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The Promise

Love demands love. [.] It demands it . encore.

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX

To Burn or To Last?

Does it burn or does it last? If it burns out it consumes itself quickly and cannot last. In order to last it must not burn brightly, but instead lower the intensity of its flame. But what becomes of a love that no longer burns? Can a love still exist when there is no longer fire? Is that love worthy of still being called 'love'? As Roland Barthes asks, why is it better to last than to burn?1

The figure of the person in love seems to be different to that of the husband, the figure of the sensual lover different to that of wife and mother. Does the lexicon of the family signal the end of the lexicon of love? On the one hand, we have the fire of the person in love, whilst on the other we have the affectionate presence of the father or husband. On one hand, we have the eroticism of the lover, on the other the attentive care of the wife or mother. One side burns, the other endures. Isn't this perhaps one of love's greatest paradoxes? We will see it in all of its different guises in this book.

We can attempt to grasp things from the outset and simply ask ourselves: how is love born? How does it happen? How is it that the Two meet and declare their love for one another? What is love's secret? What does it mean to declare one's own love? What do we mean when we say, 'I love you'?2 Is it all a trick, an illusion, a trap, as so many insist? Is it, as the most cynical would have it, a waste of time, a needless pain or an irritation to be ignored? And then, how long does a love last? How long can it last? Doesn't a declaration of love that wants to be forever exist as an irreconcilable contradiction? Doesn't every love necessarily end up in the shit? Doesn't it always eventually end in hate? Isn't this the ultimate truth about love? Doesn't every love always come to an end? Is believing in love between Two akin then to believing in a fairytale? Is declaring one's own love to be 'forever' not a signal of the psychological immaturity of the person making that declaration?

Novalis warned us that the mystery of love cannot be explained; that the only people with any authority to speak about it are poets. Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, are often among the most determined adversaries of love as a promise that demands to last forever. Some of them would say that whoever declares love forever is talking rubbish.3 And yet in every age and in every corner of the world, the birth of a love defies time because every love worthy of this name would like to be 'forever', would want its flame to be eternal. Every time I say 'I love you' I mean (lovers mean) that 'it will be forever', regardless of any rational evidence or common experience to the contrary. The promise of love is, indeed, a promise that is not afraid of evoking eternity - 'our love will be forever'.

Saying 'I Love You'

Freud did not believe in any way, shape or form in the miracle of love. He insisted that it was the illusory result of a narcissistic passion for one's own I, or rather, one's own narcissistic ideal. He believed that to love means nothing more than to adore one's own ideal image embodied by the beloved. When I say 'I love you', I am saying that 'I love myself through you', I am saying that 'I love myself in you', that 'I love myself', that 'I love my I in you.' The subject is more important than the verb.

Love for Freud is essentially an imaginary phenomenon that belongs to the sphere of narcissism and is consumed among the deceptive reflections of the mirror. He believes that we never love the beloved for what they are but for what we imagine them to be, or more precisely, for the ideal of ourselves that they reflect. What I love in you is my own ideal I, the way in which your gaze looks at me and makes me lovable. Love, for Freud, is always accompanied by narcissistic fantasies. It is a deceptive passion, the effect of the subject in love being blinded and hence overestimating the object of their passion in order to exalt themselves. It is, in short, a mirage. And it exists, contrary to what we might believe, more in the dimension of having, of receiving rather than that of giving, it is more about appropriation than expropriation, about centralization of the self rather than its decentralization. This is why every act of falling in love, fed by the narcissistic fantasy, tends to vanish at the first disappointment, the first experience of non-coincidence between how the beloved is in reality and their ideal-narcissistic representation.

Is love, Freud's critical voice would continue to insist, actually an experience of the New? Of a new life? Of a new experience of the world? Or just illusions, traps, smoke and mirrors created by poets? What if love of the Two was actually nothing more than the repetition of ancient, repressed loves, hidden deep down in our memories? What if it were nothing more than the impression of a mark that has already been left? Nothing but a game of masks? Isn't it true that behind the beloved woman there is always the unconscious shadow of one's own mother? And does the mother (or even - in some rarer cases - the everlasting childhood ideal of the father) not always, even for a woman, overshadow the beloved man? The experience of the unconscious would teach us that love is never love for the New, but only ever the replica of the same love - love for the mother - that condemns us to repeat, in identical forms, the disappointment of the Same. In this way, the spectres of our past, our fantasies, our first experiences of infant sexuality, of our most archaic fears, all fall onto our beloved. Freud would have demonstrated without exception how the so-called New of love is nothing more than a reissuing of the old, of that which has already been, of a love that has already been consumed - with the mother or with the father - and that stops the loving encounter from ever truly being a new one. Rather, love would be a form of psychic regression, returning us to a childlike state in which we either idealize the Other or chastise them for not being as ideal as we had fooled ourselves they were. The skirmishes of love repeat the skirmishes of our most remote childhood fantasies.

The Miracle of the Encounter

But perhaps Freud lacked the words (or the experience - was Freud ever in love?) to describe the generative force that the event of the loving encounter carries with it. Because if we look closely at its beginning, we see love is caused first and foremost by the enchantment of the encounter. Love offers itself not as regression or repetition, but as a surprise. Something unpredicted, unplanned, unexpected occurs that interrupts the sequence of the already-known, the already-been, already-seen. Every loving encounter suspends the natural passing of time; it digs a hole, an empty space, opening up a gap, a discontinuity that we could not have predicted in the usual course of things in the world. In this sense, the encounter always tastes of the future, of that which has never been before, of a festival if the festival is the place where the ordinary is derailed by the explosion of forbidden joy. 'The amorous subject', writes Roland Barthes, 'experiences every meeting with the loved being as a festival.'4

The loving encounter always seems like a miracle because it transforms the predictable into the unpredictable, the possible into the impossible, water into wine, routine into revelation. But regardless of whether the promise is miraculous, every loving encounter always occurs by chance. In a supermarket, at a party or through an aquarium, as happens in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), in which the gazes of the Two (Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes) meet obliquely, as if by magic, through the clear waters of the aquarium with its multi-coloured fish, and cannot help but follow one another, each drawn to the other like a magnet. The focus here is on just one detail of the body: the gaze. For Lacan, this is the object that corresponds most to the movement of desire. But the encounter is always made up of details, fragments, pieces of the body: looks, scents, the sound of a voice, the colour of hair or eyes, clothes, a silhouette. We never fall in love with souls, but always and only with bodies. I must add here that love usually emerges from a unique flaw of the body rather than from its ideal perfection. Often, a body's perfection has the effect of anaesthetizing love, of rendering the beloved too distant, unreachable, whilst the flaw throws open the lack from which love can emerge, mobilizing the desire that finds this imperfection to be a divine detail. God, as Flaubert and Warburg have rightly said, is in the details. The enchantment of the encounter always implies a mystery. Why with her, why with him? What does this unknown hold, this x that has ignited my desire? The encounter seems to happen as if it were already written, but it never is; it has never, despite what lovers sometimes believe, happened before. It looks like destiny but is always the product of chance. It seems expected but is always unforeseen. This is why no psychoanalyst can claim to hold the key...