Desiring bodies.

The scene opens with a close-up of Leonard's face, Guy Pearce's face: stubbled, sharply boned, handsome, with bleached hair and two scratches on his left cheek. He is lying on his back, in bed, looking up at the ceiling; bathed in a soft, pale yellow morning light. (1) We hear his thoughts as he pulls them together, out of sleep. 'Awake.' An observation and a question, as if he had to name the experience of awakening in order to imagine and remember it as his own experience. And indeed, forgetting and imagining is Leonard's constant condition in Christopher Nolan's film noir, Memento (USA 2000). Following the rape and murder of his wife, Leonard has lost the ability to make new memories, and apart from his life before that traumatic event--that his anterograde amnesia allows him to remember partly (selectively)--his world begins anew every 15 minutes. By means of notes on the reverse of Polaroid photographs, and messages tattooed on his body, on arms, legs and chest--one laterally reversed so that he can read it in the mirror--Leonard reconstitutes his world, repeatedly. He tells anyone who will listen of his search for the murderer of his wife, his need to avenge the world he has lost. (2)

'Oh, where am I?' Leonard wonders as he looks around the room: a cage with two birds, a gold-framed picture by the door, a drawing of a young girl. 'Somebody's bedroom.' Perhaps it is his room? Then he realizes that he is not alone in the bed. He has raised himself on his right arm and seen a sleeping woman--Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss)--lying close beside him. 'Oh, must be her room.' Leonard has taught himself not to show surprise at what might be the everyday, as it keeps befalling him anew. 'Oh, who is she?' With his moving she begins to awaken, and her left hand falls against his shoulder. With a start Natalie opens her eyes, and she too is a little surprised to find him there, for she only met him yesterday. 'It's only me,' he reassures. He has remembered who he is, the man who cannot remember, and who must now, again, piece together where he is and why he is there, and with whom he has been sleeping. His own body will prove to be the clue he needs, a living memento of his dismembered life.

The Other Between

Many will have been there, like Leonard, like Natalie. Upon waking you find yourself in bed with a stranger. Who is he? How did he get there? Or, finding the bed unfamiliar, how did you get here? And then you remember. But in the moment before you recall how his body came to be lying beside your own, perhaps still sleeping, you are disconcerted by his presence, by the warmth of his flesh. Even as you seek to name him, your own identity is disturbed, dislocated, for a moment undone, rendered indeterminate. The space between your bodies becomes a distance within yourself, opening between 'consciousness' and 'identity.' Then he rolls over, moves closer, and still sleeping extends his arm in a half-intended embrace and the touch of skins covers the distance within, and you remember who you are: yourself and the stranger.

Between the intimacy of sheets, between one body pressed against another, each following the other's posture and curves--the convex nestling in the concave, as one spoon lies against another--there is still a space, a distance, a hail's breadth. The stranger with whom you awaken may have been long known to you, a long-time companion, a dear friend, a spouse. Yet even in moments of intimacy, when your beloved gives himself to you and you to him, he is still beyond your grasp, a stranger to the caress of your flesh. This is what the phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas--here a phenomenologist of sexual desire--calls the 'pathos of voluptuosity.' (3) No matter how close the embrace, the 'coinciding of the lover and the beloved, is charged by their duality: it is simultaneously fusion and distinction.' (4) In 'the other's proximity, distance is integrally maintained,' (5) even as proximity calls forth the desire for union with the other.

Eros is not so much the destruction of self or other, as their transformation, by making one present to the other, so that the other is not encompassed by the self, or the self submerged in the other, for that would be the destruction of their relationship. Rather the self--the 'I'--goes beyond itself, becoming the self of the other, for 'the amorous subjectivity is transubstantiation itself.' (6) The presence of one to the other--of one in the other--is made possible through the distance of proximity, through the 'absence' that opens in the nearness of the other's body. 'What one presents as the failure of communication in love precisely constitutes the positivity of the relationship; this absence of the other is precisely its presence as other.' (7) To encounter the other in this way, as absent even when most close, because most close, is to encounter the other as 'feminine'--so Levinas avers. In the erotic embrace there is no overcoming of the other as other, no denial of the fundamental duality and alterity announced in the other's body, pressed against your own. 'The other as other is not here an object that becomes ours or becomes us; to the contrary, it withdraws into its mystery.' (8) This withdrawal--which is the mystery of the 'feminine'--is not that of the 'mysterious, unknown or misunderstood woman,' but is that 'mode of being that consists in slipping away from the light.' (9) It is the appearing of that mysterious alterity that hides in being, in the body that encompasses your own, that holds you, not with the strength of enfolding arms, but with a tender otherness, an essential alienness to yourself. 'The transcendence of the feminine,' Levinas tells us, 'consists in withdrawing elsewhere, which is a movement opposed to the movement of consciousness. But this does not make it unconscious or subconscious, and I see no other possibility than to call it mystery.' (10)

