Abstract
More than any other biblical book, the Song of Songs has over the centuries generated a tumultuous conflict of interpretations, which divide between an overly sacred allegorism and an excessive profane materialism of the text. This article addresses the hermeneutical question of the Canticle and considers the corporeality of its language, in which the question of meaning cannot be separated from the question of the body and its affections. The philosophical categories of Platonic chora in Julia Kristeva’s reception and Lacanian lalangue will be examined, each of which stands at the crossroads between biology and sense, libido and signifiers, and affect and meaning. Within this horizon, the woman who is the speaking subject of this biblical text becomes a witness to the powerful yet ambivalent experience of eros, of a desire characterised by a dialectic of presence and absence, but above all of a word inhabited by the body.
More than any other biblical book, the Song of Songs has over the centuries generated a tumultuous conflict of interpretations, which divide between an overly sacred allegorism and an excessive profane materialism of the text. This article addresses the hermeneutical question of the Canticle and considers the corporeality of its language, in which the question of meaning cannot be separated from the question of the body and its affections. The philosophical categories of Platonic chora in Julia Kristeva’s reception and Lacanian lalangue will be examined, each of which stands at the crossroads between biology and sense, libido and signifiers, and affect and meaning. Within this horizon, the woman who is the speaking subject of this biblical text becomes a witness to the powerful yet ambivalent experience of eros, of a desire characterised by a dialectic of presence and absence, but above all of a word inhabited by the body.
1 Divine Irony?
The Song of Songs is one of the shortest texts in the Bible and yet has experienced one of the most extensive and tumultuous reception histories, from late antiquity to modern times. From the very beginning, it has been at the centre of a maelstrom of alternative and contradictory readings and interpretations. The ancient Rabbi Saadia ben Josef (892–942) compared the Song to a lock whose key has been lost (already unconsciously alluding to the erotic nature of the poem).
More than any other biblical book, the Song of Songs has led to the most diverse readings, from the mystical, spiritual and sublime to those that tend towards extreme eroticism. The deep ambiguity, inner tension – or divine irony? – of the text has ignited like a fuse the conflict of interpretations, which testifies not least to the text’s inherent fire, and which cannot be reduced to a unilateral, exclusive and Manichean decoding of it.
For many centuries, the prevailing tendency in Jewish and Christian commentaries was to read the Song of Songs as an allegorical poem whose primary aim was to celebrate divine love, the bond between God and the people of Israel, between Christ and the Church, his bride, between Christ and the believing soul, between Christ and Mary. Only love for God – and nothing else – was considered theologically and morally valuable and therefore worthy of the Bible.
A profound change, which according to Ilana Pardes was “one of the most dramatic exegetical shifts of all time”,1 took place, initially in the secular Hebrew love poetry of medieval Spain and then, more extensively, in the intellectual framework of the eighteenth century. The new results of exegetical research and the spirit of the Enlightenment challenged the authority of the ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible, and new readings of the Song of Songs as love poetry, as a profane, earthly and erotic dialogue between human lovers, prevailed.2 The exegesis focused on the literal meaning of the text, with the intention of freeing the Song of Songs from the “Babylonian captivity of allegorism”.3
The Song of Songs then begins to be seen as a (more or less) structured collection of verses which sing about the love between two lovers – and nothing else. Understood in this way, the praise of sexual love contained in the Song – the sacredness of which the rabbinic tradition, after long and heated discussions, finally came to recognize – stirs the waters of the biblical conception of love and inscribes in it an abyss, an excess, a madness, a béance,4 which in a certain way represents the inflammable base of the entire canon. The Song can be read as that which subverts the biblical discourse on love and the relationship between the sexes:5 it is shir-hashirim (“the most beautiful song”), i.e. the superlative that leaps out, that is eccentric to every other song, discourse or sacred text,6 and introduces itself as something new into the canonical symbolic landscape. In the Song of Songs, the patriarchal gender configurations that emerged with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden are abolished: the text is interpreted as a literal counterpoint to the narrative of Genesis 2–3, and Shulammìt, the woman of the Song of Songs, becomes a kind of “second Eve” who participates in the creation of a garden of redemption.7 However, the ancient allegorical interpretation of the text had such a profound impact on the life of the synagogue and the Church that it cannot simply be ignored, even if many scholars believe it requires too many textual distortions and too many arbitrary explanations to be sustained.
While it is true that the text can or should be considered non-theological and non-religious, its traditional and consecrated use by faith communities is fundamentally religious and theological. The praise of eroticism seems, however, refractory to an ethical, liturgical or theological interpretation. This conflict of interpretations appears “more acute here than in any other literary piece”,8 whether biblical or secular, because the allegorical exegesis of the text not only departs from the “natural” or literal intent of the work but takes us to the opposite extreme. The paradoxical tension in the Song of Songs is that no other biblical book is more “unbiblical” (Carol Meyers) and no other reading is more sacred (Rabbi Aqiba). This combination of opposites is extraordinary and represents a hermeneutical challenge par excellence.
There remains, therefore, an underlying unease that constantly reignites the conflict of interpretations. However, if we follow Walter Benjamin, who contributes to the re-assessment of allegory during the twentieth century and considers allegory as a fundamental category of twentieth-century aesthetics, this paradox takes on a new dimension. Allegory can in fact be thought of in a different way, namely as the condition of the post-adamic, post-lapsarian human being who can no longer name things directly. After original sin, the relationship between the name and the thing is torn apart and becomes allegorical. In his work Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Benjamin thus invited us to appreciate allegory as the mode that best represents the complications of meaning: in the hands of the allegorist, “the object becomes something different; through it he speaks of something different and for him it becomes a key to the realm of hidden knowledge.”9
Benjamin emphasizes the anticlassical trait of allegory, which undermines the beauty, plasticity, clarity and totality of the symbol, showing its baroque aspect as enigmatic, fragmentary and ruinous, obliterating any false semblance of totality. In the wake of Benjamin, the “speaking of other” or “speaking other” of allegory can be perceived as a reflection of the fluctuating and fissured condition of language and the world it explores. Allegory then paradoxically makes a sign to the Real, rather than to the Symbolic, to use the Lacanian topology. The allegory in fact refers to a linguistic failure at the impossibility of being precise in what one wants to say to whom one loves. It is no coincidence that the Song of Songs, like no other Old Testament book, is rich in hapax legomena,10 rare terms or archaisms, as if to say that to describe eros, habitual words, those with which one is most familiar, are not enough. To name the love experience and sexual intercourse, new ones must be found which, in their excess, escape ordinary language.
