Passion, Language and the Body: An unpublished Tribute to Michael Holquist, 
originally delivered at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, February 2005
by Robert F. Barsky [1]
 
--“No essence can withstand the battering of the moments as they pass by.”
Michael Holquist[2]
 
Paul's letter of thanks to the Philippians, written on receiving their gift through Epaphroditus while he was a prisoner of the Romans in 60AD, is integrated into the  King James New Testament as “The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philippians.”[3] If therefore there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose.” This desire requires a metaphysical link of humility, which Paul likens to what Jesus did when he “emptied himself,” and then took on human form:[4]” The idea that such symbioses can occur presupposes a self-identity between purpose and action which is premised upon some sense of faith, proven by ensuring that the body of the slave, rather than the idea of the slave as God, be “grasped.”  “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, andbeing made in the likeness of men. Therein, Paul invokes a kind of symbiotic relation with an absent other which culminates in the desire that his addressees become, quite literally, situated in the same place as him by being “of the same mind”: “
            Among the many problems that have come up to impede this kind of symbiosis of situatedness include the very idea of religion as it has evolved in the name of the savior who provides it with meaning, and yet, the dream of such profound links between situated selves prevails, even amongst the most skeptical. The problem is to overcome the mitigating or interloping factors which either create, or exacerbate, the gap between intention and action, between “matter and spirit,”[5] including the very medium we employ for seeking this identification, including philosophy, science or religion. Karl Marx, in his most cited condemnation of religion, suggests that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a situation deprive of spirit. It is the people’s opium.” But in an oft-ignored line that follows this one, and that makes him sound more optimistic and, dare I say, spiritual, he then goes on to suggest that “The abolition of religion as the people’s illusory beatitude is necessary for their real beatitude,” which seems to suggest that he is not as concerned about the ultimate objective, the beatitude, as he is of the medium, in this case the institution of organized religion. To have the faith required to seek Marx’s beatitude, or Paul’s same-mindedness, one would have to direct one’s passions to seek out intimate links to the other. But as Michel Meyer notes in Philosophy and the Passions,[6] “the problem of passion is the problem of the Other: the Other in us, the Other that we are to ourselves, and the Other that we are for others. Our identity is at risk in this game, like a broken mirror, the pieces of which we hope will be gathered up by the Other before we then smash them over his or her head because the Other did it for us, that is, because the Other answered the question of who we are for ourselves.”[7]
            We in the Twentieth Century have added a few layers of complexity to “being of the same mind” with Paul, or anyone else for that matter, because, as Michael Holquist notes in his work on dialogism, this is an age at which “relativity dominates physics and cosmology and thus when non-coincidence of one kind or another – of sign to its referent, of the subject to itself – raises troubling new questions about the very existence of the mind”[8]. As if this weren’t enough, the focus upon language references the very basic problem of how one comes to even give name to the desire to effect a rapprochement between the self and the other. If the body is the locus of the situated dialogic relation between self and environment, then language is but a symptom, a powerful but necessarily inadequate tool for the transmission of our ideas, a further illustration of the “non-identity of mind and world”[9]. As we know from such diverse realms as rhetorics, argumentation or deconstruction, expression in language either betrays us at every turn, because of the wildly unpredictable distance between intention and utterance, or, particularly when we try to communicate the most essential ideas or feelings we suffer or enjoy, it is a stand-in which, if we’re aware of such things, we simply accept as being sufficient given the limitations imposed by the gap between thought and expression, or which we employ but on a completely different plane from deeper wishes, fully cognizant that it can at best convey the most cursory indications of our inner selves. The problem of language’s inadequacy is all the more crucial for the articulation of our deepest sentiments in situations of confession, in expressions of deep feelings, or in the articulation of our passion for the other, where failure can have deep political, legal or emotional cost.
