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Scrolls of LoveRuth and the Song of Songs$
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Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs

Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg

Print publication date: 2006

Print ISBN-13: 9780823225712

Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: March 2011

DOI: 10.5422/fso/9780823225712.001.0001

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PRINTED FROM FORDHAM SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Fordham University Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in FSO for personal use.date: 28 June 2022

In the Absence of Love

In the Absence of Love

Chapter:
(p.283) In the Absence of Love
Source:
Scrolls of Love
Author(s):

Carey Ellen Walsh

Publisher:
Fordham University Press
DOI:10.5422/fso/9780823225712.003.0021

The Song of Songs has always been a source for exegetical invention. This multiplicity brings about a dynamic encounter between text and reader and, for the author, transforms his sense of what language does. The Song, a text about human desire, ignites his desire for more interpretation and impels him to think about the link between desire and interpretation. The book's power is not merely a question of rhetoric. Literary convention, technique, and polish are only part of its brilliance. Even taken together, these features do not account for the reader's joy. Rather, joy comes out of the relationship the reader develops with the text. Human sexual desire in the Song of Songs is recounted from the perspectives of its two lovers and of the “daughters of Jerusalem”, those bystanders who behold the spectacle of want. Before proceeding to an examination of the Song's imagery, this chapter briefly sketches Jacques Lacan's view of the connection between language and desire.

Keywords:   human desire, literary convention, Song of Songs, interpretation, language, Jacques Lacan

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