Allegory in the Canticle could thus become the sign of the incommensurability, untranslatability and ungovernability of bodies: the love discourse in the Canticle is so laden with semantic polyvalences as to render translation problematic in several places. To speak of the body of the beloved through allegories is, Nancy would say, to recognize its inappropriable and immeasurable dimension, which is revealed precisely in the sexual encounter. Here the body becomes present in its erotic charge, but unavailable to capture, to grasp, to objectify.
Here we already enter the vortex of the fragments of a love discourse that make up the Song of the Songs. Is not every discourse on love a combinatory activity, a work of assembling and reassembling fragments of words and bodies that pulverizes every aura, betraying every heavenly symbol? The Canticle does not seem to remove this dimension of the “intractable”11 that runs through the bond between the two lovers and oscillates between ecstasy and abandonment (“Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.” 2:5), between sad passion (“By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.” 3:1) and joyful passion (“It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth.” 3:4).
At the same time, allegory is a way of manipulating, of playing with the absence of the other and thus with the desire for the other. The body of the other is absent as referent, but present as allocutor: this is why the language of the Canticle is marked by an anomalous, seductive and dreamlike temporality. The present of love is intensive, continually troubled by a fort-da: You are here, you are gone, I desire you, I smell your perfume. The other, as Roland Barthes would say, is “atopos”: it cannot be fixed, it cannot be held. That is why “the other makes language indecisive: one cannot speak of the other, about the other; every attribute is false, painful, erroneous, awkward: the other is unqualifiable (this would be the true meaning of atopos).”12 Flashes, formulas, apparitions, disguises, absences, allegories, dreams, enigmas, and above all “a frenzied activity of language”13 make the Canticle a true love poem.
To speak of allegory, then, is not to deny the fact that the Song of the Songs is made up of fragments of an amorous discourse between two lovers. The allegorical reading undermines both a merely spiritual-theological interpretation and a voluptuous-pornographic reading of the text: eros is a trauma of language because it subverts – as poetry alone can sing it – its syntax, grammar and semantic conventions. In this sense, sexual intercourse becomes an index, a paradigm of heterogeneity, of the incommensurability of relationships in general, including the relationship between a believer and God, between the mystic and God.
2 Lalangue – Words Like Kisses
The Song of Songs begins with a desire, with the desire to be kissed: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (1:2). This is its incipit-béance, a sensual fissure that opens like a half-closed mouth and invites you in. You can only enter the Song in this way, only through the body: Ravasi refers to the onomatopoeic sound effect of the word pîhû (“of his mouth”): to pronounce it, you have to open your mouth like a kiss.14
The mention of the mouth at the beginning of the Canticle may seem superfluous, but it actually emphasizes the sensuality of the kiss and the power of love to make every bodily feature of the lover important.
The iteration of the word “kiss” creates an intensive and seductive effect which imposes itself on the reader not in the form of communication, but in that of tension, invocation, even incantation.15 There is indeed something dreamlike in this beginning of the Song, which acts like a threshold that leads the reader into a different dimension of the text. As in dreams, here, too, it is not entirely clear from where the voice of the beloved emerges or to whom she is addressing herself, since she first speaks of her beloved in the third person to unidentified recipients, but then switches to the second person, in order to reach her beloved more intimately: “For your caresses are sweet, sweeter than wine” (1:2).16
The voice, the mere acoustic substance, has a force that precedes, generates and exceeds verbal communication: before assuming the signifying function, the voice is essentially an expression of mutual invocation, an exchange between bodies through which the intersubjective relationship develops.17 The kisses that the beloved desires combine the sweetness of intoxicating wine with the freshness of a fragrant oil, calling forth an exhilarating variety of senses, from smell to touch to taste.18 The ear is here awakened in this sensual feast by a repeated rustling of “sh” that begins with the title of the Song of Songs, shir ha-shirim, and segues into many of the following words that materialize in neshikot, “kisses”.19
For Luce Irigaray, two lips kissing signifies the opening of a new world, a kind of passageway in which a communication of voices and moods takes place, a space in between two in which identities and bodies blur and boundaries vanish:
Kiss me. Two lips kissing two lips: openness is ours again. Our “world.” And the from the inside out, from the outside in, the passage between us, is limitless. Without end. No knot or loop, no mouth ever stops our exchanges. Us the house has no wall, the clearing no enclosure, language no circularity. When you kiss me, the world grows so that the horizon itself disappears.20
At the same time, the word in the Song of Songs sometimes has the effect of a kiss. As Roland Barthes writes: “The word is of a tenuous chemical substance which performs the most violent alterations.”21 Language is here a place of enjoyment and becomes skin and hands: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”22
The words envelop the body like a mantle, enacting a relationship that, as in the Canticle, passes from you to him, from you to her, in a sort of continuous secret allocution. For this reason, it is the word itself that becomes an erogenous zone: words are here like kisses that ignite desire, like caresses that touch the body of the other, generating jumps. Desire and jouissance intertwine in the eros of language.
