An essence is something true in all possible worlds. To make communication more utile and capable of abstraction we use words, or have what David Lewis calls 'conventions', which pick out 'essences' as having 'Schelling focality'- i.e. they are natural solutions to coordination problems because, no matter which perspective you approach them with, the same essence is salient to you. They enable us to communicate more effectively and to some utile purpose.
Existentialism was a silly byproduct of Phenomenology which thought it could get rid of essences so as to better grapple with the authentic problems of existence. But, shitting higher than its ontological arsehole, it quickly degenerated into ex falso quodlibet nonsense.
However, thanks to the steep decline in the I.Q of, first the students, then the Professors, in Philosophy Departments, pop-existentialism is making a come back.
An example of this genre is Agnes Callard who writes in Point-
Tolstoy was a moralist.
Surely, he was much more- or less- than that? Philosophy- or Soteriology- seem central to his project. There is a concern to accurately reflect tempora & mores- but like Gogol & Dostoevsky, a concern with Russia as a God bearing nation (naród-bogonósec) increasingly supervenes- possibly as a result of a more or less pronounced mental illness. This causes him to resile from a 'natural' view of oikeiosis as part of God's mysterious plan- oikonomia mysterion- of Government for the World. Towards the end, he is embracing something like the Indian notion of 'sanyaas'. But then, he genuinely had a severe mental illness while his Nation trembled on the brink of a greater apocalypse then it had in 1805.
He wrote one novel—Anna Karenina—in which infidelity ends in death,
the infidelity would not have mattered- Anna's husband wanted to take her back- the tragedy arose from her soulless fidelity to Wronsky sundering her from her own son and a wider economy of social utility.
and another—War and Peace—in which his characters endure a thousand pages of political, military and romantic turmoil so as to eventually earn the reward of domestic marital bliss.
Or just prosperity in peace time- but the protagonists may become Decembrists so this is but an interlude
In the epilogue to War and Peace we encounter his protagonist Natasha, unrecognizably transformed. Throughout the main novel, we had known her as temperamental, beautiful and reflective; as independent, occasionally to the point of selfishness; as readily overwhelmed by ill-fated romantic passions.
She is girlish and impulsive at a time of National upheaval and 'storm and stress' but she grows up in the same manner that Russia settles down under conditions of peace and, for the landowning class, increasing prosperity.
Marriage and motherhood turn out to sap Natasha’s interest in music, in parties, in dance, in her appearance; in fact they seem to sap her interest in having interests of her own.
Because kids aren't your own at all. They are forced upon your by Autocracy or Neo-Liberalism or some other such abstraction. You must tell your kids to fuck off and pretend to like music and enjoy parties to achieve lived authenticity.
In her new life, she self-consciously and gladly subordinates her mind to her husband’s,
does she though? Or does she merely seek to maximize a joint utility function on the basis of natural, Price Equation type, oikeiosis? Isn't her 'jealousy' simply 'appropriation'- which is one sense of the word oikeiosis- and the zealous guarding of what belongs to her oikos- or household- from those who might make ducks and drakes of her children's patrimony?
and finds the fulfillment of her domestic duties both thoroughly rewarding and utterly absorbing. All of this makes her, in Tolstoyan ethics, “an exemplary wife and mother.”
Surely, his 'ethics'- at least as they would come to develop- would involve some more Christ like self-sacrifice for the sake of the suffering masses?
There is only one moment in the epilogue in which we catch a glimpse of the old Natasha. Her husband Pierre has just come home from a trip, and Natasha launches into a speech that begins as a dutiful affirmation of the advantages of marital stability over mere romance—
“What stupidity,” Natasha said suddenly, “that the honeymoon and the first time is the happiest. On the contrary, now it’s best. If only you didn’t go away. Remember how we quarreled? And it was always my fault. Always. And what we quarreled about—I don’t even remember.”
“Always the same thing,” said Pierre, smiling, “jealo…”
“Don’t say it, I can’t bear it,” Natasha cried. And a cold, angry gleam lit up in her eyes. “Did you see her?” she added, after a pause.
“No, and if I had, I wouldn’t have recognized her.”
They fell silent.
Old married people are greatly chuffed if their spouse shows a spark of jealousy. It means one isn't wholly decrepit. But there is nothing very remarkable about this passage. Pierre's return home had been delayed by a couple of weeks. His wife had grown anxious. But their world had changed- it had become safe and gemutlich. The war was romantic. Now there is peace and prosperity. But the Decembrist uprising is around the corner.
