I have been arguing that our perception of the secular love tradition so influentially shaped by Petrarch changes significantly when we recognize that he renders in secular terms a Pauline and Augustinian conviction that faith is always aspirational, love always promiscuous. Through the influence of Petrarch, a Pauline theology of the divided will is translated into secular terms in some of the most canonical English Renaissance love poems. In this chapter, I ask: To what extent can that insight inform our understanding of the historical racialization of affect and sexuality embedded in modern norms and ideals? And how does the originally Catholic tradition of celibate devotion within which Petrarchan love originates relate to the beliefs of the Protestant Reformation that profoundly influenced the structure of Anglo-American politics, secularity, intimacy, and eroticism? To begin to answer these questions requires distinguishing theological discussions of faith from a secular ideology of monogamy. Whereas both queer critics and modern Christians tend to treat the two as cohesive and mutually supporting, they develop according to different logics and values. This chapter explores the complex and contradictory genealogy of monogamy as it emerges in both classical Greek and Roman discourses of friendship and Protestant ethnographies based on marital practices. Surprisingly, modern and secular ideals of coupledom have a lot in common with the classical philosophy of friendship that has been taken by many queer critics to present an alternative to heteronormative romance; they have less affinity with a Pauline theology of an impure and divided human will. Attending to the logical and historical intricacies of both classical friendship and Pauline soteriology, I propose that Christian views of subjectivity are queerer than their classical counterparts in some respects. I further argue that considering the racial dimensions of the concepts of friendship and monogamy helps us rethink a standard genealogy of queer studies, which includes classical philosophies of friendship while marginalizing (or excluding) religious accounts of subjectivity and relationality.
I take as my example of the racialized aspects of monogamy and promiscuity in William Shakespeare’s spectacularly promiscuous sonnets, which struggle to reconcile an aspiration to the virtue and fidelity of friendship with a reality of ambivalence and faithlessness. Shakespeare secularizes Petrarch’s conflicting desires for God and Laura into a ménage a trois among a “fair” young man, a “woman colored ill,” and a speaker whose self-introduction (“my name is Will” [Sonnet 136.14]) punningly collapses autobiographical persona with allegorical personification of the fallen will that so troubled Augustine.1 All three of these poetic characters, the sequence hints at multiple points, may also be taking additional, unnamed lovers. Because the mistress in these poems is obsessively but ambiguously described as “black,” her participation in the sequence’s threesome draws attention to the racial identities that inform what Eve Sedgwick influentially diagnosed as the triangulation of desire.2 When the mistress explicitly enters the sequence as the embodiment of “black” beauty in Sonnet 127, it is retrospectively revealed that the sequence has all along deployed a racialized vocabulary to grapple with the manifold impurities of faith it so assiduously documents. The sonnets’ frequent references to the mistress’s black hair, eyes, skin, and “deeds” (131.13) allow us to appreciate that the youth and speaker are also racialized—as white.
I begin by discussing the racial dimension of “monogamy,” itself a concept that emerges in distinction to the polygamous practices attributed to non-Christians. As I argued in the introduction to this book, the disavowal of the conceptual hybridity of race implicit in charges that its application to premodern periods is anachronistic—and the resulting isolation of biology from culture, phenotype from faith—works in concert with the historical catachresis of institutionalized periodization. By contrast, the historical specificity of the term “monogamy” has received little scrutiny. Reading the histories of race and monogamy in conjunction with one another, I argue, reveals their cooperative formation. To be monogamous—whether in classical friendship, premodern sworn brotherhood, or modern coupledom—is to aspire to the privilege that comes with a distinctly racialized sexual respectability. The flip side of this privilege, of course, is its denial to those who choose not to commit.
In the following section, I approach classical friendship as part of a longer history of what David L. Eng describes as a “racialization of intimacy” that relies on “the forgetting of race.”3 As Eng and others have argued, an urgent task for queer theory is the study of how racial difference troubles categories of normativity and transgression.4 A reconsideration of the resources that queer theory has found in the past is, I propose, an essential part of this project. According to classical theory, perfect and egalitarian friendship is available only to those who achieve the wisdom and virtue exhibited above all in self-mastery. Those “Asiatic barbarians” whom Aristotle deems “natural” slaves to their own fickle appetites are neither constant nor sincere enough to sustain friendship’s bond. Given that the sovereign self of friendship is becoming racialized and Christianized amidst the emergence of slavery and colonization in the early modern period, as Ivy Schweitzer has shown, to historicize friendship is to reveal its potential to validate as well as to resist the nascent hierarchies of a liberal democracy premised on privatized ideals of individual integrity, autonomy, and responsibility.5 This history reveals that the rationality and integrity that provide the grounds for friendship as a virtuous and egalitarian bond had been associated with racial whiteness well before the American context in which the emergence of “race” is often set. Shakespeare’s sonnets are part of this history: read as a bond between specifically white men, the sonnets’ unrealized ideal of male friendship also collaborates with the racial order that, as Kim F. Hall has observed, governs the sequence from the very first line of the very first poem: “From fairest creatures we desire increase” (1.1; my emphasis).6 Monogamy and respectability are understood as “fair” (a word that, along with the emergence of slavery and colonization, increasingly merged aesthetic and racial hierarchies); promiscuity and ignominy as “dark.”7
Having traced the affinities between classical friendship and monogamous coupledom, I propose in the subsequent section that the Christian theology so influentially disseminated by the Pauline Letters assumes a more conflicted and promiscuous subjectivity than that of classical thought. Particularly in its Protestant elaboration by the Augustinian monk Martin Luther, Christian theology paradoxically tempers the rigors of classical friendship with a more forgiving ethics of promiscuity—the recognition of impurity and self-deceit so central to the soteriology by which Protestant Reformers distinguished themselves from Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim others. Taking seriously a theological view of the opacity and intractability of the individual will may, I argue, disturb the same mutually sustaining sexual and racial categories that the unexamined deployment of its contrary, sincerity, helps to construct. However much the sonnets seek to idealize “fair” male friendship, they question the same racialized sexual distinctions they make.
As I argue in the final section of this chapter, “blackness,” precisely because of its uncertain and unstable meaning, becomes in Shakespeare’s sonnets the vehicle for recognition of shared promiscuity. As against monogamous union with a lover who is “fair, kind, and true,” the poems to the mistress struggle to imagine a more compromised, and therefore more honest and humane, relational landscape (105.9, 10, 13). Resisting the lifelong dyads of classical friendship and companionate marriage, the sonnets attempt instead to imagine a communal, dispersed caritas that is asocial in the sense discussed by Daniel Juan Gil: disruptive both of early modern homosociality and of modern ideals of interpersonal intimacy and companionate marriage.8 This encounter with difference grapples with a conflicted desire for what Michel Foucault calls “friendship as a way of life.”9 Yet Shakespeare does not merely celebrate hybridity or sexual liberation. Rather, the racist and misogynist invectives that erupt throughout these poems indicate that the speaker’s aspiration to “fairness”—as beauty, as innocence, as whiteness—as an ideal makes a relational ethos of humility and forgiveness impossible to sustain.
Tracing the racial politics of sexual respectability, a number of feminist and queer of color theorists have argued that the monogamy often treated as proof of both authentic love and personal integrity is ideologically attached to whiteness.10 As any number of reactionary cultural documents, from the Moynihan Report to the Focus on the Family website, make clear, the white, monogamous, procreative couple is an American national ideal. More recently, in the mainstream secular sphere this ideal has been extended to monogamous same-sex couples. The inclusion of LGBTQ couples in a narrative that equates mutual commitment with national belonging has in fact been treated as a sign of modern progressiveness in opposition to the presumed homophobia of American minorities or the perverse sexualities of Islamic terrorists.11
The racialization of sexual respectability has a long and intricate history, one that has been obscured by the view that “race” is a modern invention. Insofar as desire is considered to be private and spontaneous, Sharon Holland argues, “the erotic touches upon that aspect of racist practice that cannot be accounted for as racist practice but must be understood as something else altogether.”12 One form of racist practice that we understand as something else is the cultural privilege awarded to monogamous coupledom. Monogamy in its modern sense—commitment to a relationship with one other person—testifies to one’s faithfulness in both the objective sense of constancy and the subjective sense of credibility: it is a guarantor of respectability and good citizenship. Historically, in the United States the view that monogamy is a sign of maturity, responsibility, and propriety has naturalized not only the material privileges that marriage brings but also a range of policies directed at destroying forms of kinship and relationality understood as antithetical to white Christian identity.13
Renaissance lyrics are often assumed to treat monogamous coupledom as the ideal end of desire, expressing a cultural ethos summarized by Adam Phillips: “Monogamy makes the larger abstractions real, as religion once did. Faith, hope, trust, morality; these are domestic matters now. Indeed, we contrast monogamy not with bigamy or polygamy but with infidelity, because it is our secular religion.”14 Yet it is no less anachronistic to speak of “monogamy” in this sense in the Renaissance than it is to speak of “race.” While certainly the concept of erotic fidelity is an ancient one, the notion of mutual and exclusive commitment was not called “monogamy” until the twentieth century. In this way, “monogamy” is not unlike those other anachronistic terms, “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality,” both of which were coined in the nineteenth century—as was “sex,” an activity that, as Will Stockton and James M. Bromley have observed, surely happened before the modern era but was not designated by its modern term or limited to modern practices.15 As Jeffrey Masten has shown, attention to the longer history of the words we habitually and unthinkingly use compels us also to attend to the sedimented meanings that shape assumptions about what constitutes normative, perverse, or transgressive desire: “Etymology, then, in its lingering tastes of the past in the present, forces us to develop ever-expanding lexicons of erotic and affective terms and their relations.”16 In subjecting “monogamy” to the kind of queer philological study analyzed at length by Masten, I seek to bring attention to the concept’s evolution through anthropological, religious, and racialized studies that suggest that the modern association of monogamy with whiteness is there from the start, even if the connotations of both “monogamy” and “whiteness” have shifted.
