Love as errancy

I want to explore a little bit how Lacan articulates the idea of love as errancy in

Seminar XXI: Les non dupes errent.

I have taken as a compass for my work the seventh chapter of Miller’s course El partenaire-síntoma, which is called, precisely, ‘Revaloración del amor’ (Revaluation of Love).

Orienting himself essentially towards Seminar XX, Miller distinguishes here,in the work of Lacan, between an imaginary, narcissistic love, a symbolic love – the‘demand for love’ that Lacan elaborates in Seminar IV and, we might add, the definition of love as ‘giving one what does not have’ in Seminar VIII – and, thirdly –in relation with Lacan’s definition of love in Seminar XX not as a signifier, but as a sign – a love in the real. Clearly, it is this love in the real that most interests me here.Linking what he will say to a previous definition he gave of love in a text from1988, ‘Charla sobre el amor’ – a definition of the function of love as haciendo pasar el goce al deseo – Miller asks, concerning Seminar XX, ‘¿cual es la estructura que lo sostiene?’ (What is the structure that supports it?)

The perspective of this seminar, he says, is the drive; a drive conceived as profoundly autoerotic, autistic. And given this, one of Lacan’s central questions is how, and at what level, can a relationship with the Other be established?

We see emerge here, Miller says, love in a unique role; as that which is introduced to

establish a connection with the Other. It is a love that is conceived at the level of the real

of the drive. Lacan asks how drive jouissance can admit to being incomplete,

to lacking something, in order to find itself involved in the affairs of desire. 

The answer, as Lacan says in Seminar XX, is that ‘el amor suple la ausencia dela relación sexual’. This is a metaphor operating at the level of the real, I would argue, that we can add to the symbolic metaphor of love outlined in Seminar VIII.

(Lacan's phrase "there is no sexual relationship" doesn't deny physical sex,

but rather the idea of a complete, harmonious union between individuals based on sex.

He argues that due to the nature of human desire, which is shaped by language and the unconscious, each person is fundamentally distinct in their own fantasy.

We project our desires onto others, but there's no inherent "rapport"

or perfect complementarity that allows for a full, mutual understanding or

satisfaction of each other's deepest desires. Instead, what we experience as

a "sexual relationship" is always mediated by these individual, often unconscious,

internal scripts).

And crucially for us, this new love is explicitly tied to feminine jouissance. We know from Freud, for instance, how much women libidinally cathect love, and how much castration can assume for them the form of the loss of love. (MIAHANSEN-LOVE, EL PORVENIR).

On the feminine side of the formulas of sexuation, then, we might say, there is a nexus, a knot,

between love and jouissance, a knot that alludes to an Other kind of satisfaction.

I would even ask whether this knot can be limited to the feminine?

That is, can man’s relation to love be reduced to the polymorphous perversity

that he encounters in its act? The last Lacan, I think, suggests not.

Anyway, we could say a lot of things about Seminar XX on the basis of whatMiller states here. Because I think Lacan is permanently struggling with himself in this seminar about whether to define love in imaginary, symbolic or real terms.I will leave all this to one side, however, in order to concentrate here on Seminar XXI. I will limit myself to a discussion of its first two sessions.In the final pages of the first session, then, Lacan is talking about the figure of the dupe; and we should remember that the whole seminar – as its title already makes clear – is a defense of this figure.

Interestingly, Lacan inquires about the gender of the dupe. In French it isdefinitively ‘la dupe’. Is there not something about dupery, he is asking, that isspecifically feminine? Something that he says in the margin suggests a positiveresponse. Quoting Chamfort, Lacan defines marriage as reciprocal dupery; and marriage, he says, ‘is love’, feelings are always reciprocal. We have, then, a first definition of love as reciprocal dupery, with the proviso, as Lacan says, that, in marriage, woman never makes a mistake. This is why the function of spouse has nothing human about it.

