“Can anyone point to something contemporary about sexual jealousy that I can contrast with Othello?” a fellow Shakespearean recently asked on social media. “My students this past semester did not understand sexual jealousy, what it is,” she went on. “When I asked the class to describe jealousy in a relationship, one student said, ‘It’s like when your partner has something you want, like the latest iPhone.’” “That,” replied another colleague on the thread, “is weirdly awesome.”
Sexual jealousy is an emotion that was once thought to be so universal, such a commonplace experience of a person in love, that no one would think it needed explaining. A theater review of Othello from an anonymous critic in 1819 reads, “Othello is a faithful portrait of the life with which we are daily and hourly conversant; love and jealousy are passions which all men, with few exceptions, have at some time felt; the imitation of them, therefore, finds an immediate sympathy in every mind; Othello has no feelings that we should not ourselves have in his situation.”11xMichael Neill, “Introduction,” Othello, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 7. See the prefatory “Remarks” in Othello “As it is performed at the Theatre Royal” (1819). It seems as though our pre-Victorian reviewer did not anticipate a world in which jealousy within a relationship would evolve into something that could be analogized to consumer rivalry.
Yet it’s possible I am being needlessly snide about these students, who may, after all, simply be too young and innocent to know the fervor of sexual love and the all-consuming desire for another person, to have them and possess them. In that case, it is the response of the adult colleague who thought the lack of sexual jealousy, to the point that students couldn’t even conceive of it, to be “weirdly awesome” that should trouble us most. Jealousy is an ugly emotion. So one can see the appeal. He seemed to be applauding a kind of sexual egalitarianism in which sexual partners might circulate in common, each for her or his own pleasure, without any feelings of exclusivity, possessiveness, or proprietorial concern.
But this “weirdly awesome” sexual commons seems also to be one bereft of emotional investment, void of the existential risk involved with loving madly and recklessly, and evacuated of the all-consuming passion of erotic love. Rather than share in the applause for these students who were being celebrated for their weirdly awesome triumph over sexual jealousy, I felt a great sadness for them. Sexual jealousy in Othello, continues the nineteenth-century theater critic, “‘resembles a thunderstorm, which awes by its magnificence of terror; in fact it is grand beyond loveliness.’”22xIbid., 8. It strikes me as a great loss that students today do not share in the great sublimity of their own humanity. But that they cannot even imagine what it is makes my blood run cold, because it seems that theirs does, and they are commended for it.
In general, we view sexual jealousy as bad. Jealousy creates distrust and destroys harmony. It does not always cause the kind of outright physical violence it does in Othello, but it certainly does violence to one’s peace of mind and to one’s sense of security and comfort. Sexual jealousy can cause an otherwise dignified individual to become a snooping, creeping, paranoid obsessive. Jealous souls, as Shakespeare writes, “are not ever jealous for the cause, / But jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself.” It can lead to hatred, manipulation, control, and cruelty. In Othello, it leads directly to despair and to death. And yet its absence and the void it has left behind herald something more sinister and colder than the terror and grandeur produced by the hot-blooded, violent stirring of the human heart. Instead of a thunderstorm that frightens and awes, we are left with the dreariness of a gray drizzle that chills to the bone. Sexual jealousy is the proof of sexual love. It is the evidence of a love for another that is so total that to imagine another enjoying even a part of one’s beloved drives one to a crisis of meaning that turns toward rage and despair.
Kubrick and Kierkegaard
In the long list of contemporary instances of sexual jealousy that the hive mind recommended to my colleague, no one mentioned Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. This is surprising, since Kubrick’s 1999 film is not just a meditation on the role of jealousy within a relationship but a work of homage to the emotion in a modern epic. The movie revolves around a married couple, Alice Harford, played by Nicole Kidman, and her husband, Dr. Bill Harford, played by Tom Cruise. At the time of filming, Kidman and Cruise were married, which gives their performances a certain uncomfortable distance, strange to say, rather than a closeness. Acting can appear so much more intimate than a real relationship because in acting one has to be honest, whereas in a relationship we often conceal something, omit something, or leave some things unacknowledged. The distance between Cruise and Kidman adds to the erotic charge of the movie. We are watching a film where something real is at stake.