In this way, the biblical text places the mysterious dialogue between desire and language at the centre of human uniqueness. In the Song, one experiences the “lust of the word”,23 as Recalcati notes, in which the vicissitudes of desire cannot be separated from the Law of the Word, just as the exaltation of eros cannot be separated from the inebriation of wine. “The Law of the Word coincides here fully with the Law of desire”:24 the evoked name generates excitement and a polyvalent flow of images, meanings and sensations. And here also emerges the difference of the feminine, the strangeness of “other jouissance”, which Lacan considers étrange – not to be confused with être-ange (“angel-being” or “to be an angel”).25
On the one hand, we have the closed circuit, ultimately solipsism of drives that finds its satisfaction in phallic jouissance, in circling around the object a as the object of a drive. While the male phallic logic gives rise to a universal system in which the exception founds the rule and jouissance is organized by castration – i.e. vectorized by an object charged with drive, which is found on the body of a woman – the feminine logic, “not-all phallic”, gives rise to a space Other, open and unlimited because it lacks referents, that is, stable and universal references capable of founding a norm. Against the basic fantasy of masculine totalization, female jouissance is not even directed towards something (thus not vectorized by an object), but nevertheless presupposes an encounter. For female subjects, access to jouissance is much more closely linked to the dominance of the discourse of the other, to the way in which one does not so much speak as speak of him: erotic pleasure is based, for example, on the seductive discourse of the lover, on the satisfaction provided by the discourse itself, not just on the act as such. Interesting in this regard is Slavoj Žižek’s reference to Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves (1996) to show the opposition between the masculine-phallic jouissance of the drive and the feminine jouissance of the Other. The film’s protagonist is Bess, a young woman living in a small, traditionalist, Calvinist-majority Scottish village, and her intense love affair with Jan, an oil well worker, whom she marries against the strict advice of her family. Jan is seriously injured in an explosion and confined to a hospital bed in a state of paralysis. Aware that he can no longer have sex with his wife, Jan asks Bess to make love to other men and to describe her experiences to him in detail: in this way, he will keep her will to live awake. Defying the judgement of her community, Bess, despite her fragile health, begins to have relationships with strangers, hoping for the divine miracle of the healing of the one she loves. Abandoned and marginalized, she insists on sacrificing her life. Although she becomes physically involved with other men, the real intercourse takes place in her conversations with Jan. Žižek comments:
Jan’s jouissance is clearly phallic/masturbatory: he uses Bess to provide him with the fantasmatic screen that he needs in order to be able to indulge in solipsistic, masturbatory jouissance, while Bess finds jouissance at the level of the Other (symbolic order), that is, in her words. The ultimate source of satisfaction for her is not the sexual act itself (she engages in such acts in a purely mechanical way, as a necessary sacrifice) but the way she reports on it to the crippled Jan.
Bess’ jouissance is a jouissance “of the Other” in more than one way: it is not only enjoyment in words but also (and this is ultimately just another aspect of the same thing) in the sense of utter alienation – her enjoyment is totally alienated/externalized in Jan as her Other. That is, it resides entirely in her awareness that she is enabling the Other to enjoy.26
This example allows us to overcome the idea that female jouissance is a mystical bliss beyond the word, a bliss which is outside the symbolic order: on the contrary, it is women who are immersed in the word order, without exception.
The Canticle can thus be treated as a space for the appearance of lalangue, in which body and word struggle to distinguish themselves. Lacan introduces llanguage (lalangue), as a compound word in French (made by collapsing the article la and the noun langue, “language”, or, more literally, “tongue”), because its matrix is the infantile la-la-la, the babbling of children. What counts here is not the articulation of meanings but the fact that words are pulsating traces, mixtures of voices, sounds, letters, odours, visions, places, and bodily sensations. Lalangue is deposited in the unconscious, and it is the language that precedes the alphabet and grammar: lalangue is a linguistic dimension that has the nature of the body, at the crossroads between biology and sense, body and reason, an amalgam of libido and signifiers, affect and meaning. The voice, which is the object of an original acoustic pleasure, precedes and enables a language that always bears its traces. Lalangue differs from the signifier because it is not a linguistic structure and is therefore intended not for communication or dialogue but for enjoyment. Lacan writes in Seminar XX:
But one thing is clear – language is merely what scientific discourse elaborates to account for what I call llanguage.
Llanguage serves purposes that are altogether different from that of communication. That is what the experience of the unconscious has shown us, insofar as it is made of llanguage, which, as you know, I write with two l’s to designate what each of us deals with, our so-called mother tongue (lalangue dite maternelle), which isn’t called that by accident.27
Here, Lacan seems to affirm that language – and with it the symbolic order of knowledge, of thought, of science – is nothing other than the attempt to come to terms with the real of lalangue, that is, with the maternal background from which we come and which we carry in our being as speaking subjects. Lalangue, like the semiotic chora, is in fact immanent to the very functioning of language. In the process of signification, there is no symbolic without semiotic, no language without lalangue. In the logos, there is no semantikè function without phonè.
One can speak of a chorological aspect of language when referring to the thinking of Julia Kristeva, who introduces the concept of semiotic chora in her work Revolution in Poetic Language (1974).28 Through this notion, which she inherits from Plato’s account of the creation of the universe in the dialogue Timaeus and which represents the maternal receptacle/chora, the generative matrix or the “nurse of becoming”,29 she aims to examine the archaic origins of language and subjectivity as a form of protest against Western logocentrism – against its model of reason without affects and its autonomous and abstract universality. The semiotic (le semiotique) indicates an operation of signification based on those traces and libidinal signs on the speaking body that have been systematically repressed in post-Enlightenment society. Kristeva thus returns to the original semiotic scene in which the merging relationship between mother and child blurs the category of the individual and emphasizes the libidinal register of the voice. Within this primordial orality, in the so-called preoedipal phase, voice destabilizes language, semiotics subverts the symbolic, that is, language’s claim to control the entire process of signification. Deeply rooted in the body and linked to the indistinct totality of mother and child, chora is the mother tongue, not only in the sense that it comes from the mother, but also because it recalls the infantile traces, voices, smells and sounds. The French writer and literary critic Helene Cixous writes: “In the language that I speak, the mother tongue resonates, tongue of my mother, less language than music, less syntax than song of words.”30 Chorological language is not only a language of the body, but a language inhabited by the body, in which the semiotic and symbolic registers speak the same language.
