Of Mourning, Mothers and Chocolate: Double Infinity and the Affective Gift
Marsha Meskimmon
ACT I
Behind the Scenes
In March of 2001, during a book tour of the UK, Joanna Frueh came to Loughborough
University to perform a piece entitled ‘A History of Chocolate, Including Action Heroes and
Fairy Men’, a version of which appeared later that same year in Art Journal as ‘Bloodred
Beauty: A Meditation on Mel Gibson’s Midlife Allure’.1 Significantly, in the development of
this work from performed talk to article, photography became the key visual vehicle of
Frueh’s ideas. At that time, I had only met Joanna once, but we had struck up the
beginnings of a long-distance friendship through shared interests in women’s art and
alternative aesthetics and I was pleased that she was able to accept my invitation to come
to the Midlands to speak.
A few weeks before her arrival, there was a message which set the tone for the event;
Joanna needed a few ‘props’ - a lectern, a vase filled with luscious red and purple flowers,
a small stand to hold a plate of three, rich, dark chocolate truffles. It was clear that this was
to be no ordinary lecture and already, in my quest for these objects, I felt excited, like a
conspirator, instigating an attack on the bloodlessness of the academy.
For anyone unfamiliar with the sorts of lecture halls typically built for British universities in
the 1960s, suffice to say that the performance space was hardly luxurious; on an early
evening in March, the room was cold and rather dark, and, though the seats were not
uncomfortable, they were rigidly tiered, with desks fixed in front. As I arranged the flowers
(in a borrowed water pitcher - alas, it seemed my department had never had much use for
a vase), placed the chocolates on a small plate and toyed with the lighting to attempt at
least a little subtlety, I wondered just how Joanna would be able to transform this bleak,
institutional space into something suitable for chocolates, action heroes and fairy men.
But transform it she did - over the course of an hour she captivated us and filled the space
boldly, bravely, bodily. She became the hero of whom she spoke: her strong bare arms
and black leather waistcoat revealed an indomitable warrior clad in the full fragility of
feeling flesh. Her words and tone were measured, yet compelling, and the audience, in
their turn, were attentive - engaged and provoked at once.
1
The direct quotations and photographs reproduced here are taken from the text published in Art Journal,
vol. 60, no. 3, Fall 2001, pp. 24-33, subsequently referred to in these notes as ‘Bloodred Beauty’.
Today, I recall Joanna’s performance with a sort of heightened inaccuracy - a ‘sense’ of
what she argued, mixed with my recollection of the staging of the event and its aftermath
in questions, discussion and my own thoughts. For this reason, I quote from the published
text at points below rather than draw solely from my own oblique paraphrasing of her work.
Yet it is not the exact or ‘correct’ text which is of interest to me in any event, but rather the
power of her performed linguistic ellipses, allusions and metaphors, designed to conquer
grief, rekindle desire and enact a full-blooded rebirth. These wove their spell in that cold
room and, with me, for some time after. These begin what I want to call the double infinity
of the affective gift.
The Curtain Rises
The opening of ‘A History of Chocolate/Bloodred Beauty’2 was direct and deceptively
simple; in the midst of grief, we search for new bearings, ways to endure the pain and
absence within ourselves. Grief is both collective and highly personal, and while we all
seek comforting objects and images, the ones each of us choose will be absolutely
particular. For Joanna, the object chosen while mourning the loss of her parents was Mel
Gibson3, ‘...Mel has provided me with a psychic, emotional, and intellectual sustenance
that no other fantasy figure derived from popular culture has.’4
I could not help but feel that there was a wonderful irony involved in the delivery of these
lines to this audience; we were about to spend an hour according to Mel Gibson a
seriousness, an intellectual, psychic and emotional tribute, worthy of academic rigour and
debate. Some in the audience were already shifting in their seats - I sensed, rightly, as it
happens, that a few male colleagues did not want to hear a woman express desire for an
icon of masculinity5 and I looked furtively across at my students, who were uncertain that
the enjoyment of a popular movie-star was appropriate in this venue. The first shot had
been fired across our boughs and more were on their way.
