All Desire is a Desire for Being, page 15
I do not want to imply that political questioning is always out of place in Shakespeare. Until the mimetic logic that erases differences is established, it is premature; after this logic is in place, to inquire about the political significance of the logic itself is not only legitimate but imperative.
The perpetual ‘plague on both your houses’ in Shakespeare must not be void of political significance. When I read Julius Caesar I see no Utopian temptation, but I also see an author more nauseated with the aristocratic policies of his time than critics usually believe. I see more satire than most critics perceive. I see an anti-political stance in Shakespeare that suggests a rather sardonic view of history. On political subjects, he reminds me of two French thinkers who are themselves closer to one another than it appears, Montaigne and Pascal. But Shakespeare’s mimetic vision, which is artistic form as well as intellectual insight, always takes precedence over other considerations.
Scandal and the Dance: Salome in the Gospel of Mark
Of all the arts, only dance is mentioned in the Gospels, and then in only two of them, Mark and Matthew, which relate the story of the beheading of John the Baptist.
Mark’s is the richer text. He tells us that, in the course of a banquet given by Herod, the daughter of Herodias, the tetrarch’s wife, ‘came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and his guests.’ There is nothing further on the dance itself. It is not described in our two Gospels, nor is the dancer’s name mentioned. Our direct information is minimal, and yet the dancer and her dance have always fired the erotic and esthetic imagination of the West. Salome danced upon the capitals of Romanesque churches and has kept on dancing ever since. Closer to us in time are Flaubert’s ‘Herodias,’ Mallarmé’s ‘Herodiade,’ Oscar Wilde’s ‘Salome,’ and the ‘Salome’ of Richard Strauss and of Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
Why this fascination? Mark’s narrative (Mark 6:14–29) is not lengthy and deals exclusively with the relations of desire and hatred which separate and join the characters. Herod wanted to take Herodias, the wife of his own brother, as his second wife. John the Baptist condemned this action, and Herodias, with resentment in her heart, demanded his head. Herod did not want to comply and had John imprisoned, not so much to punish him for his insolence, it appears, as to protect him from Herodias, who, however, prevailed, as a result of having her daughter dance in the presence of Herod and his guests.
It all begins as in myth, with a story of rival brothers. Real brothers may be driven to rivalry by their very proximity; they dispute the same paternal heritage, the same crown, the same woman. But this alone does not explain the proliferation of enemy brothers in myth. Do they have the same desires because they resemble one another, or do they resemble one another because they have the same desires? Is it kinship that determines the duplication of desires, or is it the duplication of desires that is expressed in the theme of the rival brothers, often the rival twins? In our text both statements must be true. Herod and his brother constitute both a symbol and a real historical example of the type of desire that dominates our text. Herod really did have a brother, and he really did take his wife Herodias from him. We know from Josephus that the pleasure of supplanting his brother caused Herod serious setbacks. Herod had a first wife whom he had repudiated, and the father of the rejected woman decided to punish his son-in-law’s inconstancy by inflicting a bitter defeat on him.
At the very beginning, the hostile brothers indicate the type of relationship that dominates the entire narrative and finally culminates in the murder of John the Baptist. Every detail of this text serves to illustrate some aspect of this desire, and the entire text illustrates all of its stages, each produced by the demented logic of escalation dictated by the immediately preceding stage. Let us begin at the beginning:
For Herod had sent and seized John, and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife; because he had married her. For John said to Herod, ‘“It is not right for you to have your brother’s wife.”’ And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and kept him safe. When he heard John, he was much perplexed; and yet he heard him gladly.
The emphasis is not on legality. In the phrase, ‘It is not right for you to have your brother’s wife,’ the Greek verb exein, translated by ‘to have,’ has no legal connotation. To ‘have’ Herodias, to possess her, is detrimental to Herod, not by virtue of some formal law, but because possession of her can be secured only at the expense of a dispossessed brother. However, this is precisely the reason why Herod desires Herodias. This is what I call mimetic desire: you desire something because someone else does. That person’s desire, in turn, is reinforced by your own desire. No sooner is the woman married than she loses all direct influence over her husband. She cannot obtain from him even the head of an insignificant little prophet like John the Baptist. To achieve her ends, Herodias must resort to her daughter, whom she dominates, to reproduce a triangular configuration analogous to the one in which she was the disputed and fascinating object.
Herodias feels herself negated, obliterated by the word of John. And so she is, not as a woman but as an object of mimetic rivalry. The brothers are interested in her only as a function of their rivalry. In shielding the prophet from his wife’s vengeance, Herod acts according to the laws of mimetic desire and intensifies Herodias’s vengefulness, thus generating more conflict and fulfilling the word of the prophet. Herodias is not primarily a character in a story; she represents the violent next stage in the necessary evolution of mimetic desire.
