Seminars

Abstract

In this talk, I will explore how birds supply erotic affects and drives in medieval French and Occitan literature. I argue that erotic desire and pleasure are frequently both mimetic, in the sense that the human subject has to learn them from a bird, as well as interspecial— interspecial since both are staged as contingent on certain conditions (the hearing of birdsong) and on a certain set of relations (between the human poetic subject and the bird). Although the characters in these texts do not orient their desire towards the same object as the bird, they nevertheless learn how to desire, and that they should desire, through an encounter with birdsong. I argue that troubadour love songs, especially, rely on birds as a motor for erotic affects, a trait that the trouvères reacted against by professing their indifference to birdsong. The fact that such alleged indifference became a topos in its own right and, in this sense, expected, represents another type of reliance on birds. I show, further, that this affective dependence is often coterminous with a strange spatiality, where inside and outside blur and the distinction between human and avian subjects becomes difficult to determine.