Picked up a copy in an op shop (charity/thrift store) in Hobart Tasmania.

It contained page-staining newsclippings from decades ago, they reported the successes of amateur theatrical endeavours from Forbes in New South Wales. I hope the reader of the book was an actor and in an adulterous liason with an American involved in the reception of signals fom the moon-landing in 1969. See also The Dish.

A good precis of the book can be found on Simon Petherick's 2017 post Denis de Rougemont and Books That Change Your Life.

The general schema in reaction

Denis de Rougemont attempts a project of etymology (page 18). This is a method which I am keen to indulge as I see it as a precursor to a taphonomical methodology, even so, despite some disavowals, Passion and Society does end up having the odd genealogical moment, which is difficult to avoid when one is passionate about a subject, or just overly committed.

In this regard, it reminds me of a review I did of Beckwith's The Scythians, where the thesis is well worth entertaining, and for which the supporting documentation is perhaps not really necessary, except as future leads for research. Research which may or may not end up where the passion leads. De Rougemont is less given to this, but it is still there, the position is not de-tached so much as self-satisfied (if only just).

A taphonomic methodology would temper these inclinations even more so, less stridency would produce a better work, even if then such a book is less scratch-your-face publishable.

For me the word passion is completely neutered by its recent use in our careerist workplace and platforms. So on picking up the book I was coming to the word passion completely cold. Any freshness the word passion might have had in the workplace must have died in about 2001, if not earlier. It zombied on.

So then, learning from Denis de Rougemont that passion requires suffering for one’s self, if not for one’s love of love, and if not suffering then definitely death… I saw that perhaps the workplace's use of the term was indeed apt, if not in an expected way: like, the corporate team that is splayed together, robots together.

I find the general literary arguments de Rougemont makes, or his proto-taphonomy as I would call it, all quite acceptable.

De Rougemont puts it forward that that Manichaean-style heresies provide the base, locally by way of the Cathars, were then re-purposed by the efforts of troubadour into Courtly Love, which then re-used by the Northern French in adapting Irish stories and other Celtic efforts, if not Iron Age use of Bronze Age heroics, as then written into Arthurian romances. Both Courtly Love and Arthurian Romances influenced both more Catholic orthodox mystics and many many writers of later romances across Europe und so weiter…A fantastic argument of layered and re-used and sneaky filtrated substitutions.

There does appear even in this post-WW2 revised edition (the original was 1943) a feeling for a need for tighter genealogical movements, i.e. that Troubadours were Cathar agents) for example. Quite why there is such a pull maybe due to publishing requirements or expectations for evidence where there is none and so a likelihood is pursued too far. there may be no book otherwise I guess. I mentioned Beckwith above with his extremely long linguistic begats. But another example is Henrich’s focus on Catholicism's bans on cousin marriage in his WEIRD book (Review ① ② ③). I mention that because comparing Henrich’s WEIRD anthropological meta-data context on the social institution of the individual alongside de Rougemont’s argument on passion and orthodoxy’s sensibleness about agape, would provide some interesting comparisons for a taphonomy of worlding.

Taphonomies can produce dates, absolute and relative, but genealogies merely date by  listing generations. And family trees rarely forest. Some smarter societies forget the begats and instead cycle every other cohort through a limited number of skins or totems of whatever classifier for categories you want to use. This is a better fit with how the world is maintained as a tool. The begats are a Bronze age heroic fixation, even if their animal grammar lies in an appreciation of causal relations.  Genealogy is not a physics. Begats are a passion for origins, in love with the love of originality.

Genealogies require proof of actual blood relations, but the world itself does not. As a tool the world is wise to remember that it is possible the first person, or people, the first population, who first twined fibres into thread and string and knots and fabrics, have no living descendants. It’s also possible that the first lovers of love who suffered for their passions, have no descendants, and yet the world goes on. Genealogies are a very restricted way to look at this. Taphonomic methodologies will be much more powerful, by allowing the stratigraphy of dates, and their improprieties, more things can be tested than #whosyourfather?

Above all Passion and Society is a literary endeavour, the latter sections bring forth that taphonomy with much record, the final lines from Romeo by Juliet’s corpse is particularly instructive. As is learning Verona was a hotbed of Catharist heresy.

How much taphonomy can or will only be a literary endeavour remains to be seen. Some see the text as all consuming, some see orality as a lost purity, both of these are outcomes of the worlding urge, among nostalgics and deconstructionists both. The world prefigures us. I.E. a certain 'literariness' is as much native and suited to worlding and its study as a tool, as the economics of trade is. Certainly ideas of imaginative world-building have been instrumental in my conceiving of a worlding urge, and the kosmophasia we often suffer from.

Things I learn reading

Passion requires obstruction.

Obstacles are often social categories (some people think of them as the system or an ideology). But wrong-way love is common everywhere.

