Failing Desire

222 Pages·2018·1.83 MB·English

by  Karmen MacKendrick

F ILING
A
DESIRE

Karmen MacKendrick
Failin
g
Desire
OF
STATE UNIVERSITY NEW YORK PRESS
cover image: Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis.
Southern Netherlands, late 14th or early 15th century. Bronze, 32.5 cm x 17.9 cm.
Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.1416).
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
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Production, Laurie D. Searl
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: MacKendrick, Karmen, [date] author.
Title: Failing desire / Karmen MacKendrick.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017018231 (print) | LCCN 2017041860 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781438468921 (e-book) |
ISBN 9781438468914 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781438468907 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Failure (Psychology) | Shame. | Humiliation.
Classification: LCC BF575.F14 (ebook) |
LCC BF575.F14 M33 2018 (print) |
DDC 128—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018231
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
What exceeds the system is the impossibility of its failure,
and likewise the impossibility of its success. Ultimately
nothing can be said of it, and there is a way of keeping
still (the lacunary silence of writing), that halts the system,
leaving it idle, delivered to the seriousness of irony.
—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
one. Unworking: The Failure of Writing 1
two. Unwilling: The Failure of Autonomy 21
three. Unmaking: The Failure to Say 47
four. Uncovering: The Failure to See 73
five. Undignified: Failures of Flesh 103
six. Unfinished: The Failure to Conclude 127
Notes 135
Works Cited 171
Index 189
VII

Acknowledgments
While the chapters in this book have not been previously published in their current
forms, they do draw concepts, conceptual moves, paragraphs and passages from many
of my presentations and essays over the years. These should be acknowledged, along
with my deep gratitude to those who invited me to say or to write them, and those,
too many to name, who listened.
Material related to obedience was presented at The Body: Ethos and Ethics, the
meeting of Foucault Society Conference in 2006, at the invitation of Terri Gordon;
and at the seminar Desire, Love and Sexuality in Medieval Thought, at Lewis Univer-
sity in 2010. The Augustinian material there was refined for a seminar presentation
with Virginia Burrus and Mark Jordan at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union,
at the invitation of Daniel Boyarin. We eventually developed the seminar material
into Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions (Fordham, 2010).
Impossible Confessions, the basis of chapter 2, was refined over the course of
two presentations: The Sacred and the Debased in the Work of Georges Bataille, at Oc-
cidental College in 2008, at the invitation of Malek Moazzam-Doulat; and The
Space of Community in the Work of Georges Bataille, at the Society for Phenomenol-
ogy and Existential Philosophy in 2010. A version of that presentation was pub-
lished in the anthology Material Spirit, edited by Carl Good and Manuel Assensi
(Fordham, 2013).
An invitation from the graduate students in religion at Syracuse University
to present an opening keynote at their conference “The Monstrous, the Marginal-
ized, and Transgressive Forms of Humanity,” in 2013, first prompted me to think
about the kinds of visuality that are central to chapter 3.
Finally, material that is related more broadly to the book rather than to any
particular chapter appears in Pornotopias: Image, Apocalypse, Desire, edited by Louis
IX