Friday, September 22, 2006
(12:00 AM) | Anonymous:
Friday Confession: Confessio Amantis
I confess that the closing words of Graham Greene's The End Of The Affair, as quoted recently by Charlie Brooker in the Guardian, seem to me the truest prayer and the ultimate confessio amantis:
O God, You've done enough,
You've robbed me of enough,
I'm too tired and old to learn to love,
leave me alone for ever.
To what experiential basis Badiou can hope to appeal in his association of the amorous truth procedure with the affect of happiness, I confess I have not the least idea. He surely cannot mean the dopey-headed, sexed-up miasma of smugness some people like to immerse themselves in - the same people who, a few weeks later, are invariably to be found whining to their friends - in between crying jags - about how they're all bastards / neurotic harridans underneath.
I confess that when I first read Larkin's late poem, "Love Again", in my late teens, I was terrorised by the near-certainty that I, too, was going to end up like that.
I confess that every time I read the words "Lacan's formula of sexuation", I think of this joke:
A man is sitting slumped at a bar, drunk and disconsolate, his head in his hands. Nearby, Henri the barman is polishing glasses. Time passes. Eventually the drunk man raises his head and moans, "Henri, Henri, mon frère - men and women - zey are différent". Henri nods understandingly: "ah - monsieur ees a philosophair."
I confess that I sometimes wish I were a little bit more homosexual; more out of a general loathing for the norms of heterosexual culture than because of any positive inclination, although that [expunged to spare the poor chap's blushes] would definitely be my type if I had one.
I confess that the first person I ever had sex with had told me beforehand that she didn't want me to make a big deal out of it, so after we'd finished I went and picked up the Derrida I'd been reading beforehand and carried on reading where I'd left off.
I confess that this was the wrong thing to do.
I confess that I knew perfectly well it was the wrong thing to do, but that even after just having had sex for the first time ever I was cold enough to do it anyway, just to show her.
I confess that when my wife told me, the other night, that of course she hated me; hating me made her happy; she hoped to go on hating me for the rest of my life, I nearly wept with joy: it was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me.
As one of my schoolteachers averred when he discovered me playing Leisure Suit Larry in the school computer room when I should have been at choir practice, I am a miserable sinner and there is no health in me. And you? Confess!
