Abstract
In the following aphorism, Nietzsche is presenting a distinction he will reinforce in On the Genealogy of Morals between aristocratic and slave morality, unsurprisingly singing the praises of the former and lamenting the rise in dominance of the latter.
A final fundamental distinction: the longing for freedom, the instinct for the happiness and refinements of the feeling of freedom, belong just as necessarily to slave morality and morals as the art of reverence and devotion and the enthusiasm for them are a regular symptom of an aristocratic mode of thinking and valuating.—This makes clear without further ado why love as passion—it is our European specialty—absolutely must be of aristocratic origin: it was, as is well known, invented by the poet-knights of Provence, those splendid, inventive men of the “gai saber” to whom Europe owes so much and, indeed, almost itself.1
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Notes
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. H. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003; First published 1973).
Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), p. 113.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols., Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (NewYork:Vintage, 1990), pp. 86–87.
Pierre Legendre investigates the effects of this fantasy of papal power, of the pope as the paradoxically chaste bearer of the phallus, in L’amour du censeur: essai sur l’ordre dogmatique (Paris: Seuil, 2005).
Deleuze assigns these useful qualifiers to Foucault’s terms. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 76.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 26–27.
Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the MiddleAges:A Study in the Ideological Relation of Clerical to Lay Power (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 270.
R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).
Thomas Head and Richard Landes, eds., introduction to The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response around theYear 1000 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 2
T. N. Bisson, “The Organized Peace in Southern France and Catalonia, ca. 1140–1233,” American Historical Review 82 (1977):292–93 [290–311].
Georges Duby, La société chevaleresque (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), p. 190.
Georges Duby, “Public Power, Private Power,” in A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 26–31 [3–31 ] .
Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 30.
Bisson, “Organized Peace,” 295; Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 44.
I. S. Robinson, The Papacy 1073–1198: Continuity and Innovation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 137.
Georges Duby, Le chevalier, la femme, et le prêtre (Paris: Hachette, 1997), pp. 38–39.
The complex changes that the institution of marriage underwent during this period are presented with great clarity by Duby in “Two Models of Marriage: The Aristocratic and the Ecclesiastical,” in Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, trans. Jane Dunnett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 1–22.
Dominique Barthélemy, “The Aristocratic Households of Feudal France,” in A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 134 [35–155].
Jacques Dalarun, Robert d’Abrissel, Fondateur de Fontavraud (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986), p. 31. My translation.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (NewYork: Continuum, 2000), p. 121 [120–67].
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collége de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 115–216.
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, 3 vols., The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley (NewYork:Vintage, 1990), p. 21.
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 2, pp. 63–77; Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 96–108.
M. Payen, Les origines de la courtoisie dans la littérature française médiévale (Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1966–67), pp. 40–43
Henri Rey-Flaud, La névrose courtoise (Paris: Navarin, 1983), p. 9.
C. S. Lewis, “Courtly Love,” in The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 1–43.
Reto R. Bezzola, Les origins et la formation de la littérature courtoise en occident: 500–1200, Vol. 2: La société féodale et la transformation de la littérature de cour (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984), pp. 480–81. My translation.
Georges Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais, trans. Richard Robinson (Los Angeles: Amok, 1991)
Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985)
Thomas Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
René Nelli, L’érotique des troubadours (Toulouse: Privat, 1963), pp. 80–82.
Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 135.
Alain de Lille, Liber Poenitentialis, ed. Jean Longère (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1965) , vol. 2, pp. 45–46.
M.-D. Chenu, L’éveil de la conscience dans la civilisation médiévale (Paris: Vrin, 1969), p. 22.
Bezzola, Les origins, p. 470; Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 3–4.
Pierre Bec, Lo gat ros: le Comte de Poitiers, premier troubadour (Montpelier: Centre d’Études Occitanes, 2004), p. 101. My translation.
I adopt the numbering of songs from the following edition: Alfred Jeanroy, ed., Les Chansons de Guillaume IX, Duc d’Aquitaine (1071–1127) (Paris: Champion, 1913). English translations are mine, with the assistance of Champion’s modern French translations. Unfortunately, Champion often censors the pornographic passages in his translations, perhaps to motivate the reader to learn Provençal. The following English translation was also consulted: Gerald A. Bond, ed. and trans., The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitiers IX Duke of Aquitaine (NewYork: Garland, 1982).
My reading of perversion and masochism in fin’amor will rely primarily upon Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Venus in Furs (New York: Zone, 1989), pp. 9–138 and Jacques Lacan, Seminar 4.
E. Amman, “Pénitance,” Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, 15 vols., vol. 12, part 1 (Paris: Latouzey, 1908–1950), p. 939.
Simon Gaunt develops this point in “Marginal Men: Marcabru and Orthodoxy: The Early Troubadours and Adultery,” Medium Aevum 59.1 (1990): 55–72.
I adopt the numbering of the songs and verses and the translations from Simon Gaunt, Ruth Harvey, and Linda Paterson, eds., Marcabru: A Critical Edition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000).
For the discussion of fragmentation in the Baroque period, see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1992).
Simon Gaunt, Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 73.
I adopt the numbering of the songs from Alfred Jeanroy, ed., Les poésies de Cercamon (Paris: Champion, 1922). The translations are mine and are guided by Jeanroy’s modern French translations.
Linda Paterson, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Chapter 2.
Christopher Tyerman, God’s War:A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 120–21.
Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings (1927–1939), trans. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 116–29.
Other interpretations of medieval literature that link it with the psychoanalytic theory of perversion do not directly pinpoint the real, historical, social basis for the Law that is being disavowed and transferred to the lady. These include: Huchet, Littérature médiévale et psychanalyse, pp. 69–126; Henri Rey-Flaud, La névrose courtoise (Paris: Navarin, 1983)
and Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 38, 199–204, 259–98.
Charles Baladier, “Entre Érôs et Agapè: Théologiens et Troubadours,” Cahiers de Carrefour Ventadour 10 (2003): 9. My translation.
Erich Köhler, “Observations historiques et sociologiques sur les poésies des troubadours,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 7 (1964): 27–51.
Bec, Lo gat ros, p. 100; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 236–56.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 114.
Jean-Charles Payen, Le motiff du repentir dans la littérature française médiévale (Geneva: Droz, 1968).
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© 2013 Suzanne Verderber
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Verderber, S. (2013). The Courtly Fold: The Subjectivation of Pastoral Power and the Invention of Modern Eroticism. In: The Medieval Fold. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137000989_3
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