When I imitate the desire of my brother, I desire that which he desires. We prevent one another from satisfying our common desire. The more the resistance increases on both sides, the more desire is reinforced; the more the model is made the obstacle, the more the obstacle is made the model, so that in the last analysis, desire is attracted only when it is thwarted. It focuses on obstacles only. John the Baptist is first of all the object Herod does not want to yield. As a prophet, on the other hand, he is a tantalizing obstacle, powerless but intractable, resistant to all attempts at corruption, and this fascinates Herodias even more than it does Herod.
The metamorphosis of desire into hatred results from its mimetic nature. The more mimetic it becomes, the more it incites imitation, and the more rapidly it is transmitted from one individual to another. Mark immediately gives an extraordinary illustration of this phenomenon:
For when Herodias’s daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, ‘Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will grant it.’ And he promised, ‘Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.’ And she went out, and said to her mother, ‘What shall I ask?’ And she said, ‘The head of John the baptizer.’ And she came in immediately with haste to the king, and asked, saying, ‘I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.’
Something very odd happens here, or rather, does not happen. Salome has no desire to formulate. Young people are supposed to desire a thousand foolish and impossible things, but Salome has nothing to say. Her silence expresses, I think, something essential about the Gospels’ conception of desire. Contrary to what Freud believes, to what we all believe, there is no preordained object of desire. Children in particular have to be told what to desire. Unlike the sultry temptress of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Salome of the gospel is really a child. The Greek word for her is not kore but korasion, which means ‘a little girl.’
Children are taught desire through example or speech, or both. Children imitate the desire of prestigious adults. Because Herod offers everything, he suggests nothing. Salome must go out and ask her mother what she ought to desire.
Does the mother really communicate her desire to her daughter? Perhaps Salome is only a passive intermediary, an obedient child who does what she is told to do. The text suggests otherwise. After speaking to her mother, she becomes a different person. Hesitation gives way to eager anticipation: ‘And she came in immediately with haste to the king, and asked, saying, “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.”’
‘Immediately,’ ‘with haste,’ ‘at once.’ In a text with very little descriptive detail, we have three adverbs that signify impatience and feverishness. Salome is worried at the thought that the king might return to his senses after the dance has ended and retract his promise. Her mother’s desire has become her own. The fact that Salome’s desire is entirely imitative detracts not a whit from its intensity; on the contrary, the imitation is fiercer than the original.
Salome is a child. She has nothing to do with the dance of the seven veils and other orientalia. At first she is a blank sheet of desire, then, in one instant, she shifts to the height of mimetic violence.
It is difficult to imagine a sequence better suited to reveal the mimetic genesis of desire than the passage just quoted: first the girl’s silence in response to the overwhelming offer of the king, then the question to the mother, then the mother’s response, and finally the girl’s espousal of her mother’s desire. The child asks the adult, not to fulfill some desire that would be hers, but to provide her with the desire she lacks. To Mark, imitation is the essence of desire. This conception is alien both to our philosophical views of imitation and to our modern theories of desire.
The scene is powerful, but it contradicts superficial realism. However rapid the contagion of desire can be from one individual to another, one can hardly believe that the mother’s brief response to her daughter would suffice to kindle desire in the latter. This is too elliptical for Matthew, who deletes the exchange between mother and daughter. He sees only the awkwardness of it, not the genius. He tells simply and reasonably that the daughter is ‘instructed’ or ‘prompted’ by her mother. He feels he must interpret Mark. His interpretation is correct, but less vivid, less dramatic than Mark’s. We do not see Salome transformed in one instant, mimetically, into a second Herodias.
After absorbing her mother’s desire, Salome is one with Herodias. Each woman in turn plays the same role in relation to Herod. Our sacrosanct cult of desire prevents our recognizing this sameness. Desire is supposed to generate differences.
The modern interpreters are just about evenly divided. One half portrays Salome and the other half Herodias as the heroine of the most intense desire. Far from individualizing its victims, as our modern cult of desire demands, mimetic desire makes them interchangeable. If you consider the modern adaptations in toto, all of them celebrations of either Salome or Herodias, you will find they unwittingly reassert the truth each one taken separately denies. The mother and the daughter are one and the same. As desire intensifies, it renders its victims increasingly interchangeable.
With the exception of the prophet, there are only mimetic doubles and look-alikes in our text: Herod and his brother, Herod and Herodias, and finally the guests. Herod and Herodias phonetically suggest sameness, and the two names are constantly reiterated in our text, whereas the name of Salome is never pronounced, perhaps because nothing in it echoes the other names and suggests reciprocal mimicry, as in the case of Herod and Herodias.
I have not forgotten the dance, but before coming to it I must consider a notion that pervades our entire text, even though it is not explicitly mentioned: the evangelical notion of ‘scandal.’ ‘Skadzein’, in Greek, signifies ‘to limp’; skandalon designates the obstacle which repels and attracts simultaneously, the stumbling block. As insignificant as the first encounter with the stumbling block may seem, one always returns to it; the initial accident leads us back to it obsessively. Instead of teaching us to avoid it, this strange obstacle causes us to stumble again and again: that is, to limp.
