2014553 More Than Anything: Sartre and Žižek on Love

Name: Ryan Oomen SNR: 2014553 ANR: 794715 E-mail: [email protected] Date: 14-06-2021

MORE THAN ANYTHING

Sartre and Žižek on Love

University: Tilburg University, Department of Philosophy MA: Philosophy of Humanity and Culture Course code: 799402-M-13 Supervisor: prof. dr. R.B.J.M. (Ruud) Welten Second reader: dr. B.W. (Bert) van de Ven Word count: 16208 ABSTRACT Love appears to be a disruptive and intense phenomenon that is experienced through its life-changing intensity and transformative power, which radically alters the way in which one relates to others. It seems to have a conflictual kernel within its contradicting structure that is constitutional for love itself, while simultaneously causing love’s intersubjective experience to be marked by a perpetual imbalance. Guided by a literature study of the works of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Slavoj Žižek, my philosophical interpretation of their theory reveals — with the aid of Alexandre Kojève — a dialectical structure of love, in which love constantly founders on contradiction and consistently ends up as a passion divided against itself. It is this dynamic that leads both to love’s preservation and dissolution. There can be no experience of love outside the context of intersubjectivity, however, due to a different ontological interpretation of subject and substance, Sartre and Žižek fundamentally differ in whether this constitutes a direct interaction between lovers. Where Sartre’s phenomenological ontology asserts an epistemological limitation that ultimately results in a circular paradox, Žižek’s dialectical materialism asserts that this limitation is also an ontological fact. From the latter it follows that love’s fundamental feature is the irreconcilable antagonism between social unification and individuals. I conclude that true love is traumatic and, strictly speaking, incomprehensible, as it can only be known through its manifestations on a symbolic-imaginary level. TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 2

1. SARTRE: LACK, LOOK, LOVE 1.1 MON AMOUR, LIBERTÉ TOUJOURS 6 1.2 LE REGARD AMOUREUX 9 1.3 LE DÉSIR D’AMOUR 11

2. A RENDEZVOUS WITH HEGEL 2.1 THE MASTER-SLAVE RELATION 18 2.2 DESIRE IN THE CITY OF LOVE 21 2.3 THE LOVER’S IMAGINARY PURSUIT 24

3. ŽIŽEK: ASSUMING THE MISTAKE 3.1 STRUCTURES OF IMBALANCE 28 3.2 A TRAUMATIC AFFAIR 33 3.3 FAILURE AS A FEATURE 36

4. TILL DEATH DO US PART 4.1 LOVE IS CONFLICT 40 4.2 MITIGATING THE FALL 43 4.3 APROPOS OF EVIL 45

REFERENCES 47 INTRODUCTION

At that moment, it seemed to him that time stood still, and the Soul of the World surged within him. When he looked into her dark eyes, and saw that her lips were poised between a laugh and silence, he learned the most important part of the language that all the world spoke — the language that everyone on earth was capable of understanding in their heart. It was love. Something older than humanity, more ancient than the desert. Something that exerted the same force whenever two pairs of eyes met, as had theirs here at the well. She smiled, and that was certainly an omen — the omen he had been awaiting, without even knowing he was, for all his life. The omen he had sought to find with his sheep and in his books, in the crystals and in the silence of the desert. It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it’s easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it’s in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one’s dreams would have no meaning.1

Pure bliss it seems, the love that Santiago describes as he feels the hand of destiny, when he encounters Fatima for the first time in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (1987). Between these two lovers, there is no misunderstanding, no uncertainty, no impatience, no distraction, no jealousy, no suffering or any other kind of disturbance. All smiles and sunshine. A perfect world on a perfect day. Everything works out. They both happen to speak the pure Language of the World which they understand with their hearts, implying their romantic-passionate love is universal, while also exclusively between these two souls who are apparently destined for each other. How unfortunate that this most

1 Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, (London, HarperCollins Publishers, 2005 [1987]), 97.

