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From Psychoanalytical Notebooks 3, 1999 : Love THE
PARADOXES OF LOVE Rose-Paule Vinciguerra In the teaching of Lacan love is the object of
a series of paradoxes, especially in relation to desire.1 We
will attempt to demonstrate this paradox from the perspective of love and
not just from that of desire. A man believes that he desires a woman when he
loves her.2 When he desires, a man never has to do with any
partner other than the object a which is causing his desire. A woman is a
symbol of lack for a man, and it is the value of prohibited jouissance
represented by the phallus which is indexed on the object. A woman is
desired as a fetish, as a piece of man’s body, his rib, as it says in
the Bible. For man, says Lacan, love goes without saying, to the point
that he does not understand anything about it.3 One can say from the very start that the
condition of love for a man is narcissistic. If a man does not request a
woman’s consent to desire
her, to love her, it’s not the same thing, since he loves her just to
the extent that the way he imagines her can support him narcissistically
in his phallic position. Hence the interest for the poor woman who can
evoke, a contrario, for a man
his phallic ‘have’. This is, moreover, why a man, sharing this
condition of love with a woman, loves in the other her castration. Hence, his idealisation of a woman, his
dependence on her that Freud speaks of when he describes the enamoured man
as humble and submissive.4 So, when he loves, ‘a man believes in a
woman’.5 “A woman in the life of a man”, Lacan says,
“is something in which he believes. […] He believes in a species, that
of sylphs or water sprites”, a fantastic, evanescent species which obeys
a mysterious logic. From this point of view a woman is for a man a horizon
of freedom, condition of poetry; but should she escape him, he is caught,
bewitched. Thus, in the beautiful novel of Frédéric de La Motte-Fouqué,
Ondine, rewritten later for the theatre by Giraudoux, when the
chevalier had a premonition that Ondine, siren become woman, could, like
the water people who created her, have no soul, he was struck with terror.
Double face of the enigma. Lacan adds that a man believes in a woman like
one believes in one’s symptom. On this point, a man believes in a woman in so
far as she can make present for him his relation to phallic jouissance;
a woman is for a man that which anchors him in the field of the real.
Hence, the chevalier says to Ondine in the play by Jean Giraudoux:
“Since my childhood a fish-hook has torn me from my chair, from my boat,
from my horse. You would draw me towards you”: the fish-hook of the
symptom, the symptom in this way more real than the unconscious. What a
woman makes present for a man is the way in which in the real “…the
effect of the symbolic is imagined”,7 since a woman as a
symptom only makes present the closing of the unconscious. That’s how
one has to understand Lacan’s remark that in order to know what a man is
worth, one has to look at his wife.8 It does not mean that he
looks like her, but rather that she represents in the real the particular
way he has of enjoying [jouir] the unconscious.
He thinks that she is going to say something about it, that he is going to
decipher her like a symptom, but she remains, as Lacan says about the
symptom, a suspension point, a question about the sexual nonrelation.
‘What does she want?’ is the question from which man dangles. And even
if he thinks that he has perceived the cause eliciting his belief, he
admits that he knows he is fixed, riveted there for no reason. So, Swann,
un-stunned [T.N: In French désidéré,
formed by a reversal of the verb sidérer.
Hence the hyphen to distinguish it from the simply negative adjective unstunned. The ‘un-‘ here then has the value of that of
‘undo’], remarks: “to say that I spoilt years of my life, that I
wanted to die, that the greatest love I had was for a woman who did not
please me, who wasn’t my type!”. Men understand nothing about the
meaning of love. So, to believe in a woman, a man is going to
start ‘to believe her’. There, ‘the symptom passes through a
limit’. This time he no longer believes that she is going to say
something true or false, but that she is saying something that concerns
him directly in his being. He is signified by what she is saying. It is
not ‘What does she mean?’ but rather “That is what she is
saying…” disconnected from any other meaning. He believes it, adds
Lacan, like one believes a voice. The unutterable of his being is given to
him, stated by a woman, in the very place of his unutterable
surplus-of-enjoyment [plus-de-jouir],
as if by a voice. He does not encounter Woman — who does not
exist — but, Lacan says, he believes in Woman: a false belief, that the
man creates.9 The man believes but, in fact, he creates, he
creates the existence of woman as Other in the real. “Believing her
serves as a plug for believing in her”.10 “Believing in
her” here is correlative to a questioning; believing her is correlative
to an index of certainty. This can lead him to the worst: thus, the hero
of the novel of William Irish, The
Siren of Mississippi, prefers his belief to his life. That the
adventuress and liar he married is his symptom, and that he knows it, is
not enough. He has to go to the very end of his belief; till the very end
he is going to believe her, believe what she says. Knowledge and truth
are, when she speaks, foreclosed. In order to hear what that voice is
saying, a few brief words of love — it matters little that they are lies
— the hero will consent to the worst: he will let himself be poisoned.
