Sara Ahmed's Love Song

(I didn't see a recent post, but I want to chime in my two cents this week before 5:00...)

I'll admit, I have gone back and forth in my appreciation of Sara Ahmed's writing during our semester together. We have read many of her works, and to me sometimes her prose felt frustrating to read, like she kept repeating herself. (These instances are too numerous to be worth mentioning).

Second, I sometimes thought she picked easy targets, patting herself on the back for tossing bricks at the white supremacists and violent fascists, etc. My inner "white man" wanted to cry, "You just don't understand, it's more complicated than that, witness here the decay of a cultural type, the implosion of a European once-baroque." European culture is no more, and the depth of that intensity, of the pathos, was the soil in which Freud took his root. Psycho-analysis is the ripened tale of "our" decay. There will never be another Charlemagne, just as there will never be another Jesus. It catches up to European-Americans last of all...

But these two chapters for this week -- I must call them a love poem or a love song. Freud was a belated Romantic, as Harold Bloom demonstrated in his 1977 book on Wallace Stevens. The Romantic pathos of "loss" reaches an apex with Freud's "Melancholia and Mourning." Ahmed not only stirringly translates, but interprets Freud with a disturbing accuracy for gender relations in the West. Speaking of men and women in Freud's scheme:

Whilst love is seen as in the first instance narcissistic - the child's own body is the source of love - for men love is assumed to mature into object love, whilst women are assumed to remain narcissistic. The economy for this differentiation is heterosexual: women's narcissism involves a desire to be loved (to love the love that is directed towards them), while for men, they love to love women who love themselves. ... But what is the relation between the boy's identification with the father and his anaclitic love, his love of women as his ideal objects? His secondary love is for the mother, for what is "not him": such love works as a form of idealisation, and is based on a relation of having rather than being. ... In other words, identification with the father requires dis-identification with the mother (I must not be her), and desire for the mother (I must have her, or one who can stand in for her). The heterosexual logic of this separation of being from having is clear. (125-26)

This brief and intense summary conjoins with the hetero-normative saga, and reaction to this Romantic tale might serve as an index of one's relation to that narrative.

Surrounded by queer tales of "discomfort," Freud's narrative allows Ahmed to credit "the exposure of the failure of the ideal [marriage, etc.]" to the work of "queer families" (153). So what do "queer feelings" substitute for the heterosexual nightmare of "being" vs. "having"?

Queer feelings may embrace a sense of discomfort, a lack of ease with the available scripts for living and loving, along with an excitement in the face of the uncertainty of where the discomfort may take us. (155)

She borrows the terms "difficult and exciting" from Kath Weston (154). Both writers seem to stress the "excitement" part over the "difficulty," although Ahmed certainly does not make it look easy. I imagine different people could place the emphasis differently based on their situations, but I wonder if the "difficulty" becomes more pre-dominant with age. I guess the point is to not surmise, and that's just the difficulty.

Ahmed frequently warns against transcendence and attempts to distance herself from that goal or stance. But I wonder if this queer "exposure of the failure of the ideal" does return the investment to a primary narcissism. If it is prior to the economy of sexual differentiation (if that is possible, which the theory of narcissism seems to assume). After so many chapters and articles and essays by Ahmed that we have read for the past 2 1/2 months, with all the impersonal "slidings" and "circulatings" of Ahmed's discourse, her disavowals of psychology, her subtly equalizing usage of the potent plural noun "bodies," her constant negations and evasions, modifications, to hear her finally express what might be called a "voice"! She permits herself, at last, after all the fear and hate and shame, and pain, to avow her "own" feelings.

Ahmed works through her love song to evolve an impressionism. She claims a discomfort can be "generative" (155), even though it results from a "misfit" between body and space, like an uncomfortable chair. The impressions can bring exquisite pleasure, in a mode not unlike the nineteenth century British Epicurean aesthete, Walter Pater. Like the younger sister stretching at the end of Kafka's macabre tale "Metamorphosis," Ahmed permits herself to utter what has now become universal, a triumph of the queer:

[T]he enjoyment of the other's touch opens my body up, opens me up. (164)