“You’ve never been jealous about me, have you?” an insulted Alice Harford asks her husband. Alice is angry because her husband trusts her. She wants her husband to become jealous, to feel the anger and possessiveness that jealousy can kindle. Alice is the antagonist and the damsel in distress. Iago and Desdemona both. In response to her question about jealousy, Bill answers honestly and patiently, “No, I haven’t.” Nearly screeching, Alice asks, “And why haven’t you ever been jealous about me?” To which an increasingly exasperated Bill says, “Well, I don’t know, Alice. Maybe because you’re my wife, maybe because you’re the mother of my child and I know you would never be unfaithful to me.” “You are very, very sure of yourself, aren’t you?” she asks. “No,” Bill says to his wife, more tenderly now, “I’m sure of you.”
At this point in the conversation, Alice bursts into laughter. Her husband’s confident certainty in her sexual fidelity is hilarious to her because she knows it to be comically ill-placed. With clinical precision, Alice then narrates an instance of sexual desire so strong, a passion so hot-blooded, that she was prepared to throw away her life with her husband and daughter just for one night of sex with a naval officer who merely glanced at her as he passed by in a hotel lobby. The revelation that his wife has an inner sexual life from which he has been excluded torments Bill. Her indifference to him and her desire for another man is hard for Bill to take, but worse for him is the discovery that he was wrong to be sure of himself—specifically, to be sure of himself being sure of his wife. It is a blow to his ego, to his entire self-construct as a husband, because being a husband means being defined in relation to his wife. Not only has he lost the surety he had in his wife, he has also lost confidence in his own ability to see and evaluate the world correctly. The only objective certainty Bill has at that moment is that his sureness has been deeply misplaced. Bill’s existential crisis leads him on a quest through New York. On it, he discovers that the fabric of the city he inhabits, from its seedy and predatory underbelly to the austere and opulent orgy cult of its upper echelons, is charged with erotic energy.
For Dr. Bill Harford, the most painful part of his wife’s revelation is not that she has a will and desire of her own—presumably, he knew this already—but that his own desire and will is entangled with his wife’s, which he discovers he can never fully know or control. Bill is moved from a position of knowledge to a position of doubt. The crux of the film rests on whether Bill will be able to move beyond his doubt to have trust in his wife.
Faith isn’t the absence of doubt but contains doubt within itself. Søren Kierkegaard writes that faith is dependent on objective uncertainty. By this he means that faith must be in something one cannot be sure of. Truth, Kierkegaard states, “is precisely the daring venture of choosing the objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite.”33xSøren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, volume 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 203. Alice’s confession about her desire for the naval officer seems cruel, but when she reveals that her husband is entirely wrong to be sure of her, she gives him the opportunity to choose objective uncertainty. It is the risk they both must take in order to love faithfully. “Without risk, no faith,” writes Kierkegaard.44xIbid., 204. With a kind of dread, Bill discovers that he cannot know for certain the desires of his wife.
Ocular Proof
That one’s own sexual identity is found not within the self but rather in a desiring, uncertain, even jealous relationship with another is anathema to contemporary sexual politics, where one is held to discover one’s truth within. It is also offensive to those who entertain notions of an egalitarian sexual commons, and would therefore view this kind of proprietorial investment as mere possessiveness. The possibility of sexual infidelity holds within it the potential of the goodness in what is not seen. Reconciling oneself to sexual jealousy requires keeping one’s eyes wide shut, not out of a cowardly obstinacy by avoiding something that may prove painful but out of a courageous hope that comes with accepting uncertainty and trusting anyway. There is potential grace as well as a potential menace in what cannot be seen, and a dreary lifelessness to what can be objectively observed.
Overcome with sexual jealousy, Othello murders Desdemona, suffocating her on their matrimonial bed. “She’s dead,” he says. Quite. Surely an experienced military general such as Othello knows when one lives and when one is dead. And yet twenty-five lines later Desdemona speaks. She speaks again seven lines after that. And then she dies. When Shakespeare does something this strange, it is worthwhile to pay attention.