The terms “monogamy” and “monogamous” as names for a relational category appeared in the English language only in 1612, originally designating “the practice or principle of marrying only once; i.e. of not remarrying after the death of a first spouse.”17 About one hundred years later “monogamy” comes to mean having only one spouse at a time (the OED dates this usage to 1708). Only in the late eighteenth century did monogamy come to mean sex with a single partner; it was first used in this way (apparently) as one category for the mating habits of animals (the OED gives instances from 1770 and 1785). By the early nineteenth century, we see “monogamy” used anthropologically, as one term in a taxonomy of sexual or marital practices across different cultures. Only in the late nineteenth century does “monogamy” come to mean fidelity within marriage (the OED’s first instance is 1865). If we believe that the OED is accurate, or at least in the ballpark, “monogamy” seems not to have been used to describe sexual fidelity in nonmarital relationships until the twentieth century.18
Much as “heterosexuality” as a term and concept enters the English language at roughly the same time as “homosexuality,” with norms solidifying only with the designation of behaviors understood as marginal or deviant, monogamy is itself a back formation from bigamy, a much older term (the OED gives first use as ca. 1325), which initially meant either remarriage or marriage to two persons at once.19 “Monogamy” is also preceded by “polygamy,” which (again) could mean either multiple remarriages or a group marriage and which first appeared in English in the sixteenth century in a specifically Protestant context. The OED traces the first use to the writing of Richard Taverner, a sixteenth-century Lutheran translator of the Bible into English and a propagandist for Protestant reform of the English Church. In his 1538 translation of the Commonplaces of the Lutheran theologian Erasmus Sarcerius, next to the final section on Christian rules of marriage Taverner places a marginal gloss that reads “Poligamie, that is, the having of many wyves togyther is forbyden.” Taverner’s gloss is adjacent to the passage in which Sarcerius declares that
Neither is there read any commandment in the old testament for the having of many wives, although examples do testify that it was there, by chance also suffered at those times for increase of yssue [issue] or for other causes. But the newe testament doth utterly forbid the having of many wives, and that by the authorite of Christ, who bringeth us back agayn to the true instinct of nature, and right ordinance of God.20
Around the same time, in 1547, one “I. B.” (likely either John Bale or John Bradford) affirms, “So is it not to be founde in any apostels wrytynge, that any Chrysten man . . . hath bene Polygamous (that is to saye) hath had manye wyues.”21 The OED’s next recorded use appears in the full title of the Calvinist divine William Fulke’s 1579 treatise, which attacks “D. Heskins, D. Sanders, and M. Rastel, accounted (among their faction) three pillers and archpatriarches of the popish synagogue” in a familiar Reformation conflation of Catholics and Jews as “vtter enemies to the truth of Christes Gospell, and all that syncerely professe the same.” Fulke cites “the incest of Juda & the Poligamie of the Patriarks” as dangerous examples to be avoided by true Christians.22 A final early example occurs in Fynes Moryson’s travelogue in a section on the climatic theory of ethnicity, which notes of “Jews, Asians, and persons from the southern climes” that “Poligamy be permitted among them (I meane the hauing of many wiues for one man).”23 Polygamy in all of these early English instances is associated with the obscure Jewish past, the East, and the Southern Hemisphere, what in the eighteenth century would come to be called “monogamy” with the present of northwestern, Protestant Europe. This philological background supplements the connections that premodern scholars have observed between exotic tales of harems, orgies, sexual servitude, and sodomy in travelers’ reports.24 With the rise of European colonial aspiration, as Carmen Nocentelli argues, “polygamy became a symptom of an aberrant libido that could potentially operate as a principle of human classification,” thereby fusing the institutionalization of monogamous heterosexual marriage with the socialization of racial difference.25
The conjoined histories of the concepts of race and monogamy suggest that relational categories were part of the early vocabulary of racial difference and vice versa. They remind us that race and sexuality in the past as well as the present both include and exceed embodied identity. Premodern categories make legible the longer genealogy of what Jasbir Puar calls “Orientalist queernesses (failed heteronormativity as signaled by polygamy, pathological homosociality),” which Western feminist and LGBTQ theory and politics sometimes continue, unwittingly, to ascribe to African and Middle Eastern bodies.26 The privileging of Western modernity and secularism as the grounds of sexual rights, in Puar’s analysis, shapes an unspoken, racialized “homonationalism” in which queer activism can converge in surprising ways with Western neoliberal and imperial projects.27 Classical friendship is part of this associational complex.
Secular, modern ideals of monogamy derive, to a surprising extent, from a classical ideal of dyadic friendship limited to virtuous male citizens “by nature free” and impossible for anyone who is “intended by nature to be a slave.”28 The late medieval and early modern concept of companionate marriage—one that today includes both gay and straight couples—was imagined as an equal and virtuous relationship free of lust or self-interest, one to which the sixteenth-century writer Edmund Tilney devoted a book entitled The Flower of Friendshippe.29 As James Bromley has argued, insofar as it offers a culturally sanctioned pattern of love characterized by inwardness and constancy, friendship contributes to the eventual regulation of all sexuality by monogamous marriage.30 The legacy of this history still lingers in the curriculum of the “Loving Couples, Loving Children” workshop funded by George W. Bush’s $1.5 million Supporting Healthy Marriage Program, launched in 2003 and reauthorized by Congress in 2010, which is explicitly “organized around the concept that the underpinning of a healthy relationship is a strong friendship.”31 This view of friendship as the source of commitment is reflected in the history of the very term. The word “friend” is derived from the Old English freond, which equally signified love and freedom: the friend is one who is free to go but chooses to stay. Along with its modern meaning, “friend” in premodern English could designate a lover or kinsperson, affiliations that rested on ties other than political or economic compulsion. The companionate model of marriage, in which spouses are also friends, began to take shape at the same time that the states of freedom and slavery that classical and Christian writers had described in affective terms were becoming attached to racialized whiteness and blackness, respectively. Political conditions, in this view, were external expressions of inward states of rational self-mastery, on the one hand, or enslavement to brute appetite, on the other. Figurative deployments of slavery thus naturalized that institution’s expansion and minimized its brutality.
Friendship “as a way of life,” to again evoke Foucault’s influential phrase, has been embraced by early modern queer scholars as evidence of a culturally central form of same-sex love, and it has often been celebrated as an egalitarian alternative to the domination and hierarchy central to heterosexual relations. Because of friendship’s prominence in classical and Renaissance philosophy and political theory, it offers evidence of what Laurie Shannon calls “the powerfully homonormative bias in Renaissance thought [that] favors both self-likeness (constancy) and same-sex affects” and whose “rhetoric tendentiously aims at the highest degree of integrity and unsubordinated being as a kind of private sovereignty of the self, a rhetoric formulated against the gendered contingencies of life within authoritative hierarchies whether political, social, or marital.”32 Mindful that in “prevailing models of the liberal subject . . . the production of equals has entailed a concomitant disenfranchisement of others,” Shannon cautions against “judging early modern likeness from a post-liberal perspective” and instead takes a historicist perspective that attunes us to “specific opportunities” that homonormative ideals “afforded sixteenth-century subjects and selves.”33
I want to propose that it is not an either-or. We can appreciate that friendship makes visible a valuable historical alternative to modern compulsory heteronormativity while also scrutinizing the exclusionary implications of its idealization of likeness and self-sovereignty.34 According to classical theory, the equal relationship that is perfect friendship is available only to those who achieve the wisdom and virtue exhibited above all in self-mastery. Those who are “natural” slaves to their own fickle appetites are neither constant nor sincere enough to sustain friendship’s bond. As Puar maintains with regard to contemporary homonationalism, the contrast between a universalized queerness and an oppressive heteronormativity “operates as an alibi for complicity with all sorts of other identity norms, such as nation, race, class, and gender, unwittingly lured onto ascent toward whiteness.”35 To address the collaboration of racial, sexual, and gendered norms, Puar rightly argues, we as queer critics must be attuned to our own implication in their work, however “painful,” even shaming, such awareness is. For, Puar continues, “allowing for complicities signals not the failure of the radical, resistant, or oppositional potential of queerness, but can be an enabling acknowledgment.”36 Offering an analysis of the politics of attraction to likeness more generally, Holland observes that racial distinction may lurk in the erotic yearnings often treated as presocial, even preconscious:
We often only have eyes for the spectacularity of racist practice, not its everyday machinations that we in turn have some culpability in. This desire to see ourselves as exempt from racist violence, no matter how small, is part of the same logic that attempts to excise life choices, erotic choices, from these larger systems. . . . For example, to say that I am not hurting anyone when I say that I prefer to sleep with one racialized being over another, is to tell a different story about the erotic—one where the autonomous becomes clouded by the sticky film of prejudice morphed into quotidian racism.37
If, as Holland argues, “there is no ‘raceless’ course of desire,” then homo- as well as heteronormative mutuality and egalitarianism premised on likeness cannot escape a consciousness of “race” in the multiple significances of color and culture, embodiment and belief, that early modern discourses help make legible.38 Holland puts in conversation Kwame Anthony Appiah’s contrast between aesthetic preference and moral treatment and Emmanuel Levinas’s question “Is the Desire for the Other (Autrui) an appetite or a generosity?”39 This conjunction, she proposes, allows us to “surmise that what we need to do is turn an appetite—an ‘aesthetic preference’—into an antiracist stance; a ‘generosity’ that has great potential” to “unmake the (queer) autonomy of desire—the thing that is shaped, like many other emotions, and circumscribed by the racist culture that we live in.”40 It is from this perspective that I want to examine classical philosophies of friendship, the racial dimensions of which, I argue, come to the fore in Shakespeare’s sonnets to his male beloved. These poems remind us that, as Roland Greene maintains, in the interchange between Petrarchan poetry and colonial discourse, “there is no love that does not take account of race, class, and politics.”41
In the utopian discourse of Greek philia and Latin amicitia, friendship was both model and ground for an ideally virtuous polity of equals. The relationship that Aristotle deems “complete,” or perfect, friendship (the Greek is teleia) is one between “good people similar in virtue.”42 As known and “reciprocated goodwill,” friendship displaces formal law or justice as the greatest political good: “if people are friends, they have no need of justice” (NE 8.2.3–4, 8.1.4; original emphasis). In reality, however, perfect friendship, as opposed to friendship based on utility or pleasure, is extremely rare for two reasons. First, there are not enough men (for Aristotle, perfect friends are always male: women are just not smart or virtuous enough) who are “both good without qualification and advantageous for each other” (NE 8.3.6).43 Second, much like erotic passion, complete friendship “is like an excess” and therefore “directed at a single individual,” not distributed among many (NE 8.6.2).44 Friendship demands “equality and similarity, and above all the similarity of those who are similar in being virtuous” (NE 8.8.4) to the extent that “the excellent person is related to his friend in the same way as he is related to himself, since a friend is another himself” (NE 9.9.10; see also NE 9.4.5–6). The dynamic of friendship is one of aspirational narcissism. In friendship, one loves the friend not merely because he is like the self but, more importantly, because he manifests the virtue that “the excellent person” cultivates. The greatest virtue of all is continence, or self-mastery. The “self-lover” of perfect friendship “gratifies the most controlling part of himself, obeying it in everything” and differs from “the self-lover who is reproached . . . as much as the life guided by reason differs from the life guided by feelings, and as much as the desire for what is fine differs from the desire for what seems advantageous” (NE 9.8.6).
