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My Favorite Authors, My Favorite Films, My Favorite Music

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MY FAVORITE BOOKS, MY FAVORITE FILMS, MY FAVORITE MUSIC: Joseph Suglia

My favorite music is German Progressive Rock from 1969 until 1987.

My favorite writings include those of Johan August Strindberg, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, David Herbert Lawrence, Algernon Blackwood, James Graham Ballard, Elias Canetti, Roland Topor, William Shakespeare, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and [name redacted].

My favorite film is Brainstare (2025), directed by Steve Balderson and written by Joseph Suglia.

Joseph Suglia

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David Foster Wallace Is a Bad Writer: Part Five: INFINITE JEST / David Foster Wallace Was a Bad Writer / Is David Foster Wallace Overrated? Is INFINITE JEST Overrated? Critique of INFINITE JEST / Criticizing INFINITE JEST / Criticizing David Foster Wallace. A Critique of David Foster Wallace: Part Five: INFINITE JEST / David Foster Wallace Is Overrated

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A Critique of David Foster Wallace: Part Five: INFINITE JEST

by Joseph Suglia

The writings of Lessing and Kant are the magna opera of the German Enlightenment.  The works of Novalis and Schelling are the magna opera of Early German Romanticism.  Joyce’s Ulysses is the magnum opus of European Modernism.  The poems of Trakl and the films of Murnau are the magna opera of German Expressionism.  The films Un Chien andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930) are the magna opera of French Surrealism.

Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace is the magnum opus of American Hipsterism.

What is a “hipster,” you ask?  A hipster is one who has what Hegel described as an “unhappy consciousness”: He is a self that is at variance with itself.

* * * * *

Anyone who has spent any time in academia will instantly recognize Wallace’s pedigree upon opening this book.  Wallace was an academic writer.  Unhappily, all connotations of “academic” are intentional.  That is to say, the book is both fantastically banal and seems to have been composed, disconsolately and mechanistically, in a registrar’s office.  It is not arbitrary that the narrative begins in the Department of Admissions of a tennis college.  The language here recalls the world of registration- and withdrawal-forms and the world of classrooms where works such as this are spawned, dissected, and pickled—the world of the academic industry.

Wallace: “Matriculations, gender quotas, recruiting, financial aid, room-assignments, mealtimes, rankings, class v. drill schedules, prorector-hiring… It’s all the sort of thing that’s uninteresting unless you’re the one responsible…” [451].

I wonder if anyone besides Wallace has ever found these things interesting.

Since no one else has taken the trouble to encapsulate the narrative, permit me to attempt to do so here.  The novel seems to have two diegetic threads and a meta-narrative.  The first thread concerns the incandescent descent of Hal Incandenza, teenager and tennis student, into drug addiction.  (Well, no, it isn’t quite incandescent, not quite luciferous, at all, but I liked the way that sounded.)  The second outlines the shaky recovery of Don Gately, criminal, from Demerol.  The “woof,” I imagine, details the efforts of a cabal of Quebecois terrorists to inject a death-inducing motion picture of the same title as this book into the American bloodstream.  All of this takes place in a soupy, fuzzy future in which Mexico and Canada have been relegated to satellites of the onanistic “Organization of North American Nations.”  Predictably, and much like NAFTA, America is at the epicenter of this reconfiguration.

It is hard to care about any of this.  If Wallace had written fluidly, things would have been otherwise.  It is not that the book is complex, nor that its prose is burnished (if only it were!).  The problem is much different: The sentences are so awkwardly articulated and turgid that the language is nearly unreadable.  You will wish that someone would fluidify the congested prose while struggling with the waves of irritation and lassitude that will weave their way through you.

There is literary litter everywhere.  No, “nauseous” does not mean “nauseated.”  No, “presently” does not mean “at present.”  Such faults are mere peccadilloes, however, especially when one considers the clunkiness of Wallace’s language.  A few examples:

1.) “The unAmerican guys chase Lenz and then stop across the car facing him for a second and then get furious again and chase him” [610].  I am having a hard time visualizing this scene.

