Topos taxi: Michel Foucault and Virginia Woolf on two modern grammars of love

Topos taxi

In the translated and transcribed interview ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act’ ([1982–1983] 1997) Michel Foucault is asked to speak about differences between heterosexual and homosexual erotic encounters within the realm of literature. ¹ More specifically Foucault is asked to elaborate on the comparatively explicit mode of sexual imagery found in modern literary depictions of gay love. Against the backdrop of a heterosexual love literature concerned primarily with amorous courtship and what precedes the sexual act, he ascribes the sexually explicit nature of gay love literature to the fact that homosexual love has been condemned and prohibited and thus not allowed to create a system of courtship. Even if this was not always the case (take ancient Greece for example) any modern literature on the subject of gay love, Foucault contends, would have to take into consideration the grammar of modern homosexual experience: ‘The wink on the street, the split-second decision to get it on, the speed with which homosexual relations are consummated’ ([1982–1983] 1997: 150). Reminded of Cassanova’s expression ‘the best moment in life is when one is climbing the stairs’ (Foucault, [1982–1983] 1997: 150), he offers a scene with the taxi as topos to describe the pinnacle of gay love. ‘[F]or a homosexual’, Foucault declares:

the best moment of love is likely to be when the lover leaves in the taxi. It is when the act is over and the guy [garçon] is gone that one begins to dream about the warmth of his body, the quality of his smile, the tone of his voice. It is the recollection rather than the anticipation of the act that assumes a primary importance in homosexual relations. ([1982–1983] 1997: 150, italics mine)

The taxi, this modern and mundane site, is curiously enough also the site for Virginia Woolf’s modern love couple in the famous essay on women and literature, A Room of One’s Own ([1929] 2000). In the beginning of the essay Woolf’s narrator notes how the romantic humming of Cristina Rossetti’s and Alfred Tennyson’s has ceased as a result of irrevocable changes in the relationship between British women and men following the first world war ([1929] 2000: 14–17). The experience of the war, when women’s labour built the nation while men’s bodies were slaughtered or mutilated on the other side of the Channel, is said to have changed the fundaments for heterosexual love so profoundly that an entirely new grammar of heterosexual love must emerge. Woolf, thus, towards the end of the essay also makes use of the taxi as topos to formulate a new heterosexual love configuration. Overlooking a young woman and a young man coming together in the back of a taxi, the Woolfian narrator ponders the possibility of a new mode of relationship based, not on romantic ideals, but on the idea of cooperation between the sexes where sexual difference has been eradicated by the notion of androgyny. ‘For certainly’, the narrator starts out:

when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to cooperate. One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. (Woolf, [1929] 2000: 96)

In the following pages I will outline more carefully the different grammars of love that Woolf and Foucault offer, paying special attention to the concepts of lack and fantasy. For while lack and fantasy are the motors in discourses on love as unification where the concept of love is understood as (a fantasy) covering over a constitutive lack in the subject, theories that emphasise action have a tendency to leave the notions of lack and fantasy behind. I do not think we should sidestep concepts of lack and fantasy in considering questions of love. On the contrary, I believe we should take seriously the realm of imagination, fantasy and daydreaming in considering questions of lived experience. ³ I do, however, argue that it is important to try to separate fantasies that aim at obliterating the other’s singularity and difference from fantasies that cherish the other as other. In Woolf’s and Foucault’s taxi scenes we are given the opportunity to consider those two different notions of lack and fantasy, what we might call a lack generative of anticipation versus a lack generative of recollection. I want to suggest that whereas Woolf’s notion of love as unification rests on an idea of love that cannot retain the other’s singularity, Foucault’s notion of love is based on a lack that responds to the specificity of a singular other and is related to the moment of an event or encounter.

A grammar of one

The idea of love as unification, as a discovery of my long lost second half with whom I merge and finally recreate a whole, is a dominant image of love in our culture. This image of love, and its failures, has traversed centuries and even millennia, constantly giving rise to new cultural representations. It is telling, I think, that the speech we remember most promptly when thinking of Plato’s Symposium is Aristophanes’, where he in love’s honour declares that ‘love of one another has been inborn in human beings, a restorer of our original nature, trying to make one from two and cure human nature’ (1998: 55), and not for example Alkibiades’ speech about his repeatedly failed courtship of Socrates. But as Anne Carson has commented on Aristophanes’ account in her poetic-theoretical essay Eros the Bittersweet: ‘Most people find something disturbingly lucid and true in Aristophanes’ image of lovers as people cut in half’ ([1986] 2009: 31). This common experience of lucidity and truth is something we must be able to take seriously and try to analyse. And here Virgina Woolf’s taxi scene (which I will cite at length) comes readily to mind:

The sight of two people coming down the street and meeting at the corner seems to ease the mind of some strain, I thought, watching the taxi turn and make off. Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of mind. Now that effort had ceased and that unity had been restored by seeing two people come together in a taxi-cab. […] For certainly when I saw the couple get into the taxi-cab the mind felt as if, after being divided, it had come together again in a natural fusion. The obvious reason would be that it is natural for the sexes to cooperate. One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness? ([1929] 2000: 95–96).