Joanna distinguished between Mel Gibson, the actor, and ‘Mel’, the object of her desire
and intense, bodily, identification. Mel’s appeal, or as Joanna termed it, ‘...Mel’s rich
corporeality, which I call in-the-bodyness.’6 has depth - it is dark, physical and, unlike so
many of the images which surround us in mass culture, not about youth. Mel’s is a ‘midlife
allure’, a fully corporeal desirability, the kind of sensual and sexual charisma which is not
In this text, I refer to the performance with the combination term ‘A History of Chocolate/Bloodred Beauty’
to indicate the conjunction of the written and performed versions in my own experience of the work.
3 It’s important to note that at the time, Mel Gibson was simply a popular action hero and not the figure of
derision he has subsequently become, following several ‘scandals’.
4 ibid. p.25
5 As it happens, this was not my imagination - in the questions which followed the paper, the only aggressive
and negative comment came from men who were upset at the choice of ‘Mel’ or who argued that the sexual
desire Joanna evinced for this icon was, somehow, misplaced or misinterpreted.
6 ‘Bloodred Beauty’, op.cit., p.25
2
available to us when we are young, inexperienced and unscarred by encounters with/in
the world. This midlife allure links Joanna with Mel: ‘Gibson and I look more or less the
same age, even though, as I write, I am just about fifty-three. ... the strong, round muscles
of his built body, which resemble mine, and the wide face, dark, silvering hair, and intense,
inviting eyes - features that we share.’7
Joanna’s desire is not simply for Mel, but to become Mel; it is the longing to know the
beauty, power and precariousness of being blood and flesh: ‘...as I fall in love with midlife
Mel, I am continually falling in love with myself.’8 With this move, ‘A History of
Chocolate/Bloodred Beauty’ turned the tables on us; as Mel’s allure worked its magic, the
speaker became the desiring subject and the desired object at once. And, in this
empowering experience of the pleasure and pain of embodied subjectivity, grief and loss
were endured, were re-cast: ‘In the acts of enjoying and thinking about Mel, the charisma
that withered after my parents’ deaths grows again; he stirs my blood, my heart increases,
he nurtures a new life.’9
At three points during the performance, Joanna paused, took one of the chocolate truffles
from the plate and ate it, slowly, before us. This simple strategy was effective; we waited,
mouths watering, for her to continue after each chocolate reverie.
‘The History of Chocolate/Bloodred Beauty’ took a darker turn after the first taste of cocoa
and shifted from the midlife allure of Mel to his undeniable connection with blood and
violence. As Frueh explained, Gibson frequently stars in action-movies and thus Mel is
often seen covered in blood - his own and/or others’. Joanna did not eschew this violence,
but lingered with/in it, questioning the play of Mars with maternity, and connecting birth
with death. On this reading, blood is not the province of some evacuated masculinity,
brandishing weapons and killing indiscriminately. Rather, the flow of blood is the mark of
our incarnation and marks our mortality. We neither come from nor shall return to ashes;
we have come from blood and to blood we will return. Mel’s ‘bloodred beauty’ is vital and
revitalising: ’...the rich red palette of an exquisitely lurid Mel - blood-bathed birth phantasm
- heals my current wound, my being bloodied in soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body by
my parents’ deaths.’10
Another truffle taken and consumed - we savour the metallic taste of blood.
7
ibid.
ibid., p.26
9 ibid., p.25
10 ibid., p.27
8
Like an alchemist, Joanna then created gems from blood, rendering ‘...Mel at his most
alluring, gleaming like a dark jewel, like a garnet.’11 This passage of the performed text
was for me both the most evocative and the most elusive; after hearing it, I could not recall
a single detail, just the force with which the linguistic play had linked desire, love, blood,
beauty, loss and memory together through the talismanic gift of garnets. In re-reading
Frueh’s published text, the eloquence remains palpable; in a few highly suggestive
passages, we envisage a re-born Mel (fe-Mel) as Venus and venous, potent and
vulnerable, physically present, but the cipher of mourned absence, ‘Me and Mel, standing
skin-to-skin, naked except for garnets, one necklace apiece, each bead an allusion to our
broken hearts.’12
At the heart of this passage is the gift, imaginatively re-given:
How exquisite fe-Mel would look in the rope of garnet beads my mother gave me
years ago for a birthday present. ... My mother’s garnet gift to me, and its imagined
replica, which I’ve given Mel, are amulets. ... garnet, my birthstone, is as beneficial
as love. That is why I give the beads to Mel.13
As I am consumed in my thoughts of garnets, gifts, love and loss, Joanna slowly eats the
last truffle.