The reader hasn’t been told about “her”—the events in question must have happened in the years the novel leaves undocumented—so the reference could be to anything from a full-blown affair to an infatuation existing mostly in Natasha’s imagination. All we know, looking on this scene, is that some early fracture continues to reverberate through their relationship.
Not really. All we know is that this is something which wasn't really a fracture.
Is Natasha’s continued jealousy the one flaw in their otherwise perfect union? Or is it the spark of life keeping the relationship from flattening into deadness? Could it, somehow, be both?
It is neither. It didn't matter.
Jealousy is an unattractive emotion,
in unattractive people- yes. But, in Natasha it may have been quite fetching. God in the Old Testament is Jealous- El Kanna- but this is not unattractive, it is sublime and awe inspiring. The essence of Jealousy- as opposed to Envy or 'mimetic desire' or 'Rivalry'- is that it demands an equal and reciprocal dedication irrespective of any potential tertius gaudens.
but unlike hate, contempt or spite, it is not a forbidden emotion.
Hate is not forbidden. I'm allowed to hate Hitler. Contempt for what is contemptible is salutary. Spite, by definition, is mean and dishonorable. A strong person exacts vengeance without being sullied by it.
If we knew that Pierre had cheated on Natasha, we would find her jealousy intelligible and even reasonable.
But it is intelligible and reasonable provided Pierre is rich and heterosexual. Some artful minx would find it in her interest to get him into her toils such that Natasha and the kids are left financially worse off. Even otherwise, there is a risk of sexually transmitted disease. Syphilis isn't a welcome addition to any family.
We would understand. Or, at any rate, we would say, to ourselves and to her, “I understand.” We are very quick to find such “justified” jealousy intelligible—so quick, that the very speed of our response testifies to our disinclination to look into the matter too deeply. But let us do so anyway.
Why? Emotions are 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'. Jealousy has survival value. Fucking everything that moves could cause your nose to fall off and your wife to die a slow agonizing death.
Our comfort zone, when it comes to jealousy, is the righteous anger of the betrayed spouse.
Actually, the Jews seem to have done just fine with El Kanna- Jealousy as God. Fidelity is generally a good thing. It permits better correlated equilibria and thus public signals of a jealous type are useful.
It seems to speak to us in the rational language of entitlements and violations and justice.
There is no 'rational language of entitlements'. Either there is an incentive compatible remedy for a rights violation or there is no entitlement. It is irrational to indulge in such language unless the matter is justiciable under a protocol bound vinculum juris of an essentially incentive compatible type.
Thus Natasha’s attitude towards Pierre is that he “had to be kept in such a way as to belong entirely to her, to the household.”
Marriage is a partnership based on both parties maximizing a joint Utility function. This is a feature of oikeiosis. But oikeiosis broadens out into wider and wider circles of affiliation. Thus once a partnership is up and running, the partners may take on pro bono work so as to benefit the wider community. This is actually beneficial for the partnership.
But the enforcement of contract is not the real concern of the jealous spouse; infidelity is not really about property rights.
It is about oikeiosis- belonging and appropriation- which may have justiciable aspects.
It is true that marriage is a contractual relationship,
No it isn't. We can't factorize it even as an incomplete contract because there is an essentially ontologically dysphoric element to it. But what precisely that is, it skills not to ask. The thing is too ideographic to be effable.
but how many marriage vows actually specify sexual exclusivity?
Laws relating to marriage 'read in' sexual exclusivity to such vows. It is not the case that infidelity is not grounds for divorce.
I have never yet been to a wedding in which the couple explicitly promised each other not to sleep around; certainly I did not promise this.
Yet, to have legal force, this was read into the vows or other forms of assent used in the ceremony.
And yet, when it comes to the many things that are explicitly promised—to love, honor, obey, care for, etc.—people rarely end up insisting on their contractual rights.
It may be that there are a few people who like being hated, dishonored, disobeyed and beaten by their spouses. But this is not generally the case.
Every divorce is a violation of the “as long as we both shall live” clause, and yet neither spouses nor onlookers are inclined to be outraged over that fact.
It may be that divorce is now accepted as just one of those things which happens even in the best of families. But Scripture condemns it. Prophet Muhammad described it as the worst of permissible things.
Even if one were to write a “no infidelity” clause into one’s marriage vows,
though the law already 'reads it in'
that wouldn’t make it the case that the primary problem with infidelity lay in the breaking of that agreement.
Yes it would.
It is the jealous person who understands all this better than anyone. She may speak (in a calmly furious way) of ownership, but she has a very accurate and precise understanding of the limits of such claims.