Othello does not demand proof of Desdemona’s faithfulness. He demands proof of her unfaithfulness. “Ocular proof.” Seeing isn’t believing; it is knowing. Proof of unfaithfulness, of dishonesty, is possible. Othello becomes obsessed with knowing that Desdemona has been dishonest toward him precisely because this is something he needn’t take on faith. In a strange way, he wants this ocular proof because it will end his anguish of uncertainty. And Desdemona supplies him with this proof. When she calls out, after her death, that Othello didn’t murder her but that it was “I myself,” it is a lie. In her final act of love, Desdemona tells a lie, which gives Othello the proof of her dishonesty he was looking for. They are words uttered from death, a place beyond hope.
Othello, like Bill Harford, discovers that his self-understanding is wrapped up in his wife’s inner desires. It is not his lack of control over her but his sudden loss of assurance in her and in himself that brings the story to its awful end. Othello and Desdemona’s relationship shows us that one’s identity is not something constituted in isolation from those whom one loves. “But I do love thee!” exclaims Othello before Iago torments him with whispers of jealousy, “and when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again.” Othello’s love for his wife isn’t just an emotion. It is the substance by which he is ordered. Autonomy for Othello is more than an illusion. It is chaos. To form his own identity is to form himself apart from others. It is to be alone, unable to give or to receive love.
Given Othello’s vulnerability to Iago’s insinuations, autonomy might seem preferable to love. Such a safe course prevents one from what Kierkegaard called the daring “venture of choosing objective uncertainty.” The venture is that of keeping the possibility of fidelity alive while knowing that it cannot be known. Bill Harford discovers that his wife lusts for others. He suddenly catches a glimpse of her depth. His picture of her becomes less self-evident. His choice is whether to love her anyway, to believe in her despite no longer being sure of her. (The word belief has its root in just such a risk, for it shares the same root word as libido. The root word is leubh-, and it means variously “to care, desire, love”; “to be tangled, be hit down, be in love”; or “romantic sexual attraction.”) Faith can only grow out of doubt. It does not abolish doubt but fulfills it.
Othello is placed in the same position as Bill Harford but with greater stakes. Bill is a handsome New York doctor who certainly has a sexual past and is accustomed to female attentions. (An early scene of the movie depicts him beset upon by two models who try to lure him into a threesome. He is called away before we have the opportunity to see him say, presumably, no.) But Othello stands alone because of his principles and his goodness. He has farther to fall because he is a less subtle man.
“Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee.” Before Iago begins to torment Othello with the lies of his wife’s unfaithfulness, Desdemona’s father warns Othello about his daughter’s cunning and deception. Brabantio speaks the truth. Desdemona did in fact deceive her father by marrying Othello, her attraction to the Moor causing her to make the first move. It was she who first acted upon her desires, and she who encouraged Othello to follow her lead. The very sincerity of Desdemona’s love also reveals the worst of her: She is guided by the violence of her feelings and her scorn of public opinion. Desdemona’s love for Othello holds within it the potential to be ungoverned by lust and inordinate appetite. She is reckless. What makes her attracted to Othello also has the potential to make her unfaithful to him. Shakespeare has anticipated this in the center of Desdemona’s name: demon. She is temptation, the exquisite moan of a demonic seduction.
But, of course, Desdemona isn’t demonic at all. Nor is she a seductress. Desdemona loves Othello. She contains her desires within her love and faithfulness to him, just as the word demon is contained within her name. Desdemona is unfaithful only in Othello’s imagination. The play allows us to see the imagination of a man picturing the sexual imagination of a woman. “O curse of marriage,” laments Othello, “That we can call these delicate creatures ours, / And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad / And live upon the vapour of a dungeon, / Than to keep a corner in the thing I love / For other’s uses.” Othello’s language expresses his possessiveness. He wants all of Desdemona, her in her entirety. His love is not a half love.