The 'feminine' is the mystery of the other, and as such is not your projection. It is not something you can possess or own, even as you hold his body most dearly. The erotic embrace, the sexual relationship, is 'neither a struggle, nor a fusion, nor a knowledge ... It is a relationship with alterity, with mystery--that is to say, with the future, with what (in a world where there is everything) is never there, with what cannot be there when everything is there--not with a being that is not there, but with the very dimension of alterity.' (11) The erotic is the lure and embrace of the truly alien, the flesh that is other.

Needless to say, Levinas's feminization of alterity, his understanding of the 'feminine' as 'the of itself other, as the origin of the very concept of alterity,' (12) has given rise to much criticism, most famously, and caustically, by Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxieme Sexe (1949).

       I suppose that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware
       of her own consciousness, or ego. But it is striking that he
       deliberately takes a man's point of view, disregarding the
       reciprocity of subject and object. When he writes that woman is
       mystery, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his
       description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an
       assertion of masculine privilege. (13)

Levinas's response to this criticism is reluctant and less than pellucid. 'All these allusions to the ontological differences between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two genders), they would signify that the participation in the masculine and in the feminine were the attribute of every human being.' (14) It would appear that Levinas, in admitting his 'archaic' use of terms, would not want to deny that woman is also a subject, and that in the man she too can discover the feminine other. Thus for Levinas, 'masculine' and 'feminine' are not biological but ontological distinctions, modalities of being that might be ascribed to either sex. (15) No doubt Levinas is betrayed by a certain cultural context, but his 'feminine' is figural, culturally motivated but biologically arbitrary. (16) 'Masculine' and 'feminine' are attributes of every human being, and Levinas wonders if this might not be the meaning of Genesis 1.27: 'male and female created he them.' (17)

If, biologically speaking, Levinas's use of 'masculine' and 'feminine' is gender neutral, why does he not employ non-gendered terms, thus avoiding the cultural figurations of man and woman as 'virile' and 'modest,' 'active' and 'passive?' It is in part because he wants to avoid any abstraction of eros, which, after all, is an intimacy of gendered bodies. Furthermore, he wants to avoid any suggestion that the erotic relation is simply symmetrical, a relationship of two subjects, for both of whom the other is an object, as in de Beauvoir's correction of Levinas. From the outside the relationship may appear symmetrical; but viewed from inside the relationship is a doubled, reciprocal asymmetry, for it is in the erotic relationship that we discover otherness itself: the Other in the other. Thus Levinas takes (hetero) sexual difference--which he holds to be fundamental--as a figure for the yet more fundamental difference of the same from the other, of ipseity from alterity. It is then not so much the 'feminine' that is the 'of itself other,' as the difference of the 'feminine' from the 'masculine,' that again should not be understood as a biological difference, as between the sexes, but as a carnal distance, between bodies.

What is at issue here is the discovery and preservation of difference, of a radical otherness that cannot be collapsed into the same; denied in favour of an undifferentiated totality, a single flesh. Thus Levinas refuses Aristophanes' myth of humanity's ancient tripartite nature, which is said to have consisted of the male, female and androgyne, with each gender a whole couple, with four arms, four legs, a single head with two faces, that runs by turning somersaults. (18) It was only with their cleaving that erotic desire was born in these comical beings, as each half yearned for his or her other part, for that which they now lacked. The fulfillment of desire then consists in the (re)union of two complementary bodies--the male with male, the female with the female, and the androgyne with his or her other half, once more forming an originary whole. Levinas rejects this myth of sexual union as the fusion of complements, for that which complements yourself, that which fills up your lack of self and returns you to yourself, is not other than yourself. There is no going outside of yourself, no meeting with another, but only more of yourself: an engorged solipsism. Thus the idea of complementary bodies--so pervasive in Christian marital theology--betrays a ('masculine') desire to possess the other, as that which will satisfy your want of self. (19) Those who seek for their complement--always heterosexual (androgynous) in the prevailing Christian rendition, but also homosexual (male and female) in the original Platonic joke--seek for that which they can grasp and hold, but which they can never really receive as different from themselves, as the appearing of the Other in flesh. They can never caress the alien.

