Love beyond narcissism (I)

As the title of my presentation indicates, and as the bibliographical references I've provided for this series' work indicate, what I'd like to do this afternoon is give you an idea—and only an idea, because Lacan addresses this topic from the beginning to the end of his teaching—an idea, then, of what Lacan says about love.

I've taken three references from three different moments in Lacan's teaching. First, Seminar 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (from 1959-60), where Lacan speaks specifically about courtly love. Second, Seminar 8: Transference (from 1960-1), where he offers a very entertaining and subversive reading of Plato's famous Symposium, perhaps the best-known Western text on the subject of love. And third, Seminar 20: Encore (from 1972-3), where Lacan gives some outlines of what can be understood as a "more worthy love."

This idea of ​​a “more dignified love” is found in another of Lacan's texts, the “Italian Note” published in his Other Writings. And elsewhere, Lacan also speaks of a “less foolish love.”

Let's take note of the important implication, because it's something we'll see later: love can be both foolish and unworthy; although—and this is Lacan's wager—not necessarily so.

We'll also see that, with this overview, we can provide an answer—partially, of course—to two questions that have circulated in the announcements for this series: How does Lacan read literature, in this case, the poetry of courtly love? and How does Lacan read philosophy, in this case, Plato's Symposium?

We could perhaps add a third, crucial question: How does Lacan read literature and philosophy as a psychoanalyst? Because, after all, a psychoanalyst—even if “the artist is ahead of him”—is neither an artist nor a philosopher.

Let's start, then, with the first point:

1. Courtly Love, or Love as Sublimation

Everything Lacan says about courtly love in Seminar 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is based on what Freud had previously said about the artist's work as a work of sublimation. (We know that Lacan described his teaching as a "return to Freud," a return to a literal reading of Freud's texts.)

According to Lacan, Freud essentially says three things about sublimation. First, that sublimation is based on the plasticity of drives in the human being. Second, that for the human being—what Lacan calls the parlêtre, the speaking or speaking being—this plasticity of drives is absolutely involved, intertwined, with language—with what Lacan calls the play of signifiers. And third, the artist's sublimating work operates with these signifiers to give the drives a destiny diverted from their directly sexual goal, though still satisfying in another way, and without having to undergo the repression produced by the neurotic symptom. The artist who achieves the satisfaction of sublimation is not, in Freud's terms, a neurotic. 

What does Lacan add to this description of sublimation? (Because we also know that Lacan returns to Freud's texts to renew them with his own articulations and inventions.)

First, Lacan says that, for the speaking being in general and for the artist specifically, the play of signifiers revolves around a central void. In this Seminar, Lacan designates this void as das Ding (the Thing). He draws this term from one of Freud's earliest writings and makes it resonate with the philosopher Kant's famous Ding-an-sich (the Thing-in-itself), although it should be said that if Kant's Thing-in-itself is purely external and unknowable, Lacan's Thing is what he himself calls, with a famous neologism, "extimate." 

What does extimate mean? It means that all the undertakings and activities of the human being, of the speaking being, permeated as they are by language, by the play of signifiers, are carried out around the central emptiness of the Thing, which operates in them as a kind of impregnable internal boundary. Religion, says Lacan, functions to avoid the Thing. Science (and capitalism as well, he will say later) functions to disbelieve in the Thing, to try to abolish it, or, to use another of Lacan's terms, to foreclose it (capitalism also forecloses, according to Lacan elsewhere, love, something that is very interesting for us in this context). 

Art, however, manages to do something else with the Thing, so to speak. As Lacan says, and I quote: "All art is characterized by a certain mode of organization around this void." How can we begin to decipher this phrase, both powerful and enigmatic? Lacan helps us a lot, because he gives four examples.

First, he speaks of the potter so beloved by the philosopher Heidegger, who also speaks of das Ding. The potter who creates the vessel around nothing, who creates nothing from nothing, says Lacan, paraphrasing Shakespeare. All creation, Lacan asserts, is creation ex nihilo.

Second, Lacan speaks of a collection of matchboxes belonging to his friend Jacques Prévert. A collection that gathers the drawers of the boxes gratuitously, proliferating and

excessive, beyond any utility, thus revealing the boxes themselves as the Thing.