2 important part of language that all the world spoke, which seems so crucial for such an ecstatic love affair to be manageable, was nowhere to be found when I needed it most... In the spring of 2014, I received from my lover at the time a book for my birthday. It was the most romantic and intimate present I had ever gotten. It was Ronald Giphart’s debut novel Ik ook van jou (1992) in which she — my lover — had written all kinds of confidential messages in the margins, while underlining parts in the text of explicit details that reminded her of me, herself and of us. With it, she tried to express the intense and complicated feelings she experienced with regard to our passionate relationship that was, ultimately, short-lived. These mutual feelings of love and lust towards each other just seemed too much for just two persons to bear. The sheer intensity finally made it a suffocating and overwhelming affair altogether. After we had parted ways, the initial feeling was considerable relief, but soon afterwards, it was loneliness, pain, anger, depression and a deep sense of loss. It left me with an existential question; because how can love, that absolute of all notions which is so often presented as the answer, as a solution to everything, cause such sadness, pain and despair? How is it that love, which I considered to be warm, unifying and tender, can at the same time feel so violent, disruptive and intrusive? In effect, love seems more of a problem than a solution, a question rather than an answer. But why? Through art and literature we know that throughout history, numerous people have experienced similar encounters with love, some even have been driven mad by it, have died for it, or even killed for it. Likely you are familiar with the thrill of mutual love yourself, or at least with the anguish of a love unrequited. Poets, musicians, artists, philosophers, all roused by love, have created both their finest and most awful work on — and because of — this subject matter. Spurred on by love, they have attempted to convey love’s life-changing intensity, its transformative power that radically alters the way in which we perceive and behave. But almost as an inexorable rule, when we try to express what love is by describing it, it promptly sinks, lifelessly into banality and platitude. Hence the intricate question ‘What is love?,’ which will be the common thread through my interpretive exposition. It should be clear that the love we are dealing with here is best described by the Ancient Greek word ‘Eros’ which, although often associated with intense sexual

3 attraction, is precisely the erotic-romantic-passionate love that ‘has inspired a greater number of poems, music, works of art — and crimes — than any other human condition’.2 It is this kind of love, that I from now on will plainly refer to as ‘love’, which only seems to happen rarely, sometimes not even once in a lifetime. In his Love: A Very Short Introduction (2015), Ronald de Sousa writes:

Contrary to what is often assumed, love is not an emotion. To be sure, the thought of love is likely to conjure up delicious and tender feelings. Those loving feelings are indeed emotions, but they are far from being the only emotions that constitute erotic love. Depending on circumstances — depending on where you are, in just what love story — love might be manifested in sorrow, fear, guilt, regret, bitterness, gloom, contempt, humiliation, elation, dejection, anxiety, jealousy, disgust, or murderous rage. Rather, think of love as a condition that shapes and governs thoughts, desires, emotions, and behaviours around the focal person who is the ‘beloved’. Like a kind of prism, it affects all sorts of experiences — even ones that don’t directly involve the beloved.3

When people are in love, their predicament is such that they are seriously affected by its sensation. This phenomenon relates to particular individuals, each of whom we consider to be entirely unique human beings. But if love is reflecting the unique characteristics of each person involved, as de Sousa seems to suggest, then why does this exquisite distinctness appear to manifest itself in a remarkably confined number of ways, between lover and beloved, when a virtually infinite variety of ‘loves’ should be expected?4 It is puzzling how many paradoxicalities are involved with this — as Johnny Cash would sing — ‘thing called love’, which is possibly why so many philosophers occupied themselves in direct and indirect ways with its mysteries.

Philosophy loves puzzles, and love provides a welter of puzzles. It does not take exceptional humility to admit that we are often confused about it. Love is selfless; love is selfish. Love is kind; love is cruel. Love is fickle; love is forever. Love is heaven; love is hell. Love is war. Love communes with the divine; love justifies the worst of crimes.5

2 Ronald de Sousa, Love: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. 3 Ibid., 3-4. 4 Although de Sousa does present such a question he does not provide a philosophical theory but merely speculates that categories only exist to make love experiences easier to talk about. 5 Ibid., 4.

