Ownership

Ownership is usually hidden from view. Its different varieties are passed over, assumed as natural, taken for granted. The artificiality and inherent obscenity of certain types of ownership become obvious at certain critical moments.  Over the last few weeks while the protests about water tax have been happening I kept thinking about Joyce’s Ulysses, specifically, Leopold Bloom’s Heraclitean thoughts as he stood on O’Connell Bridge looking into the river Liffey:  “How can you own water really? It's always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream.”  

A lot of Bloom’s thoughts are about ownership; or, more precisely, the impossibility of ownership. His attitude to his wife’s infidelity is instructive. He can’t stop her, he doesn’t own her:

“Too late. She longed to go. That's why. Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost”.

Bloom knows that the most important things cannot be owned. One of his heroes is, of course, Marx. Another is Jesus. The comparison with Jesus is apposite because it raises questions about the nature of his love for Molly. I remember telling my mother about Bloom’s attitude to his wife and she was impressed at the civility of his example. Bloom loves his wife despite everything. The kind of love to which/under which he lives is very close to the absolute, hyperbolic and self-effacing formulation of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 13.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Love cannot be possessed by mortal, partial, imperfect human beings. It is not something that can be owned. The statement 'I love you' may be the most profoundly vain utterance ever to leave the mouth of a human being.

Krzystof Kieslowski’s film, Blue  touches on the same theme of the impossibility of ownership of love, indeed, it takes St Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians 13 as its ur-text.

The film concludes with Zbigniew Preisner’s  Song for the Unification of Europe. This piece of music takes Corinthians 13 as its libretto and, within the film it has been written by Juliet Binoche’s character, Julie and her husband. She is told that she can’t destroy the music that they had written: 

“This music is so beautiful. You can’t destroy something like that” 

The question of the limits of property is at the core of this film. What is it that can be owned? Isn’t there something obscene in the notion that truly gifted people might keep their gifts to themselves? 

I’m not talking here about the contents of people’s heads; rather what I am pointing to is the products of labour. The music that she produces is not hers in an even more radical sense than intended by the post- structuralist idea of the death of the author. Really, what is going on in this film is an examination of something that cannot be owned, something that is bigger than any and all human beings. Her music is a labour of love and love is, according to St Paul’s letter not something that can be owned or possessed by any one person.

Binoche’s character completes the composition of the music she’d begun with her husband before his death and that of their daughter in the car accident at the beginning of the film.

St Paul’s formulation of love is thereby instituted as the defining narrative of European history.  

Jacques Derrida, in his book The Gift of Death describes how the Czech philosopher, Jan  Patočka makes the same gesture in his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History.  For Patočka, the history of Europe is the history of responsibility made possible by the human being’s relationship to the Christian concept of infinite love. This is necessarily a relationship of perpetual inadequacy and humility. Love such as that spelled out in Corinthians is an impossible challenge; it is an aspiration, a reminder that a life lived in its wake will never measure up but will as a result be well lived.

That’s a nice idea, but there are so many problems with a life lived with Corinthians as its ur-text. For example, Love ‘bears all, believes all, hopes all, endures all’. How many people have lived lives of misery as they struggled to bear, endure, put up with privations of one kind or another?

It would be monumentally hypocritical to make any claim that Europe has or does live up to its own ur-text. 

Think of the myth of Europa and Zeus. A founding narrative of rape and kidnap. Not much love or responsibility there. Auschwitz? Again, St Paul’s message seems to have got lost. Think of the excluded narratives of Europe: its philosophical and scientific debts to the ‘Orient’; the histories of racism, anti-semitism, sexism that are alive and well.

This list could go on and on. Suffice it to say that texts like Ulysses, Corinthians 13, Blue and Song for the Unification of Europe remind us that Europe has no ownership of liberty (the theme of Kieslowski’s film), it has no ownership of love, it has no ownership of responsibility. These things are all impossible, aspirational projects but sometimes I wonder if people have just given up.