If the body is omnipresent in the Song of Songs, then it is as “corpoème”, to use the words of the Algerian poet Jean Sénac,31 as a body that is brought into language and inscribed in the promises of language. “Honey and milk under thy tongue” (4:11): this is not only the image of the kiss between two lovers – the tongue as a sensual organ of the body. Here, the sense of the tongue as a sensual instrument of speech also appears: “under the tongue” of the beloved there are words that nourish love (“honey and milk”). Between two lovers, words are certainly no less important than kisses. It is what Lacan calls “‘another satisfaction’, the satisfaction of speech.”32
We are far removed, therefore, from naturalism: the lovers depicted are just as aware as the poet that human desire is always a work of language and culture.33 The Canticle, then, draws a space of encounter between subjects, or rather, an encounter from unconscious to unconscious, from knowing to knowing, from lalangue to lalangue. It is therefore not entirely correct to state that the Canticle, unlike the Egyptian love poems, which mostly represented love monologues, is a dialogue between lovers: it corresponds, rather, in Lacan’s words, to “a knowing how to do things (savoir-faire) with llanguage”,34 that is, to a savoir-faire of affects that entails “effects that are affects”.35 The unconscious is structured like lalangue. This is what the Song reveals to us. This is what the Song enacts on each reading, which, for this reason, can be defined neither as literal nor as allegorical, but perhaps as semiotic and at the same time mystical, in the sense of the “other satisfaction” to which Encore refers.
The human is where “sense is enjoyed”: not simply the body (sex, sensuality, the organ, separated from language); nor simply thought (consciousness, reason, thought). The mystery of the “speaking body” comes into the world and onto the earth as an enigma, where the Thing, the real object of desire shines by its absence and the Other looms as the subject of enjoyment.36
In our way of enjoying, in the symptoms or in the events of the body, we approach the Real, we skirt its unspeakable and unrepresentable region: “The real, I will say, is the mystery of the speaking body, it is the mystery of the unconscious.”37
Is it not in this mystery, which is at once the conciliation and the conflict of being-for-the-jouissance and being-of-the-speech, between the semiotic and the symbolic, that the essence of being a subject is revealed?
3 A Woman
A woman, Shulammìt, is without doubt the protagonist of the Song of Songs: not only does her voice characterize the book’s prologue and epilogue, but she is also the voice that speaks in most of the Song’s verses: “To speak of the woman of the song is simply to speak of the song itself: it is the voice of the woman.”38
In her beautiful Tales of Love, Kristeva focuses on the singular language and subjectivity of Shulammìt: “She, the wife, for the first time ever, begins to speak before her king, husband, or God; […] It is she who speaks and sets herself up as equal, in her legal, named, unguilty love, to the other’s sovereignty.”39 She is a woman who achieves sovereignty through her love and the discourse that produces it. This is precisely why she has the ability to experience and powerfully express the stormy intensity of the various divided aspects of love: “The Shulamite, by her lyrical, dancing, theatrical language, by an adventure that conjugates a submission to legality and the violence of passion, is the prototype of the modern individual.”40 The woman of the Song of Songs is not an advocate of loving harmony, but a woman who, out of her love, “becomes the first subject in the modern sense of the word. Divided. Sick and yet sovereign”:41 “Sustain me with raisin cakes, refresh me with apples, for I am sick with love” (2:5). She is unarmed and weak: “The watchmen found me / as they made their rounds through the city, / they struck me, they wounded me, / they took away my mantle, / the watchmen of the walls” (5:7). She has within her, however, the irresistible strength of a warrior: “Who is this, who looks down / like the dawn, / fair as the moon, / bright as the sun, / terrible as a host drawn up for battle?” (6:10)
Moreover, love is clearly formulated as a historical and contingent relationship and as a singular encounter.
Someone falls in love with another person because of their qualities. Love is not centred on the qualities, however, but on the uniqueness of the other. “Unique is my dove, my perfect one” is like the result of a precise interpersonal comparison between sixty queens, eighty concubines and countless handmaidens.
This is the meaning of the Lacanian aphorism “The Woman does not exist” (La Femme n’existe pas),42 where the emphasis falls on the determinative article “The”: there is no universal model of being a woman with which one can identify, a model that establishes a norm. This logic therefore promotes singularity; it inaugurates the realm of the one-for-one, of absolute differences.
We must now realize that the concept of love as a historical and contingent relationship is at odds with another influential model, that of Eros, which in our tradition is attributed to Plato’s Symposium. I should point out here that many of the allegorical interpretations of this mysterious and elusive book of the Bible can in some way be traced back to the influence of Platonic or Neoplatonic motifs on the rabbinic hermeneutical tradition and on the emerging Christian tradition. For in order to read the fragments of the love speech as an allegory of the love between Yahweh and Israel or the love between Christ and the Church (or the soul), we have to accept something: we need to transcend the powerful literalness of the descriptions and transform them into allegories, and to abandon the idea that she and he are bodies, for their corporeality is only the first stage of the erotic ascent that leads to the idea of beauty, in whose vast sea we can thus reach the highest rung of the ordo amoris. The scala amoris thus immunizes the lovers against the overwhelming power and risk of the bond of love. The price for this is high: the human experience of being held and bound in the bonds of mutual desire is eliminated and rendered ineffective. What is sacrificed is the desire to reach for the beauty of love in its fragility, its risk and its finiteness. Perhaps even the most famous verses of the Song of Songs can be interpreted in this sense:
In the last chapter of the Song, the awareness of the unattainability and fragility of love becomes clear. The woman asks for her love to be immortalized with a seal: the request of the seal, the one on the heart and the one on the arm, sounds like an invocation, a plea for the protection and perpetuation of love. There are many threats to its persistence, its permanence. But of all the threats, the awareness of the temporal limitation of death is the strongest. Strong, you could say, like love. And here we are perhaps faced with a kind of prayer, a question that arises from the phenomenology of the experience of love.