4 Note that within this juxtaposition of opposites, there seems to be a pattern, or rather a structure, inherent to love. It is this structure that I will be focussing on, as it seems to reveal a dialectic which offers a point of departure in order to provide an answer to my central question on love. My philosophical interpretation of love will be based on a literature study of the work of two philosophers, who both seem to share this dialectical structure in their theoretical models of love, namely Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980) and Slavoj Žižek (1949). On first glance, this might seem like an odd pairing for those who are somewhat familiar with their work. However, they are both influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831), known for his dialectical theory. This influence however has been heavily mediated by French philosophers, most notably Alexandre Kojève (1902 - 1968), who from 1933 to 1939 delivered a lecture series on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that would be influential among French intellectuals, including psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981). What this bricolage of thinkers have in common is a theoretical structure through which we can start to make sense of love. My aim is to reveal the structure of love by discussing both theories of Sartre and Žižek in relation to the subject matter and provide a philosophical interpretation of love from their theory. I will proceed first by examining Sartre’s theoretical model of love, after which I will further scrutinize its underlying Hegelian structure. Then, after having discussed the apparent shared influence of Kojève, I will discuss Žižek’s theory of love. Finally, I will conclude with the findings of the study and offer my interpretation of love from the discussed theory. A caveat may be in order here, since the wager of my scrutinization of love’s structure might turn out to be a disillusionment, because what if our belief of what constitutes love — mistaking it to be a harmonious affair — is the fundamental problem with our understanding of its phenomenon?

5 1. SARTRE: LACK, LOOK, LOVE In Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (2003), Jean-Paul Sartre constructs a theoretical model of love that by no means constitutes a reconciliation of two persons, even though it takes place in the context of intersubjective relations in part 3, section 3; ‘Concrete Relations With Others’, in which love is understood as a project of attempted unification. The love relationship seems characterized by an inevitable opposition in which love is at odds with freedom. But what has this freedom to do with love? Do freedom and love not go hand in hand? Was for instance the hippie movement not all about love and freedom? Sartre considers that the relation between these two notions is not as rose-colored as some would have it, as he notes that our freedom is predominantly at risk in the encounter with the other.

1.1. MON AMOUR, LIBERTÉ TOUJOURS ‘Love is a contradictory effort to surmount the factual negation while preserving the internal negation’.6 This basically means that, in love, we want to be one with the other while simultaneously being ourselves. How is this effort contradictory? In Sartre’s account, for love to come into being, to make its appearance, it first of all has to rise from a lack, a nothingness, that makes appearance possible. This mode of being, this ‘nothingness’, is referred to as ‘pour-soi’ or ‘being-for-itself’, which is consciousness understood as an act of internal negation by means of which the world is revealed.7 Consciousness is always ‘consciousness of something’, that is, the intentionality of consciousness that defines it.8 Intentionality therefore indicates ‘an essential structure of the being of human life and comes to signify human access to the world’.9 This other mode of being, ‘the world’, is referred to as ‘en-soi’ or ‘being-in-itself’. Since human consciousness reveals itself as a not-being — pour-soi — it follows that; ‘Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world’.10 Annihilation, which is the act of

6 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, (Abingdon, Routledge Classics, 2003), 398. 7 Ibid., 204. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2012), 102. 10 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 48.

6 negation, belongs to consciousness and not to the world — en-soi — or, better yet; it is the dynamic of consciousness. A lover is above all oriented towards a being which is not itself, because as a pour-soi, the lover primarily exists in relation to the world. Thus, as far as the lover as pour-soi is mere intentionality to the world, it is unreflected and does not appear to itself as a self. So properly speaking, the lover is first of all not a lover by essence but rather radically free, as freedom in its foundation coincides with the nothingness ‘which is at the heart of man’.11 It is impossible to distinguish the being of ‘human reality’ from what we call freedom, which is why Sartre concludes that ‘there is no difference between the being of man and his being-free’.12 Consequently, as consciousness, the lover can never find any ground within itself, since it has to derive continuation or consistency from the exterior world. To be more clear, I will shift the viewpoint to ‘me’. Essences are never to be found within me but in role patterns and meaning that existed previously. This predicament is not unfree because I am not determined by the exterior world but, on the contrary, this exterior world places me in a particular situation that belongs to me. It is my free subjectivity that relates to the situation. It is me who has to realize the meaning of the world and of my essence; ‘I make my decision concerning them — without justification and without excuse’.13 The crucial point is that I have to recognize the situation, any situation, as my situation, which I can do only in freedom, which is; the nothingness which I “am”.14 I can pretend to escape this freedom by duping myself that I am unfree, by considering the situation as determined, a fate, but that is to neglect that only a free being, a pour-soi, can be situated. A situation is not a determination, it is not an idle fact but it demands an act; it demands that I adopt a behavior. The fact that I can adopt any kind of behavior creates the condition that I can become anything because I am not already it. It is precisely under this condition that the lover can become a lover as we will see. While love itself is a state, falling in love is a situation. But how can that be? We do not choose to fall in love, right? That is correct, but falling in love is not a fate either.

