Lacan on the anxiety of love
From On Anxiety by Renata Salecl, loc 1320:
Love is linked to the fact that in the end we know nothing about the object that attracts us in the Other, and that at the same time the Other knows nothing about this object that is in him more than himself, i.e. what makes someone attracted to him. But today it looks as if we try to alleviate this essential anxiety that comes as part of love. People do not want to deal with uncertainty, so either become more and more enclosed (i.e. are able to maintain mostly only cyber-relationships which allow them to never actually meet the partner) or want a very precise answer from the Other (and are buying tons of self-help books which will supposedly help them to figure out the desire of the Other).
What I find so provocative about the Lacanian approach is how this recognition is tied up in a broader picture of relationality. It is radically different to the rather optimistic account of intersubjectivity found in thinkers like Charles Taylor and Pierpaolo Donati* which deeply shaped my thinking. Our own trajectory is driven by the gnawing incompleteness lurking behind the account we give of who we are and what we want, with our demands always failing to satiate our ceaseless desire. The manner in which we grapple with ourselves, with our place in the world and our experience of it, has always already failed. This leaves us prone to fantasising about the completeness we imagine in the Other, access to the fullness we crave which they might under certain conditions invite us into. Or perhaps the Other has stolen this fullness from us in a dastardly scheme to deprive us of what we are due.
I was struck when writing this post how powerfully Morpheus’s question in the original Matrix film captures the ubiquity of this experience, with the red pill being a symbolic fantasy which offers us the possibility of resolution:
What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
The reality insists Lacan is that our mind was splintered from the outset, with the alien machinery of language violently inserting itself into our being, in a wound we only become even dimly aware of once our personhood has constitutively formed around it. The problem is that it is not only we who must also grapple with troumatisme (the trauma caused by the hole we find in the Other)… the concrete others we share our lives with are constantly engaged in the seem arduous fumbling towards a sense of wholeness that will forever elude them. They are imputing wholeness to us, or seeing us as a means through which they might get to where they distantly sense they need to be. They are just as incomplete and fragmented, driven mad by the splinter in their mind in a way so familiar as to fade into the horizon of quotidian experience.
The dazzlingly depressing element of Lacan practice, as I understand it, is that there’s no resolution to this dilemma. We can’t escape the trap of desire but we can approach that trap with greater poise. To the extent there seems to be a normative philosophy underpinning the theory and the practice, it involves how we comport ourselves through the process: how lightly or heavily we stumble through it, how orientated we are to the satisfactions or fixated on the outcome. The same is true of love, I think, though I’m still not hugely confident in my interpretation despite two years of trying to teach myself Lacan. There’s no way around, or even through, troumatisme because that implies a resolution. Can we instead inhabit the anxiety Salecl talks about in the opening quote? Furthermore, can we do that together? Can we see the anxiety as anchoring a space of authenticity, as much as Lacanians would cringe at the term, marking a neurotic mirror image to the humanistic vision of encounter found in a thinker like Taylor?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pNhrlPU-fA
Romance is dead and done
And it hits between the eyes on this side
The grass is dead and barren
And it hurts between my thighs on this side
See me here, meet me here
I don't care if it's not repeated
I wanna know who you are
For every second we outrun the moon, dread the sun come up
I wanna know who you are
So I don't have to check my stuff's still here when you're gone
I wanna know who you are
I wanna know who you were
My understanding is that Lacan would insist that such a meeting is fundamentally impossible. I wonder however how this might reflect the individualising technology of the clinic, as well as constituting an overcorrection to the psychic naivety of humanist accounts of intersubjectivity. The fact there is always a missed understanding between people does not mean there can be no understanding. There is a deeper being-with-others made possibly in recognition of that gap, rather than seeking to overcome it. The gap is a condition of that depth, an anchor, in which a moment of meeting is marked by anxiety. It’s a practice rather than an outcome, a precarious achievement rather than a project that can be completed. It necessitates living in confrontation with one’s own lack, in the process of encountering the lack in the other. While Lacan says “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you”, I wonder if the mutilation can be suspended (at least some of the time) in that moment of encounter.
This Lacanianism with Taylorian (or Archerian!) characteristics which I’m awkwardly gesturing towards suggests a notion of authenticity which I suspect Donati could, perhaps slightly reluctantly, endorse. Authenticity consisting in navigating lack and anxiety together rather than seeking to foreclose it. The authenticity moment as in jointly holding and inhabiting the ontological gap, however precariously, rather than the imagined moment of having transcended it. There’s a possibility for new meaning and insight to arise in this encounter, the partial integration and symbolisation made possible when the fantasy of symbolically mastering the Real is dispensed with. There’s a register of partial success and partial failure, which is sociologically and psychologically generative, which I think Lacan forecloses too hastily. These partial successes and failures might themselves elicit fantasy responses but these can in turn be held, to varying degrees, in order to be integrated in partially sucessful or failing ways.
*Though Donati certainly confronts what he terms ‘relational evils’, it is still fundamentally optimistic about the relational potential of human beings.
#charlesTaylor #desire #donati #Lacan #love #margaretArcher #relationality #RenataSalecl #romance #sex
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