within it.
One does only expand one’s internal world in the process of accommodating and venturing forth on readerly engagement with a story, then, one in fact subsidises it so as to form the connection link between the story and oneself, and thus augurs or expands the life of each, by allowing something to be subtracted from oneself as the enabler. My paper uses Jacques Lacan’s formulation of love’s active dynamics--a feature more germane to his thinking than the oft-mentioned rhetorical complexity--to unfold a possible ethics of the human lostness involved in sleep and reading. In love, one is captivated by the qualities in another that one cannot know or grasp within oneself, as is one’s lover likewise, but the trick of love’s arrival is its reliance on this yielding (or, love is never where you’re doggedly looking, but arises where you are fortunately seen). I am interested in how love, sleep and reading, as practices of working exceptionality or rhetorical impasse--figured in the claims I don’t know what she sees in me; I don’t know how it’s done--generate a holding place or affectively subsidised region that we can privately inhabit in public or normalised guise, in the form of the pleasurable loss of oneself in a book or the good night’s sleep and intimate relationship respectively.
Using some fictional examples my paper will explore how the ethics of all three events, involving what Joan Copjec calls an active engagement with that which is encountered as . . . absent (Tomb of Perseverance, 257) or an impasse rhetoric can only attempt to cover, opens onto the question of how we understand and use the pressing absence of the lives and loves of others, including the others we ourselves love in sleep, in bed, in reading. It raises the question of whether a love for the lost in each event is able to ameliorate our own finitude (or extimité, to use Lacan’s term, another being objet a) in such a way as to allow for its alteration by the unimaginable finitude of others.