            A positive spin would be to suggest that language, even if insufficient, can nevertheless serve as a catalyst to further passions, or different passions, as in the case of erotic literature or in the expression of profoundly moving thoughts, even if the thoughts generated in the listener are radical misreadings of those expressed by the speaker. It’s for this reason that most of us have abandoned or at least tempered any hope of communicating our inner selves through language; we have found, no matter how profound the interaction, that language tends to render banal even the most moving and passionate sentiment of, say, lust or warmth, and this despite the fact that we do enjoy moments, particularly in literature, when “the two ‘notes’ of pleasure and utility” not only “coexist but coalesce,” to recall Wellek and Warren[10]. Even with the knowledge of immanent failure of communication as a means of “knowing,” we the speakers keep trying, particularly when there’s a physical distance between the speaker and the recipient of the utterance, if only because there seems to be no alternative. Much of this “trying” occurs in literature, and indeed when we begin to think about literary texts with regards to this quest to “be of the same mind,” it’s remarkable the number of times we find it articulated. In Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, which is in most other ways a book about the non-identity of appearance and thought, the narrator suggests that happiness is really only to be found “where there are no words or at least nor more words,” so his real interest “lies… in the extreme, silent regions of human intercourse – that one, first of all, where strangeness and social rootlessness still maintain a free, primordial condition and glances meet and marry irresponsibly in dreamlike wantonness; but then, too, the other in which the greatest possible closeness, intimacy, and commingling re-establish completely that wordless primordial condition.”[11]
            In the rarest of cases, made famous in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, the language can be not only effective in the transmission of passions, but in a tragic spin, it to be more effective than the presence of the authentic speaker, so the passion he feels for Roxane turns out to be better conveyed linguistically than in fact. 

CYRANO (à Roxane)
….Vous souvient-il du soir où Christian vous parla
Sous le balcon ? Eh bien toute ma vie est là
Pendant que je restais en bas, dans l'ombre noire,
D'autres montaient cueillir le baiser de la gloire !
C'est justice, et j'approuve au seuil de mon tombeau
Molière a du génie et Christian était beau ![12]

Roxane’s response, “Je vous aime, vivez!” invokes the potential power of words no longer spoken from this darkness, but to no avail, for Cyrano is wise to words powers, but also to its limitations:

CYRANO
Non ! car c'est dans le conte
Que lorsqu'on dit : Je t'aime ! au prince plein de honte,
Il sent sa laideur fondre à ces mots de soleil...
Mais tu t'apercevrais que je reste pareil.[13] 

The effects of the failure of language, to save the dying from death or the living from being ugly, and its further failure to express the ends of passion, can be simple frustration or, in an unexpected link between language and criminality, to efforts at overcompensating for our own failure by engaging in more dramatic speech or actions which attempt to forcefully bridge the gap;[14] destined to fail, these addressees tend to literally go “over the top” of the barrier that separates the thought from the expression.[15] We don’t feel regret for those who do this for effect, like Antonin Artaud was wont to do, or as a means to summon the Muse, as we find so often in Yeats’s work, so we can save our regret for the likes of Madame Bovary, who in her haste to find real meaning in her passion pushes to the point where her words of passion go beyond the actions themselves, rendering her ridiculous and destined for failure. In one of the most remarkable moments in the novel, Rodolphe reflects upon Emma’s overstatements about his power and his beauty with pure scorn: “He had heard these things so any times that they no longer held any interest for him. Emma resembled all his old mistresses, and the charm of novelty, falling away little by little like articles of clothing, revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and speaks the same language. This man, who was so experienced in love, could not distinguish the dissimilarity in the emotions behind the similarity of expressions. He couldn’t really accept Emma’s lack of guile, having heard similar sentences from the mouths of venal and immoral women. One should be able to tone down, he thought, those exaggerated speeches that mask lack of feeling – as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors. No one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, or conceptions, or sorrows. The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.[1]
            So where do we go to seek rejuvenation, to capture or, as in this example, to re-capture the sense of loss that is so much a part of the inter-human realm? Since the intimate space is precarious and unpredictable we might join Baudelaire amidst the crowd, or, better still reach backward to the social world of the late Medieval carnival space, that blessed wicked locus where “all distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people”.[16] Carnival is the place where such contact is possible because the distances are worked out, quite literally, through “a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals….”[17] In such a realm, deemed utopian or, at least in our age, repressed into or reduced to the literary carnivalesque, “the latent sides of human nature” are able “to reveal and express themselves” because “all things that were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a noncarnivalistic hierarchical worldview are drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations.” The effect of this brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid,” producing not only new contact, but a new kind of communication that is linked to “profanation: carnivalistic blasphemies, a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings, etc.”[18]
