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Romantic Love, Absence and Jealousy in Roland Barthes’

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Romantic Love, Absence and Jealousy in Roland Barthes’ “ “Affective emotions”: Romantic love, absence and jealousy in Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux Léonie A. J. Mol 5884780 rMA Cultural Analysis Final thesis Supervisor : J. G. C. de Bloois University of Amsterdam June 17, 2016 Table of contents Introduction: “Shimmerings”: Barthes, Romantic Love and Affect ....................................................... 3 Barthes, romantic love, affect .............................................................................................................. 3 Methodology ....................................................................................................................................... 9 Organization of the thesis .................................................................................................................. 12 Chapter One: Love as absence .............................................................................................................. 16 The Discourse of the Absent: Barthes’ Analysis of Absence, Discourse and Love .......................... 17 Truth and Absence ............................................................................................................................. 19 The Knight of Resignation: Romantic Love as Self-Containment .................................................... 21 An Encounter between Me and the Other: Kierkegaard and Levinas ............................................... 23 Splendid Isolation and Absence ........................................................................................................ 24 Chapter Two: Love as Jealousy ............................................................................................................. 29 Jealousy as Affect: Barthes’ Explanation .......................................................................................... 31 Love, Creativity and Concept Formation .......................................................................................... 33 Desire and the Annihilation of the Self ............................................................................................. 36 What Is there to be Jealous of: Ideas of Possession .......................................................................... 38 Chapter Three: Love as Vulnerability ................................................................................................... 44 From Possession to the Annihilation of the Self ............................................................................... 45 Love as Specific “Scene” .................................................................................................................. 47 Love Politics ...................................................................................................................................... 49 Love as Indomitable Force: Notions of Authenticity ........................................................................ 52 The Future of Love: A Tentative Conclusion ........................................................................................ 57 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 63 2 Introduction: “Shimmerings”: Barthes, Romantic Love and Affect Bisher hat alles Das, was dem Dasein Farbe gegeben hat, noch keine Geschichte: oder wo gäbe es eine Geschichte der Liebe, der Habsucht, des Neides, des Gewissens, der Pietät, der Grausamkeit? (Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft §7) So far, all that has given color to our existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or even of punishment is so far lacking entirely. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science §7) Nue effacée ensommeillée Choisie sublime solitaire Profonde oblique matinale Fraîche nacrée ébouriffée Ravivée première régnante […] Sommes-nous deux ou suis-je solitaire ? (Paul Éluard, Poésie ininterrompue, 9-10) Naked wiped out fallen asleep Chosen sublime solitary Profound oblique early Fresh nacreous wild Revived first reigning […] Are we together or am I alone? (Paul Éluard, Uninterrupted poetry) Barthes, romantic love, affect Writing about the things “that matter” in life is a difficult task, as Nietzsche remarks. In this thesis, I want to focus on one of the things that has made life “meaningful”: love. What? Love, again? Did cultural theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and philosophers not write enough about this topic yet? Has nobody since Nietzsche’s aphorism was published in 1882, written a proper history of love? And why should we, the reader and I, care? Not surprisingly, my answer is we should. Cultural studies and cross-disciplinary analysis are 3 the right tools to analyze such a complex human phenomenon as love. Because I think the answer to the question “What is love” is still unanswered – luckily for me, and all the real lovers outside of this text. But also because “love” is a concept which has inspired so many people, both inside and outside of the academic domain. It is therefore I want to scrutinize the concept of romantic love, not to write its history or give an exact definition of it, but how it can manifest itself and what this means for our understanding of love. In this thesis, I focus on the concept of romantic love and its manifestation in particular relational or social settings. I use the concept of “romantic love” as portrayed in Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1975) and analyze it as a methodological tool, paying in particular attention to its possible affect. I argue that Barthes’ book has a particularly rich potential to develop valuable tools for critical analysis. I draw from Barthes’ affect as “effet de réel” and “sense” [of a text] that has an effect outside of this text itself (Le Plaisir du Texte, L’Effet de Réel). In these texts, Barthes discusses how literature can produce an “affect” that cannot be reduced to narrative or discourse. I interpret the concept of “romantic love” as such and use it as a methodological tool to analyze three cultural texts. Before introducing my main theorists, I want to slow down a bit and return to the quote I started with. Nietzsche writes the things that have “colored” life suffer from a lack of history. In line with Nietzsche, I ask: does the concept of love lack historical analysis? And if so, why? The field of cultural studies and cultural analysis – which, we should remember, were developed far after Nietzsche’s mental breakdown and death in 1900 – seem to have taken their task seriously. “Cultural studies” is an academic field of studies which originated in Britain in the 1980s, combing sociological and literary research methods to analyze contemporary social concepts and phenomenal. It is an interdisciplinary field of conducting research that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power.1 “Cultural analysis” is commonly traced back to Mieke Bal, who coined the discipline as “cultural memory in the present”, by which she meant the attention paid to contemporary cultural “objects”. Bal has argued the notion of close reading is also a practice of framing; in old close reading, “critique is more important than the object” (Travelling concepts, 8-9). Newer or new close reading, Bal argues, takes the object as a starting point (ibid.:18). In this thesis, I refer to close reading as “new close reading”. Contemporary scholars in the field of cultural analysis, sociology, but also biology and the neurosciences have by now written hundreds and thousands of pages about love as romantic illusion, social phenomenon tied to economic warfare, or as programmed in our brain, far from the spheres of what we think is our “free will”. In the Netherlands, debates are organized about 1 See http://culturalstudies.web.unc.edu/resources-2/what-is-cultural-studies/ (accessed June 14, 2016 and Literary Theory, 175). 4 the future of love, monogamous relationships are being thoroughly questioned and polyamorous discussion evenings seem to have become mainstream in the capital Amsterdam.2 Books as We Are Our Brains (Wij zijn ons brein, Swaab 2010), The Free Will does not exist (Lamme 2010) and biodeterministic analyses and tv-shows coining that “whom we will love” is a matter of predetermined genetics flourish today. Does this mean love has too much of a history by now? Romantic love and relationships have been discussed – and explained, in the eyes of many – as a socially or biologically determined phenomenon. What might there be useful to add, then? In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone writes: “[Love] is portrayed in novels, even metaphysics, but in them it is described, or better, recreated, not analyzed. Love has never been understood” (Dialectic of Sex, 126). In this thesis, I do not want to focus on the diachronic aspects of love. Just as Nietzsche, Barthes and Firestone, I think crucial and careful analysis of love in its contemporary manifestations is important since it tells us about how love as both a concept and practice travel and change through time. Analyzing how concepts travel through time, how their meaning and use changes and how this influences their manifestation is an important task. Countless historians, philosophers and social scientists have taken up this complicated yet fascinating task. How love is (said to be) experienced
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