2.) “Avril Incandenza is the sort of tall beautiful woman who wasn’t ever quite world-class, shiny-magazine beautiful, but who early on hit a certain pretty high point on the beauty scale and has stayed right at that point as she ages and lots of other beautiful women age too and get less beautiful” [766].  It would take more effort to edit this see-Spot-run sentence than it did, I suspect, to write it.

3.) “The puppet-film is reminiscent enough of the late Himself that just about the only more depressing thing to pay attention to or think about would be advertising and the repercussions of O.N.A.N.ite Reconfiguration for the U.S. advertising industry” [411].  This is a particularly representative example of Wallace’s heavy, cluttered style—a sentence larded with substantives.

4.) “So after the incident with the flaming cat from hell and before Halloween Lenz had moved on and up to the Browning X444 Serrated he even had a shoulder-holster for, from his previous life Out There” [545].  So… Lenz moves “on and up” to a knife… “from” his previous life?  If this is a sentence, it is the ugliest I’ve yet read.

To say such a thing would be to say too little.  Nearly every sentence is overpoweringly ugly and repellently clumsy.  Not a single sentence–not one–is beautiful, defamiliarizing, or engaging.  I am sorry to write this, but Infinite Jest is a joylessly, zestlessly, toxically written book and the poisonous fruit of academic bureaucracy.

* * * * *

A few valedictory words: It would be tasteless–raffish, even–to malign the literary estate of a recent suicide.  Wallace was nothing if not intelligent, and his death is a real loss.  Had he lived longer, he might have left us books that impress and delight.  Let me advise the reader to avoid this plasticized piece of academic flotsam and pick up and pick at instead Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, his one tolerable book, his true gift to the afterlife and the afterdeath.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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Quentin Tarantino is an anti-black racist. Is DJANGO UNCHAINED racist? Is Quentin Tarantino racist? DJANGO UNCHAINED is a work of anti-black racism. Race Analysis. Representation of Race. Quentin Tarantino and Race. Quentin Tarantino and Racism. Django Unchained and Racism. Django Unchained Race Controversy. Django Unchained Racist Controversy

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Quentin Tarantino Is an Anti-Black Racist

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

Quentin Tarantino is a beslobbered anti-black racist who makes Blaxploitation films for hipsters.  These hipsters grow aggressively defensive whenever African-Americans stand up and denounce these very films.  (Roxane Gay, Spike Lee, Katt Williams, and Armond White are only a few of the African-Americans who have spoken out against Tarantino’s racism.)  Tarantino wishes to prove to his hipster fanatic base that he knows African-American culture better than African-Americans know their own culture.  And his hipster fanboys also desire that feeling–the feeling that they understand African-Americans better than African-Americans understand themselves.  (For an analysis of the mind of the hipster, consult Norman Mailer’s essay on this topic.)

Tarantino’s latest abomination is Django Unchained (2012), a film about a murderer-for-hire named Dr. King Schultz (Christopher Waltz) who enlists an African slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) to assist him in his mass-murdering spree.  Their journey ends at Candyland, a plantation owned by the oleaginous Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio, in an amusing and impressive performance that elevates above the film and never quite descends into camp).  There is much to demur to, but I will restrict myself to three demurrals: 1.) The film is an agglomeration of plagiarisms.  2.) The film is crypto-racist garbage.  3.) The screen violence is without passion or meaning.

DJANGO UNCHAINED IS AN AGGLOMERATION OF PLAGIARISMS

Django Unchained is a pastiche of Spaghetti Westerns.  The opening song was lifted directly from the English-language version of Django (1966).  On the soundtrack is a well-known composition from Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)–an American Spaghetti Western, if there ever was one.  There is also an appearance by Franco Nero, star of the original Django, which is a pointless, meaningless cinematic reference that adds nothing whatsoever to the film, which is itself a pointless, meaningless accumulation of cinematic references.

The references are smarmily, unctuously obvious.  One thinks of the scene in which Schultz recounts to Django the basics of Das Nibelungenlied.  If Tarantino were an artist, he wouldn’t have spelled out the legend of Siegfried and Brunhilda for the benefit of his illiterate spectatorship.

Not merely does the film contain a cluster of plagiarisms; it itself is a plagiarism.  The film is an unacknowledged remake of the Mandingo films of the 1970s–in particular, Mandingo (1975) and its sequel, Drum (1976).  Tarantino steals from these sources to such a degree that his film would have been better entitled Mandingo Unchained.