Passion is a technique of self.

In mid-century French discourse this subject was refered to by the term ascèse or askesis, from the Greek for exercise/training/practice (translator's footnote page 55). These selfings of the self are often as narcissistic as any special project can be. A pilgrim progress might be another. All these practices predate monotheistic religions, as they often world the self into seclusion, enlightenment or occupation.

The passionate are in love with love, but not in a good way.

This is why when storied there are so many obstacles, actually meeting up with one’s true love is often only at or near death. (One can see how this compared to Henrich's emphaisis on banning cousin marriage is much more a severe condition for the survival of the species than cousin marriage.) (This is also why in orthodoxy passion is restricted to the son of god and mystic saints, passion is not a ‘devinizing’ askesis for the rest of us --- who are we to judge ourseves? That is what the church is for.). (We not each supposed to ask what would Jesus do?)

Passion is a bit teenagery, passion is a type of emotional dogmaticism, an attachement made in the form of a vow (all that feudal fealty and loyalty stuff which is way messed-up).

In terms of what we now call a narrative arc, the death of the lovers returns things to balance. In more heretical modes the kiss of the lady is also in that sense of the saying “death is a lady” and we return to the true realm of our spirit from this evil realm that traps us, when the body is not a temple of the soul so much as its infernal prison. Chastity maintains passion, the suffering is it revelation or epiphany, thus the later link to Orthodox mystics use of passionate suffering expressions and the language of lovers.

De Rougemont contrasts all that suffering [with chastity as suffering, with adultery not-so-much bad as indicating the path of passion, in true love’s embrace of one’s love of true love, and all its confusions]… —with agape, which is that sense of Christian love that informs the sensible end of Catholic teachings (e.g. solidarity, see Reading Beyer: Solidarity by Grace, Nature or Both?).

I came to this realisation as well when I said to a friend that boring is good.

It terms of a potential taphonomy it is interesting that both orthodoxy and heresy might be argued to give rise to the social institutionof the individual as we know it in WEIRD societies. The world is more than an outcome of genealogies. Its a mess, we need asystem to work with the mess, and sure, reducing the mess into simplicities is one way, but often it just adds to the mess. Much like true love and passion do by execerbating teenaged mistakes rather than learningfrom them in a safe place.

Everyone in the Bronze age was a teenager. Life was passionate, brutish and short. Consider that as you dwell on the past.

The first part (above) is crossposted at substack.com. Part two, below, is here.

Notes made while reading Passion and Society

From hand written notes, which are generally unreadable. You may note I do not make notes on his numerous examples of literature.

Paraphrasing Denis de Rougemont.

The quotes show what he wrote, the paraphrasing shows what I read.

2026-AUG-26

Page 21. Without obscurity (of origin) myths would have no reason to be.

This sort of accepts a more skeptical position akin to a suspension of judgement. Judgement still pulls Denis de Rougemont towards some genealogical attachements.

Chapter 1. Passion is a suffering if not a death.

Chapter 2. On how a myth in worlding a set of social categories/relations, such as the always half-mythic code of chivalry (already nostalgic when first written down as a version of the past wars and their stories) begets Romance.

Page 23. de Rougemont uses myth as a fabula to the instance of a presented plot, as its Ur-story or pattern (whoseyourfather) — even if this requires a certain social frame for it to function (refunction?). The pattern is a fashion. A cycle of investitures.

The first structuralism is time.

Footnote page 23. Comments on how the Church ‘incorporates’ elements of paganism [if we forget Christianity is a paganism I guess] is also what happens to some heresies, in this case Catharism via troubadors into Romance.

Page 44. Husbands are despised in Courtly Love.

So chaste adultery is then okay? Would we call this emotional cheating nowadays? Are some emotionally-charged types of feminism also a form of (inverse) Courtly Love? I.E. Wrong-way love rather than heresy??? The world will contain all of them/us.

Page 45. (again) this death/passion is for love/passion.

Analogous of course to Christ passions suffering for us so we don’t have to ever again (if only), which the Church's more orthdox mystics pick up on, modelling Christ rather than union (which according to de Rougemont is heretical), in a re-rendering unto Ceasar what is Ceasar’s sort of way. #whosyourceasar?

Page 46. In the throes of an active passion for darkness — their own suffering is a world they cannot self — a matyrdom — a sacrifce — (coupling the world)

They fell in love with love (How St Augustine describes his earlier phase --- is this the Manichaean Phase – need to check Confessions, de Rougemont does not say...??)

In love with love they fail to move on (teenagers doom and gloom is forever) — fail to learn — they double-down — while some in moving on turn the error into a repeating series of mis-takes (cycles of self-abuse).