In her final manoeuvre, Joanna reminded us of the history of chocolate, a history bathed in
the blood of central American indigenous rituals and the violence of European
colonisation:
Seeds from a tree called achiote or annatto probably colored chocolate drinks
reddish, and according to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, reporting during the
Spanish conquest of Nicaragua, natives’ mouths, lips, and whiskers turned red,
as if they’d been drinking blood, after they had drunk chocolate containing
achiote.14
Chocolate is not saccharine-sweet, it is powerful and the demand for it, like sugar, cotton
and tobacco, shaped the colonial cultures of the Americas.
Grief seeks sacrifice: ‘Red advances, it is a demanding color; so bloodred beauties make
advances to one another, require mutual intimacies.’15 Our gifts of blood, sugar, sex and
magic16 steep us in our corporeality, permit us the space to mourn our losses, lick our
wounds and return to the world revitalised.
11
ibid., p.30
ibid., p.31
13 ibid., pp.30-1
14 ibid., p.33
15 ibid., p.31
16 In an apt coincidence, the name of the band from whose album this phrase is borrowed returns us to the
history of chocolate - The Red Hot Chili Peppers.
12
INTERLUDE
Joanna’s performance took place just five weeks after my brother Mark died of cancer,
aged 54. Joanna could not have known this, nor the fact that, at nearly nineteen years my
senior, I was named for Mark, a naming which linked us both with Mars. I want to tell him
about Mel, Mars and our bloodred beauty, but cannot.
Neither could Joanna have known that Mark was not the first loss I had endured within my
close family. My father died in 1993 after many years with an illness which slowly withered
his wiry frame while my mother, the heart of my family, was already suffering from the
illness that claimed her five years later. My parents share a birthstone - the garnet.
My brothers, two decades older than me, were the children of my parents’ youth, while I,
as the third and last child, loved my parents first at the peak of their midlife allure and will
always remember them at that point, radiant, dancing. They could dance as the parents of
friends my own age could not - elegantly, as a pair, gliding in waltzes, tangos and fox-trots.
Mark’s death came swiftly, leaving his dark hair and broad-shouldered body intact. He was
a presence - I still expect to find him talking, shifting his weight from foot to foot, and
remember how safe I felt as a child when he picked me up and carried me, wrapping the
string of my helium balloon around his strong, blunt fingers when I was afraid that it would
fly away from my own.
When Joanna came to speak at Loughborough, I was blood-let, but she could not have
known that, nor could she have guessed that her bloodred beauty, mixed with the
alchemical allusions and corporeal charisma of her performance, might offer me a glimpse
beyond the painful loss of my own loved ones. The performance was a gift - not seeking a
response, not a contractual obligation or reciprocal arrangement - and it is the affective
power of the gift that has stayed with me since that night in March than a decade ago.
ACT II
Reprise: Affect and the Gift
In a moving text entitled ‘The Intolerable Gift: Residues and Traces of a Journey’,
Teshome H. Gabriel described two talismanic gift-objects his mother gave him when he
left his home in Ethiopia to make his way as a cosmopolitan scholar based in the United
States of America. One of these was the clay cup from which he drank milk as a baby and,
made from local earth, linked him, through his mother, to his homeland. The other was a
photograph of himself as a young man meeting the Emperor Haile Selassie I. The
photograph, full of the promise and (sometimes misguided) faith of youth, was a reminder
of his desire to become a writer and of his politically-inspired exile. But the objects
themselves are not the issue here, rather the gift of these. As Gabriel put it: ‘[t]he gift that
my mother gave me does not presuppose anything in return. It is an incredible gift where
one does not expect reciprocity. It is an infinite gift.’17
Infinite gifts defy the economy of exchange characteristic of contractual social interaction.
In the contractual ‘gift’, difference is effaced and, in the expectation of analogous
reciprocation, a form of ‘return’ is maintained which forecloses the future in favour of the
status quo. The gift of Gabriel’s mother is, as he says, incredible; bearing no burden of
reciprocity, no contractual obligation and no reductive, itemised ‘value’, this gift is a
gesture to the other, opening the possibility of the future beyond bonded return. 18
What links Gabriel’s clay cup and Frueh’s string of garnets is not simply the fact that they
are mothers’ gifts, though that is important in each case, but that they are doubly-infinite they cannot be acknowledged by return in either sense of the word. Gabriel and Frueh can
neither give the objects back, nor reverse the transformations which they have wrought in
their wake. Both Gabriel and Frueh come to the painful, yet empowering understanding
that these gifts advance, that infinite gifts have given them their future, not locked them
within their pasts. Thus in each case, the infinite gift is of mothers and mourning, but also
of becoming.