But that is a problem re. justiciability or enforcement. Still, depending on jurisdiction, she may be entitled to exemplary damages of some sort.
One cannot own another person; one has no “rights” over their body, or, for that matter, over their affections or interests or attention.
Yes one does- when it comes to babies. It is a different matter that some jurisdictions can't enforce similar claims with respect to spouses for practical reasons or because of the less defeasible nature of Human Rights.
The marriage ceremony may include me saying, “I am yours,” but the truth is that I am not and cannot ever be anyone else’s, and no proclamation of mine can change that fact.
Nonsense! The thing happens all the time. We join Armies or Business Enterprises or the Church on precisely the same basis. We are another's to any extent we care to be. Many have laid down their lives to prove this is so.
Of course there may be a few people who are so constituted that they are lying when they say 'I am yours' or 'I will faithfully discharge such and such obligations'. That is a separate matter. Sociopaths we will always have with us- though people may give them a wide berth.
Jealousy is this knowledge, combined with the intolerability of it: understanding that I don’t own, and needing to own.
Passion of any sort may be described in the same way. Gluttony is the knowledge, combined with the intolerability of it: understanding that the chocolate eclair I've just eaten is turning into shit in my intestines and that the same thing will happen to the next chocolate eclair in the box that I just purchased and which I currently own.
But it is more the latter than the former.
but, yet more, it is neither.
Jealousy is often
simply taken for granted as a 'Darwinian algorithm of the mind' which it is pointless to prose over
mischaracterized as a negative attitude, misclassified into the family to which fear, anger, aversion and denial belong.
why not simply speak of it as involving threat perception? If Mummy gives more time and attention to baby, maybe I'll starve to death
To see why this is mistaken, consider Natasha again.
In the excerpt cited above, we see Natasha living in the opposite of denial. She is haunted by something that happened years ago; moreover, she is actively keeping herself haunted—fueling the fires of her own ancient passion. Her question—“did you see her?”—is uttered not in the voice of anxiety or fear but in the voice of an emotion that launches her backward in time.
This sounds like mimetic desire and the scapegoat it requires.
Her sudden cold gaze and her angry voice connect her to an incident whose details we don’t know, but which she appears to be unable to let go of. That woman, whoever she was for Pierre, is for Natasha some kind of link to a past self, or, even more likely, to an alternative version of her present self: someone she could have been but is not. Whether or not Pierre is telling the truth when he says he wouldn’t even be able to recognize her anymore, I imagine she means much more to Natasha than she does to Pierre.
So, we are speaking of mimetic desire. Having a rival sharpens one's wits and gives color to life.
You may object that I am reading a lot into these few lines.
Callard is reading too little.
That is true. I can imagine all this with some vividness, because I have occupied both positions: I have been the other woman, and I have also been other-woman-ed. In both roles, I felt intense jealousy, wanting with my whole being to occupy the place of my counterpart.
So why not gas on about the Hegelian Struggle of Recognition and each consciousness hungering for the extinction of every other consciousness and Simone de Beauvoir beavering away boringly and then Rene Girard ensconcing himself in Stanford on the basis of Proust scholarship and some bogus African anthropology regarding the atrociousness of twins and so and so forth?
There is nothing so desirable to the Other Woman as the established and secure position of the woman who was there first; to whom, in turn, there is nothing so appealing as the carefree spontaneous romance she imagines he has with the Other.
The beautiful Begum in Sarojini Naidu's poem is discontented because her husband can bring home no worthy rival. Then one arrives by herself. It is her daughter. That's how these stories end. Daddy yields with good grace to sonny boy. Mummy retreats before Daddy's little princess. Thus has it always been. Running off with some rotten Vronsky, leaving your kid in the lurch, is a blind alley.
The primal scene of jealousy is this: I see a mark on my lover’s body, and my mind traces it to Her.
This is certainly what happens in Tamil Sangam era poetry.
How do I respond?
The Sangam heroine disdains her man. He has accepted trash and thrown gold away.
You imagine I feel angry at being robbed of what is mine; or afraid of losing him altogether. But those are not my real emotions; they are merely the faces my jealousy wears when I am in the business of eliciting sympathy from you. The inner truth of what I feel is so much more maddening than anger and so much more violent than fear: it is desire. Desire of desire. I want, quite simply, to have been wanted with the desire with which She was, at that moment, desired.
This is silly. The encounter may have been mediated by drink or boredom or peer pressure. God is jealous because the Jews are better than mere worshippers of golden calves. An unfaithful spouse is likely to have cheated with a person of an ignoble sort. They have cheapened themselves. Jealousy can be sexy. Disgust kills.