But for all the intertextual pleasure that this passage in A Room of One’s Own brings, there is, to my mind, something disturbing about the ideas that Woolf’s narrator advances in the story about the two young lovers. For all the brilliance of A Room of One’s Own one feels slightly ill at ease as the Woolfian narrator here first obscures sexual difference for the sake of peace of mind, only to go on to obliterate any other sign of singularity by turning to the notions of ‘fusion’ and ‘union’ in order to attain ‘complete satisfaction and happiness’. It should be emphasised that the story about the two lovers and the notions of union and fusion follow from a rather complex and sometimes apparently contradictory interrogation of the effects of sexual difference on literary creativity. In the previous chapter, Woolf has raised questions concerning sex-consciousness’ ruinous effects on literary production, and she has touched upon the idea that a great literary mind must be unconscious of sexual difference. The image of the two lovers then, and the notions of union and fusion, appear as Woolf attempts to work through the question of sex-consciousness and it points towards a discussion of the constitution of the mind of a literary genius. However, the taxi scene also offers us a possibility to inquire about love as a fantasy of unification. A fantasy that, in Woolf’s words, revels in the ‘profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness’.

Let us at this instant turn to Freud, who in Civilization and its Discontents ([1930] 1978) suggests that the wish for unification in love can be understood as an infantile trace in the adult psyche to restore a limitless pleasure reminiscent of the infant’s pleasure at the mother’s breast. Just like the baby that ‘does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world’ ([1930] 1978: 66–67), Freud notes that: ‘at the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that “I” and “you” are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact’ ([1930] 1978: 67). Freud’s clinical observations fit well with Woolf’s narrator’s testimony about the ‘profound, if irrational, instinct’ that appears to be structuring the sense of unification in love. But Freud does not advocate for this fantasy of unification. Even if he does contend that the couple in love and their apparent self-sufficiency is the clearest example of Eros’ purpose of ‘making one out of more than one’, Freud goes on to write that ‘this desirable state of things does not, and never did, exist’ (1930] 1978: 108). Instead, ‘Reality shows us that civilization is not content with the ties we have so far allowed it’ ([1930] 1978: 108). As Freud has shown in Three Theories of Sexuality, the popular notion of love as ‘an irresistible attraction exercised by one sex upon the other’ aimed at ‘sexual union’ ([1905] 2000: 1) forecloses the fact that the libido is present in the subject from early infancy, and can take different outlets, including artistic creativity, and that it can direct itself towards a multitude of objects too. Thus, the fantasy of love as unification for Freud remains just that: a fantasy. And as such it is probably better to analyse it as a method for averting suffering through illusion and imagination, rather than understanding it as a serious attempt to outline a new love configuration or a desirable way of life (Freud, [1930] 1978: 78 and 80).

Read as an image of love as unification, Woolf’s taxi scene gives us a clear picture of love as a fantasy covering over a sense of constitutive lack. Furthermore, Woolf’s rhetoric suggests that the merging of two into one is a way of restoring things to their natural state, a blissful state where complete happiness and satisfaction rein. The operative word here is restoration, for it indicates that this fantasy intends to change nothing or create nothing, but only seeks to find that which is already familiar and known. This then might help us to better understand the logic and the grammar of one. For Woolf’s narrator might be correct that thinking of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort: faced with the other’s difference, whatever marks that difference, faced with that which is foreign to me, it might indeed be less straining to let the other’s specificity collapse into already familiar concepts and notions, to let the other collapse into and become (part of) me. Luce Irigaray, who has written extensively on the subject of love and the other, contends that:

It is in the first moments of drawing near to one another that the other moves us the most, touching us in a global unknowable, uncontrollable manner. Then, too often, we make the other our own – through knowledge, sensibility, culture. Entering our horizon, our world, the other loses the strangeness of his or her appeal. The presence of the other included us in a certain mystery, communicating to us an awakening that is both corporeal and spiritual. But we reduce the other to ourselves, we incorporate the other in turn: through our knowledge, our affection, our customs. At the limit, we no longer see the other, we no longer hear the other, we no longer perceive the other. The other is part of us. Unless we reject the other. ([2001] 2004: 24, italics mine)

