Selfless

Since it was published in 1954, Histoire d'O (Story of O), has vividly represented certain extremes of domination and submission. Through that empty vowel snake forked whips, corset lacing, and amber lashes of whiskey. No one imagined that a woman had written it until the journalist and editor Dominique Aury announced to The New Yorker, four years before her death, that she had composed the work as a series of love letters to the editor Jean Paulhan, her lover and an admirer of de Sade.

For the first half of the book, the main character, O, whose inner life is admittedly not explored in great detail, expresses no desire other than to please her lover, Rene. She waits, bathes, dresses, strips, sleeps, and submits to strange and often brutal encounters at his will and does not seem to mind, whatever that might mean in the context of their relationship. However, this undiluted desire to please him is troubled when Rene introduces a proxy between them in the form of his friend, Sir Stephen, and informs O that from now on pleasing Rene will mean pleasing Sir Stephen. In a parody of a wedding ceremony, O is asked to verbally hand herself over to this new master whom, unlike Rene, she does not love.

For the first time, she balks. The snag in this arrangement is not being asked to submit to another man's advances, but having to swear a new allegiance and, in doing so, willfully abdicating her own will. "Le plus difficile, se disait O, n'était pas d'accepter...Le plus difficile était simplement de parler" (89-90). More difficult than obeying as an object is obeying as a subject.

This is the first incarnation of the paradox we are here to discuss and it is erotic.

The second is religious, articulated by Marguerite de Porete, a 14th-century Christian mystic, and paraphrased by Anne Carson in her recent work Decreation: "...she understands the essence of her human self to be in her free will and she decides that free will has been placed in her by God in order that she may give it back. She therefore causes her will to depart from its own will and render itself back to God with nothing left over," (163) is how Carson explains de Porete's version of faith. What might be left over? The pride of the self-righteous, the glory of the saved: none of this residue is allowed the true saint.

How is de Porete like O? Not in aspect, but in gesture, in the figure they cut. Both women define the self through its abandonment.

The third face of this shape is rational and it comes to us via the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. He describes God as infinite consciousness, a vast mind comprising the natural world, its physical laws, and its every being, and maps out a route to salvation along which ever expanding knowledge lifts the seeker out of themself and brings them ever closer to the point of perfect -- and divine -- objectivity. There is a truth in this philosophy and it is singular, accessible to all, and utterly lacking in perspective: a view without viewpoint.

According to his biographer Rebecca Goldstein, Spinoza came to this vision of the Almighty in response to an excess of identity. A Portguese Jew living in Holland, he was surrounded by the violence, both internal and societal, that excessive adherence to identity can spark and so aspired to shed his individuality and exist in a realm beyond the particular, filled only with the static harmony of reason.

And so it is that these three characters -- the lover, the prophet, and the philosopher -- align in their need to exercise this paradox. Their compulsion to trace the same shape suggests that the limit of erotic, religious, and intellectual realization can only be reached in the eradication of that troublesome and unruly thing: the self.

Selves are problematic in many ways. Selves conflict. They fear, often for the preservation of their selfhood, and so they jealously guard their own security. They long for things they can only have at the expense of other selves. They suffer loss, they fade away, and are forgotten. They are limited in their knowledge and often stubborn in their beliefs. Most damning of all, perhaps, is that selves can only communicate with one another in limited ways: by talking, for example, or singing, or making faces. It is hard to build a coherent philosophy or radiant image of divinity, hard even to conceive of the completeness love, when dealing with such rough-edged and uncooperative materials. So our visionaries invite us to give up our troublesome selves in exchange for something greater.

And after all, isn't this something we all long for, sometimes? To melt into someone else, to evaporate out of our own skin clear into the silent thicket of other people's thoughts? Understanding seems always to bump against the gate of consciousness, desperately passing words back and forth through the bars, hoping that one phrase or another will smuggle in a key to set it loose...so we read: medieval manuscripts, enlightenment tracts, dirty novels. We read and we comb the skies and everyday sink a little bit deeper into ourselves.