Dear Bob, 

I am fond of intellectual integrity, and precision, and truth, and creative
thinking,and inseparably, sensuality, and had used the word "wrong," with
sincere regret, since you had explicitly asked me to use it; and I am
always serious. It does seriously disturb me that passionate engagement,
which I think the texts we study insist upon, and passion in general, are
taken by many members of this list as indicators for lack of seriousness.
To me, they are quite the reverse. And I believe there is nothing more
serious or worthy of serious reflection that the sensuous and passionate.
      

Professional seriousness and insistence on precision are why I would strive
not to use any word in a loose sense. When I referred to musical form, I
meant the forms our Renaissance authors were writing and thinking about,
such as "Ayre," and "Songe," and "Counterpoint" Campion writes about or
"harmony" and "symmetry" -- all worth, I think, serious and in-depth
reflection which has yielded and might yield more philosophical and
psychological insights about their thinking of the psyche, and to our
thinking of the psyche. "Diapason" is one of those categories. Primary
texts of Renaissance musical theory would have told you. That is where the
psychoanalysis which is lexicalized in such books as Laplanche and Pontalis
might benefit from such theory, as from rhetorical theory. 

On this matter, and here I return to a point Professor Grossman made a
while ago with regard to Lacan, I am also amazed by the tendency of
scholars to turn to the OED, *The Language of Psychoanalysis*, or feminist
misreadings of Lacan, instead of to Lacan, sixteenth-century rhetorical
treatises, sixteenth-century music/music theory books. We do have a
professional/intelelctual responsibility not to use terms loosely and to
know the culture in which our authors were steeped.               

As for Deleuze, I leave it to list members more qualified than I to
enlighten you further on this subject, but can tell you *Anti-Oedipus* and
*Mille Plateaux* (co-authored with Guattari) have always been my least
favoured among his works I know. I would recommend, for a start,
*Difference and Repetition*, which I think could stimulate interesting
conceptual (not semantic) discussion on categories which have been coming
up on this list, such as Marlowe's various aliases, and the relation
between Pythagoreanism and pastoralism, or the Greek as compared with the
sixteenth-century forms of pastoral gifts. Or you could try the essay "On
the Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy" in
Deleuze's last book, *Essays Critical and Clinical.* It's quite short (but
dense). This with due credit and deep gratitude to Aim Luski, who
introduced me to this brilliant essay.           

My answer to your next question is: both. I do mean and have been arguing
for a long time that Lacanian psychoanalysis is implicit in Renaissance
texts, *and* that these texts manifest a complex thinking of the psyche. I
fail to identify a primitivism in Renaisance rhetoric and poetry in the
sense of "less progressed" I think you intend it, although I do think they
reflect about the "primitive" or archaic state of the psyche, which does
not mean what is lesser, but, instead, what is most fundamental, origin --
it has to do, as you wanted me to say for you, but not just in the
corporeal sense. It has even more to do with the phallus (which is not what
feminists and many literary critics referring to Lacan think it is) which
Lacan theorizes in *Seminar V* recursively, in relation to its function of
the most archaic mysteries of origin, the ecstatic/choreographic mysteris
of Eleusis. There, male and female, phalos and omphalos were, but not
entirely distinct. Just as in Marlowe's "Passionate Shepheard" and
Shakespeare's sonnets #134, 135.    

I think, on the basis of many years of researching, reading, teaching,
thinking, and writing about little else -- that Renaissance authors did
have the complexity of thinking to manage many things -- one point among
several on which I concur with Peter Zenner, a fascinatingly complex
thinker of our own day -- and, as I have been suggesting in print and on
this list, I think they did have the language with which to articulate this
thinking. Part of this language is the rhetorical/musical theory I analyze
in my book and earlier articles. Another part, as I suggested in an erlier
post today, is in the language of pastoral poetry. Renaissance rhetoric and
pastoral undeniably have a systmaticity of their own -- another point on
which Deleuze's thinking on difference and repetition are apt, and on which
early modern (and Pythagorean) thinking anticipated Deleuze. This being
said, your suspicions notwithstanding, it is irrelevant that Spenser did
not read Lacan. He understood many of the things Lacan was to understand,
and more.    

This leads directly to the next part of your engaging message, regarding
time and teleology. As I pointed out in an earlier discussion with
Professor Willett, the two are not one and the same category. It does not
go without saying that human thinking (and this, again, is a category
distinct from technology) progresses linearaly and teleologically. Nor is
it clear that everyone is teleological deep down. Psychoanalysis argues the
reverse. So, in tehir diapasonically different way, do Barnfield in
"Orphues his Journey to Hell* and Dickenon in *Euphues Among his Slumbers
or Cupid's Journey to Hell*. So of course there is a fallacy of teleology
in my thinking, because I do not view time linearly and teleologically as
you do, but recursively and concentrically, like Barnfield, Dickenson, the
Pythagoreans, deleuae, and Montrelay. I think Renaissance thinkers may have
had at least as much profound understanding of fundamental psychic and
philosophical categories as we do. Listen to what Petter Zenner has been
telling us about how some of them have managed to dupe so many for four
centuries. It may take brilliant, facsinating, creative, insightful, and
telepathic minds such as his to begin to unfold what they have thought.
Part of my professional frustration with the field of Renaissance studies,
and I am being very frank as well as serious here, is that I think it will
take too long for one person, will take quite a number of such minds to
unfold their thinking, and there seems to be such a dearth of these in the
field. 

Of course we differ not only in our thinking about time but in our attitude
to the explicit. Of course, as a psychoanalytical thinker I grant much more
importance to what is not said explicitly. What is implicit or unconscious
is far more important. Lacan calls what is said explicitly "empty speech,"
as contrasted with the "full speech" of the unconscious which reveals
itself through sounds and forms. Montrelay has a fascinating article about
listening to/for such full speech entitled "On Folding and Unfolding." It
might interest you also because she calls this art at once the art of
"primitive listening" which magically leads back to origin (as a
psychic/conceptual, not anatomical category). And of course, as Peter
Zenner has been saying on this list, I think, truth is occult, what is
hidden. Renaissance thinkers knew this about the occult. And they also
anticipated psychoanalysis in calling to listen to what is not explicitly
said. Doesn't Shakespeare tell us *explicitly* in sonnets #116 129 that
what is said explicitly in these sonnest is a cliche and that we ought
therefore to listen for what these, and other sonnets, have to say about
the psyche on other levels (rhetorical/phonic)? I always start off my
Shakespeare courses teaching those. I see them as the most instructive ways
of ushering students into the psychoanalytic thinking of the sixteenth
century which knew more about the pscyhe than we think we know today.       

I am sincerely grateful for your questions and your engaing in this
dialogue. And seriously grateful for your apt psychoanalytical observations
concerning my ecsattic musicality, and your compliment regarding Merlin. I
feel the most gratified by your sometimes explicit, sometimes
implicit/unconscious, engagement with pscyho-conceptually significant
rhetorical categories (ellipsis, prolepsis, simile, irony). 

My heartiest thanks, and very best,

elliptically ......

Shirley       

 



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