For Simone de Beauvoir the game is torture: “The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. (Carson) She deepens it into existential modernity: “Sartre has less patience with the contradictory ideal of desire, this “dupery.” He sees in erotic relations a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror-game that carries within itself its own frustration (1956, 444-45). Four of his dialogues explore what it means to say that desire can only be for what is lacking, not at hand, not present, not in one’s possession nor in one’s being: eros entails endeia.1Īs Diotima puts it in the Symposium, Eros is a bastard got by Wealth on Poverty and ever at home in a life of want. There is a dilemma within eros that has been thought crucial by thinkers from Sappho to the present day. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting. The Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have. Anne Carson’s Eros – The Bittersweet takes up the ancient thread of desire and cruelty that would be in our age best typified dramatically by Artaud-Beckett-Kane (Sarah Kane). “If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.”Īt root there are two notions of Desire in our age: Hegel’s built of “lack” - coming from the ancient Greeks notion of Prometheus and Epimetheus myths and Deleuze’s notion of the pleroma-fullness and positivity of the Unconscious as power, cruelty, and sadism – the drivenness of the Will-to-life/power (mastery) of Schopenhauer-Nietzsche. ““There is something in you I like more than yourself.
Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love. “…this is love – I have my self-consciousness”
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