Love As Human Freedom by Paul A. Kottman

Author:Paul A. Kottman [Kottman, Paul A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804776769
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Lovemaking

To make love, we can now say, is to experience our inability to ‘live out’—to carry out sexually—the social authority of sexual reproduction and of sexual domination. To make love is to ‘feel’ the insufficiency of natural appetite, procreation, or institutional domination to explain what we are feeling, experiencing. Lovemaking and courtship enact the collapse of the explanatory authority of sexual reproduction and sexual domination, at least for the subjects involved.

Those who make love—or even fantasize that it might be possible to make love—thus confront a new threat to sense: the inability to understand what we are doing sexually as being either a moment of procreation or natural appetite or an act of domination or subjugation.

At the same time, this does not yet guarantee that any other sense of lovemaking has been made.

Lovemaking must have been ‘felt’ long before poets reported on it; the Tristan myth and the Song of Songs drew their legitimacy from these subjective feelings, as did Plutarch’s dialogue and early Hindu works. But if the feeling of love gained intense lyrical expression in the works of these poets, then this was because lovemaking had ‘reality’ in the world only as a passionate, subjective experience—not yet as an objective practice that might orient and authorize a way of life. Even the voluptuousness of the Song of Songs took root in a context in which “sex [was] sanctioned only in marriage; on this point the Old Testament laws are unequivocal.”124 Lovemaking could only be shown as permitted by institutionalized powers that were forged in sexual domination, for instance in the marriage of man and woman in the Old Testament, or as occurring behind the back of these institutional powers, as in the Tristan myth.

This does not mean that medieval lovers like Tristan and Iseult were “adulterous,” in the sense of not being authorized to make love by the social powers that be (the church, a court, God, or feudal society).125 If troubadour poets could depict extramarital sex whereas the Old Testament could not, then this was not because “love is adulterous” or constitutively “heretical” or traitorous—as Denis de Rougement and Tony Tanner have claimed.126 It was because sexual practices had finally been cultivated, over time to the point where sexual activity itself had become clamorously unintelligible as either the manifestation of base appetite or as institutional domination (as in traditional marriage). Hence, the emergent significance attached to lovemaking, or so I have been arguing. Lovemaking is ‘felt’ to have occurred as soon as sexual interactions cannot (or can no longer) understand themselves—cannot be intelligibly experienced—as either a natural demand (appetite, procreation) or a social obligation (traditional marriage, adherence to command). Lovemaking—lovers themselves—had thus to be perceived as a challenge to the normative authority of sexual reproduction and sexual domination. (As occurs in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, too.)

That said, lovemaking itself had not yet achieved any social-historical or institutional reality at this stage. Lovemaking may have been achieved as ‘real’ by the lovers; indeed, it must have been intensely ‘real’ to anyone who had made love.

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