Calvin Candie is clearly modeled on two characters in Drum: DeMarigny (John Colicos), connoisseur of Mandingo fights, and Warren Oates’s character Hammond, slave-owner and breeder of Mandingos.  Both characters were spliced together to create the hybrid Calvin Candie, lover of intra-racial violence.

The Mandingo-fight scene [1:05] owes everything to the original Mandingo film, although different body parts are excised.  In Django Unchained, an eye is enucleated.  In Mandingo, a jugular vein is torn out.

Quentin Tarantino isn’t very much different from Calvin Candie.  After all, they both enjoy watching Mandingo fighting.

DJANGO UNCHAINED IS CRYPTO-RACIST TRASH

On the surface, Django Unchained seems to be directed against white anti-black racism.  But it is itself a work of white anti-black racism.

Now, I like revenge-fantasies as much as the next person, but there is something more sordid, more sinister going on here than what goes on in most revenge-fantasies (“You got me!  Now I’m gonna get you, sucka!”).  Like its predecessor, Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained is a work of genocide pornography, the cruelest, most unconscionably vicious form of pornography in existence.  The crude plot of Inglourious Basterds trivializes the Holocaust; the crude plot of Django Unchained trivializes the enslavement of Africans in antebellum America.

But Django Unchained does more than merely trivialize the enslavement of Africans in nineteenth-century America.  It turns the enslavement of Africans into an object of consumption, an object of enjoyment.

To call this film “ahistorical” would be to utter a gross understatement.  The film approximates history as closely as Spongebob Squarepants approximates marine biology.  With one important qualification: The creator of Spongebob Squarepants actually knows a great deal about marine biology, even if he chooses not to exhibit this knowledge in the television program that he spawned.  This film bears no relation to history whatsoever.  It is a bombinating vacuum in which references from exploitation films resonate.

No one in the nineteenth century ever said, “Adult supervision is required.”  Nor did anyone ever use the term “***********************************.”

Slaves could not read, but Django does a pretty good job of reading aloud the text of a Wanted poster [0:57].  He doesn’t know the words “bounty,” “valet,” or “positive,” but he does know the words “antagonize” and “intrigue.”  As Katt Williams pointed out, it is odd that Django can spell his own name.

The late populist film critic Roger Ebert used the term deus ex machina (“God-out-of-the-machine”) to describe the entry of Schultz in the opening of the film.  That moment isn’t quite a deus ex machina–such a device is commonly used at the end of a work, such as when Helios transports Medea on a golden chariot at the end of Euripides’ tragedy.

However, Ebert was correct to call Schultz a “god.”  He just didn’t know the extent to which he was correct.

Schultz is a god, all right.  He is the white god who creates the black Django.  “I feel vaguely responsible for you,” he says to Django.  “I gave you your freedom.”

Yes, it is Schultz who grants Django his liberty.  The first time we see Django’s face is when Schultz shines light on him.  It is Schultz who transforms Django into a murderer-for-hire.  It is Schultz who sculpts Django into a full human being.

Django is not allowed to kill Calvin Candie.  Only the Good White Master is allowed to kill the Evil White Master.  Django is allowed to kill Candie’s minions–both black and white — but not their Evil White Master.  Django has a master, all right, and his name is Dr. King Schultz.

It is for this reason that Will Smith declined to assume the role of Django: “Django wasn’t the lead, so it was like, I need to be the lead.  The other character was the lead!  I was like, ‘No, Quentin, please, I need to kill the bad guy!'”

Will Smith’s objection to the film gets to the heart of the problem: Django is a secondary character, the Good White Master’s marionette.

Much has been made of the use of racist language in the film.  That is because Tarantino enjoys using racist language.  Racist words, evidently, are his favorite words in the English language, a language that he does not know very well.  He expresses racist words with brio, emitting them with gusto, as if such words were  shibboleths.

One recalls the infamous (I am using this word in its proper sense) scene in Pulp Fiction (1994) in which Tarantino-playing-Tarantino utters a racist word in Tourette’s-like staccato beats.  There is no point in arguing that Tarantino is playing a character and that his character is racist, not Tarantino, when Tarantino is obviously playing himself in the scene.  The delight that he feels whenever he bleats the racist word is palpable.

