The Arguments and Argots of Pleasure
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Description
Carol Gilligan's The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love uses the Cupid and Psyche myth as the portal to many places. Cupid falls in love with Psyche but will only make love to her in the dark. Psyche's jealous sisters populate that darkness with horrible imaginings, saying her lover is a monster. Terrified, Psyche violates Cupid's injunction not to look at him and finds he is a beautiful god. Yet the light she casts is itself embodied and drips oil on his skin. The wounded Cupid reproaches her and flees. Psyche sets out to find him. After many travails she finds her way back to him and gives birth to a daughter named Pleasure (Apuleius 1989). Gilligan reads this myth as one about overcoming dissociation. In each of us, she argues, is a voice that could also be called a knowledge, a self, an instinct that feels natural or authentic. We are prevented from speaking in this voice by a culture that constantly overrides it. Dissociation is the tectonic slide between what we know and what we are told we know. That slippage occurs in the myth when Cupid tells Psyche that love and light cannot coexist. Psyche knows this cannot be the case. In lifting the lamp, she seeks to exit dissociation. This reading is revisionist. Traditional interpretations cast Psyche's need for ocular proof as a failing, specifically a gendered failing akin to the curiosity displayed by Eve or Pandora (Norris 1999, 112-34). By succumbing to their curiosity, these women destroy an idyllic state. Unlike Eve or Pandora, however, Psyche ultimately forges a finer world than the one she dissolved. This distinctive feature of the Psyche story makes it an apt archetype for Gilligan. Psyche vindicates her violation of the patriarchal law by having that violation lead to the birth of Pleasure. The Psyche myth frames Gilligan's multiple depictions of the triumph over dissociation. Dissociation is so pervasive that it often appears not to have an outside. To imagine the world beyond it is like imagining the outside of an egg from within. Gilligan employs the Psyche myth as a bird would use a beak, beating and beating at a complete surface. The myth enables two related ways of surmounting dissociation: a shift in subject position and a shift in cognitive style.
Source Publication
Enacting Pleasure: Artists and Scholars Respond to Carol Gilligan's New Map of Love
Source Editors/Authors
Peggy Cooper Davis, Lizzy Cooper Davis
Publication Date
2011
Recommended Citation
Yoshino, Kenji, "The Arguments and Argots of Pleasure" (2011). Faculty Chapters. 1459.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1459
