[lbo-talk] Y'all Yeti for This (was: How many earths)

[Carrol Cox]

shag carpet bomb wrote: "I have been telling him that it would be
delicious to have him consider Zizek's explorations of woman-as-thing in
the context of chivalrous love, where the obvious issue is about putting
woman on a pedastal and, thereby, emptying her of content, subjectivity.
But the less obvious thing about the chivalrous lover is that the
chivalrous lover never actually wants to have sex with the Lady, though
that would seem his most obvious desire."

Query: When you talking about "chivalrous love" are you referring to the
present or to the development of the practice in Provencal during the
middle ages? If you are referring to the latter, this is probably
incorrect. Sex was very much in mind - and some troubadours quite
literally died (at the husband's hands) for having achieved it. Some
were probably (through choice or failure of effort) as sexless as you
claim here. It was in any case always a relationshp ('platonic' or
actual) with a married woman: i.e., it  celebrated adultery. The
adulterous love of the courtly tradition got turned into married love in
the 17th century by Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. 

There is a late Spanish romance in which, at the ned, the hero marries
the heroine, and begins repeating some of his rapturous speeches which
had punctuated the text. She interrupts him: We can't be in love now,
we're married."

Carrol