Given Woolf’s attentiveness to the need for respect of sexual difference elsewhere in A Room of One’s Own, and her way of advocating for lovers to be respectful of each other’s differences in, for example, Orlando (Woolf, [1928] 2003), one might wonder why Woolf outlined this rather conservative scenario of love as unification in the taxi scene. ⁴ No doubt Woolf’s modernist aesthetics play a big part. Read as an aesthetic vision of a presumed androgynous mind, the picture takes on a different and perhaps less conservative meaning. Yet, the need to unify differences into some cohesive and delimited whole arguably brings the flight of mind to a standstill. In Irigaray’s words it is a strategy aiming to avoid ‘the problem of meeting with the stranger, with the other’ ([2001] 2004: 24). Thus, we understand the Woolfian narrator’s complaint about the efforts of ‘thinking of one sex as distinct from the other’ as a way of refusing differences. In this refusal the possibility of ‘letting ourselves be moved, questioned, modified, enriched by the other as such’ (Irigaray, [2001] 2004: 24–25) is cancelled.

Philosophising about love as a political concept, detaching it somewhat from a romantic concept of love limited to the couple, Michael Hardt differentiates between notions of ‘love of the same’ and ‘love of the different’, suggesting that love of the same on a political level functions as a kind of racism and nationalism, whereas love of the different, or ‘love of the stranger’ (2008–2009: 813) opens up for a possible encounter and interaction of differences. Hardt’s notion of love as a never-ending process of differences meeting that ‘explore and experiment with possible compositions among the multiplicities in each of us’ (2012: 7) is undoubtedly attractive, even if it avoids the concept of lack and privileges the idea of recurring, ceremonial encounters in order to think love both as event and as extended over time. One must presume, however, that there are moments of lack and separateness in between the serial encounters. Hence the question at stake here is how we can make those moments of separateness and lack into moments of ethical reflection. It is at this juncture that we turn to Foucault.

A grammar of two

When Foucault in ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act’ proffers the story about a lover leaving by himself in a taxi the morning after an amorous encounter, there is something about the notion of love as act, lack and recollection that stands out. It cannot just be the idea of a momentary sexual encounter with no strings attached that appeals: there is something more fundamental of interest here, and I want to suggest that what Foucault’s lonely lovers offer is a possibility of thinking love as a grammar of two. Not that there is anything in the taxi scene itself that vouches for love and respect for singularities, but if we take Foucault’s image of the single taxi passenger as part of a larger body of statements that he has made on the subject of gay sexual relationships, what appears is a possibility for a grammar of love that pays attention to the necessity of keeping separateness, singularity and differences in play. The empty space created by the absence of a lover’s body offers a spatial possibility where we with Foucault can begin to think as of yet unforeseen relationships and new possible love configurations that Foucault advances without giving them name, shape or form.

Foucault’s line of argument in ‘Sexual Choice, Sexual Act’ proceeds from a conversation about sexual imagery in heterosexual and homosexual love literature, where he not once but twice offers up the phrase ‘the best moment of love is likely to be when the lover leaves in a taxi’. This image, which Foucault clearly finds productive, is offered as an alternative to the image of Cassanova anticipatorily climbing the stairs on his way to an amorous encounter and it leads Foucault to differentiate between a homosexual and a heterosexual grammar of love. Foucault suggests that heterosexual love historically has been preoccupied with an anticipatory mode of desire. In his own words it has:

‘considered the essence of the relation between two people to reside in the knowledge of whether one of the two parties was going to surrender to the other, all the interest and curiosity, the cunning and manipulation of people was aimed at getting the other to give in, to go to bed with them ([1982–1983] 1997: 151).

Foucault himself suggests that ‘it is this transfer of strategic relations from the court(ship) to sex that is very interesting’ ([1984] 1997d: 170) and that ‘[a]ll the energy and imagination, which in the heterosexual relationship were channeled into courtship, now become devoted to intensifying the act of sex itself’ ([1982–1983] 1997: 151). Foucault is not only talking about literature here. For even if his differentiation between a heterosexual and a homosexual grammar of love emerges from a discussion of literature, his philosophising about love has more to do with social formations and possible ways of life than with aesthetic expressions. In the following I want to draw on the part that has to do with energy and imagination and suggest that what Foucault opens up is an alternative to the heterosexual code of anticipation, as he forefronts action followed by recollection.