But how can he love completely something that cannot be completely known? (It is perhaps not a coincidence that Cassio, the man whom Iago identifies as Desdemona’s lover, is also a naval officer.) The unknowability of a woman’s inner appetite is dangerous territory. It is precisely such a corner of herself that Alice opens to her husband, risking not only her family’s stability and domestic contentment but also her husband’s certainty in who she is, and, by extension, who he is. It isn’t simply the thought of Desdemona in the act of sex that torments Othello but the thought that her desires might not be exclusively for him. This is his torment and also, strangely, the thing he must know. He needs her to be the whore he now imagines, so as to put to rest his suspicions. “That cuckold lives in bliss / Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger,” he professes. “But, O! what damned minutes tell he o’er, / Who dotes yet doubts, suspects yet soundly loves!”
Objective Uncertainty, Always Present
The agonizing truth is that female sexuality is hidden, and so the cause of much uncertainty and anguish. It is the problem that Othello, who is obsessed with “ocular proof,” encounters. How does one inquire into a woman’s sexual pleasure? How does her orgasm work? When is it achieved? She is capable of sex again and again, even after orgasm. So when is she sexually sated? “How satisfied…?” to ask Iago’s question.
The inscrutability of a woman’s desire is the thing a man must pry into because his self-understanding is wrapped up in what he cannot know. And the thing that must be seen to be known is precisely that which a man cannot see. A woman has always the objective uncertainty of her sexuality present with her. Indeed, in some ways this inscrutability is her presence. This is a uniquely female quality, though of course men may and do harbor secret sexual fantasies of their own. But in the act of sex, in its actuality, there is a distinct difference between men and women that cannot be erased through talk of social conditioning, gender construction, or sexual equality.
“Now do I see,” Othello, under delusion, declares about Desdemona’s corruption, “’tis true. Look here, Iago: / All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven—’tis gone.” Othello finds the position of radical contingency and dependence on another unendurable. The very existence of her sovereign imagination opens him up to humiliation, her unknowability to chaos, which is why he must see the proof of her sexual fantasies: What he wants is to be sure of her, and the only way to do that is to see her dishonesty.
But even as he claims that his love is gone, Othello reveals how deeply misguided he was about love in the first place. “Look here,” he says to Iago, as though love itself, like a woman’s sexuality, is something one can look at. Othello’s love is, as he says, blown to heaven. The tragic paradox is that heaven is what was available to him had he not insisted on his certainty. Contingency opens one up to serendipity and grace as well as to humiliation. The objective uncertainty of love is a fall, not from but of grace.
In Eyes Wide Shut, it is Alice who brings her husband to the precipice of their relationship precisely so that he can take this leap, have this fall. She acts, once again, as antagonist and tragic heroine at the same time. Through tears, Alice relates a nightmare she just had—an odd nightmare in which she laughs with pleasure while she is having it. She and her husband are in a deserted city, naked. She feels frightened and ashamed. “You rushed away to try and find our clothes for us,” she says. It is the “for us” here that is so arresting, as though her nakedness is what exposes both of them. His nudity is incidental—his actual exposure is somehow connected to her shame. It is she, the woman, who feels shame, and she whom her husband is ashamed of. Why must this be? Contemporary ethical thought can supply a ready answer: It is this way because of historically pervasive misogyny. Men’s own insecurities about female sexuality have led men to control women’s sexuality, to label it shameful, and to cover it up. In doing so, they project onto women their misogynistic fantasies both of women’s depravity and of their need for masculine dominance.
An Impossible Situation
I have no interest in debating this familiar picture of patriarchal control, because it does indeed seem to be a competent assessment of the role sex has played in much of human civilization. Yet I do not pass any judgment on it, either. I don’t want to correct every sexual double standard, even when it is recognizably unequal. My inquiry into sexuality is not about why it is wrong but why it is. Why is a man’s connection to a woman’s hiddenness so pervasively a part of men’s relation to women, and not just to women in general but specifically to the woman a man cares most about? Why is it personal?
