Love and masochism

The previous chapter began by posing a question. What sensibility releases the poet to speak, publicly and directly, to admit her vulnerability, to say, ‘God knows how I adore life’? What connects her to the realm of the sensible, to what she calls ‘mysteries of love’? Is her departure from the spheres of good sense and common sense an affirmation of the nonsense that is their foundation? Or, does she resolve her separateness, does she slow her cognitive or active response to perception by opening herself to her own pleasure and pain, her discrete diffusion and distress, her multiple networks of influences, thereby departing from the only scale on which autonomy is possible? Is she spinning into another structure of relations, a structure that is finite yet lingers, that is almost transparent to its past and the past of the world; a structure that precipitates a distinct point of view, an absolutely new spatio-temporalization, not merely a continuous, smooth transition? Philosophers may have some difficulties accepting this. Hume has shown us that impressions and ideas of relations (resemblance, contiguity, causality) organize the mind, but that they constitute an autonomous logic; they are the manner in which the mind passes from one term to another. In this they provide the mind with constancy or universality; the association of ideas allows the mind to go beyond any contingently given experience and to connect it to an other contingently given experience, whether or not this is warranted.