Third, Lacan speaks of Cézanne, and his famous apples. I quote him because it's worth listening to what he says. “At the moment when the painting turns once more on itself, at the moment when Cézanne makes apples, it is very evident that by making apples he is doing something entirely different from imitating apples—even though his final way of imitating them, which is the most captivating, is the one most oriented toward a technique of presentifying the object. But the more presentified the object is as imitated, the more it opens up to us that dimension in which illusion breaks down and points to something else. Everyone knows that there is a mystery in Cézanne's way of making apples, for the relationship with the real, as it is then renewed in art, brings the object into being in a lustral way, which constitutes a renewal of its dignity, through which, if you will allow me the expression, these imaginary insertions are dated in a new way.” Cézanne's imaginary apples, we could say, once again, reveal something of the real of the Thing.

The fourth example Lacan gives is surely the most radical. This is Holbein's famous painting (one might say the most famous after Lacan) "The Ambassadors." Lacan reads this painting as paradigmatic of the artistic technique of anamorphosis, a technique that operates an optical transposition to make a previously illegible form legible. What we see in the painting are two gentlemen ostentatiously displaying the various possessions of their world, but if we look at the painting from a certain angle, the previously indecipherable form appearing below is revealed to be a skull, "a symbol," Lacan notes, "of the classic Vanitas theme."

This analysis of Holbein's painting is very important in relation to what Lacan says about courtly love in this Seminar. In fact, the central chapter is entitled "Courtly Love in Anamorphosis," and it is possible to summarize Lacan's argument by saying that what courtly love accomplishes is a kind of anamorphosis in reverse. Why in reverse? Because if anamorphosis moves (like Cézanne) from the imaginary to the real, from the goods of the world to the skull, courtly love moves from the real to the imaginary. If there is a downward movement in anamorphosis, literal in Holbein's painting, in courtly love there is an upward movement, an upward movement. This is why Lacan understands courtly love as paradigmatic of sublimation (Sublimierung in Freud), a word that is related, of course, to the famous Aufhebung (also sublimation) of the philosopher Hegel, which implies something of this elevation.

Lacan offers two definitions of sublimation that greatly clarify these issues: one more colloquial and the other more formalized, almost algorithmic, algebraic. The first is the following: “At the level of sublimation, the object is inseparable from imaginary elaborations, and especially from cultural ones. It is not that the community simply recognizes them as useful objects—it finds in them the field of distinction thanks to which it can, in a certain sense, deceive itself about das Ding, colonize the field of das Ding with its imaginary formations. In this sense, socially accepted collective sublimations are exercised […] Society finds some happiness in the mirages provided by moralists, artists, artisans, dress or hat makers, the creators of imaginary forms.”The second definition, more formalized and crucially grounded in Freud's discoveries about narcissism, and which Lacan summarizes here crystallinely, is this: "We have as our guide the Freudian theory of the narcissistic foundations of the object, of its insertion into the imaginary register. The object—to the extent that it specifies the directions, the points of attraction of man in his openness, in his world, to the extent that he is interested in the object, to the extent that he is more or less its image, its reflection—that object, precisely, is not the Thing, insofar as it is at the core of the libidinal economy. And the most general formula I give you for sublimation is the following: it elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing."Here we find the two fundamental ideas that Lacan introduces to speak of courtly love. First, this love "elevates an object to the dignity of the Thing." And, second, this elevation to dignity is essentially narcissistic. The love at stake in courtly love is a narcissistic love.To explain these ideas, we need to talk a little about the poetry of courtly love, this phenomenon that appeared like a meteor, Lacan says, between the 11th and 13th centuries, especially among the French troubadours and the German Minnesänger, but also in Castile, Catalonia, and England. A phenomenon that not only had an impact and influence on all subsequent poetry, but also continues to shape, in some ways, the romantic relationships of speaking beings.I won't go into the details of this phenomenon. For those who want to, on p. 182 of Seminar 7, Lacan provides a list of books on the subject that he undoubtedly read. I also highly recommend the chapter on "Medieval Lyric Poetry" in the famous History of Universal Literature by Martín de Riquer and José María Valverde (an absolutely indispensable book for all literature lovers).What I will do is very quickly summarize what Lacan says about the poetry of courtly love as paradigmatic of sublimation.Clearly, the object that this poetry “elevates to the dignity of the Thing” is a very peculiar, highly sublimated version of what Lacan calls in this Seminar the “feminine object” (precisely, and paradoxically, in a feudal era that shows no sign of a possible emancipation of women). This object is the Lady, the feminine figure to whom all the linguistic and properly poetic contortions, varying according to the poet, of courtly love are directed. Crucially, she is a Lady devoid of any particular or personal characteristics. “The lady is never qualified,” says Lacan, “by her real and concrete virtues, by her wisdom, her prudence, or even her relevance.” Or again, and even more clearly: “In this poetic field, the feminine object is emptied of all real substance.” In fact, as Lacan observes, many of the commentators on courtly love have said that it is as if the poets were always talking about the same woman – something that sounds almost ridiculous to us.

