Introduction: planting oblivion

Summary

In Shakespeare's “Venus and Adonis,” Venus is overcome with a desire whose effects are depicted in terms of forgetting:

And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage,

Planting oblivion, beating reason back,

Forgetting shame's pure blush and honor's wrack.

By “planting oblivion,” Venus abandons herself to a lust that overrides modesty and honor. Her self-abandonment is prompted by the strong passion of sexual desire, which “stirs up a desperate courage.” But how precisely is Venus's giving herself over to lust an act of forgetting? Does Venus (or, more broadly, anyone driven by desire) literally fail to recollect the demands of shame and honor? It makes more sense to understand the forgetting of shame and honor as encompassing not just cognition but the entire body's operations. Shame and honor prescribe a bodily comportment; they are the end result of a disciplining process that produces a certain type of (honorable, modest) subject and helps to shape that subject's interactions with the world. To “forget” shame and honor, then, is to live in the world in terms different from those specified by that process, to act in terms of a different set of desires and imperatives, to become a different person. In this example, “forgetting” modesty and honor entails less a failure of memory than a transformation of self.

These three lines from “Venus and Adonis” describe the staking of a territorial claim: lust-driven courage beats reason back and plants its standard (oblivion), thereby announcing passion's victory.