11 Ibid., 462. 12 Ibid., 49. 13 Ibid., 63. 14 Ibid.

7 When we fall in love, we have to deal with it, we have to choose which behavior to adopt because we have to act, since we are now in relation to our infatuation. Which act that is, is determined by nothing; I am always ‘in situation’ and with the act I adopt the situation as mine. So the act is not the infatuation itself. Although we often speak about love in terms of ‘war’ (e.g. ‘She fought for him’), ‘magic’ (e.g. ‘I was entranced by him’), ‘madness’ (e.g. ‘I’m crazy about her’), as a ‘patient’ (e.g. ‘Their relationship is sick or in really good shape’) or a ‘physical force’ (e.g. ‘They gravitate to each other’), which all suggests that love is something of which we have hardly control, it nevertheless constitutes a situation that I have to take upon as my own.15 I can try to seduce the person I fall in love with, talk to someone else about it, write about it, make a song, keep it to myself, I can even kill my beloved one or commit suicide like Goethe’s Werther. Whatever choice I make, it is that choice which I am at that moment, which is; my relation to my situation. There is not first an ‘I’ that then makes a choice, but ‘I am what I choose’. To claim otherwise constitutes a lie towards myself, because then I no longer recognize myself as a ‘being-free’ but reckon myself as an en-soi. Such double negation, the denial of my freedom which is nothing but a nothingness, is called bad faith (mauvaise foi). Bad faith seeks to affirm identity while preserving differences, as it affirms ‘facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity, in such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the one, he can find himself abruptly faced with the other’.16 We are constantly utilizing various procedures in order to maintain ourselves in bad faith. Which is not to say that we are never acting as ourselves, since there is no way in which we can be authentic. It is only against the background of nothingness that ‘authenticity’ appears as a project. It is not that ‘human beings strive towards freedom’ but on the contrary; we are being-free’s that endeavor to be something. Notably, this endeavor reveals desire by exposing a lack. ‘Desire is a lack of being’.17 Human reality emerges as an endless desire towards en-soi, as desire reveals ‘a self having-to-be-formed’; it is ‘the mode through which the self comes to be,

15 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 49 [with each term they provide a multitude of examples]. 16 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 79. 17 Ibid., 112.

8 i.e., its mode of realization’.18 The whole dynamic of our lives consists in the impossibility of desire. It is doomed to failure. That my life is my project means that within the situations in which I find myself, I only “become” myself by being engaged; which is to recognize the situation as mine and relate myself to it as a ‘being-free’.

1.2. LE REGARD AMOUREUX ‘The beloved is a look,’ according to Sartre, a look which apprehends the lover.19 To perceive is to look at, while to apprehend a look is to be conscious of being looked at.20 The look makes one conscious of one’s object-being, as self-consciousness is redirected by the look or gaze (le regard) of the Other, who is ‘present to me everywhere as the one through whom I become an object’.21 Which means that there does not even have to be an actual person effectively looking at me for me to experience the look of the other, and when I do, my freedom is being taken away from me. The beloved thus does not have to look at me, as my awareness of being looked at is primary. Whether I experience this objectification by the look negatively through shame or positively through pride, in either case, consciousness presents us with the same behavior; as the pour-soi is the nothingness which perpetually attempts to escape in en-soi. It is therefore both a flight and a pursuit, since it flees the en-soi while simultaneously chasing it.22 One moment the other unwillingly reduces it to en-soi, the next it wants to be an en-soi by having an identity. Our predicament is such that it is only in encountering the other that a ‘self’ arises distinct from the object that is absorbed by me, while simultaneously having no power over it to the extent that my ‘self’ is produced by the other. For instance, if I am caught peeking through a keyhole, shame will come over me as I experience the other who imposes the identity of a voyeur on me, which I cannot refuse, since it is only I who sees myself through the eyes of the other. So it is within the feeling of shame that I thus recognize that I am the way the other sees me, without knowing what this being actually is. Because I forever lack this

18 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 123. 19 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 393. 20 Ibid., 282. 21 Ibid., 303. 22 Ibid., 384.

