Constellations of Desire forms the third part of Solitary Ethics, a sequence on ethical and moral considerations. The book is available here.
Book One, Caravaggio’s Dagger, deals with right action in the context of the experience of the individual will; Book Two, Mahler and Freud Meet in Leiden, in the context of the absolute nature of the essence of being; and Book Three, Constellations of Desire, in the context of human desire guided by reason.
Constellations of Desire forms the third part of Solitary Ethics, a sequence on ethical and moral considerations.
Book I, Caravaggio’s Dagger, deals with right action in the context of the experience of the individual will; Book II, Mahler and Freud Meet in Leiden, in the context of the absolute nature of the essence of being; and Book III, Constellations of Desire, in the context of human desire guided by reason.
Constellations of Desire is structured in fifteen sections, a first, opening part in six sections and a second, closing part, in retrograde, and thus also of six sections; the two linked by an entr’acte of three . The arrangement in the first half is an introduction, exposition (an “understudy”), an ostinato, a commentary, a second ostinato, a recitative, and the first aria of the entr’acte; the middle section of the entr’acte; the second half is the exact retrograde of this order, and begins with the third aria in the entr’acte, and continues with the recitative, an ostinato, a commentary, another ostinato, and understudy, and concludes with a final coda. The structure, and to some extent the content, of the book is further influenced by that employed in the sacred cantatas of J.S. Bach, in which movements of set pieces—choruses, arias, chorales, invariably all based on or linked to the teaching of the day, and thus a sort of ecclesiastical or moral ostinato—are linked by recitatives.
The desire of the title includes the affect discussed by Spinoza in Part III of his Ethics, where he defines desire as one’s very essence, one’s “strivings, impulses, appetites, and volitions,” which, because these are frequently in opposition to one another, that one “is pulled in different directions and knows not where to turn.”
The constellations imply the foundational awareness that Spinoza presents in Part I of his Ethics, that Nature is the only substantial whole, outside of which there is nothing. All that exists is a part and deterministic necessity of Nature, and this necessary being is coterminous with what is commonly meant by ‘God.’
Because of this innate necessity there is no teleology in the universe, Nature and what exists within it neither acting nor existing for any set ends or purposes.