Instead of the concrete, then, the Lady appears as what Lacan designates as “an inhuman, maddening partner,” the most arbitrary possible in the demands of proof she imposes on the poet who praises her, because courtly love is essentially a moral code that entails a whole series of loyalties, services, and exemplary behavior. The inhumanity of this couple is not a particular quality either, because it serves to structurally guarantee, says Lacan—and this is the fundamental point—the fact that the Lady is strictly inaccessible to the poet, who is deprived of her. On an empirical level, we know that almost all the women who inspired this poetry were married to aristocrats, and that almost all the poets were mere servants. On a more structural level, Lacan states something difficult, but very interesting: “[t]he ultimate demand to be deprived of something real is essentially linked to the primitive symbolization that fits entirely within the signification of the gift of love.” The poetic approach to the Lady presupposes asceticism, erects an obstacle, and requires repetitive detours that point to a transgression that never arrives. Lacan even goes so far as to define the failed eroticism of courtly love—with its techniques of circumspection, suspension, and amor interruptus—as a permanence in the preliminary pleasures identified by Freud.Repeating what we have already seen him say about sublimation in general, Lacan insists that what explains the deprivation, the inaccessibility, of the Lady in the sublimation of courtly love is nothing more and nothing less than the poet's narcissism. This poet projects his own ideal onto the image, the mirror, of the Lady, but this mirror functions as a limit, a barrier, which is impossible to cross. The poet cannot cross the limit of his own narcissism.We find a surprising confirmation of Lacan's hypothesis in one of the poems or songs, The Song of the Lark, by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn. He sings the following: "I ceased to have strength and control over myself from the moment she let me look into her eyes, a mirror that pleased me so much. Mirror: since I looked into you, my deep sighs have died, because I lost myself in the same way that the beautiful Narcissus lost himself in the fountain."Regarding the question at hand, then, what lies beyond the object of narcissism, at the level of what Lacan calls the Thing? In all the poetry of courtly love, Lacan points out, this Thing is revealed only once, in a very strange inversion of sublimation, in an absolutely astonishing poem by the troubadour Arnaut Daniel. It is the eighteenth of the nineteen that exist. I'll read it all, because it's worth it, and then we'll move on to Plato's Banquet: "Since Raimon and Truc Malec defend Doña Ema and her possessions, I will grow old and senile before sharing such demands, from which such a great sin could be strayed: to gore him he would need a beak with which to extract the adhesions from the horn; and then he could easily go blind, because the smoke that comes out from within the folds is strong. / It would very well have to be beaked and the beak long and sharp, because the horn is fierce, ugly, hairy, and deep within the swamp; and it is not dry for a single day, because it gives off the viscosity that immediately spreads and shrinks. And it is not fitting that he who brings his mouth close to the horn should never be a lover. / There would be many more beautiful pleasant trials that would be worth more; and if Bernart [de Ventadorn] renounced this, by Christ, he did not act like a villain, because they took fear and terror; that If the stream were to fall on him from above, it would scald his neck and jaw. And it is not fitting that he who gored a stinking horn should kiss a lady. / Bernart, I do not agree with Raimon du Durfort when he said that you never acted wrongly, because if you had gored for fun, you would have encountered great trouble and the stench would have killed you soon, because it smells worse than manure in a garden. And you, whoever dissuades you, praise God because he has saved you from it.”