Django Unchained is backwater-garbage, racist filth, intended for ugly-souled, racist hipster-fanboy-cretins.  The film is retrogressive because it imagines that White (the presence of all light and absence of all pigment) and Black (the absence of all light and presence of many pigments) are races that have really existent correspondents.  Race is not a categorical fact.  Race does not exist; only individuals exist.  The film erodes and erases so many of the steps that America has taken over the past four years.  I wrote the words above on 13 July 2013, the day on which George Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

What is a racist?  A racist is someone who has nothing of which to be proud other than his or her epidermal pigmentation.  We are, all of us, out of Africa.  Anthropologists have established that Africa is the cradle of humanity and that there are only epidermal subdivisions between us.  It makes no sense to speak of “race,” since each individual “race” encompasses so many of these subdivisions.

Quentin Tarantino hypostatizes race.

THE VIOLENCE IN THE FILM IS PASSIONLESS

I don’t mind screen violence.  Screen violence can be bracing.  The problem with the representational violence in Django Unchained is that it is mechanical, spiritless, passionless.  It is difficult to understand how or why anyone would be offended by the violence in the films of Tarantino.  The violence in all of his films is automatized, transactional, emotionless.

I would like to call your attention to the moment [0:57] in which Schultz murders the alleged stagecoach robber Smitty Bacall.  Schultz snipes at his victim from a distance of about 200 feet.  Tarantino shoots the man from a distance of 200 feet, as well.  There is a complete emotional disengagement between the murderer and the murderee.  There is also a complete emotional disengagement between the film and the murderee.  We see the man’s son running to his father and hear the boy screaming, “Pa! Pa!”  But the boy and his father are no more than flecks of dust on the screen.  The father and son are hardly represented as human beings, at all.

And what about the scene that immediately follows the one that I just described?  The scene in which Django and Schultz use a band of cowboys for target practice [0:58]?  What, precisely, did these cowboys do to deserve to be gunned down?

All of the murders are filmed with the detached eye of a psychopath.

By contrast, the death scenes in the films of Nicolas Roeg are historically intense.  “A young man is cut down in the prime of his life,” Roeg said, referring to his directorial debut, Performance (1970).  “[Death] is an important thing.”

The murder of Lara Lee Candie (Laura Cayouette), Calvin’s sister [2:39], is as passionate as the deletion of an unneeded Microsoft Word document.

In Django Unchained, human characters (and horses) are eliminated with the same passion with which you would close pop-up advertisements on your computer screen.

* * * * *

The antistrophe to my arguments is quite predictable.  “It’s only a movie” comes the bleating response.  You can hear the booing, the cooing, and the mooing: “It’s only a mooooooooooooooooooovie.”  Keep on telling yourselves that: “It’s only a moooooooooooovie…  It’s only a moooooooooovie…”

Despite such zoo-noise, it can be said, without fear of exaggeration or absurdity, that Django Unchained is one of the vilest motion pictures ever made.  Not because of its violence (again, screen violence can be bracing), but because it delights in the exploitation and dehumanization of African-Americans.  Quentin Tarantino is a hate-criminal, and Django Unchained is a hate-crime.

Dr. Joseph Suglia, table41thenovel.com

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Romeo, Juliet, and Deleuze: Together at Last! by Joseph Suglia / Romeo and Juliet / Shakespeare’s THE MOST EXCELLENT AND LAMENTABLE TRAGEDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET / The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare / ROMEO AND JULIET by Shakespeare / William Shakespeare, ROMEO AND JULIET: Analysis, Interpretation / twentieth-century French philosophy and Shakespeare / Romeo and Juliet

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Romeo, Juliet, and Deleuze: Together at Last!

by Joseph Suglia

“Zu wenig Liebe, zu wenig Gerechtigkeit und Erbarmen, und immer zu wenig Liebe…—das bin ich.”