Not the same kind or degree of desire, but with that token, past act of desire. Jealousy desires the love intended for and directed at another, the very love one can be assured of never securing.
But this can happen without any envy or jealousy. One may desire to be loved in the manner one's own spouse loves the dog or- in a Graham Greene novel- God. One is not jealous or envious of the dog or of God. But then, I may desire to be admired as Beyonce without wishing to be a woman or being able to twerk. Equally, I may desire to be Einstein or A.R Rahman. No jealousy is involved in these impossible projects.
Jealousy hungers after this desire impossibly, unattainably, unsatisfiably.
As I hunger after recognition as Beyonce. Ontological dysphoria is infinitely plastic. That is why Satrean shite is shite. Existential psychoanalysis can make exactly the same heavy weather of my Beyonce impersonation or bathroom singing as Jean Genet's more sordid, or splendid, misadventures.
Like all that is truly erotic, it quests for what cannot be had.
But also like all that is merely silly or deeply eccentric.
Jealousy is a positive emotion. Jealousy is a form of lust.
Love is a positive emotion. Jealousy may express love or seek to guard a loving relationship. It is not a form of lust. Fucking won't quench it.
Lacan, commenting on Plato’s Symposium, tells us that eros is “giving what one does not have.”
No it isn't. That's cheating or pretending to be a psycho-analyst. Sex does not involve giving away a penis or a vagina. There may be an exchange of bodily fluids and that may cause a baby to come into the world. But there is no 'mirror stage'. Baby aint a 'specular mirage'.
Think of how often, in a romantic relationship, one’s image of a romantic gesture will be precisely whatever act one’s beloved is disinclined to perform. If you are not in the habit of complimenting my clothing, then that’s what I need from you, “for once!”
But the same is true of workaday relationships which aren't romantic at all. We may resent a boss who does not praise us or notice changes we have made to the work process.
But this is not the case of 'giving what one does not have'. Rather it is a case of a necessary metanoia such that you give what others need without having to be nagged to do it.
If you never fold the laundry, then it’s that.
But one might say this of a flat-mate whom one is obliged to get along with. We can imagine Monica shrieking at Rachel about something like this. The thing won't end in kisses- worse luck.
The harder and unlikelier it is, the more romantic the prospect of your doing it will strike me; and yet if you actually rise to the challenge, that will always be somewhat anticlimactic.
You get your boss to finally say something nice about you- and, yes, it is an anticlimax. But so is finally getting your hands on that i-phone you queued up all night for.
The romance lay in its being undone and undoable.
In which case my relationship with the Number 28 bus is romantic as is my affair with my old Hewlett Packard laser printer.
One time, in a furious lover’s quarrel, it was pointed out to me that “nothing I do could ever count as the thing you want; as soon as I did it, it wouldn’t count!”
This is cabin-fever- not love.
That was perfectly true. I wanted him to show me his love—but not just any love. I wanted to see the love he didn’t have.
You might want your prison cell-mate to be very different from what he is- more particularly if he is showing you a love he ought not to have.
The love a person doesn’t have is, by and large, not visible—because it is not there.
Though its absence eclipses him ontologically such that in the mirror of non-being sodomy occurs. That's the problem with talking nonsense. You get sodomized on some other ontological plane.
But in the special case where he loves another, the love he doesn’t have for me becomes something concrete and embodied—it is embodied in Her body, it is clothed in Her flesh.
But this also happens when you imagine your beloved eating a chocolate eclair with a relish which she never shows for your body. One may say the same thing of her reading a Harry Potter novel or going for a swim.
And that, finally, is the moment when the laser beam of my erotic passion locates the impossible love it was born to lust after, namely his love of Her.
Or his love of chocolate eclairs.
Jealousy ushers eros into its own; jealousy makes the invisible visible.
Jealousy may increase one's powers of observation. It may be sexy- that's true enough. But to say anything useful about jealousy you must distinguish it from other emotions or sentiments. To do this you need to look at its essence- i.e. what is true about it in all possible worlds but isn't true of other sentiments or emotions. Existentialism refused to do this. That's why it turned to shit.
As long as the invisible stays invisible, we can tell ourselves a set of noble lies:
We can tell ourselves noble lies even when the Truth is staring us in the face and shoving things up our backside so as to make us scream with pain.
that there is a romantic gesture that would count; that all the love I seek from him is love that is or could be mine; that romance is a two-body problem.