            Much of this relation described here as a kind of idealized link between the body and its language, or languages, has been present via Bakhtin in Michael Holquist’s writing,[19] and his powerful presence, as a thinker, as a person, which I think contributes to the feeling that many colleagues and friends of his describe, of never being able to get enough of him as a scholar and as a person, is his insistent obsession with the body, and with language, in a way that moves far beyond philology, or physical relations, because he in his very being seems to fill-in the “gap” of existence and presence in a way that Bakhtin can only abstractly articulate in his description of the carnival and its manifestation in literature as the carnivalesque. The work that Holquist chooses to engage comes in part from what makes him the kind of person he is, and it’s what makes his writing so carnal, so immediate, so pulsing with life beyond the physical and beyond the linguistic. An example of this is his article entitled “From Body-Talk to Biography: The Chronobiological Bases of Narrative,” which suggests that “our bodies seem to be the site from which the reality of things is most convincing” because the “motivated sign” interacts with what he calls, in the very pregnant sense of the term, “streams of information”[20] in which we are awash at any given moment. Likened to a cell awash in the blood or an organism in the ocean, he imagines the ways that narrative come to interact with the sea of cycles, signals and signs that are present in the receiving and transmitting body. We are, he suggests, experiencing “a passion for precisely the representation of bodies, for bodies as a means for representing, a fascination with the body as escutcheon of historically manifested mentalités.”[21] It is indeed a passion, and it is his passion, but once again we must wonder aloud, is it a passion that drives the quest or is it a quest that is both driven by and impeded by passion, driven in the sense of it being catalyzed, but impeded, as well, in the sense of it being obscured or redirected by the very passion that motivates it?
            This question makes us realize that the linguistic leap across the gap from body to body through language occurs at our own peril. That we do so is evidence for our passion for representing some kind of problem, re-presenting, that is, not only across the boundary of thought and expression, but through a boundary imposed by the distance between the thought and its re-presentation as an utterance in time. In Meaning and Reading, Michel Meyer speaks of the decision to resort to language, suggesting that “in contrast to other problem-solving techniques, language is capable of relating to all problems” and it therefore has the advantage of covering “an unlimited range of problems and is not confined to any of them in particular, while the possibilities offered by another tool are restricted to a narrow range of problems, and the solutions it permits are limited.” Nevertheless, “the use of any tool is as specific as that of language, and the latter can seldom serve as a substitute for the former. In that sense, language is already a particular solution, the solution to which we resort when our problem must be referred to as a problem, or as what used to be problematic.”[22] If we find that language is the solution to the problem, or if we don’t but are nevertheless willing to take a chance, then we leap at the very moment we’re moved by our passions to do so; but in the leap across the space of thought and utterance we have the sense of either smashing into the self same passions that motivated it, or we are induced by those same passions into some other realm, no longer linked to the transmission of the passionate senses but nevertheless, on account of the pleasure of body talk, passionate in its own right?
            So what about this passionate quest for and in narrative, and how does it come to be hampered or encouraged by passion as it enters into the cauldron of our bodies fluid self, as Michael Holquist suggests in his provocative work? The leap I’m taking here suggests that the sign, the word, the utterance, as it encounters, bathes in, or is drowned by the body, is neither a mere composite of one side of the binarism of “sheer figuration”, nor is it but another element in the plethora of sensations that compose our “overpolarized physicality,”[23] it is introduced into an internal environment in relation to which it comes to mean in a way which is, to recall Michael’s Bakhtin, “dialogic.” This idea in some ways recalls various stages in the reception process described in The Act of Reading by Wolfgang Iser,[24] whose sense of creating individualized meaning which reflect an individual’s reading situation thanks to the need to fill in indeterminate white spaces between signs, or perhaps with Barthes sense described in Le Plaisir du texte[25] of an indeterminate text entering into the space of personal introspection creating self-reflexivity-inspired jouissance, both of which demonstrate the reception theory side to Bakhtin’s and Holquist’s work. But Holquist is going much further than Barthes or Iser, and he is much more optimistic than Levinas who, while setting forth a “phenomenology of voluptuousness” as a means of understanding the “relationship with the other through Eros,” ultimately deems the “relationship with the other through Eros” as a failure specifically because there is in such an interaction no hope for “fusion:” “if one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other.” For Levinas, “the relationship with the Other is the absence of the other; not absence pure and simple, not the absence of pure nothingness, but absence in a horizon of the future an absence that is time. This is the horizon where a personal life can be constituted in the heart of the transcendent event, what I…[call] the ‘victory over death.’[26] When Holquist describes a similar relation, he speaks not of an interaction between fixed text and indeterminacy, and not of the constitution of a “personal life,” but of the tides of human existence as captured in a particular body within a given chronotope, a relation between stasis and change, a dialogue of already ideologically-drenched signs, pace Bakhtin, and a drenched body.