“Its darts are darts of fire, / a flame of Yah” (8:6). This is the only verse in the Song of Songs in which the name of God occurs, and it is in the form of a superlative: as in “fiercest flame”, extraordinary.43 When the Song of Songs expresses something in the order of transcendence, it is not thinking of a metaphysical dimension, but of incarnations of transcendence, the highest model of which is love. But it is a love that appears visually, sensually, connected to nature in all its elements, to living and non-living bodies in all their colours, tastes, textures and scents. So then nature, this sacred ark of life, is also a figure of transcendence. Indeed, the Song of Songs as a whole can be interpreted as an intense act of faith in creation, nature, animals and the joy of lovemaking.
An apple tree among the forest trees, the gazelles and hinds of the landscape, a bag of myrrh or a lily among the brambles: here we find ourselves in the realm of desire, in the life of desire. As Deleuze says, “You never desire someone or something, you always desire an ensemble.” Desire is then something that flows, that forms concatenations and ensembles, that draws landscapes and brings various factors into play.
Since Proust already said it, and it’s beautiful in Proust: I don’t desire a woman, I desire a landscape that is enveloped in this woman, an unfamiliar landscape, something I can feel. As long as I have yet to unfold the landscape that envelops her, I will not be happy.44
The woman’s body becomes a landscape in which the gaze is lost – desire does not isolate an object, it is never a desire for something, it is not a desire for a woman, but for the “landscape” contained in this woman, which becomes the image of a world charged with references and mimetic effects. As in wasf, a popular literary genre in Arabic love poetry, “the vitality of the entire surrounding landscape, especially the land of Israel, is condensed in the body of the beloved.”45
After all, this woman is above all the one who makes the exodus, who has the courage to leave the boundaries of her own ego in the direction of an unknown, unconscious zone: in the direction of the abyssal dimension of the Es, as Freud would say. “My beloved is speaking, and he says to me: / ‘Rise up, my love, / my fair one, and go!” (2:10) The verb “to go out” used in the Hebrew text is a theologically important verb, as it refers to the Exodus. The woman is called upon to make an “exodus”, to set out, to leave her family, start a new life, giving up her securities and going towards the new – like Abraham. This implies an abandonment of (phallic) self-mastery and (phallic) appropriation of the other, that eclipse of the ego, which is both constitution and subjective dismissal, that is, a becoming subject between love and death, wisdom and ignorance, I and the Other.
4 Escape
At the beginning of Seminar XX, Lacan states that human sexuality is inextricably linked to the impossibility of becoming one. One of his most paradoxical mottos is “There’s no such thing as a sexual relationship” (Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel).46 It is a relationship that is crossed out between sexual people as speaking beings, i.e. a relationship that “cannot write itself out”. There is always a breakdown that stops the miracle.
What constitutes the basis of life, in effect, is that for everything having to do with the relations between men and women, what is called collectivity, it’s not working out (ça ne va pas). It’s not working out, and the whole world talks about it, and a large part of our activity is taken up with saying so.47
In Encore, Lacan makes the non-sexual relationship descend from the asymmetry of male and female jouissance, which he traces back to two different logics: the wholly phallic, which presides over male jouissance; and the not-at-all phallic, to which female jouissance is suspended.
Adam’s illusion of “being one flesh” therefore proves to be a failure. Indeed, one can never become master of one’s own lack of being. The woman of the Song of Songs also witnesses a wall, an aporia in which the two lovers cannot truly vibrate in unison, in which every chord is suspended at a certain point. The lovers wait for each other, chase each other, disappear, and experience a dialectic of desire that is characterized by the ghostly quality of love:
Every action of the beloved ends in futility – “I opened to my beloved, but …”; “I sought him, but …”; “I called him, but …” – in a growing amorous tension. The greater the expectation, the more bitter the disappointment: there is no one! The lover is gone. The encounter is inexorably postponed. Not surprisingly, the text ends paradoxically with an invitation to the beloved to flee:
The Canticle closes with a final, virtuoso sleight of hand between the literal and the figurative, in a flow full of ambiguity. The “mountains” cannot be fully defined and remain open to multiple interpretations: they can refer both to a real landscape and to the figurative landscape of the female body – more precisely, we can assume that they are a metaphor for the breasts of the beloved. By asking her lover to flee “on the mountains of balms”, Shulammìt sends him away, but at the same time playfully invites him to explore her body. And perhaps she urges him to disappear only to let the exhilarating search continue, to continue the rapid oneiric rhythm of the amorous race into new metaphorical zones, where a gazelle or a small deer may be encountered. Union remains impossible, but desire seems open to new writings.
If there is a relationship, if one wants to speak of the relationship, in terms of union, one must in fact always “consider that union cannot make one without immediately suppressing it.”49 One cannot think of a final unity, a final fusion in the sense of an Aristotelian fulfilment or entelechy capable of stabilizing the relationship forever.
For this reason, it can be said that the final impasse, the flight of the beloved, the loosening of tension, is not the end of the relationship, but, on the contrary, what keeps it open, renews its intensity in the name of the infinity of a desire-pleasure that, Freudianly, is never alien to a certain displeasure. It is not, however, the infinite captivity of repetition, in which one finds oneself in a dead end every time, in the sign of neurotic repetition. On the contrary, it is the experience of a desire that asks to renew itself, again and again, of an act that “consummates itself in not ending; it makes neither one nor two, it has no result, it never stops beginning, and it never stops finishing.”50 Union is never a definitive possession but must always be “reconquered”. Nancy speaks of an infinition51 as an act that opposes “closure”, which implies a dynamic of two finite realities coming into relationship. There is neither pure separation nor pure fusion, but a “Flee, my beloved” (8:14).