9 knowledge, I am completely dependent on the other for my being, and in the same way, the lover is dependent upon their beloved one. ‘Having an identity,’ ‘being someone,’ is always being someone in the eyes of the other. But even when the other recognizes me as that which I want to be, the other still determines me just as well and still trumps my freedom. We now start to see why our encounter with the other is determined by the apprehension of the look and why there is no escape. ‘Being-for-others is a constant fact of my human reality, and I grasp it with its factual necessity in every thought, however slight, which I form concerning myself’.23 Every encounter with the other is a threat to my freedom, which is why the original meaning of being-for-other for Sartre is conflict.24 An harmonious or authentic relationship with the other therefore seems to remain impossibile, as relationships are revealed as a dual antagonism, an alienating struggle of tendencies that do not carry in themselves the promise of a resolution. It is precisely the way in which the look is apprehended that forms the primal obstacle in the concrete relationship, because freedom solidifies under the gaze that makes me an object. When the other person is a subject, this irrevocably means that I am an object, or conversely, but never simultaneously. Since there is only one pour-soi, there is no such thing as unity between two pour-soi’s, because one always immediately annihilates the other. So love in this structure can never be a reconciliation of two persons because it is inherently conflictual, a struggle, which at the same time is the reason why love is possible in the first place.

Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me.25

Through this parallel disposition, in which what holds for me in my relation in the same way holds for the Other, the opposing structure in love relations becomes more explicit to us. I can love someone else only when I am looked at by this other person. But when

23 Ibid., 303. 24 Ibid., 386. 25 Ibid.

10 I apprehend this look as mine, I am again surrendering my freedom. So strictly speaking, I do not ‘love’ the other, as if ‘loving’ would constitute an intentionality, but on the contrary; that I love the other means that I am nothing without this person. Expressions such as ‘Only with you can I be myself!,’ ‘Only with you I feel understood!,’ ‘Only you complete me!,’ and so on, reveal that within love we try to apprehend the other’s freedom as our freedom. I want the other’s freedom to be mine. The lover therefore demands the impossible from the beloved one; to possess the other, not as object, but as freedom. This project is of course doomed to failure, as I submit myself to the freedom of the other, which can only realize itself by making me an object. Love is therefore always at an intersection, a critical juncture; since if my love for the other is understood as an intentionality, then I am free and the other object. But within love, we primarily want to be the object of the other in this regard, because loving someone means wanting to be loved. The conflict, which consists of the unsurpassable difference between lover and beloved, emerges here as the principle condition, as love is not possible without this conflict.

1.3. LE DÉSIR D’AMOUR Love and conflict are by no means opposed to each other but, on the contrary, constitute together our concrete relationships with others, as the love project is rooted in the paradoxical nature of the pour-soi. The relation toward the other is thought by Sartre as ‘a circle — although each attempt is enriched by the failure of the other’.26 For this reason, it is at the very core of the one that the other is always present because ‘neither of the two can be held without contradiction’.27 It is impossible to escape this circle, as we have seen in love, in which I want to be the way that my beloved sees me and try to compel this other to love me, while possessing their freedom as freedom.28 The desire ‘to be’ exists and manifests itself within concrete relations with others, yet consciousness seeks to appropriate the being which it is conscious of. But we have seen that this is bad faith, since it tries to be something that it is not. When in love, I as a lover, that wants to be loved by my beloved one, will continuously try to show my

26 Ibid., 385. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 389.

11 beloved lover that I am the way I imagine the lover sees me, in a constant effort to impress the other so that this other will love me. But I thereby surrender my freedom to the other in order to make the other love me. By assuming my being-for-the-other, while trying to love the other as a subject by deceiving my beloved, I actually deny the beloved’s freedom, that is, the beloved’s subjectivity. So in the desperate attempt in which I want the other to love me, I try to seduce my beloved one into loving me as a being that I am not. It is therefore impossible to love the other without falling into an object-subject relationship, because the desire ‘to be’ always lapses into acts of bad faith. Relationships are ultimately reduced by Sartre to two fundamental attitudes that are produced and destroyed in the circular structure, which are; ‘assimilation’ and ‘appropriation’.29 These two attitudes consist of elements that are at play in the love relationship, which all involve the lover’s dependence on the beloved’s participation, because we cannot force the other to reciprocate love. We see this for instance in ‘possession,’ in which we try to possess the other in order to learn the ipseity of our being, which the other is thought to hold. But the other is trying to do the same, while simultaneously, both try to free themselves from each other’s grip. This dynamic reveals being as a project of possession and the relation as a struggle that involves an attempt to integrate possession into our being, which means to destroy it, as nothing can ever actually be assimilated into our being. Possession is thus impossible, as even if I would literally possess my beloved physically by locking up their body, there would actually be nothing feasible for me in such possession.

