Abstract
While proliferating the signifiers of masculinity, Mamet’s plays simultaneously blur erotic boundaries in a deconstruction of sexuality. Romance makes explicit what many Mamet works dramatize implicitly: eros can play a part in male attraction and attachment. But friendship and erotic desire are not one and the same. Although eros and philia share elements in common, they are not commensurate. Libido, to use Freud’s term, may bring friends together, but libido— sublimated, repressed, or alive and kicking—does not exhaust the meanings of friendship.
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Notes
Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London, 1997), 302.
Michael P. Farrell, “Friendship between Men,” Men’s Changing Roles in the Family, eds. Robert A. Lewis and Marvin B. Sussman (New York, 1986), 179.
Brain, Friends and Lovers Chapter 12. Williams, “The Relationship between Male-Male Friendship,” 187. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000).
Philip C. Kolin, “David Mamet’s Duck Variations as a Parody of a Socratic Dialogue,” American Drama 9.1 (1999): 21–32.
René A. Spitz, “Life and the Dialogue,” Counterpoint: Libidinal Object and Subject, ed. Herbert S. Gaskill (New York, 1963), 154–76.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York, 1976); and Coping with Death and Dying, audiocassette, Psychology Today, 903, 1973. Edwin S. Shneidman, Deaths of Man (New York, 1983); and Death, the Enemy, audiocasette, Psychology Today, 19, 1973.
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© 2014 Arthur Holmberg
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Holmberg, A. (2014). The Dialog of Life. In: David Mamet and Male Friendship. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305190_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305190_9
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