Aristotelian confidence in the reality of such a union between rational equals, as Schweitzer argues, gives way to the elegiac tradition initiated by Cicero’s De amicitia.45 In this dialogue, Laelius takes the occasion of the death of his friend Scipio Aemilianus to reiterate in personal terms the abstract Aristotelian principles of identity and equality in virtue that prompt the “man who both loves himself and uses his reason to seek out another whose soul he may so mingle with his own as almost to make one out of two.”46 Because the friend is as close to “another self [alter idem]” as one can find, Laelius’s eulogy for Scipio is also an encomium to his own ability to choose reason and duty over passion and desire (On Friendship 21.80). Laelius’s “bereavement,” he confirms in the closing passage, is a “trial” that will prove that “it was [Scipio’s] virtue that caused my love and that is not dead” (On Friendship 27.103, 102).
Cicero here takes to its logical conclusion Aristotle’s maxim that because “reciprocal loving requires decision, and decision comes from a state,” one must distinguish between “the wish for friendship,” which “comes quickly,” and friendship itself, which does not (NE 8.5.5, 8.3.8). For Cicero, in order to discover whether “the characters of friends are blameless,” both must restrain their attraction to the other: “It is the part of wisdom to check the headlong rush of goodwill as we would that of a chariot, and thereby so manage friendship that we may in some degree put the dispositions of friends, as we do those of horses, to a preliminary test” (On Friendship 17.61, 63). But, as Aristotle’s long meditation on the dissolution of friendships admits, this test cannot be passed as long as friendship is spoken in the imperfect grammar of the living present. The friend can always change, revealing his seeming love of virtue to have been a cover for appetite or advantage all along. Cicero’s choice of fictional elegy rather than abstract treatise makes formally explicit what Aristotle leaves unsaid: the perfect (teleia) friend is the dead friend. Accordingly, as Jacques Derrida observes, classical friendship inhabits the temporality of the “future anterior” in which death is the culmination of friendship insofar as it confirms purity of virtue on both the friend’s behalf and one’s own.47
Michel de Montaigne’s account of friendship preserves the view that it is a dyad based on equality of virtue, but he replaces the cautious prudence of classical philosophy with the ecstatic certainty of Christian mysticism or Neoplatonic ecstasy. Montaigne’s parfaict amitié is complete from the start, initiated by a love at first sight that annihilates individual boundaries. In his elegy for his friend Étienne de La Boétie, Montaigne situates feeling as itself a form of secular faith:
If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: “Because it was him, because it was me.” Mediating this union there was, beyond all my reasoning, beyond all that I can say specifically about it, some inexplicable force of destiny [je ne sçay quelle force inexplicable et fatale]. . . . At our first meeting . . . we discovered ourselves to be so seized by each other, so known to each other and so bound together that from then on none was so close as each was to the other. . . . There is no one particular consideration—nor two nor three nor four nor a thousand of them—but rather some inexplicable quintessence of them all mixed up together [je ne sçay quelle quint essence de tout ce meslange] which, having captured my will brought it to plunge into his and lose itself and which, having captured his will, brought it to plunge and lose itself in mine with an equal hunger and emulation [concurrence pareille]. I say “lose itself” in very truth; we kept nothing back for ourselves: nothing was his or mine.48
Montaigne’s repeated use of the inexpressibility topos, along with his lexicon of penetration, engulfment, and seizure, dissolves the lines between subject and object, activity and passivity, that make rational assessment and argument possible. Friendship for Montaigne is a relationship of faith that “must belong,” as Derrida puts it, “to what is incalculable in decision.” As a “break with calculable reliability and with the assurance of certainty—in truth, with knowledge,” faith in the friend cannot be justified.49 To say anything more specific than “because it was him, because it was me” is to move from the realm of faith to that of empirical proof.
Precisely because Montaigne’s friendship involves no calculation of quality or benefit, it can be immediately consummated, reaching its perfection in its inception. Whereas Aristotle and Cicero recommend wariness, Montaigne’s love for La Boétie is evinced in instantaneous trust. His representation of friendship has the structure of Pauline faith that Giorgio Agamben ascribes to love more generally. It “has no reason” but rather is “an experience of being beyond existence and essence, as much beyond subject as beyond predicate.” In fact, “the moment when I realize that my beloved has such-and-such a quality, or such-and-such a defect, then I have irrevocably stepped out of love.”50 But this faith, paradoxically, requires that identity and equality give way to difference and hierarchy. The friend is not just another self, but a better, more trustworthy, one: Me 2.0. Montaigne writes of La Boétie that “all the arguments in the world have no power to dislodge me from the certainty which I have of the intentions and decisions of my friend. . . . I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself” (Essays 213). When Montaigne places more faith in La Boétie than in himself, he also attributes to La Boétie greater foresight and benevolence than he himself has. This introduces the question of Montaigne’s own trustworthiness. Should La Boétie believe in him?
Montaigne’s apotheosis of La Boétie makes visible a new dimension of Derrida’s insight that the enemy is the “phantom friend” who equally permits the ideal of perfect (teleia) friendship and impedes that very telos.51 The enemy haunts friendship not only as the structural contrary against which the friend defines himself. More troublingly, the enemy concealed within the friend may ambush us at any time, as may the stranger concealed within ourselves. This undecidability appears in the derivation of hospes (the friendly host) from hostis (the stranger who may prove grateful guest or hostile enemy) and the parallel formation of the English “friend” and “fiend” (the latter originally meant not devil but enemy).52 The friend’s superiority, however benevolent, may also give rise to enmity. Aristotle’s paradoxical statement, “O my friends, there is no friend,” Derrida argues, registers this inconceivable because self-contradictory essence of friendship: “On the one hand, in effect, one must want the greatest good for the friend—hence one wants him to become a god. But one cannot want that, one cannot want what would then be wanted.”53 As a relation of mutuality and equality, perfect friendship demands human imperfection, and therefore the possibility of disappointment. If the friend is better than the self, he may be a mentor or benefactor, but he is not a true friend. If the friend is no better than the self, he may turn out to be an enemy.
Shakespeare’s sonnets, it has been widely noted, draw on the same classical ideal of friendship as Montaigne. But what is striking about the sonnets is the extent to which the relationship they depict diverges in nearly every way from the rational and steady bond they evoke, drawing out instead the enmity that may lurk within amity. Whereas Montaigne makes himself vulnerable because he believes he will not be hurt, Shakespeare’s speaker, Will, cultivates what Tim Dean calls an “ethical disposition of vulnerability to the other” that acknowledges risk and difference.54 To be sure, the sonnets’ speaker claims that he and the youth have achieved the “total interfusion of . . . wills” in which “each gives himself so entirely to his friend that he has nothing left to share with another” portrayed by Montaigne (Essays 214, 215). Speaking in the present indicative, the grammar of facts, the sonnets’ Will confidently describes his relationship with the youth in terms of mutual identification and fidelity: “my friend and I are one” (42.12); “’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise” (62.13); “As easy might I from myself depart, / As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie” (109.3–4). But these confident assertions are belied by the sequence’s frequent expressions of suspicion and admissions of mutual betrayal—in fact, the declaration that “my friend and I are one” is itself an ostentatiously facetious consolation for the youth’s affair with the mistress: although “Both find each other, and I lose both twain,” if the friend is another self then “she loves but me alone” (42.11, 14). Sonnet 42 offers but one example of a consistent collapse of the idealized homoerotic friendship that Will strives for with the youth and the promiscuous heteroerotic appetite that makes both men “slave to slavery” in their desire for the mistress (133.4). Read all together, the poems to the young man depict neither the rational virtue of Aristotle or Cicero nor the Neoplatonic meeting of the minds of Montaigne. Will’s feelings for the man he calls “the master mistress of my passion” (20.2) instead resemble the more debased categories that Montaigne calls the “fickle, fluctuating, and variable” love men feel for women or the “license of the Greeks” that “required a great disparity of age and divergence of favours between the lovers” (209, 210).
In other words, whereas the identity of classical friendship acts as a prophylactic against disappointment and betrayal, the sonnets depict a series of entanglements in which all of the parties get hurt—and inflict wounds of their own. The sonnets, as Stephen Guy-Bray bluntly puts it, provide ample evidence that the young man, no less than the mistress, has done “bad things” with “bad people.”55 Will asserts that the young man does “most common grow” (69.14), but urges him to “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done” (35.1) and promises that if he at least appears repentant, the “tears of pearl that thy love sheds” will “ransom all ill deeds” (34.14). Likewise, Will himself confesses that “I have frequent been with unknown minds” and “I have hoisted sail to all the winds” (117.5, 7) and laments “What potions have I drunk of siren tears” and “What wretched errors hath my heart committed” (119.1, 5). He excuses his infidelity on the grounds that it serves “to prove / The constancy and virtue of your love” (117.13–14) by inflicting pain: “if you were by my unkindness shaken, / As I by yours, y’have passed a hell of time” (120.5–6). Such reciprocal betrayal, paradoxically, restores equality and mutual possession through an economy of forgiveness in which “your trespass now becomes a fee; / Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me” (120.13–14).
If in classical friendship the enemy is the phantom of the other, in Shakespeare’s sonnets the slave is the phantom of the self. Sonnets 57 and 58 explore the impurity of devotion through the ambiguously racialized metaphor of slavery. Certainly, the trope of erotic enslavement was well-worn by Shakespeare’s time, and it appears not only here but in subsequent depictions of Will’s male beloved as “slave to slavery” in his relation to the mistress and himself as the mistress’s “proud heart’s slave and vassal wretch” (133.4, 141.12). But to emphasize the metaphoricity, and therefore the political neutrality, of this convention at the expense of its literal referent is itself a racialized argument. It assumes that Shakespeare’s own whiteness removes him from the reality of the history of slavery, thereby perpetuating what David Nirenberg has described as the “remarkable consensus that the earlier vocabularies of difference are innocent of race.”56 But, as I have been arguing, the ambiguity of race should not be conflated with its absence. In early modernity, the naturalization of forced servitude as black, one initiated by the Portuguese slave trade and gradually adopted by Spain and England, intersected with a long record of white and Asiatic slavery from both classical antiquity and the medieval and early modern Ottoman practice of using conquered persons as forced servants and concubines.57 John M. Archer compellingly argues that while they do not explicitly mention “race” in the sense of skin color, Shakespeare’s Sonnets 57 and 58 cannot be separated from a long history of bondage whose racial referent was rapidly constricting in his time.58 The sixteenth-century Valladolid debates over the natural slavery, indeed humanity, of Indigenous Americans and the increase in the European trade of West Africans as forced labor were known in Shakespeare’s England, where slaves were increasingly depicted as “black”—that catch-all term for dark skin—in visual and literary representation.59
Precisely because the racial meaning of slavery was unstable, as was its distinction from other forms of servitude, it provides Shakespeare a complex and troubling vehicle for contemplating the limits of friendship as a relation based on identification and self-mastery. Sonnets 57 and 58 rigorously contest an ideal of homonormative friendship as a uniquely virtuous and respectable relation between a male pair “by nature free” of irrational and self-destructive appetite. Instead, these poems depict monogamous devotion as a struggle of wills vying for domination:
57.
