#PROFOUNDLY UNJUST!!!!! as if it were the same thing as if it were perfectly acceptable in love. violence done upon me this fucking book

[joelletwo]

A pun is a figure of language that depends on similarity of sound and disparity of meaning. It matches two sounds that fit perfectly together as aural shapes yet stand insistently, provocatively apart in sense. You perceive homophony and at the same time see the semantic space that separates the two words. Sameness is projected onto difference in a kind of stereoscopy. There is something irresistible in that. Puns appear in all literatures, are apparently as old as language and unfailingly fascinate us. Why? If we had the answer to this question we would know more clearly what the lover is searching for as he moves and reasons through the borderlands of his desire. We do not yet have an answer. Nonetheless we should pay attention to the punning character of the lover’s logic: its structure and its irresistibility have something important to tell us about desire, and about the lover’s search. We have seen how Sokrates makes use of punning language to slip from one sense of oikeios (‘kindred’) to another sense (‘mine’) when in the Lysis he is discussing eros as lack. Sokrates makes no attempt to conceal his wordplay here; indeed, he draws attention to it with an uncommon grammatical usage. He deliberately mixes up reciprocal and reflexive pronouns when he addresses the two philoi, Lysis and Menexenos. That is, when he says to them “… you belong to one another” (221e6) he uses a word for ‘one another’ that more commonly means ‘yourselves’ (hautois).* Sokrates is playing, through words, upon the desires of the young lovers before him. Mix-up of self and other is much more easily achieved in language than in life, but somewhat the same effrontery is involved. Like eros, puns flout the edges of things. Their power to allure and alarm derives from this. Within a pun you see the possibility of grasping a better truth, a truer meaning, than is available from the separate senses of either word. But the glimpse of that enhanced meaning, which flashes past in a pun, is a painful thing. For it is inseparable from your conviction of its impossibility. Words do have edges. So do you.

this section made me genuinely sick to read through before /COMPLIMENT

*directly preceding section that lays out this passage more, cut for fucking length of her paragraphs:

It seems impossible to talk or reason about erotic lack without falling into this punning language. Consider, for example, Plato’s Lysis. In this dialogue Sokrates is attempting to define the Greek word philos, which means both ‘loving’ and ‘loved,’ both ‘friendly’ and ‘dear.’ He takes up the question whether the desire to love or befriend something is ever separable from lack of it. His interlocutors are led to acknowledge that all desire is longing for that which properly belongs to the desirer but has been lost or taken away somehow—no one says how (221e-22a). Puns flash as the reasoning quickens. This part of the discussion depends upon an adroit use of the Greek word oikeios, which means both ‘suitable, related, akin to myself’ and ‘belonging to me, properly mine.’ So Sokrates addresses the two boys who are his interlocutors and says: … Τοῦ οἰκείου δή, ὡς ἔοικεν, ὅ τε ἔρως καὶ ἡ φιλία καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία τυγχάνει οὖσα, ὡς φαίνεται, ὧ Μενέξενέ τε καὶ Λύσι.—Συνεφάτην.—Ὑμεῖς ἄρα εἰ φίλοι ἐστὸν ἀλλήλοις, φύσει πη οἰκεῖοί ἐσθ᾽ ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς. … Desire and love and longing are directed at that which is akin to oneself [tou oikeiou], it seems. So if you two are loving friends [philoi] of one another then in some natural way you belong to one another [oikeioi esth’]. (221e) It is profoundly unjust of Sokrates to slip from one meaning of oikeios to another, as if it were the same thing to recognize in someone else a kindred soul and to claim that soul as your own possession, as if it were perfectly acceptable in love to blur the distinction between yourself and the one you love. All the lover’s reasoning and hopes of happiness are built upon this injustice, this claim, this blurred distinction. So his thought process is continually moving and searching through the borderland of language where puns occur. What is the lover searching for there?

[elektramouthed]

 Puns flash as the reasoning quickens. This part of the discussion depends upon an adroit use of the Greek word oikeios, which means both ‘suitable, related, akin to myself’ and ‘belonging to me, properly mine.’  [...]  It is profoundly unjust of Sokrates to slip from one meaning of oikeios to another, as if it were the same thing to recognize in someone else a kindred soul and to claim that soul as your own possession, as if it were perfectly acceptable in love to blur the distinction between yourself and the one you love. All the lover’s reasoning and hopes of happiness are built upon this injustice, this claim, this blurred distinction. So his thought process is continually moving and searching through the borderland of language where puns occur. What is the lover searching for there?

Anne Carson, from Eros the Bittersweet

[splendidemendax]

tbh it goes beyond fanon theories to straight up textual shit

like i can't look at this:

It is profoundly unjust of Sokrates to slip from one meaning of oikeios to another, as if it were the same thing to recognize in someone else a kindred soul and to claim that soul as your own possession, as if it were perfectly acceptable in love to blur the distinction between yourself and the one you love. All the lover’s reasoning and hopes of happiness are built upon this injustice, this claim, this blurred distinction. —Carson, Eros the Bittersweet 34 (emphasis mine)

and not think of:

KIRK: But even if there's a chance that Spock has an eternal soul ...then it's my responsibility. MORROW: Yours? KIRK: As surely as if it were my very own! —Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (emphasis mine)

i am going to need to be physically restrained from bringing anne carson's theories of desire from eros the bittersweet to bear on fanon theories of vulcan bonds