[Proust’s Marcel], for example, who installs his mistress [Albertine] in his home, who can see her and possess her at any hour of the day, who has been able to make her completely dependent on him economically, ought to be free from worry. Yet we know that he is, on the contrary, continually gnawed by anxiety. Through her consciousness Albertine escapes Marcel even when he is at her side, and that is why he knows relief only when he gazes on her while she sleeps. It is certain then that the lover wishes to capture a “consciousness”.30

29 Ibid., 386. 30 Ibid., 388.

12 The example of Proust’s Marcel who desperately tries to capture his beloved’s consciousness, reveals possession to be a desire to unite. However, to unite means to assimilate the beloved as an object, thereby destroying it. It is therefore that in mutual love, lovers are torn between the desire to unite and not wanting to destroy each other. This desire for the other is ultimately traced back to the desire ‘to be’ because we are lacking. Whereas love, just as jealousy and hate, is a state that gives itself as actually existing — something which happens to me — desire is the mode through which the subject comes to subsist.31 Desire reveals in this way ‘a self having-to-be-formed’ and ‘indicates obliquely an existential orientation toward the world as such’.32 This desire to overcome ontological disjunction, the desire ‘to be’, is called the desire to become God.33 This fundamental project to be one’s own foundation — the God project — is the foundation from which all our other concrete projects are derived, including the love project.

[Stendhal and Proust] have shown that love and jealousy can not be reduced to the strict desire of possessing a particular woman, but that these emotions aim at laying hold of the world in its eternity through the woman. This is the meaning of Stendhal’s crystallization, and it is precisely for this reason that love as Stendhal describes it appears as a mode of being in the world. Love is a fundamental relation of the for-itself [pour-soi] to the world and to itself (selfness) through a particular woman; the woman represents only a conducting body which is placed in the circuit.34

After this explanation, Sartre notes that the ‘impulse toward God is no less concrete than the impulse toward a particular woman’.35 Such impulse can only be purely individual and unique, yet is revealed as an essential aspect of all human striving; the desire to become a ‘en-soi-pour-soi’, or rather, the ‘ideal of a consciousness [pour-soi] which would be the foundation of its own being-in-itself [en-soi] by the pure

31 Ibid., 185. 32 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 123. 33 Ibid., 124. 34 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 583-584. 35 Ibid., 584.

13 consciousness which it would have of itself’.36 This desire is the foundation of our hierarchy of projects from which, ultimately, all other concrete projects derive. Which is why all concrete projects become ways of pursuing the God project, including the love project. To love is to want to be loved. Our project’s aim is thus to receive love rather than to give it, as our self-focused impulse goes toward securing a fixed nature for ourselves, by becoming the beloved’s absolute value and universal centre of meaning. But the lover cannot enforce this because the ‘total enslavement of the beloved kills the love of the lover’.37 Lovers want to be loved freely and at the same time they do not want each other to be entirely free as lovers, since they do not want the other to love anyone else other than them. Lovers demand pure loyalty, a pledge, despite that they would be irritated by such a pledge, because they want to be loved by a freedom, yet ‘demand that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free’.38 Lovers want to become the absolute ends for each other by letting each other choose to limit their freedom freely. They would like to believe that their relationship usurps any other values and morals. Lovers are anxious to know whether their beloved one would betray friends for them, would steal for them, would kill for them, and so on.39 They want to be the absolute top priority of their beloved one, because when they are the end and justification of their beloved’s life, then they do not have to worry that they are an instrument or means to other ends. When lovers find themselves in such a joyful situation, they feel that their existence is justified, and this is the basis for the joy of love.40 The love project fails in three different manners. The first one is dissatisfaction, as a lover will never be completely satisfied because the game of seduction is obfuscating love, our desire for reciprocation, which causes love to be deceptive. The second manner is insecurity, as the beloved can break the spell of reciprocity at any moment, for instance by looking at the lover as an object, as a means to an end. The third manner in which the love project fails is by the inference of others. When other people look at the lovers, they disrupt the illusion of harmony the lovers had while