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world without end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour,
When you have bid your servant once adieu.
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But like a sad slave stay and think of nought
Save where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love, that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill. (1–14)
58.
That god forbid, that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand th’account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure.
O let me suffer, being at your beck,
Th’imprisoned absence of your liberty—
And patience tame to suff’rance bide each check,
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong,
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
I am to wait, though waiting be so hell,
Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well. (1–14)
Both sonnets begin with Will’s self-identification as “slave,” only to probe the meaning of that term. Itself derived from the Middle Latin sclavus—“identical,” the OED tells us, “with the racial name Sclavus,” or Slav—the modern slave differs from the classical servus (either servant or slave) in having been unequivocally stripped of any right to free will. Early justifications for the destruction and enslavement of West Africans and Indigenous Americans, as I have noted, often cited the Aristotelian concept that literal enslavement was the proper condition of those bound to irrational appetites. Will’s shifting identifications across the two poems as “slave,” “servant,” “slave,” “fool,” “slave,” and “vassal” strains synonymy. Different forms and degrees of servitude—the involuntary bondage and compulsory labor of the slave, the contractual and remunerated work of the servant, the feudal allegiance of the vassal—are not interchangeable as metaphors. This failed substitution formally probes the meaning and limits of a conventional idiom that compares commitment to bondage. What can or should one expect in return for devotion? At what point does generous love become humiliating enslavement? Is the distinction a matter of fact or faith? Does pleasure in the thought of enslavement not depend on an actual position of freedom? Does the fantasy of such pleasure not minimize the violence and dehumanization of slavery?
These two sonnets’ dissection of Will’s thoughts registers the resistance that inevitably accompanies devotion and without which submission cannot be felt as voluntary. The struggle to be possessed by heartfelt love appears in Sonnet 57’s final couplet: “So true a fool is love, that in your will, / Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.” The 1609 Quarto prints “in your Will,” making typographically explicit the lines’ interpretive crux. Are “your will” and “your Will” synonymous? Is this allegory or autobiography? We cannot tell, and neither can the speaker. This poem, as well as the one that follows, dramatizes the struggle to “think no ill” through its emphasis on the prohibition of instinctual response to the beloved’s absence: “Nor dare I chide,” “Nor think,” “Nor dare I question with my jealous thought,” “think of nought,” “That god forbid, . . . / I should in thought control your times of pleasure,” “without accusing you of injury,” “I am to wait . . . / Not blame your pleasure.” This series of negations registers just the discrepancy between the friend and Will that Sonnet 57’s final couplet obscures. Whereas Masten treats “the idea of friendship as material ingestion and incorporation” as a laudable “attempt to imagine mutual and unhierarchized same-sex intercourse,” Derrida, Michel de Certeau, and Carla Freccero have argued that friendship’s ideal of fusion as the ultimate expression of likeness and equality rests on a logic of sacrificial anthropophagy.60 The spiritual metabolism that perfects Montaigne’s friendship with La Boétie manifests itself in Shakespeare’s sonnets as the wish to abolish difference through assimilation, a wish thwarted by the recalcitrant and opaque will of self as well as other.
The divergence of wills in these poems is manifested in the quotidian activity of waiting in the senses of both anticipation and service. Waiting for the youth to affirm desire by coming back shades into waiting on him (a resonance retained in the modern vernacular interchangeability of “waiter” and “server”). Waiting prioritizes the other’s time over one’s own, affirming through suspension of activity that one has nothing better to do, “no precious time at all to spend.” In Roland Barthes’s account, such patience is the ultimate evidence of love:
“Am I in love?—Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.61
The discrepancy between the eager, (im)patient lover and the dilatory beloved—the roles of waiting and being waited on—exposes a difference in affection. To love is also to choose the “hours and times” of the “sovereign” beloved’s desire or pleasure over one’s own. This choice concedes hierarchy: “To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of power.”62
The banal experience of waiting for someone, as we all know, can become an excruciating exercise in the tolerance of vulnerability and unpredictability. Because it arouses anxiety and resentment, waiting may threaten the very love it should demonstrate, a risk that Phillips neatly summarizes in the observation that “if somebody you are longing to see makes you wait too long for them, it is extremely difficult to appreciate them when they finally arrive; and to recuperate your desire for them.”63 In order to preserve the spell of love, one must not only wait but must also learn not to mind waiting. This preserves the belief that both parties want each other at the same time and in the same way, that both offer “free” love and not grudging servitude. To “control” the beloved’s “times of pleasure” or “crave” an “account” of just what took so long is to distrust the other’s sincere interest in one’s own happiness. To “think of nought / Save where you are and how happy you make those” (that is, those other people whom you are with instead of me) is to struggle to accept that the beloved enjoys the absence that torments the lover. At the same time, to offer absolute freedom is as much a threat as a gift, and it (again) requires precisely the actual freedom denied by the metaphor of enslavement. The concession that the beloved may “Be where you list” and “you yourself may privilege your time / To what you will”—in other words, do what you want—has as its unspoken counterpart and so will I.
Imagining himself as having lost self-determination and been “made your slave” by a “god”—erotic subjection, as I discuss in the next section, could be equally attributed to Cupid or Christ—Will can only obey his own demonic attachment: “I am to wait, though waiting be so hell / Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.” When waiting becomes “hell,” it also becomes an act in the Pauline sense of compelled service and therefore, as Luther would stress, the fearful performance of a hypocrite that replaces rather than reflects sincere devotion. This involuntary servitude, which, as I discussed in this book’s introduction, Luther likened to “Babylonian Captivity,” is at odds with the “Freedom of the Christian” who waits with wholehearted joy. The homonormativity of friendship falls short of the identity and equality ideally attributed to it. Insofar as “the marriage of true minds” continues to signify a racialized integrity and respectability that justify political and social privilege, to challenge this ideal is to make way for the imagination of forms of relationality premised on disproportionate and changing desires rather than mutual vows—friendship as a way of life beyond the racially pure dyad of the homonormative as well as the heteronormative couple.
As I have been arguing, the ethics of promiscuity that finds expression in secular love lyrics may be traced to a Pauline theology in which the delusion of sovereign subjectivity must be relinquished. Whereas the Aristotelian theory of friendship derives from the conviction that those who “are by nature free” have achieved the “rule of the soul over the body,” the Pauline tradition, as I discussed in chapter 1, insists that the mind and soul are no less subject to fleshly corruption than the body. Shakespeare’s sonnets accentuate such failure of self-mastery in the speaker’s tongue-in-cheek self-appellation as “Will.” As many critics have noticed, “will” in early modern English could signify intention, purpose, wish, drive, lust, and both male and female sexual organs, an overdetermination announced most flamboyantly in Sonnets 135 and 136, between which the word appears a total of twenty-one times.64 Lisa Freinkel points out that the relentless capitalization of “Will” in the only edition of the full sequence from Shakespeare’s lifetime, the 1609 Quarto, underscores a Lutheran conviction that any analogy or similitude between divine and human love is actually a catachrestic expression that registered all that humanity is not.65 The poetic and typographical assertions that the speaker’s “name is Will” (136.14) locate the sequence’s threesome within a Christian tradition of fellowship patterned on God’s love for human creatures who can never deserve it.66 Humility and forgiveness in this structure replace virtue and integrity as the foundation of love. But, as the sonnets demonstrate, these Christian qualities are difficult to cultivate, requiring no less self-control than the classical rationality they replace. In the sonnets’ presecular view, Will as human creature can neither love with the freedom and generosity of God nor discern whether he is motivated by humble love, emulous pride, or grudging compliance.
The theological structure of love, as I argued in chapter 1, helps us to understand the contradictions and perversities of secular experience, particularly insofar as Pauline and Augustinian theology assumes the ideal model of love, God’s, to be impossible for human creatures. Faith must waver, in this view, in order to rescue humanity from its own soul-killing delusions of innocence and autonomy. This conviction only intensifies in Protestant theology. When Luther and Calvin seek to explain why election is a cause for gratitude rather than resentment, they emphasize that we are not loved because of what we do or who we are. The whole point of Pauline Christianity—and this is true of Augustinian Catholicism as well as the Protestantism of Luther and Calvin—is that we do not deserve to be loved by anyone, including and especially God. Moments in which obedience is experienced as imposition rather than pleasure function to remind the human creature that love is a gift rather than an entitlement. The love we feel and the love we attract, whether spiritual or secular, is inexplicable, and to that extent it is an object of prayer and seduction as well as a cause of both gratitude and anger. In the secularized and racialized politics of eroticism that I have been tracing, the ability to love in the right way—that is, monogamously—is a sign of election understood as sincere and unfeigned goodness. Such sincerity, as Ann Pellegrini has argued, is an indication of authentic political and cultural belonging because it cannot be externally compelled.67 Understood as a secular version of grace, true love reconfigures meanings of freedom and bondage so that the sincere aspiration to affective monogamy, rather than mere technical fidelity, becomes a racialized sign of integrity and credibility. At the same time, the self-assured righteousness that characterizes much modern white evangelical affect is, for Luther and Calvin, a sign of reprobation.
