On Erotic Accountability

This chapter focuses on lyrics written from the point of view of the unfaithful lover. Theological concepts of charity, forgiveness, and confession can inform secular discussions of erotic accountability: what we owe those we love and those who love us. Understanding accountability in the dual senses of responsibility and narration illuminated by Judith Butler, this chapter considers how aesthetic creation—the struggle to tell a coherent story of the self and its desires—constitutes an unattainable ethical obligation. The devotional and libertine poetry of John Donne, like the writings of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin before him, represents confession not as what Michel Foucault called an act of truth, but as an imaginative acknowledgment of guilt in potentia. Donne’s attention to the entanglement of matter and spirit resists the ideals of romance and rationality that have often been deemed the signal characteristics of “human” sexuality; instead, he writes from the perspective of a being coopted by foreign forces within and without. Counterintuitively, Donne is at his most religious when he defends promiscuous, impermanent, and impure intimacies. For the indiscriminate desire that Donne’s speakers pursue is a secular approximation of divine forgiveness and caritas, the arbitrary yet generous love for imperfect creatures regardless of merit.