The infidelity of marriage and its beyond (II)

Matrimonio e infidelidad

The structural infidelity of marriage and its limits

How, then, might we expand on Lacan's reading of Figaro and his revelation—in the two scenes analyzed, but also in many others—of the quasi-structural infidelity that haunts his final celebration of the institution of marriage?

In Seminar II, Lacan devotes a few brilliant pages to the consideration of this institution. If we have to distinguish between the imaginary, symbolic, and real father, he argues, we would also do well to separate these three registers at the level of the couple. In fact, Lacan's questioning focuses on the first two registers, the imaginary and the symbolic; but this will allow us to ask at the end of this text what constitutes the real of a couple.

Structurally, Lacan's argument is directed against what he calls the “romantic illusion,” the idea that human commitment is sustained by “perfect love,” the “ideal value” that partners feel for each other. Marriage definitively proves that “idealization is not sustainable.” Instead, it can only be rigorously defined as a “symbolic pact.” Lacan refers here to a text by the philosopher Proudhonix, who wonders about the reasons for ‘tenacious’ but “fragile” fidelity. If giving our word is not enough, this is because the “sacred” fidelity of marriage is directed by men to “all women” and by women to “all men”; although Lacan emphasizes that this ‘all’ is not a quantity but the “universal function” or “symbol” of man and woman.

Historically, Lacan details a long passage from the symbolic to the imaginary. The Roman confarreatio, marriage between patricians, had a “highly symbolic character, which is ensured by ceremonies of a special nature.” But it has been a version of the plebeian institution of concubinage, based merely on a mutual contract, that has come to dominate society, strongly colored by the spiritual inflections of Christianity, and ending in the various contemporary narcissisms of love. Only a figure like Lévi-Strauss is capable of reminding us of the “original structure” of marriage, on the condition that women are reduced in his work to objects of exchange in a patriarchal or androcentric order that Lacan simply accepts as a fact in this seminar.

Do we not have here a key to unlocking the secret of The Marriage of Figaro? Structurally, this opera stages a permanent struggle between symbolic marriage and imaginary infidelity. Or, as Lacan says in Seminar II: “between that symbolic pact [of marriage] and the imaginary relationships that spontaneously proliferate within every libidinal relationship, there is a conflict, all the more so because something of the order of Verliebtheit intervenes. This conflict underlies the vast majority of those others in the midst of which the vicissitudes of bourgeois destiny unfold.” Figaro is the perfect bourgeois comedy, and the bourgeois symbolic and imaginary effectively subsume even those more radical musical aspects of the work that we identified earlier: meaning subordinates sound. Moreover, historically, Figaro stands on the threshold between a traditional, aristocratic master discourse and the future post-revolutionary society of equality. Indeed, Mozart and Da Ponte are often criticized for having blunted the pre-revolutionary edge of Beaumarchais' original work. But what this ignores is that they ingeniously replaced what Beaumarchais calls a “social impropriety”xi with an essentially amorous or erotic impropriety. And, crucially, this seems to stem from an emerging equality of the phallus. In Mozart, all men have the phallus, and all women are women. It is the figure of Cherubino, once again, who embodies this phallic universality.

In conclusion, then, how could we imagine a Figaro who is not entirely phallic, the reality of the couple Figaro and Susanna? Mozart/Da Ponte give us a clue precisely in the aria for Cherubino's famous love song: "Every woman makes me blush/Every woman makes my heart beat faster./ Just the word love or beloved/Disturbs and upsets my heart/And forces me to speak of love/A desire I cannot explain/I speak of love awake/I speak of love dreaming/To the water, to the shade, to the mountain/To the flowers, to the grass, to the fountain/To the echo, to the air, to the wind/That carry away with them/The sound of my vain words.../ And if no one hears me/I speak of love to myself.“ This phallic character here goes from ”all women" to an idiotic loneliness—in Lacan's sense—and Mozart's music reinforces the movement from mania to depression. But what lies beyond phallic loneliness? Returning to the two scenes discussed by Lacan, we could visualize Figaro seducing and declaring his love to the disguised Susanna, and a screen above them projecting an image of their future together: she, a woman, the cause of his desire; and he, a man, caring for the objects of her desire, the children. And we could hear, beyond Susanna's “Yes!”, a simultaneous “No!” shouted at the Count, the universal man who does not exist, and even at Figaro, the singular man who does exist, paradoxically indicating to them that there is a part of her that they will never touch.

Only Mozart could provide us with the music, but by reconceptualizing his work in this way, we can recover it as a groove that opens up against the fracture of the current, increasingly vehement, narcissistic degradation of love.