Luther’s “Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans,” which seeks to explain why election is a cause for joy rather than resentment, emphasizes the inexplicability not only of God’s love for us, but also of ours for him. Here as elsewhere, Luther is at pains to define obedience in affective terms. In his treatment of the human failure of autonomy, Luther’s insight that “we act heteronomously rather than as self-willed, autonomous creatures” is, as Freinkel puts it, “at once a psychological and a philosophical one.”68 Luther deems the Letter to the Romans “the most important document [das rechte Haupstück, “the true centerpiece”] in the New Testament, the gospel in its purest expression,” for it condenses Pauline teachings on faith, sin, grace, and election into a single book.69 Because each encounter offers a fresh appreciation of the miracle of divine love, this tract “can never be read too often, or studied too much” (“Preface” 19/3). It is a commonplace to understand Protestant theology as opposing faith to works. But Luther, and Calvin after him, in fact makes the two inseparable by locating righteousness not in what we do but in how we feel about what we do. What Romans teaches, according to Luther, is that sin includes not just doing bad things but also doing good things for the wrong reason. According to Luther, the
law must be fulfilled in your very heart [Herzens Grund], and cannot be obeyed if you merely perform certain acts. Its penalties do indeed apply to certain acts done apart from our inmost convictions [Herzens Grund], such as hypocrisy and lying. Psalm [116] declares that all men are liars, because no one keeps God’s law from his heart [Herzens Grund]; nor can he do so; for to be averse to goodness and prone to evil are traits found in all men [jedermann findet bei sich selbst Unlust zum Guten and Lust zum Bösen]. If we do not choose goodness freely, we do not keep God’s law from the heart [Herzens Grund]. (“Preface” 20/3–4)
Citing Psalm 116 (“I said in my fear, All men are liars”), which Paul also alludes to in Romans 3 (“let God be true, and every man a liar, as it is written”), Luther explores an insight that, as we have seen, is developed at length in Augustine’s Confessions and, in secular terms, in Petrarch’s love lyrics: we are helpless to tell the truth about our own motives and feelings because we may ourselves mistake or misinterpret them (GB Ps. 116:11; Rom. 3:4). Luther takes this insight to its logical conclusion, insisting that in our innermost hearts we are all potentially and intermittently insincere and therefore sinful. (The repetition of Herzens Grund in the German makes this insistence more prominent than the variable phrasing of the English.) As Luther explains,
Sin, in this light, means something more than the external works done by our bodily action [äusserliche Werk des Leibes]. It means all the circumstances that act together and excite or incite us to what is done; in particular, the impulses operating in the depths of our hearts [des Herzens Grund mit allen Kräften]. . . . Even where nothing is done outwardly, a man may still fall into complete destruction of body and soul. In particular, the Bible penetrates into our hearts, and looks at the root and the very source of all sin, i.e., unbelief in the depth of our heart. (“Preface” 22/6)
Whenever we obey the law “unwillingly and under compulsion [mit Unlust und Zwang]” rather than “from free choice and out of love for the law [freie Lust und Liebe zum Gesetz],” the law shows our actions to be only lies, hypocritical performances that substitute external compliance for internal desire (“Preface” 20/4). God can penetrate to psychic depths that we cannot; he knows us better than we know ourselves. We can fool ourselves and others, but not him.
The law requires something impossible: our love for what it makes us do. It is directed, in other words, at hearts and minds, not just bodies. As Calvin explains, when God commands particular behavior, “he requires you to apply the same rule in regulating your mind. It were ridiculous, that he, who sees the thoughts of the heart, and has special regard to them, should train the body only to rectitude.”70 True obedience stems from heartfelt desire, not external compulsion. And because the law exacts a feeling over which we have no control, it makes us aware through affective rather than rational means of our sinfulness. Paul explains the dynamic thus: “What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? God forbid. Nay, I knew not sin, but by the Law, for I had not known lust, except the Law had said, Thou shalt not lust” (GB, Rom. 7:7). “Lust” here is not just sexual desire, but willfulness more generally. The Vulgate’s “Sed peccatum non cognovi, nisi per legem: nam concupiscentiam nesciebam, nisi lex dicerte: Non concupisces” gives both the nominal and verbal forms of concupiscence as a more general longing or striving. The law shows us to be liars not only when we bear false witness to others, but, more profoundly, because we lie to ourselves when we imagine we are free from desire for things of the flesh, whether sex, wealth, power, or praise.
Because they address feeling rather than action, the final two commandments (against lying and coveting) are for the Protestant Reformers essential to producing the awareness of failure that makes possible those precious moments of sincere love and gratitude in which the human will is briefly aligned with God’s. As Luther puts it in The Freedom of a Christian:
The commandments show us what we ought to do but do not give us the power to do it. They are intended to teach man to know himself, that through them he may recognize his inability to do good and may despair of his own ability. . . . For example, the commandment, “you shall not covet” [Exod. 20:17] is a command which proves us all to be sinners, for no one can avoid coveting no matter how much he may struggle against it. Therefore, in order not to covet and to fulfill the commandment, a man is compelled to despair of himself, to seek the help which he does not find in himself elsewhere and from someone else.71
We are all proven sinners, Calvin explains, because desire for that which we do not already possess may exist without “deliberation and assent, when the mind is only stimulated and tickled [titillatur] by vain and perverse objects” (Institutes 2.8.49). It is only in being told that we are not allowed to feel this way that we come to see our feelings as violations of the law that “no thought be permitted to insinuate itself into our minds, and inflame them with a noxious concupiscence tending to our neighbor’s loss” (Institutes 2.8.49). The command that we love our neighbor is in essence a demand that we love like God, without regard to others’ desert or our own reward. This heartfelt generosity and altruism are at odds with coveting or concupiscence. The commandments against lying and covetousness make us aware of our inability to love that which is unlovable or that which can offer us nothing in return.72
Lutheran and Calvinist soteriology can be summed up in the maxim that God requires us to love as he does, and the law reveals that we can’t. The ninth and tenth commandments (against lying and coveting), in particular, reveal human love to be self-serving rather than altruistic, and to that degree suffused with aggression. This theological insight, as Jacques Lacan demonstrates, also helps us understand the structure of secular desire. For Lacan, as for Luther and Calvin, the Pauline maxim that “I knew not sin, but by the Law” designates the unspeakable hostility at the center of jouissance, the Thing that gestures toward “whatever is open, lacking, or gaping at the center of our desire” (84).73 Lacan is quite explicit: “With one small change, namely, ‘Thing’ for ‘sin,’ [Chose à la place de péché] this is the speech of Saint Paul on the subject of the relations between the law and sin in the Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 7, paragraph 7.”74 Humanity defends itself against this unbearable dimension of its will by denying the bad feelings that permeate love, or, as Lacan puts it, “lying about evil [la mal].”75 The biblical prohibition against lying, Lacan maintains, “is related to what presented itself to us as that essential relationship of man to the Thing, insofar as it is commanded by the pleasure principle, namely, the lie that we have to deal with every day in our unconscious.”76 This command “included the possibility of the lie as the most fundamental desire,” which is to say that we desire misrecognition of our own erotic impulses and motives. The lie we tell ourselves is that we want what is good for us and for others.77
As Lacan interprets it, the invaluable insight of Pauline theology is that our desire is not good or redemptive. If this reading resonates strikingly with Leo Bersani’s critique of the “redemptive reinvention of sex” that is because, as I have been arguing, Christian theology has profoundly shaped Western secular descriptions of love and sexuality.78 Religious writing is valuable to psychoanalysis, Lacan argues, because it takes seriously impulses unavailable to objective observation:
Whether from personal conviction or in the name of a methodological point of view, the so-called scientific point of view . . . there is a paradox involved in practically excluding from the debate and from analysis things, terms, and doctrines that have been articulated in the field of faith, on the pretext that they belong [appartiennent] to a domain that is reserved for believers. . . . We analysts, who claim to go beyond certain conceptions of prepsychology relative to the phenomena of our own field or who approach human realities without prejudice, do not have to believe in these religious truths in any way [Pour nous analystes . . . il n’y a nul besoin de donner à ces vérités religieuses une adhésion], given that such belief may extend as far as what is called faith, in order to be interested in what is articulated in its own terms in religious experience—in the terms of the conflict between freedom and grace, for example.79
One can believe in the structure of religious devotion without having faith that its objects are real or its content true. To address “human realities” is to admit the ambivalence and irrationality that theology assiduously locates at the core of desire, the amoral core, as it were, of Christianity. “Under these conditions,” Lacan comments, “it is hardly surprising that everyone is sick [malade], that civilization has its discontents [qu’il y ait malaise dans la civilization].”80
The command that Freud found so repellant, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, as the “fulfilling of the law” (GB, Rom. 13.10), sums up the perversity of a rule that is designed not to be followed but to be broken.81 What Freud calls the “cultural” (or civilizational) super-ego [Kultur-Über-Ich] gets Pauline theology exactly wrong when it “issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it. On the contrary, it assumes that a man’s ego is psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, that his ego has unlimited mastery over his id.”82 In Luther’s and Calvin’s reading (as in Lacan’s), the biblical command presents not an obstacle but an incitement to aggression. Assuming its own violation, the command produces knowledge of the hostility it prohibits, a hostility that, as Freud also recognized, is the other side of covetousness: judging others by ourselves, we learn that the stranger “has more claim to my hostility [Feindseligkeit] and even my hatred,” for “if it will do him any good [Nutzen bringt] he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage [Nutzen] he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me.”83 In this light, the command to love the neighbor “at bottom . . . is the same thing” as that to love the enemy.84 To love our neighbors as ourselves is to love similarly unworthy creatures in full awareness of a mutual determination to seek advantage, a disposition directly at odds with the humility that Paul enjoins. The intolerable commandment to love “can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself” because it punctures the fiction that love is entirely, to again evoke Bersani, pastoral, innocent, or redemptive.85
As these Protestant and psychoanalytic readings of Romans demonstrate, Paul’s account of subjectivity is at odds with the definition of faith as something that one can confidently or conclusively achieve. It is also distinct from the Marxist view of faith as pure ideology, neatly captured in Althusser’s summary of Pascal: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”86 For Paul and Augustine, as for Luther, Calvin, and Lacan, we never know for certain what we really believe or why we really pray. Luther observes that the command to love without aggression, resentment, or entitlement effectively arouses the very hatred it appears to prohibit: “A man only hates the law [feinden wird] the more, the more it demands what he cannot perform” (“Preface” 21/4). This hatred, however, is salutary because, as Calvin puts it, “we cannot aspire to [God] in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves. For what man is not disposed to rest in himself [in se requiescat]? Who, in fact, does not thus rest, so long as he is unknown to himself; that is, so long as he is contented with his own endowments, and unconscious and unmindful of his misery?” (Institutes 1.1.1). Ugly feelings of hatred and misery offer warning signs that love, and therefore faith, has failed. They thereby compel the distraught believer, to recall Luther, “to seek the help which he does not find in himself elsewhere and from someone else.” It is only after confronting our own imperfection that we are prepared to be grateful for the unmerited election that otherwise would seem random and unfair.