—Georg Trakl, in a letter to Ludwig von Ficken, June 1913

THE PRODUCTIVITY OF DESIRE

One of the great lessons of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) is that most of our desires are not our own.  Despite the turbidity of their language, I believe that this is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they suggest that most desire is embedded in the social order itself: “The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions.  We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire…  There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.”  That is to say: Most desires are not individual; they are social.  They are manifest in the world; most of our desires are already part of the world as such.  Deleuze and Guattari make no distinction between social production and the production of socially conditioned desires.

It is not the case that desire is geared toward an absence.  It is not the case that we want what we don’t have.  Quite otherwise: We don’t long for what we don’t have—for the most part, what we want is already part of the really existing concrete landscapes of the cultures in which we live.  We want what others want; we want what we are prescribed to want.  Most of our desires are premanufactured and mass-manufactured; they are herd-desires, group-desires.  The Platonic-Lacanian theory of desire, which posits that desire is based on absence, is erroneous.  Desire is not empty; it is already full.  Nothing is missing from desire; it already has all that it needs.

Needs do not produce desires.  The exact opposite is the case: Desires produce needs.  Most of our desires do not respond to preexisting needs.  No one is born wanting an Automated Robotic Friend.  Desire creates the need for an Automated Robotic Friend.  Desires rapidly convert into needs; in consumerist culture, there is an infinitely accelerating and multiplying conversion of our desires into needs.  Now, it becomes a need for me to have the newest Bluetooth-compatible selfie stick.  Such things, such commodities, are appendages without which I cannot live.

There is a different kind of desire for Deleuze and Guattari, a desire that they denominate “real desire.”  Real desires would not be desires for our own repression, desires for our own persecution, desires for our own exploitation, desires to reproduce an army of docile consumer-workers, but an altogether different kind of desiring—a desiring that is not socially configured or designed.  I will use the word “love” to describe this other-desire.

Love means the undoing of the community, since love is not reducible to the norms of any community.  This thought is metaphorized beautifully in Shakespeare’s The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (circa 1591-1595).

The desire of Juliet Capulet for Romeo Montague and the desire of Romeo Montague for Julie Capulet are not herd-desires; they are not collective desires.  Both Romeo and Juliet are created by the desire that they have for each other.  It is only a social desire in the self-productive sense—for do Romeo and Juliet not form a society of two?  Though their social is desire, their desire is not the social.  In other words: The love of Romeo for Juliet and of Juliet for Romeo is not familial desire, is not collectivized desire, is not acculturated desire.  It is the subversive desire of each for the other (I will return to this subject below).

The desire of the young lovers is spontaneous (self-productive) and active: As soon as they see each other, they are transformed.  There are at least two signs of this transformation: 1.) Romeo is willing to repudiate his own birth name for the sake of Juliet.  2.) Romeo immediately forgets his erstwhile beloved, Rosaline, as soon as he fixes his eyes on Juliet.  From the moment that they see each other, Romeo and Juliet become entirely other.

Now, Romeo would not be Romeo outside of his relationship to Juliet, as Juliet would not be Juliet outside of her relationship to Romeo.  Who are they apart from their desires?  From this point forward, they do not exist apart from the desires that they have for each other.  Their amatory desire for each other gives birth to Romeo.  Their amatory desire for each other gives birth to Juliet.  The relation precedes the relata.  In other words: The impulsions and propulsions of real desire imply the loss of the self-sufficient subject.  I believe that this one of the things that Deleuze and Guattari mean when they write: “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack an object.  It is, rather the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject.”

We see this clearly in the second scene of Act Three.  Juliet asks the maddeningly tangential Nurse: “Hath Romeo slain himself?” [III:ii].  Juliet is No One without Romeo, as Romeo is No One without Juliet: “I am not I if there be such an ‘Ay’” [III:ii].  Such is the subjectlessness of the desire, the asubjective character of all real desire.

JULIET IS A NOMINALIST

I am not the first literary critic to notice that Juliet Capulet is a nominalist: The title of Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose is predicated on this premise.  A nominalist is one who thinks that words are generalities that, in order to signify anything at all, must transcend any particular context.  (The deconstructionists are therefore nominalists by another name.)  A word is only a word—and does not refer to any being or object in the world.  My question to the nominalists would be: Can a word not also be a thing in the world?  When a word is written, is it not a thing?