            If this is suddenly sounding erotic, it’s because it is,[27] and to fully enjoy Michael Holquist’s approach I want to bridge the gap between sign and signified, between utterance and body, between uttering body and receiving body, between one situated self and another, by “talking dirty,” by taking the plunge across the language-biology gap,[28] the hyphen as it appears on this page, from linguistics to the body and from stasis to change, in a system which is shifting and dynamic, but which potentially comes into synch when flesh grinds against desiring flesh and literally shares in the fluids produced and spilled in the process. The hyphen fades, perhaps, as hungry mouths drink from the fountains of mounting desire, and idea meets utterance, when the dialogic partners both spew from the self-same gaps between the lips the words describing each tender kiss and erotic nibble, creating a running commentary describing the very act being performed, in all of its lustful and material and bodily detail. This is a “they’re off and it’s Thunderbird lurching out in front followed by….”, a “what a hit, that ball is up, up, up, that ball is gone!” a “Elle ne le regarde pas. Elle le touché. Elle touché la douceur du sexe, de la peau. Elle caresse la couleur dorée, l’inconnue nouveauté. Il gémit, il pleure. Il est dans un amour abominable.”[29] But does the hyphen really fade in such an interaction, and if so, why? Better still, why does it feel so good as I do it, even as I say it? Is this why so many people find their potential partners in lust seated before a narrated image of gladiators throwing, catching and being hit by balls on Sunday afternoon? Is this, in either its carnal or mediated couch potato form a better sense of passion, something which is beyond linguistic but in its effect, in its generating of passions that come to be described, beyond bodily as well? Can the “failure of communication in love” that Levinas celebrates as the “positivity of the relationship” because the “absence of the other” really announces his or her presence “as other” really account for the pleasures of such interactions?[30] The answer is only to be found in the effect produced, this “amour abominable” which of course, which is why in desperation to get down, that is, to bring the heavens to earth, that we have chosen literature and by doing so land up scouring texts, our hearts and pulsating flesh in our hands in the hope that in the end we’ll land up, as Marguerite Duras’s lover does, in a breathless and soundless “amour abominable.” But how so? Hadn’t the lover just said to this young girl, this fifteen year old author-turned-narrator-turned-girl being seduced in the present turned-girl-seducing-in-the-present that “il ne la connaît pas, qu’il ne la connaîtra jamais, qu’il n’a pas les moyens de connaître tant de perversité”?[31] He is incapable of following through with his lust, of leaping from present to future, of truly knowing her or, as he says, pathetically loving her avant la lettre. In weakness or despair in the face of time’s gap he turns away from her and cries, which ought to be the end of the story; but she is beyond him in wisdom, and so, motivated by money, perhaps, or adolescent love, or awakening lust, or some sense of the connivance-to-come, begins to undress him, her eyes closed, and as she does so she whispers, her hand upon his skin, “laisse moi.” And then silence. The narrator speaks for her as she herself speaks and caresses: “Elle dit qu’elle veut le faire elle. Elle le fait. Elle le déshabille.”[32]
            The narrator of this story and her lover, indeed the narrator and both of these lovers, are in a dialogic, or more likely a trialogic state, or a multilogic state, as we are, with Marguerite Duras, with the narrator, with the lover, with this fifteen year old girl, who in turn is in lustful multilogue with the pool of sensations that surround her in this den of pleasure that bathes in the scents, the smells, the tastes, the hustle and the bustle of downtown Saigon in the early afternoon from which they are separated by a thin cotton drape. In full realization of this scented bath, the narrator-turned-now deflowered lover is further aroused not only in her nakedness and vulnerability, but in the realization that “aucun matériau ne nous sépare des autres gens. Eux, ils ignorant notre existence. Nous, nous percevons quelque chose de leur, le total de leurs voix, de leurs mouvements, comme une sirène qui lancerait une clameur brisée, triste, sans écho ».[33]The couple of lovers are drenched, the narrator insists upon it, in odors of grilled peanuts, of Chinese soups, of roasted meats, of herbs, of jasmine, of dust, of incense, of the smell of charcoal, and the world comes strangely together such that « l’odeur de la ville est celle des villages de la brousse, de la forêt.”