As a woman, I can only imaginatively enter the mind of a man. But I imagine that there must be a type of desperation that a man experiences when he is in love with a woman he cannot fully know, cannot fully access. This strikes me as something awful, courageous, and potentially very beautiful. A man in love wants to comprehend his beloved precisely because he feels himself to be connected to her, and because of this he is vulnerable and exposed. His insecurity exists in part because a woman’s pleasure, her sexual arousal and her orgasm, cannot be seen. There is no “ocular proof” writ on a woman’s body of her pleasures or desires—or of how her partner makes her feel. This is perhaps why the desperation isn’t quite as uncertain in reverse. Unlike a man, whose phallus becomes erect with the blood of his desire, and whose orgasm is evident in the obvious moment of release, a woman’s desire is within herself. His phallus provides her ocular proof. Yet her orgasm is hidden by her very nature, her sexual organs deep inside. And her sexual desire is imaginative. She invests herself in it.
Women are often put into an impossible situation of being expected, even desired, to be sexually spirited creatures—sensual, passionate, and bold—but are also punished for the very sexuality men want to see in them. The contradiction between freedom and containment often manifests as anger when it touches upon a man’s sexual insecurity, that is, his uncertainty about a woman’s fidelity. This is Othello’s anger—“I will chop her into messes—cuckold me!”—and Bill Harford’s impotent anger, punching his own hand as he imagines his wife’s erotic fantasy with the officer.
Bill Harford probes into his wife’s secret fantasy, the nightmare that made her giggle. “It’s only a dream,” says Bill reassuringly to his wife as she relates her dream to him. But his reassurance is cold and serves only to press her to reveal more of her erotic dream, expose herself more fully to him. Bill wants to see his wife’s depravity in order to confirm his fear of her unfaithfulness. He wants her to be a whore so that he can know with certainty. When she tells him of the orgy in which she was having sex with “all these men,” Bill is relieved to have his suspicion confirmed. “And I…I wanted to make fun of you,” Alice adds, now sobbing, “to laugh in your face. And so I laughed as loud as I could.”55xA similar scene of Desdemona giving herself to hundreds of men is imagined by Othello. “I had been happy,” he says, “if the general camp, / Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body, / So I had nothing known.” Othello is far from indifferent to Desdemona’s sexual behavior, but more important to him is how his own self-understanding is wrapped up with his wife’s faithfulness. He continues his speech by bidding farewell to all that he was: “Farewell the tranquil mind; farewell content; / Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars […] Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone” By “occupation,” Othello means both his vocation and his sexual possession of Desdemona. Othello’s standing in the world, his manliness, and his position are built upon his wife’s sexual fidelity.
That Alice’s pleasure climaxes in her humiliation of her husband seems at first to be simply cruel. It is cruel, though not simply so. It reveals to us that her being is not an investment in him, but that she knows his being is an investment in her. And she resents this because it makes her less free. At the same time, it gives her a power over him to do him harm. The pleasure Alice might get from sex with other men is secondary to the pleasure she derives from laughing at her husband, from showing him that he doesn’t own her completely, even while he is at the center of her erotic fantasy, and even while she understands that, in a strange reversal, she owns him completely. He is humiliated by her bottomless sexual appetite. Her debasement of his dignity is shown to be her most powerful desire. She would be rid of the responsibility of it. She describes it as “too awful.”
Alice’s resentment is familiar to us. It is the sentiment of much contemporary feminism that resents men’s investment in women’s sexuality, seeing it as proscriptive, confining, and controlling. Yet to renounce the responsibility for men’s dignity because it comes with a duty, as Alice does in her dream, is to cut off a part of men’s and women’s most intimate connection to each other.
As he listens to Alice relate her dream, Bill is unmoved, as though the remedy for her transgression is to turn cold, to remove any emotional connection to his wife, any warmth. Bill is like Othello here, who feels the remedy for his humiliation is to become hardened. “My heart is turned to stone,” Othello states, “I strike it, and it hurts my hand.” Alice fawns on her husband, stroking his hair, hanging off his neck. She resembles Desdemona, who attempts to soothe her own jealous husband’s headache with her handkerchief and is heartlessly swatted away. When Alice calls her dream “too awful,” it seems as though she means it. The dream reveals not simply the depth of her depravity but the depth of her connection to her husband. It reveals how she holds him within her, a revelation that would not be possible without the specter of his jealous possession of her. It reveals her expansive love by showing its opposite in her self-gratifying resentment. By telling her dream, Alice makes herself vulnerable. She exposes her capacity for cruelty in addition to her sexual insatiability. As does he: Once a heart turns to stone, any number of cruelties are possible, as Othello so clearly shows.
