Subjecting Verses by Miller Paul Allen; Miller Paul Allen Allen;

Author:Miller, Paul Allen; Miller, Paul Allen Allen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

DECONSTRUCTING THE VIR :

LAW AND THE OTHER IN THE AMORES

Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world); and exactly for thisreason its role is to measure the excessive distance that opens at the heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to arise. Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being—affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time.

—Foucault 1977b: 35

The new or postmodern development, indeed, remains progressive to the degree to which it dispels any last illusions as to the autonomy of thought, even though the dissipation of those illusions may reveal a wholly positivist landscape from which the negative has evaporated altogether, beneath the steady clarity of what has been identified as “cynical reason.”

—Jameson 1991: 323

OVID IS IN MANY WAYS our intellectual contemporary, an ironist at the end of history. While everyone from Perry Anderson (1992) to Jacques Derrida (1993: 104) has raised theoretical objections to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis (1992) that history has reached its telos with the collapse of communism as a viable form of opposition to liberal capitalism, nonetheless credible alternatives to the world domination of American consumer society and its commodified politics are woefully thin on the ground. The position of externality on which the stance of critique depends has evaporated beneath our feet. There is no obvious outside to the present system (Hardt and Negri 2000: 45; Rabasa 2001: 12). The contemporary social critic is reduced to the position of an ironist whose jibes are as much selfconsuming artifacts as catalysts for social change. This is a fair description of Ovid and his relation to Augustan ideology as well. Ovidian transgression, like that described by Foucault, “incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration”(Foucault 1977b: 34).

In chapter 4, we argued that the postmodern age had better positioned us to understand Tibullus’s repetitive and dreamlike poetics. There, following Žižek’s definitions of modernism and postmodernism, we contended that Tibullus could be seen as a postmodernist in the same sense as Kafka or Philip Glass (in opposition to the more modernist Propertius, so dear to the heart of Pound and his followers). In that same chapter, we observed that postmodernism as an artistic style dilates on the abundance of the absurd and the unintelligible, rather than examining the lack at the heart of signification after the fashion of modernism. From this perspective, Ovid is a postmodernist of a uniquely contemporary stripe, more along the lines of Andy Warhol than Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco.He is an author of works whose resistance to the dominant mode of the Symbolic is to be found in their uncanny re-production of it. Ovid on this view is more a deconstructionist than a Brechtian poet of Revolution.1

Born in 43 B.C.E., the year after Julius Caesar’s assassination, Ovid was but twelve at the battle of Actium.

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