Mothers and Others

TLS May 22 2009

from Michele Pridmore-Brown's review of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mothers and Others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding:

[Hrdy's] paradigm in essence decentres--it obviously does not eliminate--the usual Darwinian stories of "man the hunter" and his inter-group enmity and intra-group power struggles; instead, Hrdy argues that the marauding and patriarchal lifestyles of the past 12.000 years (the Neolithic era) are a scrim or coda that have obscured other kinds of selective pressures that would have been especially operative during the hundreds of thousands of years of the Pleistocene. The supposedly "female" impulse to "tend and befriend"--to optimize sharing--as a way of manufacturing alternative parents would, she argues, have been more important to infant survival in harsh conditions than the supposedly "male" desire to outmanoeuvre or kill an elusive and distant other. 

***

from Peter Holbrook's review of Catherine Belsey's Shakespeare in Theory and Practice:

The dust jacket of Shakespeare in Theory and Practice glows with a reproduction of "Queen Mab's Cave" by J. M. W. Turner. the image is both refulgent and hard to make out: it conveys something of Catherine Belsey's preoccupation with that which lies outside understanding--that obscure object of desire, the pursuit of which is a feature of being human. Turner's golden, delirious picture is both compelling and swooningly vague, signifying a desire we can barely articulate. 

*

Ultimately, underying [Belsey's] approach to the literary is a conception of the human. People and poems are "potentially inconsistent", not monological. Our nature is best captured in the rhetorical figure known as "synoeciosis, the trope of deconstruction"--which George Puttenham terms "the Cross-couple" and which "brings contraries together to form oxymoronic . . . truths" (for example, the notion that "excess of pleasure brings grief"). Understanding plays or persons means attending to the internal oppositions structuring them--and refusing to unify them under any "single thematic imperative". The politics of this interpretative mode are not obvious. Does it perhaps resemble the position of a liberal-conservative thinker such as Michael Oakeshott, in which irony, plurality and the empirical are valued over rationalist simplifications? One response to desire's eternal unruliness might be dandified disdain for any project naively seeking rationally to reorder the world. If desire is always already tragic, hopes for end-of-history plenitude or social amelioration are doomed. "All things that are / Are with more spirit chased than enjoy'd", as Shakespeare's Gratiano observes. The social revolution becomes, in the Lacanian terms Belsey adopts, the mere "stand-in" for that desired thing that can never be had. Like Apollo seizing Daphne, the moment we possess what we (think we) want we stumble on another yawning lack.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Thumboo's "Ulysses by the Merlion"

I've just revised a poem written years ago, a poem that delineates the different responses of four readers, of different generations, to the seminal nationalistic poem by Edwin Thumboo . Thumboo is reckoned to be the first major Singaporean poet writing in English. First, Thumboo's poem, then followed by mine. ULYSSES BY THE MERLION (for Maurice Baker) I have sailed many waters, Skirted islands of fire, Contended with Circe Who loved the squeal of pigs; Passed Scylla and Charybdis To seven years with Calypso, Heaved in battle against the gods. Beneath it all I kept faith with Ithaca, travelled, Travelled and travelled, Suffering much, enjoying a little; Met strange people singing New myths; made myths myself. But this lion of the sea Salt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail, Touched with power, insistent On this brief promontory... Puzzles. Nothing, nothing in my days Foreshadowed this Half-beast, half-fish, This powerful creature of land and sea. Peoples settled here, Brought to th
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic
Read more

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Examples from ar
Read more