An Economy of Despair
In light of the stakes involved in such a jealous, resentful love, one has to sympathize with Emilia’s much more cynical approach to sex. Emilia, maid and confidante to Desdemona, reduces desire to appetite, and fidelity to self-interest. And who can blame her? She is also Iago’s wife. “Tell me Emilia,” Desdemona asks, “That there be women do abuse their husbands / In such gross kind?” “There be some such, no question,” is Emilia’s response. “Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?” asks an incredulous Desdemona. “Why, would not you?” is Emilia’s pert reply. Desdemona is shocked. “No, by this heavenly light,” she says. “Nor I neither, by this heavenly light,” Emilia replies, and then, after a pause, provocatively says, “I might do’t as well i’th’ dark.”
Emilia’s wink toward women’s infidelity done in the dark shows us her street-smart common sense. She knows what men are like: “They are all but stomachs,” she states, “and we all but food; / They eat us hungerly, and when they are full / They belch us.” There is a recognizable, defiant feminism in Emilia’s speech that some of us may want to applaud. Men have, evidently, treated Emilia as a morsel, something to nibble, and she is right to be cynical. On the other hand, perhaps she has treated men that way herself, since she seems to condone infidelity. Or perhaps the mutual use she and men make of each other has led to mutual cynicism and low regard. The danger in treating someone as something for your own pleasure is that this will probably be reciprocated.
One can see the attraction to Emilia’s view; it offers liberty from the mutual responsibilities of proprietorial care and the duty of sexual fidelity. It looks like freedom. But it cheapens relationships and ultimately cheapens the way men and women see each other, perhaps even how women see other women. Emilia, after all, lies to Desdemona about the fateful handkerchief that she herself has stolen. The path of mutual use leads toward isolation and bitterness. Emilia may profess to have a kind of worldly knowledge, but her lexicon is of a sexual economy that sees relationships as merely transactional. There are no possibilities of grace or enlargement within it. It is an economy of despair.
Iago, like his wife Emilia, reduces desire to its lowest form: unbridled lust. He derides those who term this feeling “love.” Iago takes a clinical approach. Yet he doesn’t come across as a sexually hardened cynic like his wife. Iago describes love as a “sect or scion.” These words are worth pausing over. “Sect” denotes something that has been cut off or split away from its foundational community. While “scion,” a more archaic word, means a shoot or twig that is grafted to something new. An offshoot.
What Iago seems to mean is that love involves splintering from desire and grafting onto something new. Emilia believes that her way of seeing the world is sophisticated and worldly, but she belies her own naiveté as well as her limited scope. Because, in fact, the world has Desdemonas in it, those who believe sexuality contains more than desire. And it has Othellos, those who feel so connected to another that their self-understanding—their whole ontology—is entwined with their beloved. There are individuals for whom love is much more than an appetite, and for whom sexual jealousy is so much more than control. By suggesting that love both breaks away from lust and that it can create an offshoot, the genuine potential for new life, Iago reveals that he is not a mere Emilia, embittered and jaded. Iago sees that love isn’t lust but that it is new, a radical growth out of lust that is grafted to something new that can flourish. Two literally becoming one. Iago is evil because he sees this, and he hates it.
Lost in the Sexual Commons
Things look bleak. How might we have sexual faith in another if such faith leads to sorrow? Perhaps it is best to have, like Emilia, lowered expectations. Maybe sexual jealousy should be an artifact of the past. Maybe we should applaud a brave new way of having sexual relations, one that is “weirdly awesome.”