Juliet refuses to accept that Romeo is defined and confined by, restricted and reducible to the name “Montague,” the name of the familial clan that opposes her familial clan.  From the window, she serenades Romeo:

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy. / Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. / What’s Montague?  It is nor hand nor foot, / Nor arm nor face nor any other part / Belonging to a man.  O be some other name! / What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet; / So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, / Retain that dear perfection which he owes / Without the title.  Romeo, doff thy name, / And for thy name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself [II:ii].

The olfactory sensation—the aroma of the rose—is independent of the word “rose.”  What is this if not nominalism?  Juliet is suggesting that the word “rose” is an abstraction that is abstracted from the referent, the physical rose, as it is from any other referent.  She implores Romeo to retain his “dear perfection”—his essence, his character, his quiddity, his haecceity, his ipseity—even if another surname were substituted for “Montague” and even if another given name were substituted for “Romeo.”  Charmingly, Juliet has an intuitive understanding of the arbitrariness of naming.  Names are artificially grafted to things and to people; they are mere universals that never touch particulars.  That it is possible to “doff [one’s] name”—this is Juliet’s charmingly naïve belief that beings are beings without language.  Endearingly, she pleads with Romeo to strip away his name in exchange for any other.  And Romeo agrees.  He hates his own name since that name is hateful to Juliet and, were it written, would rend it to pieces: “Had I it written, I would tear the word” [Ibid.].  Her distrust of language shows itself again when she implores Romeo not to swear his love to her: “Well, do not swear” [Ibid.].  A contract between them would have no more weight than the words “It lightens” [Ibid.].  Much as the lightning that ceases to be before one can say, “It lightens,” the contract between them might cease to be before the terms of the contract have been uttered.

The fact that Romeo is willing to discard—and, if necessary, mutilate—his surname implies that he does not see himself as reducible to his clan or definable by his clan.  Again, his desire for Juliet is not a communalized desire.

THE INVISIBLE CENTER OF THE PLAY IS ROSALINE

Readers should note that the seemingly minor characters in Shakespeare are often the most significant characters.  In The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, the most significant figure in the play is, arguably, Alarbus, who is a superficially peripheral character: Without Alarbus, the sequence of vengeance would never be instigated.  I believe that the key to understanding this play is Rosaline, though “key” is probably the wrong metaphor.  Better: I believe that the invisible center of the play is Rosaline.

When we first meet him, Romeo is mooning over Rosaline:

O brawling love, O loving hate, / O anything of nothing first create, / O heavy lightness, serious vanity, / Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, / Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, / Still-waking sleep that is not what it is. / This love feel I that feel no love in this [I:i].

Such is the Shakespearean paradoxology of love.  The use of antiphrasis (the combining of opposites) is remarkable: “love” blends with “brawling,” “loving” blends with “hate,” “heavy” blends with “lightness,” “serious” blends with “vanity,” “misshapen chaos” blends with “well-seeming forms,” “feather” blends with “lead,” “bright” blends with “smoke,” “cold” blends with “fire,” “sick” blends with “health,” “still-waking” blends with “sleep.”  Opposites are interlaced.  There is a coalescence or interpenetration of opposites, which means that love, for Shakespeare, is unsystematizable—for only that which is simple and undifferentiated can be systematized.

Rosaline is not named explicitly until the second scene of the first act, when Romeo recites the list of invited guests to Capulet’s feast.  She is first anonymous and then, the audience of readers / spectators only learn of her name from the recitation of the guest list, which foretokens her imminent departure from the thoughts of Romeo.  On the guest list, her name is nothing more than one name among other names.  She will quickly be replaced by Juliet Capulet, who is not listed on the guest list, since she is not a guest at all, but the only child and daughter of the great rich Capulet.

Oppressed by his love for Rosaline, Romeo cannot forswear Rosaline until he falls in love—instantaneously—with Juliet.  Sunday night, when Mercutio, Benvolio, and Romeo are masquerading themselves for the feast, Juliet will supplant Rosaline in Romeo’s mind.  This substitution of Juliet for Rosaline will take place in the span of no more than one hour—both Scene Four and Scene Five of the first act take place Sunday night, the night of the feast.  There is no more than an hour or so between the scenes.  The new beloved, Juliet, quickly kills off, interchanges with, the old beloved, Rosaline.  As the Chorus phrases it: “Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie, / And young affection gapes to be his heir” [II:0].