The good news is that God shows mercy to those who love him, but there is a catch: loving God is not something anyone can choose or will. Since the law is spiritual, Luther explains,
No one keeps it, unless everything you do springs from your inmost heart. Such a heart is given us only by God’s spirit, and this spirit makes us equal to the demands of the law. Thus we gain a genuine desire for the law, and then everything is done with willing hearts [freiem Herzen], and not in fear, or under compulsion. . . . But this joy, this unconstrained love [Solche Lust freier Leib], is put into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. (“Preface” 21/5)
In other words, God gives us the ability to love him because he loves us. Election is not just about God’s inscrutable preferences, which, Luther and Calvin remind us, have nothing to do with merit of our own and therefore seem arbitrary, unjust, even abusive. Election is also the name for the source of our own unfathomable feelings. Faith is inseparable from the pangs of love that can come out of nowhere and disappear just as inexplicably. “No one,” Luther assures us, “can give faith to himself, nor free himself from unbelief” (“Preface” 25). The Christian God, in this light, sounds a lot like the pagan Cupid, an affinity registered in Renaissance art and allegory, which often treated the love between Cupid and Psyche as an allegory for that between Christ and the human soul.87 Once given the divine gift of love, we gain “freedom from sin and the law” (29) and no longer hate the God who imposes it. We want what God wants. Obedience and freedom, law and desire, are indistinguishable. Freedom means “taking pleasure simply in doing good [Gut zu tun mit Lust]”—obeying and liking it (“Preface” 30/14). As Luther explains in The Freedom of a Christian, “Love by its very nature is ready to serve and be subject to him who is loved.”88
As Luther and Calvin are well aware, this freedom is also described as a form of ethnic belonging in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. Paul’s assurance that “there is neither Jew nor Grecian, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” is followed by a qualifier that ties this transcendence of the flesh to the flesh: “And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs by promise” (GB, Gal. 3:28–29; emphasis in original). In clinging to the bondage of the law rather than the freedom of love, the observant Jew places himself outside what Paul will call the “household of faith” a few chapters later (GB, Gal. 6:10)—a metaphor teased out in Paul’s long discussion contrasting the descendants of Hagar with those of Sarah: “He which was of the servant, was born after the flesh, and he which was of the free woman, was born by promise” (GB, Gal. 4:23; emphasis in original). To choose the law over grace, action over faith, is to reject this heritage and thereby to remove oneself from the household, the ethnos, of Abraham’s freeborn son Isaac. As I noted in this book’s introduction, numerous scholars have examined how this seeming inclusiveness positions the Jew as the recalcitrant subject who does not want to be included. As Freud puts it, “When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom toward those who remained outside [die drausen Verbliebenen] it became the inevitable consequence.”89 As Medovoi and Balibar have noted, such intolerance has expanded to include all who refuse assimilation into a secular version of Christian culture summed up in an ideal of whiteness. In the Crusades as in modern Islamophobic discourse, Derrida observes, the Muslim shares the role of the self-excluding other who is a danger not as a political enemy but as “an enemy of the political—more precisely, a being radically alien to the political as such.”90
The Pauline Letters thus depict bondage and freedom as heritable biopolitical attributes—Jerome’s Vulgate describes Hagar as an ancilla, which, like servus could mean either slave or servant, an ambiguity registered in the tensions between the Geneva Bible’s translation as “servant” and the Douay-Reims’s and King James’s translations as “bondwoman.” This is consistent with the Septuagint Greek text of Genesis—the version likely read by New Testament authors—where Hagar is called a paidiskê, a diminutive of pais, meaning both “young girl, maiden, damsel” and “a young female slave, a courtesan.”91 For Luther, faith as an ethnic attribute becomes literalized in the figure of the Jew who does not so much do the wrong thing as feel the wrong way, obeying involuntarily: “Such were the Jews, and such too are all hypocrites, for they live without joy and love. In their hearts they hate the divine law and, as is the way with all hypocrites, they habitually condemn others. They regard themselves as spotless, although they are full of envy, hatred, pride, and all kinds of impurity [Unflats, “filth,” but also “vituperation”]” (“Preface” 26). The Jews are like everyone in that they hate the divine law and fail to obey it wholeheartedly, but they are distinct from true believers in that they “regard themselves as spotless.” They are hypocrites—the Greek word ὑποκριτής originally meant “actor”—because when they “appear to be godly” even as they “commit secret sins,” they perform devotion they do not feel. As Ania Loomba, Kim Hall, Sujata Iyengar, Dennis Britton, and Imtiaz Habib (among others) have shown, such suspicion was directed not only at Jews, but also at Muslims and, in Protestant writing, at Catholics. In England, adherents of these three religions were frequently conflated as irredeemably black on the inside as well as the outside. Like the category of “Moor,” the designation of “black” could include persons of Middle Eastern, South Asian, North African, sub-Saharan African, Indigenous American, and sometimes Iberian and Irish origin or descent.92 This collapse of racialized and religious others to Christianity, and especially Protestantism, made blackness a property of the soul that manifested itself on the skin, whether through its color, cosmetics, or texture (in premodern writing, soft skin, along with dark skin, is sometimes treated as a racialized characteristic).93 Religious and racial distinction, dogma- and color-line racism, culture and biology, were intertwined in shifting and unpredictable ways that continue to shape erotic aspirations and sexual hierarchies.
Yet by Luther’s own logic, the distinction between humble and sincere Christians and proud and hypocritical religious and racial others can easily break down, for one can never be secure in one’s own faith. As Claire McEachern deftly explains, “The hallmark of a sincere faith is the fear that one might not be sincere.”94 The line of dogma in early modern thought is as uncertain as that of color. Luther’s warning not to be like observant Jews—not to be confident of one’s own rectitude—needs to be given only because Christians are already like this. The hypocrisy and slavishness that Luther attributes to Jews must, by his own logic, be recognized as the truth of the Christian self as well. What distinguishes the elect (and Luther excludes Catholics, along with Jews, Muslims, and pagans from this category) is awareness and confession of infidelity and unworthiness. The difference between the redeemable and unredeemable sinner is the desire, so assiduously traced in Augustine’s Confessions, not to be loved but to love, a second order desire to desire that is perpetuated through its own failure. What Luther called the freedom of a Christian is the opposite of the sovereign self of classical askesis. The freedom of a Christian is freedom from (or loss of) the self that Paul announces when he introduces himself as Paulus, servus Jesus Christi, “servant/slave of Christ” (Rom. 1:1). To love properly is to aspire to the selfless and monogamous desire for God enjoined in the first commandment prohibiting idolatry, which insists that we have no competing affections. But to aspire to the love of God (in both the objective and subjective senses of that double genitive) is also to recognize that we will never love him enough or in the right way, for we will never wholeheartedly want what God commands, nor will we experience duty as choice.
It is customary to read Shakespeare’s sonnets as striving for exactly the distinction between faithful self and treacherous other that Luther’s treatment of Paul at once invokes and undercuts. The conventional division of the Sonnets into 126 sonnets to the youth followed by 28 to the mistress formally registers a narrative that, in Joel Fineman’s influential formulation, constitutes nothing less than the invention of a new poetic subjectivity—“the poetics of heterosexuality” in the sense of difference—whereby the speaker’s own ambivalence, duplicity, and opacity to himself appears in a shift in object of address.95 The sonnets, Fineman argues, feature a speaking subject who wants what he does not admire, as rational and assured praise for a beautiful and virtuous object (the “fair” youth) is replaced by expressions of compulsive yearning for one who is debauched and repulsive (the “foul” mistress). This view has not gone uncontested, either as poetic history or as a reading of the sequence. Noting that many of the poems have no gendered pronouns or other information to identify the addressee, and that the order of the sonnets may not have been authorized by Shakespeare, several scholars have argued that, as Heather Dubrow puts it, the sonnets not only explore rather than depart from the subjective dilemmas of Petrarchism but also “repeatedly problematize the narrative impulse that the conventional wisdom so unproblematically assigns to them.”96 Accordingly, poems usually read in reference to the youth may be to the mistress and vice-versa, with the result that praise and blame, admiration and disgust, may be more evenly distributed—and the sequence may be neither as homoerotic nor as misogynist as it is often deemed. By contrast, Valerie Traub argues that “the formal operation of the sequence” is “relevant to the ongoing manufacture of gender and desire” insofar as most readers first encounter the sonnets as a sequence that, read from start to finish, begins with an ideal of purity that is gradually degraded.97 Distinctions persist due to the temporal nature of reading itself, even if they cannot be verified by objective formal, material, or historical evidence.
Rather than stake my claim on a certainty about the order or addressees of the sonnets, I propose along with a number of previous critics that even if we focus only on those poems in which the addressee is specified, we have ample evidence that the speaker’s relationship with the youth is as compromised and faithless as that with the mistress.98 But compromise is not necessarily a bad thing; an acceptance of impurity may lead to a more ethical relation with others than a demand for love that is “fair, kind, and true” (105.9, 10, 13). In relinquishing the classical ideal of self-sameness and mastery in favor of the Pauline division and distraction that equally influenced Petrarch, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, Shakespeare also struggles against the assumption that desire finds its telos, or perfection, in monogamous coupledom, whether in the form of classical friendship or companionate marriage. In what is often regarded as the first subsequence of the sonnets, focused on the youth, the effort to renounce the desire for progress appears explicitly in the speaker’s promise to “forgive” and “excuse,” rather than deny or prohibit, the affair between youth and mistress (40.9, 42.5). In the second part, conventionally understood as addressing the mistress, Will concedes the similarity of his two loves: “thou art covetous, and he is kind” (134.6). Once we read the sequence—in whatever order—through a framework that cultivates not monogamous purity but a secular approximation of what Will calls “Lascivious grace,” the gendered, sexual, and racial distinctions it maps appear as conspicuously artificial as they are fragile (40.13).