For me, the infinity of the gift as a mode of becoming also suggests a way to unravel the
most pervasive paradox of gift-logic. Put simply, the paradox of the gift is that its
acknowledgement returns it to reductive contractual exchange. That is, as soon as I
become aware of the fact that a gift has been made to me, I am in its debt and, arguably,
any form of response re-establishes the contractual nature of exchange and dismantles
the infinity of the giving. However, what I find compelling in the accounts of both Gabriel
and Frueh is the potential to move beyond this logic, such that there is the possibility to
realise the infinity of the gift and mark it, acknowledge it, so that it yet retains its enabling
power. Their accounts suggest that the infinite gift can be marked by a transformation, its
power can be articulated by a full-bodied becoming with/in the other - a change of state
that resists the reductive incorporation of return.
For Gabriel, the power of his mother’s gifts remained hidden to him until he attempted to
make a return-exchange through his journey back to Ethiopia after an absence of three
decades. His narrative tells of his failure to enact this return in a reductive sense and
Teshome Gabriel, ‘The Intolerable Gift: Residues and Traces of a Journey’ in Hamid Naficy (ed), Home,
Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place, London and NY: Routledge 1999, pp. 75-84, p. 80
18 Gabriel is not the first scholar to think through the notion of the gift and a contractual sociality - Marcel
Mauss and Jacques Derrida are frequently cited on this topic, but Rosalyn Diprose, in her work on feminism,
difference and ethics, is more pertinent to the present context - see The Bodies of Women: Ethics,
Embodiment and Sexual Difference, NY and London: Routledge, 1994 (esp. ch.4).
17
instead becomes the story of his realisation of the transformative power of the infinite gift.
His acknowledgement of the gift is itself a giving-forth - he marks his own transformation in
a vital connection with his mother, the community of his birth and generations of unsung
African women to whom he attributes the legacy of infinite giving.
There is a telling passage at the start of Gabriel’s text:
I would like to begin by asking your indulgence. What I have in mind here is not
the customary academic essay, but a more personal, indeed, autobiographical,
narrative. ...In telling this story, in sharing it with you, I would like to note the extent
to which cinema is itself a shared experience in Africa. This shared experience,
this notion of “the gift”, is one of the threads running though my main story. 19
The distinction Gabriel’s passage makes between the shared story (autobiographical
narrative or cinema) and a ‘customary academic essay’ is revealing. In the terms we have
been exploring, it could be argued that the shared story is infinite, while the academic
essay is finite, bound by a contractual relationship between the knower and the alreadyknown. The academic text sets out the terms for its own reciprocity, thus foreclosing on
the possibility of an advance by seeking a return. When Gabriel begs our indulgence, he is
asking us to open ourselves to the other, to a dialogue with difference and the potential for
radical transformation that, as he assumes here, cannot be the kind of exchange
privileged within conventional academic writing.
Gabriel’s attempt to move beyond the limitations of contractual forms of knowledge is
brave, yet his prefatory words still act as a framing device for the shared narrative and he
still returns it, at key points in the text, to the safety of the familiar or customary academic
voice. But ‘A History of Chocolate/Bloodred Beauty’ does not stage any form of return as it
takes up the challenge of the double infinity of the gift, refusing to distinguish between art,
performance and scholarly text and thus mobilising the embodied-intellectual force of what
I would call affective theory.
In using the phrase ‘affective theory’, I am loosely drawing upon the trajectories of thinking
described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What Is Philosophy? where philosophy is
characterised by the creation of concepts, science by the production of functions and art
by the materialisation of sensation in affect and percept. 20 There has been a veritable
explosion in work on affect in the humanities over the past few years; some of this work is
19
Teshome Gabriel, op.cit. p. 76
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomilinson and Graham
Burchill, London: Verso, 1984. I emphasise my loose use of this text here, as I am not fully convinced that
the distinctions drawn by Deleuze and Guattari are so sharp as they would have them be, yet I find their
descriptions of concepts, percepts and affects very useful and am grateful for ways of exploring sensory
knowledge beyond dualist hierarchies.