At the beginning of Act Two: Scene Three, it is the dawn of the day, and Friar Laurence is gathering baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers into an osier cage.  Friar Laurence sights Romeo and asks the young man if he spent the night with Rosaline.  Romeo’s response:

With Rosaline, my ghostly father?  No, / I have forgot that name and that name’s woe.

Friar Laurence is understandably shocked: “Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here!” [Ibid.].  The change that Romeo undergoes underscores the mutability and the malleability of love.  The fact that Rosaline is unnamed in the first act and is easily interchangeable likewise highlights the ductility of love—it is articulative of the thought that desire persists for as long as life persists.  If love is mutable yet ductile, it cannot be systematized and what is unsystematizable cannot be socially integrated.  Romeo’s desire is mutable and therefore his desire is revolutionary.  More precisely: The love of Romeo and Juliet issues in a revolution, literally.

DESIRE IS REVOLUTION

There is a war in the play between two Veronese families, the House of Capulet and the House of Montague, as is well-known.  The love of Juliet and Romeo is, above all, a subversive love.  The offspring of one rivaling clan falls in love with the offspring of another rivaling clan.  What is this, if not transgression / subversion / insubordination?  Juliet’s and Romeo’s transgressive, subversive, insubordinate desire remind us that all amatory desire is transgressive, subversive, insubordinate.  Romeo and Juliet are insubordinate to their respective families, transgressive of the laws of familialism, subversive to the will of their respective fathers.  For contemporary examples of this, one has only to think of current practices of exogamy, of interracial, interreligious, or transgenerational sociosexual / conjugal relationships.

No wonder that Romeo’s uninvited presence at the feast is decried by Tybalt as an “intrusion” [I:v], as the trespass of private property.  Romeo is there to seek out Rosaline, not Juliet, but no matter: He is a lover, and lovers are intrusive; they are interlopers.  No wonder that Romeo himself claims to “profane” the “holiest shrine” of Juliet’s hand [Ibid.].  Romeo’s desire for Juliet is metaphorized as blasphemy, as intrusion, as the infringement of the holy.  Desire profanes the sacred, for the sacred is nothing if not that which should not be desired.  Seconds after they fall in love at first sight and kiss at the feast, both Romeo and Juliet use the language of “trespass” and “sin” [Ibid.] to describe their mutual fascination.  And they say these words even before they know that they belong to enemy camps, reminding us that love is the transgression and profanation of the social order.

To return to Deleuze and Guattari: Real desire is revolutionary.  They argue: “Desire does not ‘want’ revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants.”  In a culture wherein citizens are labile, wherein citizens are neurotic subjects who are subject to the desires of capitalist culture, psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists are enlisted to keep them in line.  The analysand is kept in line by the psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychotherapists who direct one’s neuroses to the father or to the mother.  “What are your problems?” the psychotherapist asks.  No matter what your problems might be, the cause of your problems will forever be named “The Father” or “The Mother.”  Deleuze and Guattari are intimating that psychoanalysis supports fascism, since both systems of thought relegate singularities to authority.

Even before draining the ampoule of sleeping potion, Juliet has already infringed the social order.  Such is love’s unfettered character.  The desires of Romeo and Juliet are still social—but they are not the desires of the herd, of the family, of the clan.  Just as today, cult leaders, marketing firms, parents, teachers, bosses, psychiatrists tell you what to desire, Capulet and Lady Capulet tell Juliet who she should desire: the mediocre Paris.  For this reason, the desire of Romeo and Juliet for each other is anti-familial, explosive, liberated, and liberating and realigns the whole of the Veronese society.  Their desire for each other reminds us that desire is resistant, recalcitrant, renitent.

The Prologue summarizes the entire play:

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, / Whose misadventured piteous overthrows / Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.

Romeo and Juliet’s love for each other, “their death-marked love,” a love which inescapably ends in death, is transgressive and literally revolutionary.  It effects radical political change: the harmonization of the House of Capulet and the House of Montague.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

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