Moving now to the figure of the non-dupe, Lacan says that he – in masculine!– errs (ça erre). Now, what is really interesting for us is that this verb, ‘to err’ (errer),historically results from a linguistic confusion: from the convergence of ‘error’(erreur) with something that has nothing to do with it, and which is akin to ‘erre’ –which means in French the continuing impetus of something when what is propelling it stops. This something is the relationship to the verb ‘iterare’, from ‘iter’ for journey. This is why knight errant means simply an itinerant knight. (DON QUIJOTE).

After all, Lacan says, ‘to err’ (errer) does come from ‘iterare’, but, crucially,this has nothing to do with a journey, since it means ‘to repeat’, from iterum. This distinction between journey and repetition (or iteration) is fundamental tothe whole of Seminar XXI, and Lacan now defines the non-dupe on its basis.Non-dupes are those who refuse to be captured by the space of the speaking being (Lacan says ‘parlant’ here, not yet ‘parlêtre’). They wash their hands of this space and necessarily end up in error. There is an invention, Lacan says, that supports

those who want to be non-dupes of the structure, the invention that their life is only a journey, that life is that of the homo viator, of he – again we discover the masculine! –who in this lower world finds himself a foreign land. Lacan fascinatingly refers here to a sentence of Freud from the very last paragraph of The interpretation of Dreams. Freud asks about ‘the value of thedream for the knowledge of the future’. Freud is not speaking about the divinatory value of dreams, Lacan says, but instead about the value of the dream for the knowledge of what is going to result from it in the world, that is, from the discourse that ensues from the discovery of the unconscious. And Freud says that thisfuture held by the dreamer to be present is ‘gestaltet’, ‘formed’, ‘structured’ Lacan says, by his indestructible ‘wunsch’, ‘desire’, insofar as it is always the same. Thedream presently moulds the future as an ‘Ebenbild’ (a faithful and eternal portrait) ofthe past.

BIRTH ----------} DEATH

This is supposed, Lacan says, to be a journey punctuated between birth and death. And what, he asks, does Freud indicate to us from the emergence of the unconscious? That at whatever point one is at on this so-called journey, the structure –the relationship to a certain knowledge – never lets go; that desire, throughout life, is always the same.

BIRTH-----------------} DEATH

         (STRUCTURE)

That is, in the emergence of a particular being into the relationships of a world where discourse already reigns, its desire is completely determined from beginning to end. It is not immediately clear that Lacan is very radically criticizing Freud here.The dreamer, if we read between the lines of Lacan’s text, is Freud himself (and also,we might add, the early Lacan). This becomes much clearer in the final pages of the second session of Seminar XXI.

Lacan is talking here about Freud’s text ‘The occult significance of the dream’,which for a number of reasons I will not go into here is not included in the Complete Works, but can be found in the journal Imago from 1925. What interests Lacan is the case of a female patient that Freud recounts. When she was 27, a fortune-teller toldthis woman that when she was 32 she would get married and have two children. Freudis perplexed because, although the prediction was not fulfilled, the subject is still, in Lacan’s words, ‘absolutely enchanted’, in an ‘absolutely expansive state of satisfaction’, with it. Freud’s interpretation of this satisfaction is that the fortune-teller had procured her ‘el presagio que le prometía compartir el destino de su madre’.

Apparently, this interpretation corresponded to the facts, but nonetheless – or precisely because of this – Lacan unambiguously rejects it and points to a field beyond the limits of interpretation.

The so-called ‘occult’ cannot be interpreted or explained in Oedipal terms.

Instead it just happens, erupts, or more exactly – like love in Seminar XX –

comes to the place of the absence of the sexual relation.

Freud’s Oedipalism, we can conclude in more general terms, interprets the manifestations of love according to the logic of the homo viator. But psychoanalysis, Lacan states here, should be guided by a quite different ethic, one founded on the refusal of being unduped, that follows the ‘way’ of being always more strongly the dupe of unconscious knowledge. If, as Lacan also teaches us, love always bears a relationship to this knowledge, we have here an orientation for that exploration of love as errancy that Lacan continues throughout this seminar.