The black mistress’s oft-discussed promiscuity takes on new significance when set within the theological tradition that, I have been arguing, in fact structures the secular love given voice in Petrarchan lyric, in which it is impossible to tell what is going on in one’s own heart, much less beneath the surface of another’s skin. Grace, as both divine forgiveness and secular love, is in this tradition always “lascivious”—wanton, gratuitous, injudicious, promiscuous—precisely because it is undeserved and indiscriminate. It is in Sonnets 127–154, when the mistress’s conjoined blackness and promiscuity become a consistent topic of the sequence, that we witness both the promise and the difficulty of a secular attempt to replicate “lascivious grace.” In Kathryn Schwarz’s elegant phrase, these last twenty-eight poems “disclose the improbable, unworkable qualities of taxonomic segregation.”99 Understood in terms of modern evangelical family values—and, frankly, in terms of the social structures that Luther and Calvin would have endorsed—this shift would appear to be the farthest thing from Christianity. But my focus is on the logical end, rather than the historical use, of a theology in which the recognition of human impurity makes necessary the promiscuous structure of Christian fellowship and treats the classical dyad as a distracting worldly lure. As Will Stockton has meticulously demonstrated, the ultimate ideal of Christianity may well be group marriage, a fellowship of all believers incorporated into the body of Christ. This plural union, Stockton argues, appears in the slippage between the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself and that to love one’s wife as one’s own flesh, so that communal and private bonds become interchangeable.100 Calvin sets forth a vision of communal confession that is also one of communal fellowship, arguing that “we are to deposit our infirmities into the breasts of each other, with the view of receiving mutual counsel, sympathy, and comfort; and secondly, That mutually conscious of the infirmities of our brethren we are to pray to the Lord for them” (Institutes 3.4.6). This relationship of shared shame, as Huston Diehl has argued, fosters a sense of community premised not on judgment but on forgiveness for the inevitable failings and injuries of others, the same forgiveness we would wish for ourselves.101
Shakespeare’s sonnets strive in the final twenty-eight poems for such mutual compassion, expressed in the form of unmerited love—the only form that human love can take. This position is voiced in the closing couplet of Sonnet 150, in which merit and grace dissolve into one another: “If thy unworthiness raised love in me, / More worthy I to be belov’d of thee” (150.13–14). However, the sonnets also accentuate the elusiveness of the humility on which fellowship in deficiency is based. Forgiveness remains as imperfect as the rationality and self-control celebrated by classical philosophy. The threat to the mistress that “if I should despair, I should go mad, / And in my madness might speak ill of thee” (140.9–10) is repeatedly carried out in racialized and misogynistic assertions such as “I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night” (147.13–14) and “I love what others do abhor” (150.11), as well as in the two Anacreontics that close the sequence, in which the mistress is deemed the source of “strange maladies” (sexually transmitted diseases) that incurably plague the speaker (153.8). Race becomes the vehicle for distinguishing between faithful self and promiscuous other, even as the traditional moral semiotics of color provides the veneer of racial neutrality.
Changes in Shakespeare criticism crystalize a larger cultural habit of suppressing the racial dimensions of ideals of sexual purity. Until the mid-1990s, editors and critics habitually assured us that “black” just meant that the mistress was a brown-eyed brunette, in contrast to Petrarch’s blonde and blue-eyed Laura, denying that Shakespeare’s sequence has anything like modern “race” in mind when it describes the mistress as “black” and dwells on her “dun” (brown, swarthy, dark) “breasts” and her “black” “face” and “complexion” (127, 130.3, 131.10–12, 132.13–14).102 Such uneasiness with racialized sexuality, as several scholars have pointed out, appears in the mistress’s conventional appellation as “the dark lady,” despite the fact that this name appears nowhere in the sequence.103 This occlusion of race, more problematically, permits the persistence of the same semiotics of color, in which sexual immorality is envisioned as internal blackness, that Medovoi describes as “dogma-line racism.” The mistress is, in Fineman’s analysis, “black on the inside, as any orthodox Petrarchan would have known at first abhorrent sight,” both “corrupt and corrupting” or, in John Kerrigan’s estimation, “decidedly dark in the conduct of her love-life” to the extent that “morally she inhabits, as she sexually enshrines, a ‘hell.’”104
Such dogma-line racism works in concert with the ideals of sexual innocence whose prejudicial and violent effects queer theory has allowed us to appreciate. Most critics take the speaker’s sexual slurs as a matter of misogynistic course, while those who have explicitly championed the dark lady have proceeded as though the best line of defense is to question the charge that she has—and likes having—multiple sex partners. Yet in accepting the terms in which misogynist culture evaluates promiscuity, scholars have allowed to stand the more general assumption that such behavior, if true, would really be blameworthy; many have also accepted the Petrarchan equation of “fairness” with virtue and dignity.105 As Jonathan Goldberg has argued, Shakespeare’s mistress complicates modern definitions of normativity according to gender of object choice by making visible a Renaissance sexual taxonomy focused on respectability: “The threatening sexuality that the dark lady represents—outside marriage and promiscuous and dangerous to homosocial order—is closer to sodomy than almost anything suggested in the poems to the young man.”106 Traub has observed that both male and female readers who align themselves with feminism tend to disavow any identification with the mistress, while both male and female readers who align themselves with gay, lesbian, and queer studies tend to identify with the young man or the speaker’s more idealized and respectable attachment to him.107 Accordingly, Traub maintains, rather than merely celebrate the sonnets’ explicit depiction of male homoerotic love, we must recognize that the “displacement of sodomy onto the dark lady is strategic and structural,” making visible the “historical interarticulation of male-male desire and misogyny” that produces hierarchies of gender and sexual practice.108 The acceptance of the assessment of female promiscuity as particularly degrading affirms a general critical pattern that Traub resists and that is explained in more general terms by Goldberg. In Goldberg’s account, because early modern writers described female desire in the most stigmatized of ways as an excuse for exerting legal and institutional forms of control, feminist scholarship has generally responded by constructing a “legend of good women” that denies imputations of excessive sexual appetite and, in the process, accords normative femininity only to women who are morally pure, suffering subjects.109 Such purity, as Jennifer Brody has insisted, has historically been racialized: “White women who are sexually deviant are blackened; black women who are sexually virtuous are never really pure.”110 We see an early instance of this dynamic in Will’s charge to the mistress that “In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,” which summarizes a cultural logic in which bodily attributes are conflated with spiritual states (131.13).
The absence of an affirmative theory of female promiscuity bespeaks the limitations of queer as well as feminist theory. Given the psychological and physical attacks to which women are uniquely vulnerable in a society premised on male supremacy, the always feminized, heteroerotic slut is a sad figure, neither as edgy as the gay male cruiser nor as empowered as the straight male playboy or philanderer. Although Dean provocatively and persuasively endorses promiscuity as “an ethical philosophy of living that is available to anyone, irrespective of gender or sexuality,” his examples of this practice are all male.111 Many feminists, by contrast, have tended to endorse as the healthiest form of female relationship a same-sex union of mutual love, trust, and nurture, a fantasy that Amber Hollibaugh has called “lesbian Cinderella-ism.”112 Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the more women deviate from a pastoralizing ideal of love (whether for men or for women), the more they are treated as ideological victims of male sexual needs.113 With regard to representations of female promiscuity and sadomasochism, I have proposed that we take a page from queer theory focused on men. In the case of Shakespeare’s black sonnet mistress, rather than deny that she is promiscuous, I suggest that we explore the possibilities that open up when we accept and revalue female promiscuity.114
Focusing here on the conjunction of racial impurity and sexual promiscuity as alternatives to the sameness and self-sovereignty of classical friendship, I draw on the arguments of José Esteban Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson, and Sharon Holland that queer studies must expand its citational repertoire to include feminist and queer of color critique.115 This body of writing affords a nuanced conceptual framework and vocabulary for discussing female sexuality, which otherwise falls outside the bounds of a culturally conservative respectability often endorsed in the name of feminism. One canonical text of this alternate archive is Gloria Anzaldùa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which refuses to honor racial, historical, or sexual boundaries. Anticipating recent work on queer temporality, Anzaldùa identifies as an icon of mestiza consciousness the sixteenth-century figure of Doña María, or La Malinche, the translator and mistress to Cortés who remains a figure of racial and national betrayal. La Malinche is also known as La Chingada (“the fucked one”), a term that for Anzaldùa registers the predicament of the Chicana who can practice neither feminist nor racial solidarity without sacrificing desire and autonomy.116 Repurposing the heritage of malinchismo as a sign of racial shame and betrayal into the resistance of the malinchista, Anzaldùa argues for sexual promiscuity both as a literal repudiation of patriarchal constraints and as a figure for an impure politics that goes beyond identity, loyalty, and opposition. As La Malinche’s queer Chicana descendent, the mestiza “has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. . . . The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. . . . Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else.”117 While Anzaldùa is most typically understood as a lesbian Chicana feminist, her work is also queer—her own self-description years before that term became institutionalized as the name of a theoretical movement—in the sense that it resists sexual or identitarian monogamy, stressing instead both racial and sexual indeterminability.118
In refusing to accept the abjection of female promiscuity, Anzaldùa (along with pathbreaking feminists of color like Audre Lorde and Angela Davis) offers an early instance of a reading method that Jennifer Nash has more recently described as “racial iconography.” Focusing in particular on racialized pornography, Nash seeks to uncover “the possibilities of female pleasures within a phallic economy” and “the possibilities of black female pleasures within a white-dominated representational economy.”119 Insofar as pornographic depictions of black women represent an extreme of white, masculine sexual ideology more generally, Nash proposes that we can use this archive “as a tool for shifting the black feminist theoretical archive away from the production and enforcement of a ‘protectionist’ reading of representation, and toward an interpretative framework centered on complex and sometimes unnerving pleasures.”120 Similarly, Amber Jamilla Musser addresses the historically and materially embedded racial and gendered experiences of masochism. She reads masochism “as a relational, contingent term that describes a plethora of relationships” and thereby illuminates the “contradictions, various imaginaries, multiple forms of power, and diverse responses to that power” that escape evaluations of S/M as either stabilizing or subverting regimes of domination.121 Nash’s and Musser’s work, like that of Mireille Miller-Young, Nicole Fleetwood, and Ariane Cruz, seeks to illuminate the feminist and queer potential of an “illicit eroticism” usually viewed through the lens of stigma or injury.122 Read collectively, this work builds on the pro-sex feminist insight that the feminist effort to protect women from imputations of indecent behavior may end up replicating conservative sexual mores. Many white feminist writings of the sex wars either ignored the difference that race makes to perceptions of female sexuality or, in Hortense Spillers’s words, replaced the racist caricature of the “supersexed black female” with that of the “unsexed black female”—both of which denied the nuances of time and history.123 Working to correct this distortion, black feminist critics have discussed in detail two effects on feminism of the intertwined ideals of racial and sexual purity in Atlantic chattel slavery. In the first wave of US feminism, as modesty, sexual innocence, silence, and self-effacement became the qualities associated with the cult of true womanhood, African American women sought to emulate “ladylike” behavior to attain social respect and parity with white women. In the second wave, black female eroticism was suppressed in favor of a focus on the traumatic legacy of slavery’s sexual violence.124 Most recently, a newer body of queer feminist of color theory that includes the work of Nash, Musser, Miller-Young, Fleetwood, and Cruz confronts the historical legacy of racial violence but resists the silencing effects that legacy has had on discussions of racialized sexuality.