[34] It seems a strange move at first, from the individual odors to the vast cacophony of odors, from the give-and-take between him and her before their embrace to the unity and then silence of their lovemaking-turned-symbiosis, but no, this is not evocative silence, it is the opening of the gap and its refilling with newfound proximity and perhaps something far higher than either side to which it all refers. Bakhtin’s dialogism, says Holquist, is like relativity, in that “it takes for granted that nothing can be perceived except against the perspective of something else,” there is “no figure without a ground,” and indeed the mind itself in its very essence “is structured so that the world is always perceived according to this contrast;”[35] but what about the moment when he penetrates her body, as the lover does, that moment at which she, and indeed he too, are forever changed? Does the figure hit the ground or become the ground in that ecstatic symbiotic state when she says, “lentement arrachée, emportée vers la jouissance, embrassée à elle”? For afterwards, there is silence, there is no figure, no ground, no form, the sign is muffled in its own soil, drowned in the sea of signs in which it had formerly signified. “La mer, sans forme, simplement incomparable” (50). The sea, without form, simply incomparable.
            This seduction is based upon dialogism, upon the “multiplicity in human perception,” but the melding of utterance and body, of body and sea, of body and body, of utterance and mouth, supersedes the bridging of the gap and becomes the gap itself now filled, it becomes the orifice now penetrated, the mouth now breathing in the air from the lungs of the other. I think that moments like this permeate certain literary texts, and that this, to give another example, is why somebody like Allen Ginsberg is so obsessed with Blake, with supreme reality, with Ohm, with “the funny balance of tension, in every direction,” with the apparitional voice that came to him as an auditory hallucination in that apartment in New York City, right after masturbating, a Blake book on his lap and “Ah Sun-flower” as a mental image within him.[36] This too is the incomparable sea without form which, incidentally, he never again attains, except briefly in a bookstore, just as one has the sense that despite the passage of an entire life the lover never attains again, which is why he still loves this fifteen year old girl-turned-memory. The lover lives only in this memory, but Ginsberg is more obsessed, and he remains so in his personal quest, so the rest of his career is spent on verbal, poetic, mental and geographical quests aimed at re-filling that gap, efforts which are described endlessly in his writings and his journals. This is one quest that tied the Beat Generation together, these experiments, like Burroughs effort to think without language so as to enter the “space age,” an interesting image in light of our discussion, or Ginsberg’s experiments, the most memorable being his effort to replicate Cézanne’s method of juxtaposing one color against another in order to create space in the linguistic realm: “I had the idea, perhaps overrefined, that by the unexplainable, unexplained nonperspective line, that is, juxtaposition of one word against another, a gap between the two words – like the space gap in the canvas – there’d be a gap between the two words which the mind would fill in with the sensation of existence.”[37] Notice here, it’s not with an idea, or an image, it’s not Iser’s mind attempting to create meaning by connecting the pinpoints of light in heaven’s dark curtain, but it is nothing less than the “sensation of existence.” This is the solipsistic eternity, dialogue’s masturbatory friend monologism, it is to Duras’s sea but a pool that then remains as a stain not upon the sheet that divides him from the city of New York, but upon the sheet upon which he lies as he contemplates New York’s skyline, shut in by bricks and steel and glass. This is not the “primal sketch of I/other distinctions,” the “unfinished aspect of selfness” in an “interaction with the finishedness of otherness,” it is the dream, like Paul’s evocative hope of maintaining “the same love,” realizable as the linguistic meets the corporal, the mouth meets the utterance meets the act described, that seems constantly chased and attained but for a few moments which, as the Supreme Reality did for Ginsberg, or as those few encounters did for the Chinese lover in Duras’s L’amant, or in friendship with Michael Holquist through his life or through his work, remains attainable and forever quested after(words).
 
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--- Philosophy and the Passions. Trans. Robert F. Barsky. University Park, PA: Penn State P, 2000.
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 Endnotes: