There is something deeply disgusting in the publication of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s love letters. There is something loathsome in the mockery of these love letters. Yes, Sanford is guilty of negligence and dereliction of duty with respect to his responsibilities as Governor. Yes, it is very likely that Sanford stole from the citizens to South Carolina to fund his trips to Argentina. Yes, Sanford is a cynical hypocrite who used the mantra of “family values” to manipulate stupid conservative values based voters to support him and who participated in legislation designed to oppress women and LBGT folk in the name of “family values” (the show True Blood has the proper take on what these conservative religious groups are really about).
Despite all this, there’s absolutely no reason to publish these letters and the mockery of these letters is even worse. Last night I watched with thorough disgust as the gasbag Keith Olbermann adopted a mocking voice and read the letters to Bridges of Madison County music. Him and his guest ridiculed the style of the letters, their inept references, and various grammatical and spelling errors of the letters. However, in reading these letters it is clear that something of deep significance had happened in his encounter with this woman and that he had, no matter how poorly expressed, genuine tenderness for her. Whatever else Sanford should be condemned for– and he really should step down or be impeached –he should not be condemned for love. Indeed, if anything redeems Sanford to some degree, it’s these letters. Indeed, given his actions over the last few days– his bizarre disappearance without notifying any of his staff –it’s pretty clear that at some level he was trying to blow up his life.
read on!
But even if one disagrees with the thesis that Sanford deserves some sympathy, I cannot help but feel that there is something loathsome in the act of mocking the letters themselves; that somehow this mockery diminishes all love. Let’s face it, as a genre, the love letter is generally fairly trite. Few lovers ever reach the literary greatness of Abelard and Heloise or Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. However, to believe that the love letter should attain this sort of literary excellence is, I believe, to miss the point of the love letter. On the one hand, in love there is a sort of repetition of the infantile where all sorts of primordial childhood libidinal cathexes, traumas, and relations are creatively repeated between the two in a way that creates a new world. As Deleuze and Guattari so nicely put it,
…what the libido invest(s), through its loves and sexuality, [is] the social field itself in its economic, political, historical, racial, and cultural determinations: in delirium the libido is continually re-creating History, continents, kingdoms, races, and cultures. Not that it is advisable to put historical representations in the place of the familial representations of the Freudian unconscious, or even the archetypes of a collective unconscious. It is merely a question of ascertaining that our choices in matters of love are at the crossroads of “vibrations,” which is to say that they express connections, disjunctions, and the conjunctions of flows that cross through a society, entering and leaving it, linking it up with other societies, ancient or contemporary, remote or vanished, dead or yet to be born. (AO, 352).
However, like Beckett’s strange desiring-machine composed of three stones that circulate from the pockets of a vest to the mouth and back again, the machines created by lovers, their desiring-connections, cannot but appear to be ridiculous from the outside.
And if these machines appear so ridiculous from the outside, then this is because socially they are useless. That is, they are machines that are not caught up in the despotic signifying machines of the socius. This brings me to my second point. Language, as Hegel observed at the beginning of the Phenomenology, is composed entirely of general, abstract, universal terms, whereas the encounter between the two in love is singular. There seems to be a way in which lovers innately understand this contradiction between the general and universal and the singularity of their encounter. In this connection, the love letter filled with cliches, poorly wrought language, vulgarities, silly pet names, and all the rest almost functions like a private joke between lovers, bringing into relief the intensive and singular nature of their encounter through the banal and facile nature of their sweet cooings to one another. Just as we can say that the sober language of Spinoza’s Ethics disguises great intensities, we can likewise say that the stereotypical, cliched, and routinized nature of the love letter actually brings into relief the intensity of the encounter between the two. It is if the love letter must be brought to its ultimate point of banality stylistically, its most general and stereotypical form– not unlike the form letter –for the intensive of the singular to be brought into relief. In this way the two express the impotence of language to express the singularity of their encounter.
In last night’s segment, Olbermann mocks Sanford’s vulgar references– and they’re really not so vulgar –to his Argentinian lover’s body and their moments of passion, suggesting that somehow these shouldn’t be there. On the one hand, Olbermann should take a look at Joyce’s love letters to his wife. On the other hand, he misses something essential about the nature of love in this mockery. There is a sort of dialectical contradiction in love between the flesh and the spirit. There is a way in which lovers strive to reduce one another to the flesh in its most base form, turning it into nothing but an object and allowing themselves to become object for the other. There is almost a sort of desperation in the way in which two lovers clasp one another’s bodies, as if they are looking for something in the body more than itself. And this is the point. What is sought in this desperate clasping of the body is in no way equivalent to the man going to the prostitute, using her as a mere piece of flesh, but rather the aching despair with which lovers grasp each others bodies, in which they clumsily try to put each others bodies into words in the love letter, is a chasing after transcendence… The transcendence of the other not as flesh but as subject, or that which evades all flesh yet simultaneously somehow animates it.
I don’t know why all of this makes me furious. I am not suggesting that Sanford’s letters somehow rise to the letters of Abelard and Heloise or Joyce’s and his wife’s. What I am saying is that there is nothing to be mocked in any such letters, regardless of their literary merit. I applaud Sanford for his willingness to blow his life up over love. I just wish he could have done it without being a sanctimonious asshole or screwing over his constituents.
June 25, 2009 at 8:34 pm
So publishing private emails and mocking them is now a horrible horrible thing?
I see your point, and I don’t think Olbermann or others are acting in a way that gives them any moral ground, but we’re talking about a guy who not only refused to take federal money to pay for unemployment benefits for his constituents, but also acted as a self-righteous ass pointing out right and left how “unfamily valued” everyone is, including calling for politicians to resign while at this point refusing to even consider resignation.
You make it sound as though this guy deserves our pity, that somehow he sacrificed his political career in the name of love by coming out – his wife knew about the affair, she kicked him out of the house two weeks ago, he wasn’t trying to blow up his life, it was already quite blown – the guy got caught and had to come out, that’s not “in the name of love” – that’s cowardly politics.
Plus, no one is mocking his love, they are mocking his incredible hypocrisy – while preaching that others should be family-oriented conservatives, he takes off on Father’s Day weekend to see his lover and you “applaud Sanford for his willingness to blow his life up over love”? Really?
June 25, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Hmmm, Mikhail where did I anywhere say that his hypocrisy shouldn’t be mocked? What I said is that it is out of line to mock the letters which Olberman did do last night. I pretty much agree with the rest of what you say, but those are the issues that should be focused on.
June 25, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Hmmm, Levi, where did I say that you say anywhere that hypocrisy shouldn’t be mocked?
You claim that these letters somehow might redeem Sanford – Why? Because love covers all sins? Because it’s all forgiven and forgotten since Sanford was in love? Wife, kids, political obligations to those who elected him can be disregarded because he was in love?
Mocking private love letters of a hypocritical conservative cheating husband is not mocking the concept of love itself, it is an act of humiliation of the person who wrote the letters while publicly preaching family values. I think it’s a pretty low tactic and Olbermann should have known better, but I don’t think that somehow Sanford’s humiliation redeems him (which is not what you say, it’s what I think).
June 25, 2009 at 9:24 pm
I think I pretty clearly state that he should be pushed out of his position. I do think the letters themselves should be off limits, however. I think the letters are the only redeeming aspect of this whole sordid affair, because at least they seem to be genuine. When I say the letters “redeem” Sanford I don’t mean they absolve him of responsibility, but that they at least indicate that he was going through a genuine struggle rather than simply having a crass affair. As for his obligations to his wife, kids, and his political post, I think the problem here isn’t that he betrayed his marital vows, his duties as a father, or his political obligations– I think that’s all fair game where love is concerned. The problem is how he betrayed these obligations, trying to have it both ways, maintaining his political position as a social conservative while doing the exact opposite of that position and exploiting his office (using taxpayer money) to fund his affair. I mean, what would have happened had there been a natural disaster while he was AWOL? What if he had been abducted in Argentina? Etc., Etc. But really, the affair is not the issue here. The issue is how he neglected his post, his use of taxpayer money, and his hypocrisy in singing the mantra of family values while doing the very thing that he’s trying to prevent others from doing. I’m not sure how the emails are relevant to any of this. Personally, I’d prefer to see us drop this obsession with people’s romantic lives altogether and to hear the right quit talking about these bullshit value issues.
June 25, 2009 at 10:02 pm
I agree.
June 25, 2009 at 10:08 pm
I agree about the letters, why stoop to that level? Olbermann is an emblem of how the democratic contingent in U.S. politics is only too happy to play Limbaugh-esque games and lower all political discourse to the kind you expect from talk radio. This is why it’s so hard to get involved politically here except on an “issues-specific” basis.
I think the spectacle of it all, the tit-for-tat scandalizing, are part and parcel of the bipartisan splitting down the middle of the electorate, and only serve to underscore the lack of significant differences between our two wings.
I’m not so sure the letters can prove that the affair wasn’t “crass”, however–not by Sanford’s own standards, at least. According to his own professed beliefs, it would seem that any straying from core values typical to exclusive-monogamous heterosexual familydom would be a “crass” betrayal of what really matters in life, of ‘real’ Americanism, of any number of related cliches, etc.
I hold on to the hope that the actual complexities of erotic experience, and the curve-balls that life generally throws at most of us, have finally collided with Sanford’s ideals to the point where he’ll be forced to re-think his “core values”. We’ll see.
June 25, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Yeah Anodyne, your point about crassness is well taken. I guess my sense of values here is inverted compared to the sorts of values Sanford professes. Where Sanford sees these sorts of “family values” as real values, I think that often these values are themselves a crass illusion that makes millions of people miserable throughout the country and world, that are often aimed at preserving certain forms of economic and power relations, and that represent an institution that is largely outmoded. By contrast, I see love and the encounter of love as a real and genuine value that is to be commended and celebrated where it happens to occur. I guess this is the influence of Badiou on me. I think Badiou has got it right when, in his little book on ethics, he argues that most of the discussions that fall under so-called “ethical theory” really have nothing to do with ethics at all, but are just babble about mores and norms, whereas genuine ethical issues only pertain to events and the procedures that follow from them. I mean, really, listening to these ethical theories you get the sense that they think there’s some burning ethical question in whether or not its right to bite your friends or whether you should murder someone or keep a contract when you enter into one. It’s bizarre to see people get so philosophically worked up about such banal and commonplace issues… Issues that very likely don’t belong to the moral domain at all but which are better suited to psychology or sociology. It’s so silly. The serial killer doesn’t go about killing people because he’s immoral but because he’s messed up. Certainly ethics has a much higher calling than these silly sorts of issues, no? Anyway, this is me ranting over the idea that love is somehow crass.
June 25, 2009 at 11:19 pm
agree wholeheartedly with your original post. I was similarly outraged.
The guy should go and go soon, and be lambasted for hypocrisy (can’t find a reference now but apparently he was very self righteously vocal about Clinton’s problems with Monica) BUT, love letters of whatever quality, silly or profound, need to be respected, even if quoted, and the fact that he can fall in love and make a fool of himself actually raised him a notch in my eyes. We need more politicians who occasionally go mad for love . . . preferably BEFORE they castigate others for same.
June 26, 2009 at 1:03 am
Exeter,
I think one of the points worth underlining here is that this isn’t a public/private issue. It isn’t– at least for me –a question of keeping love letters private (though I don’t see why the newspaper published them) but how they are treated if they are made public. In this respect, I do disagree with Mikhail somewhat. I am not sure that emails should remain private. For example, I see nothing wrong with making abusive and trollish emails public because the whole power exercised by the email abuser is the idea that somehow her communication will not see the light of day. In that situation, it strikes me as a good bromide to render the email public because cockroaches scatter when the lights are on (as Limbaugh and ilk are learning as their hate speech gets more mainstream media attention). What bothered me so much about Olbermann’s segment was the way in which he thought it appropriate to mock these letters and the governor’s love. What bothers me about Sanford is his hypocrisy and abuse of his office. As for his encounter with this woman, I actually feel sympathy for him. Life is complicated and love is even more complicated. In his self-destructive behavior– disappearing without notifying any of his staff or the American Embassy –I get the sense that at least his unconscious was behaving honestly. As Freud liked to say, every bungled action is successful and the stupidity of his action in this situation– an action guaranteed to destroy his intent of getting away with it –it’s pretty clear that the unconscious aim was to produce an outcome that is exactly the one he’s in now: the destruction of his marriage and political career. The frustrating thing about the whole situation is that he couldn’t consciously avow this desire and take measures to dissolve his marriage and his political standing among social conservatives as a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2012. In other words, if there’s something unethical in Sanford’s behavior, it is not simply how he exploited his constituents, but in how he betrayed his desire, trying to avoid the truth of his being. In pursuing the Argentinian woman he ethically actually did the right thing. It is how he failed to accept responsibility for his love that is the issue.
June 26, 2009 at 1:05 am
Or better yet, Sanford is worthy of mockery not because of the banal literary nature of his letters, but because he did not go far enough in his own self-destruction in pursuing that love. That’s where his ethical failure lies. Instead, he tried to orchestrate the situation in such a way that he could say that “circumstance” orchestrated his fall (reporters showing up at the airport, The State having the letters on hand, etc), rather than avowing his own desire and actively orchestrating his own fall.
June 26, 2009 at 1:34 am
Wasn’t the very making of them public the worst mocking? I mean would you be fine if Olbermann just read selections from them without any background music or reaction?
June 26, 2009 at 1:51 am
I don’t know if making them public in and of itself constitutes a mockery, but I would certainly agree that I don’t see what airing the letter contributed to the whole debacle. Over at the so-called “liberal” blogs– I use square quotes that I see very little resemblance between leftist thought and Democratic thought –I’ve seen it argued that the letters were relevant because they provided proof of the affair and hypocrisy writ large. It seems to me that it’s enough that the letters exist and are known to exist, without exposing them, and that the hypocrisy was already more than evident. That aside, I don’t really see why anything in the letters is worthy of mockery. Sure, grammatical and spelling errors, bad analogies, fetishizations… But this is the stuff of these sorts of letters and I confess it evokes feelings of tenderness in me.
June 26, 2009 at 1:51 am
I don’t know if making them public in and of itself constitutes a mockery, but I would certainly agree that I don’t see what airing the letter contributed to the whole debacle. Over at the so-called “liberal” blogs– I use square quotes that I see very little resemblance between leftist thought and Democratic thought –I’ve seen it argued that the letters were relevant because they provided proof of the affair and hypocrisy writ large. It seems to me that it’s enough that the letters exist and are known to exist, without exposing them, and that the hypocrisy was already more than evident. That aside, I don’t really see why anything in the letters is worthy of mockery. Sure, grammatical and spelling errors, bad analogies, fetishizations… But this is the stuff of these sorts of letters and I confess it evokes feelings of tenderness in me.
June 27, 2009 at 4:52 am
Thank you for this post. It saddens me when the sincere expression of a (to some extent) praiseworthy feeling is attacked for being artistically unoriginal. “Silly love songs” have the popularity they do because they express what we really feel; it’s just that we’re often too embarrassed to admit that we could be sharing an experience with those plebeian folk who drink pink cosmopolitans and use Windows.
June 28, 2009 at 1:13 pm
[...] 28, 2009 Larval Subjects has a post up about the ethics of ridiculing Mark Sanford’s love letters. The comments focus mainly on [...]
June 29, 2009 at 1:40 am
Great post, Levi – I especially think your points about the social uselessness of love and the conflict between the generality of language vs. the singularity of erotic experience are right on, and very thought-provoking too.
I have been thinking a little lately of the idea of language as a set of universals. Without having read more than a smidgeon of Lacan still, I think I’m coming to understand this cryptic-sounding notion that the individual’s unconscious is structured like a language. A given conscious state is related to this language-like unconscious in the same way that the individual utterance or “parole” is to a “langue” for Saussure. So far so good.
But then the question that follows for me is: Is the unconscious a private “language” or a shared one, or a universal human one, or something of a mixture, part private, part shared, and part universal? I wonder what the answer is for Lacan. (Reading tips welcome.)
If the unconscious is a “language” of universals, then the idea of a collective unconscious starts to make sense to me in a way it didn’t previously. But that’s also problematic, because you’d think on the one hand that the unconscious would be by definition a wholly private thing, containing as it does the essence and potentiality of the individual person; hence if it were a language it should be a private one … yet on the other hand, the function of a language is to provide common ground for communication, so a private language almost inherently doesn’t make all that much sense.
Probably I should go read Wittgenstein re: private language …
But then what of the lovers’ private language? If they share a special language of their own, one that commandeers generalized banalities of common language to express their own shared set of unique “signifieds,” it’s as though they also access a common unconscious that is limited only to the two of them – a common soul as it were – maybe in the very action of forming and teaching each other this shared private language. That’s the interesting part for me, because it bears on the question of how much (if any) of one’s inwardness can really be shared with or understood by others.
June 29, 2009 at 3:53 am
Is the unconscious a private “language” or a shared one, or a universal human one, or something of a mixture, part private, part shared, and part universal?
therese,
I think the answer to this is that the unconscious is structured like a language with all of these ambiguities. that is, it is somewhat private, but also universal. the intimate which moves beyond ourselves. the innermost core of our being, insofar as we understand ourselves in terms of language, and the universal communicability that loses that particularity.. this is, at least, part of what I like about the notion as I read it in Lacan.
I, of course, leave it to Levi to correct or amend this, since he knows more about Lacan than I do…