Heterosexual romance is likely to lead to a third body and then a fourth and so on. But successful homosexual romances too may have this property- the home shelters more and more. We are speaking of non-dissipative oikeiosis, not chaotic systems- though, no doubt, this is not always clear from the get go. All happy families are alike etc, etc.
Most of the time, Natasha lives in the space of these noble lies, a space within which she can say “my husband,” and mean it—or at least imagine that she means it.
There is no 'noble lie'. She really does have a husband. She may lose him to the Decembrists. But, equally, she may consider to have gained him yet more firmly for her Mother Russia.
Jealousy exposes the presence of the sometimes fleshy, sometimes ghostly, always unwelcome and never fully eliminable third party to the relationship.
This is true of any 'matching' problem, or incomplete contract, in Econ. However, relationships can be much more than contracts. The 'stable marriage problem' may have a paradigmatic solution of a type which involves superior 'common knowledge' and 'Aumann agreement'.
Jealousy is a form of attraction that repulses us.
It is not a form of attraction. It may be a symptom of it. It does not repulse everybody. Most men feel that if a woman shows jealousy then it might be worthwhile 'popping the question'. Why? Jealousy suggests that an uncorrelated asymmetry has arisen and this can be formalized through a public signal such that a superior correlated equilibria is attainable.
Existentialism is stupid shit. Mathematical Econ was advancing at precisely the time Sartre was off his head on amphetamines and writing stupid shite in the Critique of Dialectical Reason.
●
I’ve never understood how polyamory is supposed to survive erotic rivalry, but I have exactly the same objection to monogamy. The fact is, the two diverge only in the specifications of the relevant contract,
Contracts only diverge in terms of their specifications. But relationships are more than contracts.
and this difference seems laughably superficial in the face of a problem situated at the molten lava core of the soul.
or in the face of a problem situated in the molten lava core of the intestines. Shitting uncontrollably over each other can be a mood killer.
If erotic passion means wanting what is not and cannot rightly be yours, then how can it ever be stable?
If x means not x, how can it ever be stable? Erotic passion can be stable if its object can be appropriated by a 'natural' type of oikeiosis. Thus, you can marry the pretty typist on the Third Floor whom you have also seen at Church. However, your erotic interest in the photocopier on the Fifth Floor is unlikely to be reciprocated.
Jealousy is the thread in which romance is woven, and the thread that unravels it.
Or it is the loom on which romance is woven and the loom which collapses rending it asunder. But this is just a manner of speaking. One may say, with greater truth, Leisure, or Economic Security, or good Reproductive Health, is the loom or the thread or the warp and woof of Romance or Bromance or Marital Bliss or whatever else you are writing about.
Is there any solution to this erotic predicament?
If stupidity creates a predicament, greater stupidity can resolve it. Callard demonstrates this immediately-
Portuguese poet, philosopher and all-round literary genius Fernando Pessoa
who was stupid and boring and not really representative of Portuguese culture
offers one. His Book of Disquiet includes a set of sex tips for a group of people he calls “Unhappily married women,” though he clarifies that “Unhappily married women include all who are married and some who are single.” Pessoa is addressing all women who find themselves in the erotic predicament, and he tells them:
Picture your husband with a whiter body. If you’re good at this, you’ll feel his whiteness on top of you.
Kiss the husband on top of your body and replace him in your imagination—remember the man who lies on top of you in your soul.
Substitution is less difficult than you think. By substitution I mean the practice of imagining an orgasm with man A while copulating with man B.
All pleasure is in the mind; all crimes that occur are committed in dreams and in dreams alone!
This is hateful shit. Women don't need 'men on top'. Why not just close your eyes and think of England- or the apartheid South Africa where Pessoa was educated for ten years? A guy who babbles about 'whiteness' and 'men on top' may seem a great philosopher to Callard. But the rest of us think him shite.
Pessoa understands that the triad is the unit of eros, whereas stability calls for the dyad.
He, like Callard, understood shit.
His solution—squeezing three into a space for two by way of an infidelity of the mind—reflects an almost perfect grasp of the problem.
But the man on top too is fantasizing about a fourth and so forth. Why can't these cunts just look at a dirty magazine and wank?
Almost perfect. Pessoa’s one error can be traced to his masculine perspective, or, at any rate, his failure to successfully abstract it away. Any woman of sufficiently erotic temperament could have explained to Pessoa that the right advice to an “Unhappily Married Woman” is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman.
Or as a goat. Callard's blatant speciesism is triggering me! She should be cancelled with immediate effect.
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