This element of repetition, this trait of sinuosity, in difference and reiteration, is inseparable from the experience of love. If love is the desire to be-One, this desire is not to be separated from the “again!”, encore, both in the sense of “one more time”, and in the sense of encorps, “in the body”.52 Lacan writes: “It is not a sufficient answer either, because love demands love. It never stops (ne cesse pas) demanding it. It demands it … encore. ‘Encore’ is the proper name of the gap (faille) in the Other from which the demand for love stems.”53 Furthermore, we must not ignore the dimension of failure, the gap and antagonism that are constitutive of human sexuality and that cut through every orgasmic unity from within.
The Song of Songs seems to tell us that our nature desperately thirsts for relationship without always knowing how to exist in the mode of relationship. We tend to possess the other and struggle to bring them into communion. The lovers also emphasize the ghostly quality of love, its tightrope walk on the edge of death: it is always possible to fall out of the relationship of abuse, to slip into the appearance of possession and control over the other, thus reinforcing the armour of the ego.
Is this not the same line of rejection from which the question of God emanates? If Lacan associates God with feminine jouissance in Seminar XX, can it be said that the Song actually speaks of God? In the sixth lecture of this seminar, which is decisive in this sense, and which Miller rightly entitled Dieu et la jouissance de la femme, the hypothesis of a different satisfaction, i.e. a “jouissance” located “beyond the phallus”, is put forward for the first time. The feminine jouissance here indicates that the Other as Other cannot be fully said; it is something that can be felt – they experience it (ils l’éprouvent), “but know nothing about it,”54 because it eludes any symbolization. Sexual intercourse is closely linked to the experience of the absolute – or, more precisely, to the inevitable failure of the attempt to experience more than a fleeting contact with the absolute. It is precisely in the impasse, in the antinomy, in the gap, in the failure to reach a goal that the subject of jouissance touches the dimension of the absolute.55
In any case, the Song of Songs shows us with great passion and beauty that the impulse for life goes through the other, that sin is not to transgress the law but to miss the goal, the goal of the relationship in which life draws its circles like a pebble in the lake. We get to know God not by understanding him with a concept but by cultivating a relationship.
Biography
Isabella Guanzini is Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Catholic Private University of Linz. She holds a doctorate in Theology from the University of Vienna (2012), a doctorate in Humanistic Studies from the Catholic University Milan (2013) and a habilitation from the Goethe University Frankfurt (2021). From 2013 to 2016 she was senior postdoc fellow at the Research platform “Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society” at the University of Vienna. From 2016 to 2019 she was Professor for Fundamental Theology at the University of Graz. Her research focuses on the problem of translating biblical-theological categories in the contemporary plural context, on the relationship between theology and aesthetics and between Christianity and psychoanalysis. Her latest publications include: “Beyond the Sacrificial Fantasy: Body, Law, and Desire”, in: Open Theology 2024/10; “Wounded Beauty: Aesthetic- Theological Motifs in the Work of Alberto Burri and Anselm Kiefer”, in: Religions 2023, 14(6); Desiderare (2022, with D. Galimberti).
Bibliography
L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze: D comme Désir, 1996; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLlSRFLThYw&list=PLiR8NqajHNPbaX2rBoA2z6IPGpU0IPlS2&index=4 (date of last access : 17.07.2024).
Assis, Elie: Flashes of Fire: A Literary Analysis of the Song of Songs. New York/London: T&T Clark 2009.
Auwers, Jean-Marie: Dialogue ou oeuvre scénique? Enquête sur le genre littéraire du Cantique des cantiques, in: Pierre van Hecke (ed.): The Song of Songs in Its Context. Words for Love, Love for Words. Leuven: Peeters 2020, pp. 125–145.
Auwers, Jean-Marie: Le Cantique des cantiques (La Bible d’Alexandrie, 19). Paris: Cerf 2019.
Badiou, Alain/Cassin, Barbara: There’s No Such Thing As a Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan. New York: Columbia University Press 2017.
Barbiero, Gianni: Song of Songs. A Close Reading. Leiden: Brill 2011.
Barbiero, Gianni: Shulammite: The Woman “At Peace” in the Song of Songs, in: Christl M. Maier/Nuria Calduch-Benages (eds.): The Writings and Later Wisdom Books. Atlanta: SBL Press 2014, pp. 215–233.
Barbiero, Gianni: Il Cantico dei cantici. Nuova versione, introduzione e commento. Milano: Paoline 2016.
Barth, Karl: Die Kirchliche Dogmatik (Band III/1). Zürich: Theologischer Verlag 1957.
Barthes, Roland: A Lover’s Discourse Fragments. New York: Hill and Wang 2001.
Benjamin, Walter: The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London/New York: Verso 2003.
Birnbaum, Elisabeth: The Song of Songs As a Drama: A Radical Change of Interpretation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, in: Annette Schellenberg (ed.): The Song of Songs Through the Ages. Essays on the Song’s Reception History in Different Times, Contexts, and Genres. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2023, pp. 363–392.
Black, Fiona: The Artifice of Love: Grotesque Bodies and the Song of Songs. New York/ London: T&T Clark 2019.
Butler, Judith: Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge 1993.
Cavarero, Adriana: For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2005.
Cixous, Hélène: Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1991.
Cucca, Mario: “Quando l’amore inizia a parlare” (Ct 1,1–8), in: Parole di Vita 61 (6/2016), pp. 9–13.
Cucca, Mario: Il desiderio insaziabile. Antropologia del gusto nel Cantico dei Cantici, in: Rivista Biblica 68 (4/2020), pp. 481–489.
Cucca, Mario: Dalla padronanza all’alterità, dal godimento al desiderio. Ovvero: da Genesi al Cantico dei cantici, in: Parole di Vita 64 (1/2019), pp. 4–9.
Déjeux, Jean: Jean Sénac, Poète pour habiter son nom. Paris: Editions Saint- Germain-des-Prés 1981.
Evans, Dylan: An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge 1996.
