Eros the Bittersweet

Norbert Ruebsaat

Ann Carson has writ­ten a sen­sual and thought-provoking book about desire and called it Eros the Bittersweet (Dalkey Archive Press). My friends tell me you can’t the­o­rize about desire, and my lovers tell me (when I begin to the­o­rize about desire) that I’m think­ing, not lov­ing — or, what’s worse, I’m mak­ing things up rather than expe­ri­enc­ing them. When I ask my friends if we could become lovers while remain­ing friends, a kind of silence descends, as if an angel or a police­man had just walked into the room: the angel is the erotic sem­blance Rilke often writes about, and the police­man is the sem­blance of eros some Polish friends spoke about jok­ingly some years ago, before the “thaw in east­ern Europe,” when they told me a lull in con­ver­sa­tion meant another police­man had just been born. Ann Carson writes that eros is a third being whom lovers address with both hate and desire once this being is con­jured into exis­tence by God-knows-what, prob­a­bly lan­guage, and she then makes the lyri­cal claim that this being is utterly cir­cum­scribed and there­fore both hor­ri­bly and mirac­u­lously com­prised of and com­pro­mised by, yes, lan­guage — an argu­ment made also by Lacan, the French psy­cho­an­a­lyst and philoso­pher, and Foucault, the French philoso­pher and his­to­rian. Carson com­pares Plato’s dia­logues and Sappho’s poems and finds the tune for her nar­ra­tive when she learns while expli­cat­ing Greek drama that our desire for eros and the eros in our desire is actu­ally our gift for speech. Each sen­tence she writes is a lit­tle lyric, and each lyric she writes remem­bers a sin­gle moment of expe­ri­ence in both the his­tory of phi­los­o­phy and the phi­los­o­phy of poetry. This is as won­der­ful a book as you could imag­ine giv­ing to some­one; I want to give it to you, the reader; I already know who you are (I imag­ine) as a result of hav­ing read this book.