Book II Religious origins

Page 129 askesis of suffering — passion is a journey into death

Worlding the self :: selfing the world: Irish legend — disaster — eternal fate —courtly love — internal tragedy

Page 130. Example of the genealogical urge in a work of etymology “, and probably Catharist in its immediate origin).”

Page 145. In the [Roman en prose (the 13c re-working of the verse versions)] we get: “We have lost the world, and the world us,: Iseult laments; and Tristan answers: “If the whole world were now with us, I would see you alone.”

Excellent example of the proportions that function in Worlding the self :: selfing the world. One can see the use of this error, when marginal, helps the young adult move away from their kin in selecting mates, to the kith, as that old world of childhood has to die, which is what initiation rites and those rites’ inspiration of mensuration also indicate. The stories of wrong-way love illustrates the bounds of that choice, who is actually kin, who is actually kith in small bands of (unrelated and related) humans??

About page 155.

I say eros can open that world and with it childhood can die. Passion is the story of first love made into something eternal, rather than reckonising its power to end childhood, in a way it seeks to maintain a purity of innocence into the world where it may not belong (wait till the babies show up man)(whoseyourfather).

About page 173. “Passion and expression are not really seperable. Passion comes to birth in that powerful impetous of mind which also brings language into existence.”

A powerfully statement about evolution really.

Passion — as a type of emotional dogmaticism can it be more primal or only a derivative which re-inforces it primalness (first true love)??—???— This Eros is already a lost innocence? Speak now or never. The loss is thus not allowed to become an absence, the world moves on despite your lack of grief.

Page 175. Example of possible genealogical error/over-statement.

2026-AUG-27

Passion is a teenager, an obstruction to adulthood. Passion is its own obstruction. (de Rougemont == of the Redhill … — to die on? Calvary).

Page 122 Henri Bergson is a footnote – ‘the only French romantic Philosopher’.

Passion is a Peter Pan (as in Romeo oh Romeo and Romance).

Page 137. Lost touch with our origins, so genealogy is less useful now.

Page 138. Nazi romanticism (will not end the series).

Worlding the self :: selfing the world

Worlding the self :: selfing the world can be the exact same activity, because Janus faces two directions, the potential vectors can therefore be completely opposite and add up to zero (My power is zero despite the activity on the threshold).

Vectors are attempted, indicated, but always concell each other out to some degree. The dogmatic make them align.

De Rougemont’s example of Passion is one such error.

Represssion, if it exists, does not just have one direction, or at least, must some how cope with more than one direction. Freud’s return of the repressed is a miscellaneous category, perhaps a useful blur, perhaps not. Dogma is defined by desiring one direction over every which way.

Janus dances, the outcome of beauty in motion is not guaranteed, nor any motion across the world at all.

Page 243. disavows genealogy

By the way, I do class structuralisms (gnostic or not) as a type akin to genealogical impulses, if perhaps without the daddy issues of #whosyourfather and the begats arguing from authority, or not. (As with Beckwith’s linguistic begats, and Henrich's (Review ① ② ③) Church ban on cousin marriage, the attraction to genealogy is always strong, they could be right of course, but the world doesn’t care.)

Page 261. Passion, violence, nation, narcissism.

Quite good writing on narcissism generally by de Rougemont.

Page 271. “Between the artificial framework of the great States and the everyday life of men and women, the gap is too wide, so that restlessness and uncertainty are greater than ever. Nothing is [really] settled.”

The world is so big, empires confuse the world with their leader. Not that the world cares.

Page 293. Divorce has not been made too easy, marriage has.

Carl Jung in passing on page 294, Robert Graves on 295.

Page 308, & about. Absurdist contexts are unecessary.

Page 309. — “ a religion that was prior to our modern instinct.”

Prior is not a gene (nor even a rede.)

“marriage is a pledge for this world”

Page 310. Love as an act.

To end on a repetition — passion is a type of emotional dogma. And if this is an effort chosen (however immmaturely) it then differs from narcissism which by definintion allows no personal development (and does so only in fiction, the lie that character development is availble to all is what makes modern story telling a fiction and rarely fabulous.)

Overall I agree with Denis de Rougemont's position on agape. However, I do not think an order based on celibacy can safeguard the wisdom of it though. 

See also: Marginal note to Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus

Resources

Denis de Rougemont. Passion and Society. Translated by Montgomery Belgion, Revised and Augmented edition, Faber & Faber, 1956.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_de_Rougemont

https://archive.org/details/passionsociety0000roug (not yet in public domain)

Petherick, Simon. “Denis de Rougemont and Books That Change Your Life.” Simon Petherick, 9 Oct. 2017, https://simonpetherick.com/2017/10/09/denis-de-rougemont-and-books-that-change-your-life/.

Carla Rogers. “What’s With Wrong Skin.” Evolve Communities Pty Ltd, 31 July 2018, https://www.evolves.com.au/whats-with-wrong-skin/.