One should not suppose that each embrace, each and every coupling, pens onto alterity, onto the mystery that withdraws even as one seeks to encircle, hold and possess the other. Often, if not always, the meeting of bodies is but an intercourse of pleasure, a satisfaction of want, a temporary satiety that quickly passes so that we can want again. This is the repeated longing and satisfaction of those seeking to fuse with their other half. In such relationships, the other remains within the projection of the self, so that even though mutually agreed, contracted--either through the laws of church and state, or through hurried arrangements ('Your place or mine?')--it is always the hired use of the other's flesh, the negotiated pleasure of their body. But even if much sex is like this, Levinas points to the possibility of something more, to a transcendence or intensity of yearning that is other than want, a passing from need to a different, deeper desiring. When we caress the skin of the other, we do not always know what it is that we seek to touch. 'It is like a game with something slipping away, a game absolutely without project or plan, not with what can become ours or us, but with something other, always other, always inaccessible, and always still to come [a venir].' (20)

Desiring Distance

       To expend oneself; to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object
       is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on
       which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I
       shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the
       lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to
       reverse my ignorance into truth. It is not true that the more you
       love, the better you understand; all that the action of love
       obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to
       be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but,
       instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and
       appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that
       exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so
       forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know. (21)

In the above quotation, Roland Barthes (1915-80)--a phenomenologist of sorts, here a phenomenologist of amorous yearning--finds, like Levinas, that to embrace the beloved is to embrace the unknown. Perhaps, as Barthes suggests, this is a perversity of the lover, who makes the beloved opaque, turning him into an unsolvable riddle, a consecrated divinity. Yet if the 'action of love' is not something that I initiate but by which I am initiated--a 'constant initiation into a mystery rather than initiative'--then Barthes' account is similar to that which Levinas names as an encounter with the 'feminine,' a meeting with the mystery of the other, who withdraws, but does not leave. Barthes, however, wastes no time in telling us that this withdrawal is also the advent of the god, so that what Levinas names the 'feminine' can also be named the 'religious' or 'mystical.' Levinas may be more circumspect, more philosophically tentative, than Barthes, but he is also less solipsistic, since on his account the transcendent movement of desire is not so much the action of the lover as the effect of a preceding passion. Levinas ventures that transcendent desire is not an apophatic idolatry, but the disclosure of the Other in the other's flesh, so that the lover's desiring is already the disclosing, the giving of the Other's infinite difference. That which withdraws in the erotic embrace is also that which approaches, and approaches by withdrawing. It is the approach of the Other, that, in a further venture, is also the approach of God--there being no other route by which God can come to us. (23) God does not abandon the face of the beloved, but is so fully present, that there is nothing to be seen except the beloved's face.

On this reading, Levinas and Barthes open for us the analogous or parodic (24) relationship between desire of the flesh and desire of that which is beyond all flesh, but on which all flesh depends. Levinas's concern to delineate a union without the dissolution or fusion of its terms repeats the 'mystical' concern of both Jewish and Christian traditions to think the relationship of creature to Creator without the destruction of one by the other. Indeed Levinas makes the two relationships homologous, so that eros names both sexual and mystical union, in which the 'absence of the other is precisely its presence as other.' (25) Moreover, the homologous terms do not appear successively, as if one led to the other, but intensively, inside one another. These intensive, interpenetrating relationships appear as the fundamental unknowability in that most intimate of knowledge, the caress and embrace of the other's body. This is one way in which sex is always alien sex; the cut and difference between bodies that brings them together and keeps them apart even when--particularly when--they are most amorously conjoined. There is always an alien dimension in the most passionate of conjunctions, a dimension that discloses a yet deeper strangeness. It is this alien depth or intensity that has always already initiated the desire to know the otherness of and beyond the body. This is the theological venture upon alien sex that Levinas and Barthes here open for us. But it was, of course, opened much earlier in the Christian tradition, from its beginning.

Excerpted from Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology by Gerard Loughlin, Published by Blackwell Publishing. Copyright 2004 by Gerard Loughlin. All rights reserved.

Notes

1. Everything in the film is caressingly lit and crisply photographed by Wally Pfister. On the film and its making see James Mottram, The Making of Memento (London: Faber & Faber, 2002).