Fiction, no doubt, but one can say that a man who loves believes ‘Woman
to be all women’, without perceiving that he is only creating there an
empty set. He creates the signifier of Woman and at the same time begins
to believe in the sexual relation. In creating Woman, he creates a fiction
to which he strives. He is thus feminised, and that is certainly what
makes love comic. Love is comic, says Lacan, and this is the comic of
psychosis. One can grasp the comic of this in the imaginary axis a-a’:
‘my wife says that…’, but it is also the object as unrepresentable
and not the phallus, this time, which dominates the scene. Man strives
through his belief ‘for this something which is his object’.11
Hence this very particular type of comic. Thus, Alceste, the misanthrope,
who Lacan considers as a delusional, addresses Celimene: ‘You are surely deceiving
me with such gentle words. But I can do no other, I
have to follow my destiny: For your belief my soul is
abandoned’ (Act IV, scene 3). For a woman, the paradox resides in the fact
that she thinks she loves when she desires. She desires the phallus of
which man is bearer from the perspective of her identification with the
lack in the Other. The phallus, says Lacan, is everything for her. The
problem is that she can take the phallus as her compass, which can make
her stupid: my husband this and my husband that. Sartre used to say that
one could recognise a bourgeoise by the fact that as soon as she opened
her mouth she spoke of her husband. One could decline different forms of
the relation a woman holds to the phallus: serve it like a master, want to
steal it in hysteria, but also all the forms — often crafty — that
women have of keeping it, to make it their private hunting ground.
Conversely, a woman loves a man when he is
deprived of what he gives. She loves in so far as she recognises the
man’s lack. One does not love, then, a rich man, even if one desires
him. The Other of love who stirs beyond the phallus is to be referred to
the ideal father. Beyond the infinitude of love addressed to the maternal
Other is the place of the love of the father, who gives to the extent that
he does not have. In this way one can account for the erotomaniacal form
of love in women that Lacan speaks of in Proposal
for a Conference on Feminine Sexuality12 : to begin with
she is always imagining she is loved. This erotomania which is not
psychotic, is to be understood in relation to the phallus, for if it is to
the same man that her love and desire are addressed, she will veil out
with modesty [pudeur] that
‘the phallus is everything for her’, by imagining that she is
phallicised by love and by the primary desire of a man; she is going to
make castration and desire of a man emerge in order to be phallicised and
to veil, at the same time, the lack which brings her to desire. In this,
she realises at the imaginary level the substitution of the lover for the
beloved, and is situated, in relation to the phallus, in the positions of
being and having, on condition that she does not have it. That is why a
woman acknowledges her love with such great difficulty; as one sees in the
theatre of Marivaux, she uses strategies to force the man to declare his
love first, not that she does not precede him in her desire, but she will
never dare to love except with the support of that initial supposition. Later, when Lacan puts forward his formulae of
sexuation in which the different ways of making up for the impossibility
of the sexual relation are going to differentiate the sexes and their
relation to the phallic function, it will be a matter, then, of thinking
about the paradoxical duplicity of love and desire differently. A
woman’s love is no longer going to be thought of as that which veils
desire addressed to the phallus but as belonging to contingency, as what
can happen when a woman, not-wholly submitted to the phallic function,
addresses herself to a man as an At-least-one who would not be submitted
to it at all. But if the existence of this man, in a unique position, to
whom a woman addresses herself, is necessary, it is, at the same time, not
possible, since it is not possible that a man enjoys [jouisse]
all the women — there is no
‘all’ of women, they exist one by one. Thus with a woman, even if the jouissance of the One is not excluded, it is, nevertheless,
impossible. A woman does not make the exception exist, and when she
addresses the One of exception from the place of her jouissance,
from a not-all jouissance, she
encounters the Other of lack. What she encounters, then, is an absence:
the Other cannot be found. It is perhaps this that can account for the
apparently mad character of love and of feminine jouissance.