Turning again to the realm of literature, Carson has written on the grammar of courtship in ancient Greek novels that their mode of narrative is ‘devoted to keeping the lovers apart and miserable until the last page’ when ‘all is cleared up … and the happy pair is united for ever with the prospect of a long and prosperous life before them’ ([1986] 2009: 78–79). We recognise the idea of love as a struggle of ordination and subordination aimed at ‘getting the other to give in’, and we recognise the unification at the end of the story. In courtly love poetry, however, the deferral of fulfillment and unification is forever postponed: the knight never gets his Lady and the pleasure of courtly love is relegated to the oral pleasure of singing. Swedish professor of literature Carin Franzén has suggested that this postponement can be understood as a way of revealing the knowledge that most discourses on love aim to conceal, namely ‘a truth which can be found in every sexual relation, as it is understood by psychoanalytic theory’ (2013: 104). Referring to Lacan, Franzén writes: ‘From this psychoanalytic point of view courtly love responds more precisely to the subject’s lack by creating an object of desire which is inaccessible’ (2013: 104). Citing Lacan, Franzén suggests that (male) courtly love can be understood as ‘an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle to it’ (2013: 104–105). Thus, courtly love reveals in splendid code that which most grammars of love cannot bare to sustain: that two are not one, you are not me. The ethics of courtly love, according to Lacan, is precisely the ‘sublimation of pleasure and sexual drives, which (forever) postpones the imaginary wish for completion’ (Franzén, 2013: 107). If the courtly code, as Franzén has suggested, can be understood as an avoidance of the fantasy of unification and a subversion of the grammar of one by way of never-ending deferral, might we contend that Foucault offers us yet another way of escaping the fantasy of unification – one that is based not on deferral but on action and recollection?

As opposed to the eternal courtly deferral, Foucault’s alternative to the idea of love as unification is based on a notion of pleasure and recollection. And contrary to the Platonic myth that would have both heterosexual and homosexual love be a search for a long lost missing half, Foucault’s notion of love does not originate in a desire for completion or unity. Instead, Foucault rejects the integration of same-sex practices into already existing cultural forms such as practices grounded in an idea of unification. However, as a new grammar of love his philosophising about pleasure and recollection is rather obscure, as he refrains from outlining an alternative code or an alternative way of sexual or amorous conduct. Instead of offering an alternative grammar of love, he explains that ‘the relationships to be created are as yet unforeseeable’ and as such ‘we can’t really say this feature or that feature will be denied’ (Foucault, [1982–1983] 1997: 154). Refusing to outline new modes of conduct or ways of life, Foucault opens up for the possibility of thinking new love configurations but without assigning them a specific structure. As such his thinking might be understood as working mainly within a logic of resistance, but Foucault’s intellectual project has more transformative and creative claims than that. It aims both to ‘escape as much as possible from the type of relations that society proposes for us’ (Foucault, [1982] 1997: 160) and stresses the need of ‘constructing [créer] cultural forms’ (Foucault, [1982] 1997: 157). Foucault thus makes it possible to think of love, not as a set code of conduct, but as a force or energy whose potential is always to be created in a never-ending process. Thus, sexuality for Foucault is understood to be not ‘an identity, but a creative force’ ([1984] 1997: 164), ‘not a fatality’ but ‘a possibility for creative life’ ([1984] 1997d: 163). The move away from identity politics here is crucial. In stressing activity, creativity and becoming we can understand Foucault to be encouraging both women and men whatever their sexual preferences to turn from an interrogation of sexual identity to an openness and an exploration with the other. This would mean, then, that the singularity of two becomes not a threat to the unity of a couple but rather is understood as an immanent potential of any relationship.

This shift, from an interrogation of sexual identity concerned with questions of who we are and how we can live accordingly to an exploration of the possibilities of creating new forms of life that remain unknown and unstructured as they occur in relation to unforeseen events and encounters, could be of great value for feminist research approaching the subject of love and its cultural expressions. It would render feminist scholarship both attentive to the structuring logics of the grammars supporting our understanding of the concept of love, while at the same time opening up for and welcoming an unknown future. ⁵