20
merely derivative, but much is of extraordinary value in thinking through the dynamics of
art practices and what I have elsewhere termed ‘corporeal theory’, a way of revitalizing
and embodying our critical academic writing.21 Briefly, in invoking the concept of affect
here, I want to suggest an approach to theory which can account for thinking in and
through aesthetics and can begin to explore the knowledges which are produced in art, as
an engagement with the force of embodied, enworlded engagement.22 I am not arguing
that these constitute a ‘separate-but-equal’ realm of thinking, nor do I wish to reverse or
replace ‘theory’ with ‘practice’ (remaining locked within the very binary division I am
questioning). Rather, I am looking for a way to understand those forms of theorising that
dismantle any simplistic divisions between the work of art, the intellectual treatise and
performance.
In short, I am positing the notion of ‘affective theory’ as a strategic intervention into that
logic which still persists in separating academic discourse from all that would bring us back
to our senses, animate our embodiment and make knowledge act in the world. In addition,
in developing the affective elements of theory, I would note that I am not suggesting mere
‘personal feeling’, or in any sense, a state that refuses critical engagement, or expansion,
in and through others. Affect is decidedly intersubjective, social and generous in its
constitution of ourselves and our understandings of the world.
As a feminist academic, I am certainly not alone in this quest. There is now a wellestablished literature which demonstrates the imbrication of the personal with the political
and critiques the separation of the self from the other, the knower from the known. And the
customary forms of writing and speaking in academic fora are witnessing a slight shift in
emphasis such that Frueh’s work, which dares to perform and to create affects and
percepts from an embodied encounter with the archives of high theory, is now more clearly
receiving sustained critical consideration.
As a form of affective theory, Frueh’s cross-disciplinary work defies the limits of the
exchange economy and is instead premised upon the double infinity of the gift. Affective
theory does not set the limits of its own return. Rather, affects require us to open ourselves
to the new, be changed by the encounter, become. As Deleuze and Guattari put it:
See: ‘Corporeal Theory: Christine Borland’s Winter Garden’, in Difference and Excess in Contemporary
Women’s Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice, edited by Gill Perry, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 124-37 (2004)
and in Art History, vol. 26, no.3, July, 2003 pp. 442-55. I have been inspired by the work of a number of
feminist scholars on affect, including: Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh University
Press, 2004; Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, Stanford University Press,
2005; Sue Best, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde, IB Tauris, 2011 and Rosalyn
Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, SUNY Press, 2002.
22 The work of art is also a key issue in my book Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics,
London and NY: Routledge, 2003.
21
It should be said of all art that, in relation to the percepts or visions they give us,
artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not
only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with
them, they draw us into the compound.23 [italics added for emphasis]
The affective gifts which enable such becomings cannot be reduced to contractual
response; the string of garnet beads signify when they are imaginatively given again, when
their power effects an advancement of desire and life rather than a return to the past in
grief, mourning and death. The infinite gift is perpetually doubled in its acknowledgement.
‘A History of Chocolate/Bloodred Beauty’ is a profound work of affective theory premised
upon the double infinity of the gift - that which was first given without expectation of
reciprocity transformed its bearer and the work of art/performance/thought which marked
the infinity of the gift was given in turn, freely, to others.
Curtain Call
Joanna could not have known that her work would resonate so strongly with me as I
sought ways forward through my own grief, but that is precisely why the gift was infinite. ‘A
History of Chocolate/Bloodred Beauty’ was not merely a response to me or a summary of
thinking on mourning; as a work of art, a scholarly essay and a performance at once, it
was a courageous, corporeal acknowledgement of an infinite gift which advanced that gift
through the senses - the work of affective theory. My response cannot be to ‘explain’ this
text/performance or recuperate it into the language of customary academic writing or even
return to the moment in which I first heard it, unchanged.
In this context, the double infinity of the gift resides in acknowledging that it is not only in
works of art, that gifts can be infinite – can enable material and subjective transformations
to advance toward an as-yet-unknown future – but also in ‘theory’, in thinking and writing
critically to advance an open-ended engagement with our generous intercorporeality. And
this necessitates taking a position in our scholarly work that refuses to evacuate the
affective dimensions of our thought and our words. As we know, ‘bloodred beauties make
advances to one another, require mutual intimacies’, and this brief encounter with
embodiment, desire and becoming marks again the double infinity of the gift as I struggle
to be brave enough to signal the next advance.
23
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, op.cit. p.175