‘Scandal’ describes the consequences of mimetic desire. The more my model interferes with my desire, the more I interfere with his; the more we both turn each other into fascinating stumbling blocks, the more we ‘scandalize’ one another. If you examine the various uses of the word scandal in the four Gospels, you will realize that it applies to domains that appear to us independent of each other: obsessive human conflict, many psychopathological symptoms, religious idolatry, mob violence and scapegoating, ‘demoniacal’ possession, and, of course, mimetic desire. It covers so much ground that we feel it must be a loose and impressionistic concept, whereas in reality it is immensely powerful, although precisely because it is so powerful it is completely misunderstood and neglected: our most trusted intellectual instruments in the sciences of man are unable to grasp it, so this power remains unperceived. The text we are reading unfolds a process of desire, conflict, and collective scapegoating that is one with scandal itself.
To Herodias, John the Baptist is a scandal both as a bone of contention between herself and her husband and as a speaker of an unpalatable truth, the truth of mimetic desire itself: desire has no worse enemy than its own truth. Desire does its best to turn the truth into a scandal. The truth itself becomes scandalous, and this is scandal at its worst. Herod and Herodias keep the truth a prisoner. The same thing happens to Jesus. ‘Happy are those,’ Jesus says, ‘for whom I will not be a cause of scandal’ (Matthew 11:6).
Scandal always tends to contaminate everyone still untouched by it, especially those who should remain most alien to it – children, for example. To interpret Salome as I do is to see her as a child-victim of scandal, and to apply to her Mark’s words on scandal and childhood: ‘Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me …. Whoever scandalizes one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round his neck and he were thrown into the sea’ (Mark 9:37, 42). The child inevitably takes the nearest adult as his model. If he encounters only people already scandalized, too busy with their scandalous desire to respond positively, he takes their behavior as a model and turns him- or herself into a mimetic reproduction of it, a grotesque caricature.
To circumvent Herod and to obtain his consent to the death of the prophet, Herodias makes use of her own child. How could she fail to scandalize Salome? To protect herself from scandal, the child embraces it: she embraces her mother’s atrocious desire.
Everything that touches upon desire in the Gospels perpetuates the physical connotations of the word scandal. The metaphors for guilty and destructive passion are metaphors of paralysis and infirmity: the stone suspended from the neck; hindered movement; being strapped down. Scandal and the dance stand in opposition to one another. Scandal is everything that prevents us from dancing. The grace of the dancer delivers us less from our bodily infirmities, which are insignificant, than from skandalon itself. The movements of dance seem to untangle for us the otherwise unyielding knot of our desires. To enjoy the dance is to identify with the dancer; it is to dance with her and no longer to feel our imprisonment in Mallarmé’s ‘ice’ or to be mired in Sartre’s ‘visqueux.’
This metaphorical opposition between scandal and the dance is evident, but it does not altogether account for our pleasure. The art of the dance simultaneously excites and appeases desire. Dancing is not merely the bodily representation of that freedom to which we aspire; were it only that, its effects would be symbolic in the most shallow and static sense, the sense of traditional esthetic and philosophical theories. This symbolic aspect is undoubtedly present, but there is something beyond; and our text gives us a glimpse, I believe, of that awesome beyond.
Mark has no realistic description in the taste of the nineteenth century; he is not interested in physical detail, like Flaubert; he speaks only of what comes before and after the dance. Nevertheless, Mark is saying more about the dance than modern writers, for all their realism and their symbolism.
The dance accelerates the mimetic process; it brings within Salome’s influence all the guests at Herod’s banquet and causes all desires to converge upon one and the same object, the head on the platter, the head of John on Salome’s platter.
Tradition recognizes Salome as a great artist, and it must have its reasons; a tradition so powerful and durable is not established without a cause. But what is the cause? The dance is never described. The desire of Salome is in no way original, since it is modeled on a previous desire. Even the words belong to Herodias. Salome adds only the idea of the platter. ‘I want you,’ she says, ‘to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.’ Herodias had mentioned the head, but not the platter. The platter constitutes the one object that belongs exclusively to Salome. If there is something in the text that justifies Salome’s reputation, it must be this platter. There is nothing else.
The platter, indeed, is the one detail everyone remembers. Everything else is forgettable, but not the platter. At the beginning of the twentieth century, art is almost synonymous with Salome’s platter. The idea is scandalous, decadent, so barbarously crude that it is refined; it is the quintessence of fin de siècle estheticism.
Being made of metal, like the executioner’s sword, the platter stresses the cold cruelty of the two women’s desire. But there is something else. Extreme mimetic desire focuses less on some object situated behind the obstacle than on the obstacle itself. Desire feels manipulated and dominated by its model and rival. It wants to dominate and manipulate that same rival; it wants to turn scandal itself into its own thing; it wants the impossible; it wants scandal itself as a property of the dance.
By having John’s head brought in on a platter, Salome causes the ultimate nightmare to materialize. The bodies of his victims represent to the murderer the scandal that tears him apart. Because it is more portable and manageable, the severed head provides a better representation, and this same head on a platter a better one still. The platter turns the head into an object offered to all, one of the dishes circulating among the guests at Herod’s banquet.