We have yet to comment on Foucault’s insistence on recollection over anticipation, for this is what brings the relationship of the two lovers into a relationship in time and it propels the question of ethics to the forefront. For there is nothing in the codeless conduct or in the action ‘without a program’ (Foucault, [1984] 1997: 172) that in itself vouches for an ethical relation to the other. And there is nothing in the sexual encounter per se that prevents Foucault’s lover from fantasising and projecting false imaginations all over the memory of the other’s body. Foucault, however, is well aware of this and in ‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’ ([1984] 1997) he stresses the need for the ethical moment of reflection by clearly stating that ‘Without a program does not mean blindness – to be blind to thought’ ([1984] 1997d: 172). But, he continues: ‘Being without a program can be very useful and very original and creative, if it does not mean without proper reflection about what is going on, or without very careful attention to what’s possible’ (Foucault, [1984] 1997: 172). There appears, in the insistence on reflection and recollection, a possibility to outline a different understanding of the concept of lack from the one we usually consider when thinking about love. For the notion of lack in Foucault’s writings is not a constitutive lack constantly demanding to be covered over, but a lack that emerges as a consequence of an encounter, or an ‘event’ as Alain Badiou would have it ([2009] 2012: 28). It is in relation to another actual being that desire, lack and recollection begins for Foucault. It must be emphasised that there is an immense difference between, on the one hand, a desire to become whole, fulfilled, unified, to want a you (anybody) to be me and, on the other hand, a desire that explores my capability to change in the face of a you (a somebody) who is separate from and irreducible to me.

There is, of course, an unmistakably utopian shimmer accompanying Foucault’s invitation to experience pleasure and recollection instead of attempting to satisfy a coded desire. Refusing Roland Barthes’ tragic insight in A Lover’s Discourse that ‘men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves’ ([1977] 2002: 137), Foucault’s belief in sexual practices as potentially revolutionary activities appears utopian to say the least. At the same time there is something very attractive in his continuous assertion that ‘[w]e must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers’ fusion of identities’ (Foucault, [1981] 1997: 137). Drawn to its logical conclusion, however, Foucault might be understood to be saying that love or pleasure could be free from discursive power formations, at least at the outset. Yet this wish for non-discursive pleasure, what we might call a wish for enjoyment without a code, of course also runs the risk of being integrated into a system of power relations. ⁶ Understood as a demand or an insistence, the Foucauldian grammar of love becomes as insufferable as any other code; there is a remarkable absence of pleasure in the imperative ‘Enjoy yourself!’. ⁷ However, recollection, reflection and analysis bring the speedy grammar of the Foucauldian love encounters into an ethical sphere, and this, I believe, is where Foucault’s story about a lover leaving in a taxi attains its appeal. Where the enjoyment of action is coupled with a reflective moment of lack and separateness in relation to an existing other, the Foucauldian notion of love retains the important power of imagination and daydreaming without obliterating the other’s specificity.

In what respect can we be said to be responsible for our daydreams and fantasies? ‘Be careful what you wish for’ is a popular saying that warns us, if not that our dreams will come true, then at least that our daydreams and imaginations set the background against which we act and make sense of our lived experience. ⁸ We might want to ask then, what backgrounds, and thus what possibilities for action and understanding, the two taxi scenes create? What might we imagine happens when the two lovers in Woolf’s essay and the lonely lover in Foucault’s story leave in their respective taxis?

As the Woolfian young woman and the young man roll off into the streets of London we recognise what we today would call a romantic Hollywood happy ending, an ending that of course is treacherous, and that if the story was to go on probably would end in grave disappointment – since two after all is not one. But the story does not, indeed it cannot go on, and this is significant. For there is something suspicious about a fantasy that must always end at a specific point in time for it to continue to live. Stuck within the grammar of one, the Woolfian lovers are left in a never-ending suspense in the back of a taxi, trapped in a fantasy about that which ‘does not, and never did, exist’ (Freud, [1930] 1978: 108). Or as Carson puts it: ‘They are stranded in a living death of pleasure’ ([1986] 2009: 139). Nothing seems to be able to live or flourish in this fantasy.

Our Foucauldian lovers on the other hand, leave us with another notion of love that sustains a grammar of two. Embracing the possibility of an unforeseen event or encounter while being attentive to the separateness and singularity of the other, Foucault’s grammar of love resembles what Hardt calls as a never-ending process of differences meeting. For Foucault however, separateness not only creates the possibility of an encounter, but the lack and desire, or recollection, that emerge in the other’s absence remains a fundamental and primary part of the Foucauldian love story. While fantasy and daydreaming are understood as productive forces in the process of creating new modes of life, the emphasis to pay ‘very careful attention to what’s possible’ and to be reflective ‘about what is going on’ are reminders that we share the world and our relationships with others who are forever separate and different from ourselves.