2. The film itself is a kind of mirror image, telling its tale in reverse order, so that the last scene of the story is the first scene in the film's narrative. Thus the viewer experiences something of Leonard's bewilderment, having to interpret each scene as the film retraces the course of events. The film can be understood only when remembered, when its scenes are reordered and differently connected.

3. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, translated by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, [1979] 1987), p.86. For brief introductions to Levinas's thoughts see Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 47-70; Gerald Loughlin, 'Other Discourses', New Blackfriars, 75 (1994): 18-31. Levinas writes from within the tradition of phenomenology as most immediately determined by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and inaugurated by Rene Descartes (see John Milbank, 'The Soul of Reciprocity Part One: Reciprocity Refused', Modern Theology, 17(2001): 335-91). Though Levinas's reflections start out from the singular consciousness, they do not--pace Milbank--succumb to the dualism of self and body inaugurated in Cartesian thought. For Levinas, consciousness is always bodily, always the sensibility of corporeality. No less than Milbank, Levinas holds intersubjectivity to be at the same time interobjectivity. Milbank too closely follows Phillip Blond, 'Emmanuel Levinas: God and Phenomenology', in Post-Secular Philosophy and Theology, edited by Phillip Blond (London: Routledge, 1998) pp. 195-228. For a more sensitive reading of Levinas that attends to the key notions of transcendent desire and 'proximity' see Brian Schroeder, 'The (Non)Logic of Desire and War: Hegel and Levinas' in Philosophy and Desire, edited by Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 45-62.

4. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An essay on Exteriority, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, [1961] 1969) p. 270.

5. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 94.

6. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 271.

7. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 94; emphasis added. For an earlier statement of this view see Existence and Existents, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, [1988] 1978/2001), pp. 98-9.

8. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 86.

9. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 87.

10. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 88.

11. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 88.

12. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, translated by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, [1982] 1985), p. 66.

13. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated and edited by H.M. Parshley (London: Everyman's Library, [1949] 1993), p xlv.

14. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 68.

15. See Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 9. It would seem that Luce Irigaray mistakes Levinas's deployment of these terms, as does Tina Chanter. See Luce Irigaray. 'The Fecundity of the Caress', in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Athlone Press, [1984] 1993), pp. 185-217; and Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (London: Routledge, 1995), ch. 5. But see also Tina Chanter's more nuanced, searching and 'charitable' critique of Levinas in Time Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford university Press, 2001) ch. 1. and conclusion (pp. 37-74, 241-60).

16. The same would hold for Levinas's use of 'maternity' in Otherwise than Being, where it names the ethical relationship of responsibility for the other. 'Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor.' But this does not mean that men are outside the ethical relationship. See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, [1974] 19980, p. 75.

17. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, pp. 68-9.

18. Plato, The Symposium, 189c-193c; in The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 2, translated by R.E. Allen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 130-4. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p.254; and Time and the Other, p. 86.

19. For a discussion of 'complementarity' see Gareth Moore, The Body in Context: Sex and Catholicism (London: SCM Press, 1992), ch. 7. Moore shows how much theology inscribes a set of differing cultural stereotypes upon the bodies of men and women. Thus Henry Peschke tells us that the 'male is more active and outgoing; he possesses greater courage to assail. The female is more receptive and protective; she shows greater fortitude to endure ... The logic of facts and keen penetration are characteristic of the man; the woman is more led by emotion, sensitivity and intuition. He is ruled by principles, she by love.' (C.H. Peschke, Christian Ethics [Dublin: Goodliffe Neale, 1978], vol. 2, p. 377; quoted in Moore, Body in Context, p. 121.) Such a differentiation in the sexes is a solipsistic return to the same, since the womanly traits are the disavowed projection of the masculine paranoia. See further Daphne Hampson, After Christianity) London: SCM Press, 1996), pp. 192-3, and chapter 6 ("Sex Slaves") of Gerald Laughlin's Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Malden, MA; Blackwell Publishing, 2004)

20. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 89.

21. Roland Barthes, Lover's Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, [1977] 1979), p. 135.

22. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 270.

23. Christian theology finds the coming of God in the 'going towards God' that, for Levinas, is the 'going towards the other person'. 'I can only go towards God by being ethically concerned by and for the other person.' Levinas in Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, p. 59.

24. See Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology, ch. 5.

25. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 94.