Exum, J. Cheryl: Song of Songs: A Commentary. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press 2011.
Exum, J. Cheryl, Whither Song of Songs Research? A Personal View of Present Trends and New Directions, in: Pierre van Hecke (ed.): The Song of Songs in Its Context. Words for Love, Love for Words. Leuven: Peeters 2020, pp. 25–44.
Fanelli, Cristiana: Soglie. Dire del nuovo sull’amore. Un’introduzione al seminario Encore, in: Frontiere della psicoanalisi, 2/2022, pp. 263–282.
Fishbane, Michael: The JPS Bible Commentary: Song of Songs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2015.
Greenspahn, Frederick E.: Hapax Legomena in Biblical Hebrew: A Study of the Phenomenon and Its Treatment since Antiquity with Special Reference to Verbal Forms. Atlanta: SBL (Dissertation Series) 1984.
Irigaray, Luce: When Our Lips Speak Together, in: This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca/New York: Cornell University Press 1985.
Keel, Othmar: Das Hohelied. Zürich: TVZ Theologischer Verlag 1992.
Kristeva, Julia: Tales of Love. New York: Columbia University Press 1987.
Kristeva, Julia: Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press 2002.
Lacan, Jacques: Télévision. Paris: Seuil 1973.
Lacan, Jacques: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore. New York: W. W. Norton & Company 1999.
LaCocque, André: Romance, She Wrote. A Hermeneutical Essay on Song of Songs. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International 1998.
Landy, Francis: Paradoxes of Paradise. Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press 1983.
Moncayo, Raul: Lalangue, Sinthome, Jouissance, and Nomination. A Reading Companion and Commentary on Lacan’s Seminar XXIII on the Sinthome. London: Routledge 2016.
Nancy, Jean-Luc: The “There Is” of Sexual Relation, in: Corpus II. Writings on Sexuality. New York: Fordham University Press 2021.
Oliva, Stefano/Palombi, Fabrizio (a cura), L’amorevole insaturabilità del desiderio dell’Altro. Intervista a Pierangelo Sequeri, in: L’inconscio. Rivista Italiana di Filosofia e Psicoanalisi 7 (Inconscio e mistica, June 2019), pp. 19–42.
Pardes, Ilana: The Song of Songs. A Biography. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press 2019.
Plato, Timaeus, Vol. 11 of Plato in Twelve Volumes, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1975.
Ravasi, Gianfranco: Il Cantico dei cantici. Commento e attualizzazione. Bologna: EDB2002.
Recalcati, Massimo: Esiste il rapporto sessuale? Desiderio, amore e godimento. Milano: Cortina 2021.
Recalcati, Massimo: La Legge della Parola. Radici bibliche della psicoanalisi. Torino: Einaudi 2022.
Sallis, John: Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s “Timaeus”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999.
Schäfer, Elisabeth: Lippenbekenntnisse, in: Elisabeth Schäfer (ed.): Denken im Affekt. Wien: Passagen Verlag 2010, pp. 175–183.
Schellenberg, Annette: Senses, Sensuality, and Sensory Imagination. On the Role of the Senses in the Song of Songs, in: Annette Schellenberg/Thomas Krüger (eds.): Sounding Sensory Profiles in the Ancient Near East. Atlanta: SBL Press 2019, pp. 199–214.
Sherwood, Yvonne: Space and Regulation in the Song of Songs and Contemporary Sexual Politics, in: Simeon B. Chavel/Elaine T. James (eds.): Reading the Song of Songs in a #MeToo Era: Women, Sex, and Public Discourse. Leiden/Boston: Brill 2023, pp. 250–286.
Spencer, F. Scott: Song of Songs. Collegeville: Liturgical Press 2017.
Staubli, Thomas: Von der Heimführung des Hoheliedes aus der babylonischen Gefangenschaft der Allegorese, in: Bibel und Liturgie 70 (1997), pp. 91–98.
Trible, Phyllis: God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1978.
Trible, Phyllis: Love’s Lyric Redeemed, in: Athalya Brenner (ed.): A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press 1993, pp. 100–120.
Turnheim, Michael: Lacan’s Sinthome, in: Michael Turnheim: Mit der Vernunft schlafen, Zürich/Berlin: diaphanes 2009, pp. 55–75.
Verde, Danilo: When the Warrior Falls in Love. The Shaping and Re-shaping of Masculinity in the Song of Songs, in: Stefan Fischer/Davin Fernandes (eds.): The Song of Songs Afresh. Perspectives on a Biblical Love Poem. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press 2019, pp. 188–212.
Verde, Danilo: Conquered Conquerors: Love and War in the Song of Songs. Atlanta: SBL 2020.
Zakovitch, Yair: The Song of Songs: Riddle of Riddles. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark 2019.
Žižek, Slavoj: The Real of Sexual Difference, in: Suzanne Barnard/Bruce Fink (eds.): Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. New York: Suny Press 2002, pp. 57–75.
Žižek, Slavoj: Sex and the Failed Absolute. London: Bloomsbury Academic 2019.
Zupančič, Alenka: What is Sex? Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press 2017.
Pardes, Song of Songs, p. 16.
See Birnbaum, Song of Songs as a Drama, pp. 363–392.
Staubli, Von der Heimführung des Hoheliedes aus der babylonischen Gefangenschaft der Allegorese, pp. 91–98. The criticism was voiced in particular by Otmar Keel (Keel, Das Hohelied). The publication in recent decades of a series of important commentaries has radicalized this secular hermeneutical reversal. See, among others, Assis, Flashes of Fire; Barbiero, Cantico dei cantici; Black, Artifice of Love; Exum, Song of Songs; Exum, Whither Song of Songs Research? pp. 25–44; Fishbane, Song of Songs; Spencer, Song of Songs; Zakovitch, Song of Songs.