Given the pornographic perspective of so many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, these poems also provide an overlooked archive for retheorizing racialized female promiscuity across a longer time span. When Will makes the rhetorical intent of his uses of stigma so explicit—“if I should despair I should grow mad, / And in my madness might speak ill of thee” (140.9–10)—he also reveals his own moral condemnation to be instrumental rather than sincere, thereby undercutting his repeated assertion of sincerity and authenticity as racialized properties. Elsewhere, he attempts to persuade the mistress to indulge him because she can measure the extremity of his desire for her by that of her own desire for other men. In other words, the differentiation that he attempts to draw between “fair” male infidelity and “black” female promiscuity gives way to an argument for erotic identification across racial and gendered lines. To be clear, I do not propose that this argument reveals a proto-queer-feminist consciousness on Shakespeare’s part. Rather, by taking seriously an erotics of the divided will, Shakespeare’s sonnets read as a whole symptomatically confess the fragility of the racial and sexual taxonomies that underpin the modern Western ideal of sincere, monogamous love.
In its very transparent rhetoricity, Will’s identification with the black mistress concedes the Pauline insight that one can never quite separate sincerity from insincerity, proper from improper habits of desire. Sonnet 142, to take one striking instance, accentuates the promiscuity of Christian caritas. Here, Will asserts the similarity between his and the mistress’s erotic aims despite their different objects:
Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate,
Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving.
O but with mine compare thou thine own state,
And thou shalt find it merits not reproving,
Or if it do, not from those lips of thine,
That have profaned their scarlet ornaments,
And sealed false bonds of love as oft as mine,
Robbed others’ beds’ revénues of their rents.
Be it lawful I love thee as thou lov’st those
Whom thine eyes woo as mine impórtune thee.
Root pity in thy heart, that when it grows,
Thy pity may deserve to pitied be.
If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,
By self-example mayst thou be denied. (142.1–14)
As Stephen Booth notes, these lines together enact the doubling of Will and the mistress through chiasmus (inverted repetition: love/hate/Hate/loving) and anadiplosis (repetition of the last word of one grammatical and formal unit as the first word of the next: hate/Hate).125 In asking her to do what he just has—“with mine compare thou thine own state”—Will introduces the third repetition in as many lines, formally enacting the poem’s larger argument that they are comparable in their unstable and multiple desires. Much as the sonnets to the young man insisted that mutual betrayal must be met by mutual forgiveness, this sonnet asserts that an affinity of desire must yield affinity of pity.
The second quatrain initially appears to continue the “slander” threatened in Sonnet 140 by charging that the mistress’s lips have “profaned their scarlet ornaments / And sealed false bonds of love.” But that intervening “as oft as mine” implicates Will in exploiting the ambiguous significance of the kiss. When is a kiss just a kiss? When does it “seal” a more lasting “bond”? Similarly, the charge that the black mistress has “Robbed others’ beds’ revenues of their rents” is impossible grammatically to distinguish from a confession that Will is equally guilty of seduction. Grammar, syntax, and metaphor, in other words, resist the poem’s thematic distinctions between “fair” male monogamy and “black” female promiscuity. Immoderate desire here is a source of identification and legitimation, bringing subject and object into a chiasmic relationship in which they are fungible rather than singular. “Be it lawful I love thee as thou lov’st those / Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee”: the two lines fold in on themselves, so that the mistress’s love and wooing are mirrored in Will’s own love and importunity. The mistress’s promiscuous past, like Will’s own, is rendered “lawful” by her recognition that he desires her as much as she desires others. Her pursuit of future trysts provides the ground for Will’s appeal: do unto me as you would have others do unto you. Moral censure is not the end of seduction but its logical premise.
Sonnet 142 begins with what we might read as a glib paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount (“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” [GB, Matt. 7:1–2]). It ends by transforming the golden rule (usually summed up as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) into an appeal for erotic caritas (a formulation I will discuss at length in chapter 5).126 Unlike what in the vernacular would be called a “pity fuck,” the compassion for which Will pleads rests not on a hierarchical relationship of pity but on kindness: identification of another’s weakness as one’s own. In Calvin’s assessment, the golden rule of caritas reappearing from Leviticus, Matthew, Luke, and Paul’s Epistles “transfers to others the love which we naturally feel for ourselves” (Institutes 2.8.54). What is significant in Will’s adaptation of this rule in Sonnet 142 is that it takes seriously the black mistress’s interest in other men as active and legitimate, defining “love” in an explicitly sexual sense and grounding responsiveness to others’ desires on awareness of one’s own. Reciprocity exceeds a contract among two, becoming a larger principle of community. This placement of lover and beloved in a circuit of universal good will is, to be sure, a rhetorical device. But such persuasion can only succeed if it treats as legitimate the mistress’s desire to have her will in the future as she has in the past—that is, if it replaces the singular and eternal commitment of monogamy with an open-ended set of encounters and strategic affiliations. At the same time, in imagining relations that are noncommittal but intimate and ongoing, the sonnets repudiate the binary that Elizabeth Freeman has observed whereby “the magical sign” for queer relationality “has been the flip side of the cohesive couple, the purely physical and often anonymous sexual encounter—and not the tangled network of ex-lovers, concomitant relationships, unconsummated erotics, and so forth that structure so many queer lives, and that often get homogenized as ‘just friends.’”127 Such queer networks are not at odds with the secular love tradition. They are at the core of one of its most canonical texts.
What I am arguing is that the same set of poems that have been understood to attack the black mistress’s promiscuity look very different when we set aside the assumption that such behavior, particularly in women, is destructive of both self and society. Insofar as we as feminist and queer scholars use poetry as a site to retheorize gendered, racial, and sexual possibilities, a critical framework that sees promiscuity as not only inevitable but also salutary, one paradoxically provided by the logic of Pauline theology, can help us to read against the grain of an ideology of monogamous coupledom and the racial and gendered hierarchies it sustains. The religious vocabulary in Sonnet 144, for instance, contests the purity and predictability upon which classical friendship no less than modern marriage rests:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell,
But being both from me both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another’s hell.
Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out. (144.1–14)
The first quatrain, several critics have observed, asserts a strict dichotomy between the two loves. Will associates comfort with the “man right fair” described as a “better angel” and a “saint” and credited with “purity”; he associates despair with the “woman colored ill” described as a “worser spirit” and “female evil” and accused of that original sin of “foul pride.” However, as we have seen, Pauline and Reform thought admit no such soothing binaries. Saints, as the poem itself admits, may become devils, and there is no neat epistemological relation between salvation and comfort, damnation and despair. Getting too comfortable about one’s own salvation is just as bad as giving up on it altogether.
When the second and third quatrains detail the behavior of these loves who “suggest me still,” the insufficiency of the initial ontological and epistemological taxonomy becomes even more apparent. Although the neat parallelism of the first quatrain leads us to expect that the youth is “suggest[ing]”—wooing or urging—Will as constantly (“still”) as the mistress, the mistress is the subject of all of the verbs of the second quatrain. Will claims that her motive is “to win me soon to hell,” to lead him to despair of the man’s love and thereby lure him to sex with her, if we accept Booth’s gloss of “hell” as slang for vagina. The medieval tableau with Will at its center is here reconfigured as a struggle between Will and the woman for the male “better angel,” who, as Sedgwick long ago noted, is markedly passive in the octave, belying the speaker’s initial claim that the two loves exhaustively vie for his soul.128 The woman colored ill may endeavor to “win” both Will and the youth, but the man right fair does not seem to care either way.
Continuing in the present tense, Will admits in the third quatrain that the youth may already “be turned” from “angel” to “fiend.” This conversion (or perversion) has been a feature of the sequence all along, even if Will cannot “directly tell,” or empirically verify it. Like the youth’s “purity,” the contest to “win” Will may never have been a contest in the first place, since one of the poem’s jokes is that neither love seems terribly concerned about the speaker. Instead, as Will complains, “being both from me both to each friend.” This rare use of “to . . . friend” as a verb meaning “to offer friendship, aid, or support” evokes the common medieval and early modern use of “friend” to mean “lover” in a sexual sense and thereby recalls the sexual caritas for which Will pleaded in Sonnet 142. The sight rhyme of “friend” with “fiend” retrospectively supplements the obvious theological meaning of “fiend” in line 9 as a synonym for devil with its original meaning of “enemy.” The first quatrain’s crisp convictions quickly give way to the subjunctive mood of doubt and conjecture: friends and enemies, identity and difference, comfort and despair, fair and foul mingle promiscuously with one another. If, in the couplet the woman structurally remains the “bad angel,” she will be the one to comfort the poet by ending or revealing a friendship that the “good” male angel would have continued secretly to enjoy. In the poem’s secular soteriology, living in doubt is a necessary condition of achieving what salvation one can find in intimacy and love—a condition that appears repeatedly throughout the sequence. Keeping the faith is something one tries to do while awaiting an ever-deferred revelation of truth. It requires ongoing wariness of comfort and despair, both of which avoid the exhaustive work of patience.
This is not to lose sight of the fact that Will’s rhetoric of identification is instrumental, nor that subsequent poems return to the racialized and misogynistic attacks against the mistress’s inconstant and deceptive behavior. As Schwarz observes, “By reading for unity, we may find what we presuppose a coherent misogynist approach that fulfills its disciplinary functions. By suspending presumption, we can recover a fragmentary, porous, and in all senses partial account of the relations among social subjects.”129 Schwarz focuses on gendered difference, but the fragmentation, porosity, and partiality she recommends may equally describe the complex of mutually formative racial and sexual taxonomies that I have been tracing. The very fact that Will approaches the mistress’s promiscuity in so many different ways, from sympathetic identification to wounded condemnation, enables us to see his evaluations of her racial and sexual identity in provisional and circumstantial, rather than pure or absolute, terms. Shakespeare’s sequence depicts neither linear regression from a paradise of white male friendship to the hell of racial and sexual promiscuity, nor a more conciliatory progress from prideful condemnation to humble forgiveness. Rather, these poems enact the same recursive dynamic that we have seen in Augustinian conversion and Petrarchan love. Any given poem, indeed any given line, represents but a fragment of a larger, irresolvable maelstrom of human will.
Amidst such flux, the “marriage of true minds” idealized by homonormative (white) friendship is no more possible—or ethically desirable—than the mystical conjugal transformation of two bodies into one flesh. When, in the final twenty-eight poems, the speaker of the sonnets turns attention away from the whiteness and monogamy so insistently conflated in the first 126 poems addressed to the young man and toward the blackness and promiscuity of the mistress, he also relinquishes a fantasy that two minds can become one. The promiscuous entanglements across modern categories of race and sexuality depicted in the sonnets struggle toward a disposition of vulnerability to the strange and unbidden, even as these poems reveal just how difficult it is to let go of the illusion of innocent and autonomous selfhood and the gratifying aggressions this ideal legitimates.