The relation of a woman to S( Thus, one could understand otherwise Lacan’s
statement mentioned above on the erotomaniacal form of feminine love as
love addressed to the Other of lack. It is precisely because she cannot
say anything about this ‘mixture of love and of jouissance’13
that a woman supposes it comes first from the Other. She only reaches the
Other jouissance on the
supposition of the jouissance of
the Other. She can only suppose that what she cannot speak about, the
Other will be able to do it for her. It is like loving God with the love
by which God loves you, to hijack a formula of Master Eckhart: “The eye
by which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me”.14
Whilst a man believes the meanings [significations]
that a woman profers, a woman makes the word of love exist that would make
her live in that nameless place where she is staying. Thus, in the
loneliness of this love beyond the phallus, she elicits at the locus of
the Other the well spoken [bien dire]
to say the word of love ‘which is always beginning again’. One can also consider the ravage aroused by a
man in the exactly inverse dimension of the erotomaniacal form of love in
a woman. Lacan defines ‘ravage’ as an affliction, worse than a symptom
but which one is forced to specify as a symptom. If the ravage that a man
arouses is only analysable as a symptom, it can also be grasped in the
relation of a woman to the Other of lack. To the contrary of erotomania, I
would say that ravage is being faced with silence and not with the word of
the Other. Stephan Zweig’s Letter
of an Unknown recounts how for never having been understood nor
recognised by a man, a one-time lover, whom she has always loved, a woman
can go to the extremes of havoc and privation in her life. Thus, as far as love entirely saturated with
belief is concerned, one can say that it is outside meaning and, Lacan
also says outside sex, a limit phenomenon. Can one account for this
character? In his Seminar called The
Logic of Fantasy, Lacan qualifies it as Verwerfung,
from the relation of the unconscious subject to the Other. The unconscious
supposes a “you are not, therefore I am not” ( When Lacan, in the very last part of his
teaching, advances the formula of a generalised foreclosure of the sexual
relation, it is no longer in terms of Verwerfung
that he is going to qualify love but rather as an attempt to make up for
the impossibility of the sexual relation, for the mystery of the two. Love
is born out of these roots of the impossible.15 Of course, love
promises that sexual meaning is going to stop not being written in the
contingency of the encounter and that it is going to become necessary.
‘The way of the mirage’: the sexual relation cannot be written, the
human being is exiled from it. Love, in fact, ‘suspends sexual
meaning.’ It does, of course, give itself airs of truth, but the
imaginary in that truth is nothing but ‘a false second in relation to
the real’.16 Love in this respect, does not keep its
promises, and, as the lie is part of the truth, love is, to quote Aragon,
‘to lie truly’. So, a man believes that he desires, a woman that she
loves, and this paradoxical belief clings basically to the lie of love. It is probably this failure that makes it so
enthralling, for, while remaining entirely within limits, love is a border
phenomenon. It explores the confines of the impossible. Simply, unless
“the wall cracks […], one can only get a bump on the forehead”.17
Translated
by Richard Klein 1.
I have tried in a
previous article in La Revue to
consider this paradox from the perspective of desire. 2.
J. Lacan, Le
Séminaire XV, L’acte psychoanalytique, 1967-68, unpublished, the lesson of the
27th of March, 1968. 3.
J. Lacan, Le
Séminaire XXI, Les non-dupes
errent, 1973-74, unpublished, lesson of the 12th of February 1974. 4.
S. Freud, On
Narcissism: an Introduction, 1914, SE XIV. 5.
J. Lacan, Le
Séminaire XXII, R.S.I., 1974-75, unpublished, lesson of 21 January 1975, Ornicar?
no.3. 6.
J. Lacan, op. cit. 7.
J. Lacan, R.S.I.,
op.cit., lesson of 11 March 1975. 8.
J. Lacan, Le
Séminaire XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, (1970-71),
unpublished, lesson of 20 January 1971. 9.
J. Lacan, Seminar
XX, Encore, Paris, Seuil,
1975, p.118. 10.
J. Lacan, R.S.I.,
op.cit., lesson of 21 January 1975. 11.
J. Lacan, Le
Séminaire XXIII, Le Sinthome,
1975-76, unpublished. 12.
J. Lacan, Ecrits,
Paris, Seuil, 1966, p.733. 13.
J.-A. Miller, Lacanian
Orientation, Le partenaire-symptôme,
(1997-98), unpublished, teaching given within the framework of the
Department of Psychoanalysis, Paris VIII. 14.
M. Eckhart, Traités
et sermons, Paris, Aubier, 1942, p.179. 15.
J. Lacan, R.S.I.,
op.cit. 16.
J. Lacan, Les
non-dupes errent, op.cit, lesson of 15 January 1974. 17.
J. Lacan, R.S.I.,
op.cit., lesson of 21 January 1975. This
text was originally published in La
Cause freudienne No 40, 1999. Copyright © Rose-Paule Vinciguerra 2003. This text from the website of the London Society of the NLS, at http://www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk. Permission to use material from this site must be sought from the LS-NLS. All rights reserved. Please include this portion of the text in any printed version of this paper. |
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