The noun béance comes from the verb béer, which means to tear, to open, to spread wide; béance is therefore a tearing, an opening, a wide opening, an abyss, a gap. In his topology, Lacan links the term with the bodily edges that constitute the erogenous zones, which are always characterized by a gap or an opening: “The French term béance is an antiquated literary term which means a ‘large hole or opening’. It is also a scientific term used in medicine to denote the opening of the larynx.” Evans, Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, p. 72.
See Verde, When the Warrior Falls in Love, pp. 188–212; Verde, Conquered Conquerors; LaCocque, Romance, She Wrote; Sherwood, Space and Regulation, pp. 250–286.
See Cucca, “Quando l’amore inizia a parlare”, p. 9 et seq.
Phyllis Trible interprets the Song of the Songs as a depatriarchalized text within the biblical corpus and as a counterpoint to the Genesis account: “If the woman’s curse in Eden relegates her to a subordinate position – ‘Your desire shall be for your man, but he shall rule over you’ (Genesis 3:16) – in the Song’s amorous gardens, where love is harmonious and sexuality is unabashedly celebrated, the beloved can declare: ‘I am my lover’s and for me is his desire’ (7:10).” Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, p. 159 et seq. The Song thus represents a “garden of eros”, in which the patriarchal gender configurations established with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden are abolished: “There is no male dominance, no female subordination, and no stereotyping of either sex.” Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, p. 161. See also Trible, Love’s Lyric Redeemed, pp. 100–120; Landy, Paradoxes of Paradise, pp. 183–265; Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, pp. 329–362; Cucca, Dalla padronanza all’alterità, dal godimento al desiderio, pp. 4–9.
LaCocque, Romance, She Wrote, p. 3.
Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 184.
Greenspahn has counted no less than 37 hapax legomena, which are sometimes archaisms and at other times veritable neologisms taken from Aramaic, Persian, Greek, Sanskrit and even Malay, and which denote the cosmopolitan milieu of the author. See Greenspahn, Hapax Legomena in Biblical Hebrew, pp. 23–29 and 183–189. See also Barbiero, Cantico dei cantici, p. 25.
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse Fragments, pp. 21–23.
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse Fragments, p. 35.
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse Fragments, p. 68.
Ravasi, Il Cantico dei cantici, p. 151. See also Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One.
Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 93.
See Cucca, Il desiderio insaziabile, pp. 481–489.
See Cavarero, For More Than One Voice.
See Schellenberg, Senses, Sensuality, and Sensory Imagination, pp. 199–214; Cucca, “Quando l’amore inizia a parlare”, p. 10 et seq.
See Cucca, “Quando l’amore inizia a parlare”, p. 10 et seq.; Pardes, Song of Songs, p. 1.
Irigaray, When Our Lips Speak Together, p. 210. See also Schäfer, Lippenbekenntnisse, pp. 175–183.
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse Fragments, p. 27.
Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse Fragments, p. 73.
Recalcati, La Legge della Parola, p. 291.
Recalcati, La Legge della Parola, p. 292.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 8.
Žižek, The Real of Sexual Difference, p. 59 et seq.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 138. For Lacan, lalangue also stands for the mother tongue in the sense of the mother’s speech. And in this sense, it is also closely linked to the “sinthome”, which Lacan explains above all in his seminar on Joyce. See Moncayo, Lalangue, Sinthome, Jouissance, and Nomination; Turnheim: Lacan’s Sinthome, pp. 55–75.
See Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language.
Plato, Timaeus, 49a; See Sallis, Chorology; Butler, Bodies That Matter.
Cixous, Coming to Writing, p. 20 et seq.
Déjeux, Jean Sénac.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 61.
Jean-Marie Auwers asks whether the Song of Songs was intended to be heard or watched, rather than merely to be read. See Auwers, Dialogue ou oeuvre scénique?; Auwers, Le Cantique des cantiques.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 139.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 139.
Oliva/Palombi (a cura), L’amorevole insaturabilità, p. 23.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 131.
Barbiero, Shulammite, p. 216.
Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 99.
Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 99 et seq.
Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 100.
Lacan, Télévision, p. 60.
As Barbiero states, here it can also be read theologically: love is invincible, powerful, it overcomes death because it is a fire that comes from God. Barbiero writes: “As is characteristic of wisdom books, the Canticle does not name God, but sees him present in the law of nature. Therefore, one understands that the author is not tender with society, which arrogates to itself the right to legislate on this divine force, imposing laws on love that are alien to it (2:7; 3:5; 8:4), or subjecting it to social conventions and economic calculations (8:1.7; 8–9.11). Not even lovers can dispose of this power at will. They too must obey the laws of love.” Barbiero, Cantico dei cantici, p. 424.
L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze.
Barbiero, Cantico dei cantici, p. 29.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 34. See also Badiou/Cassin, There’s No Such Thing As a Sexual Relationship.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 32.
It is surprising to note how English translations of the Bible avoid confronting the paradoxical nature of this invitation to flee. Barbiero states: “One can understand how the exegetes have tried in every way to attenuate the provocative sense of the verb. Bringing forward the parallelism, which is very evident, with 2:17 and 4:6, some have seen in 8:14 an invitation by the woman to an encounter of love. But the Hebrew verb bāraḥ does not allow such an interpretation: it always expresses the ‘going away’ from a place. […] The ‘fleeing’ cannot express a coming towards the woman because the two are united: the only movement that can be intended is therefore a distancing from her.” Barbiero, Song of Songs, p. 498.
Nancy, The “There Is” of Sexual Relation, p. 11.
Nancy, The “There Is” of Sexual Relation, p. 16.
Nancy, The “There Is” of Sexual Relation, p. 18.
“En-corps is a ciphered writing, nested in the signifier encore that puts time (when? encore/en-corps) in tension with space (where? in the body/en-corps), a writing that touches love and interpellates jouissance.” Fanelli, Soglie, p. 278.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 4.
Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, p. 76. See also Zupančič, What is Sex? pp. 5–20; Recalcati, Esiste il rapporto sessuale?
See Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute, pp. 107–161.