In contemporary culture, intimate relationships seem to have moved from the blinding intoxication of passion to something resembling a competitive consumer relationship that operates under the guise of sexual egalitarianism, in which everyone is equal. In this utopia, there would be no desires because there is an acceptance of a sort of shared sexual economy of equality. This is the goal of consent culture, in which individuals are imagined to meet each other in the sexual commons and freely exchange their bodies in mutual consent for sexual pleasure. No need for jealousy because there is no personal investment in another beyond the sexual exchange. No need for jealousy because human bodies are free to get their mutual pleasures from him or her or her or him or them or others.
The free market of sexual exchange in a world without jealousy is depicted in the orgy cult of Eyes Wide Shut, a Boschean scene in which we see sex being offered up as a kind of buffet feast to its wealthy patrons. But the orgy itself is solemn, unfeeling, forbidding, even menacing. This is no pleasure cult but a scene of cold, impersonal ritual. There is nothing humane, or even human, about it. No warmth, no goodness, and certainly no space for love. The one prostitute who shows any kind of human emotion turns up dead the day after the orgy, her life and its tragic end casually dismissed by those who made use of her beauty. Without possession, we can see the degradations of communism spread to the realm of human sexuality. Without the self-interest fostered by the investment in one’s private property, there is disinterest, even indifference. The commodification of sex in a free, non-proprietorial exchange results, not surprisingly, in regarding humans as commodities.
To avoid the evils of casual indifference, one cannot be uninvested in another’s sexual fidelity. But being fully human is more than avoiding evils. It is about encountering the good, thirsting for the good, risking oneself for goodness with, as Kierkegaard says, the “passion of the infinite.” The students who not only hadn’t experienced sexual jealousy but could not understand it, what it is deserve our pity, not our congratulations. They are living a flattened human life. Their imaginative connection to others, their capacity for personal risk, for faith, for erotic love, for something built out of lust but genuinely new and life-giving, is closed off to them in their pursuit of egalitarian sexual freedom, an illusion that promises liberation but turns out to be the emptiness of personal nihilism.
Of course, one could argue that an unjealous erotic relationship is in fact the only option—just look at how Othello turns out! But Othello is tragedy not because something unfortunate happened—that is just the banality of everyday life—but because something beautiful was so close but was finally and horribly destroyed. The tragedy of Othello is, as Dostoyevsky said, that he is too trusting. “Othello’s soul was shattered and his whole outlook clouded simply because his ideal was destroyed,” Dostoyevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov. “Othello was incapable of making up his mind to faithlessness—not incapable of forgiving it, but of making up his mind to it—though his soul was as innocent and free from malice as a babe’s.”
Othello cannot reconcile himself to his (putative) knowledge of Desdemona’s betrayal, because he believed and continued to believe that Desdemona’s goodness mattered. He is a man who has lost his faith but finds no solace in an objective and indifferent reality, because love is subjective, it makes oneself subjective, an individual, precisely by moving beyond objective facts. The fact of Desdemona’s infidelity turns Othello into a kind of no man. “That’s he that was Othello,” he says of himself after he has killed his faithful wife.
It is faith, being reconciled to objective uncertainty, that makes one fully alive. In Eyes Wide Shut, Bill finds his faith precisely because he is able to accept a paradox, of seeing the corruption of his wife’s desires and having faith in her anyway. Othello loses himself by not being able to reconcile himself to Desdemona’s supposed betrayal. In seeking certainty of unfaithfulness, he has emptied himself of his own inwardness. “O who hath done this deed?” asks a desperate Emilia at the play’s end. “Nobody—I myself,” is Desdemona’s reply, uttered from death. Desdemona’s words are false and true. She is “Nobody.” Her “I myself” already vacant at the moment of utterance. And, of course, it is Othello, not herself, who has killed her. She is dishonest. But Othello is, at this moment, also a nobody, unmanned by his lack of faith. Only faith brings inwardness, writes Kierkegaard. “Faith is the contradiction between the infinite passion of inwardness and the objective uncertainty.”66xKierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 204. Genuine inwardness, one’s self-identity, consists in holding fast to the possibility of being reconciled to what one cannot know but believes in anyway.