36 Ibid., 587. 37 Ibid., 389. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 391. 40 Ibid., 393.

14 making each other the foundation of their existence. The other — the Third — transcends the lovers while they are trying so hard to be untranscendable. The Third thereby opens up other possibilities for revealing the identity of the lovers by looking at them. This is the reason why lovers seek solitude.41 The failure of the love project prompts the lovers to adopt an attitude of either masochism or sadism. These are not aberrations for Sartre. They both share a common goal in that ‘they seek to transcend the restrictive character of corporeality’ and highlight ‘the two poles of the paradoxical unity of embodied consciousness’.42 In sadism, ‘the sadist constructs distance between his flesh and the flesh of the masochist through the transformation of his own body into a pure instrument of control’.43 The sadist requires of the other to be the body the sadist endeavors not to be. A sadist must therefore have another goal in mind besides pleasure, because pleasure reasserts its own body that the sadist is trying to deny. The sadist’s true goal seems to incarnate the other’s freedom by trying to force it. We know by now why this is impossible, as the sadist treats the other as an instrument and uses violence in order to force the other into ungraceful behavior, while attempting to sustain the illusion that it holds the freedom of the other. This illusion is at its peak when the other shows pain or humiliation, because it looks to the sadist as if the consciousness of their sufferer is revealed through its body. However, the look of the sufferer reveals that it is still a free being which escapes the sadist’s control and ruins their project of disembodiment. ‘The projects of sadism and masochism necessarily convert into each other, for all flesh gives rise to intentionality and all intentional transcendence requires a ground in corporeal life’.44 In masochism then, the masochist lets themself be used as an instrument in a desperate attempt to reveal how they appear as an object to the other. The masochist is content with any fixed nature that is given by the other. Lovers who hold the masochistic attitude experience the violent subjection by their beloved as a thrilling proof of their own desirability. These masochistic lovers let themselves be used as an instrument in order to reveal how they appear as an object. However, they must sustain the sadist’s look;

41 Ibid., 438. 42 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 146. 43 Ibid., 144-145. 44 Ibid., 145.

15 ‘the masochist must keep himself fascinating for the sadist which means, paradoxically, that the masochist must keep his freedom intact so that he can continuously offer it up’.45 It also means that the masochist-lover is nevertheless still using the other to achieve its goal and ends up treating the other as means in order to ‘assimilate the Other as the Other-looking-at-me’.46 Masochism and sadism are therefore ‘the two reefs on which desire may founder’.47 We have come to see how the pour-soi suffers a never-ceasing lack that it tries to compensate for, which does not limit itself to consciousness but also to the body. It is with my body that I will have to turn myself into an object for the other, as I want my body to be seen by the other as an object of desire. This sexual desire is consciousness itself and it knows itself as essentially embodied and primarily engaged. The lover wants to have the beloved’s body and wants to be a body to the beloved. The sexual relation is thus a bodily relation, but if the bodies turn into mere objects, then there is no longer a relationship. The goal of both love and sexuality — to merge — is impossible because there is an insurmountable abyss between people. The relationship is therefore doomed to conflict, as the lovers are forever caught in a circle of assimilation and appropriation. Lovers can never merge and entirely comprehend the other’s consciousness, nor can they truly know how the other looks at them, which is precisely what makes love possible. It is our freedom itself that creates the obstacles from which we suffer, but when we lose our freedom, we lose ourselves and then love is lost. It is strictly the perpetual conflict which constitutes the open love project, as we can only be(come) somebody in the eyes of the other. The satisfaction of existential desire always presupposes bad faith and, conversely, the pursuit of an authentic loving relationship requires perpetual dissatisfaction.48 While the ever-failing subject must struggle with the barrier that the en-soi erects to its projects, the subject remains uninvolved with the en-soi and in structure distinct from it. However, one may question whether there actually is something in reality that can be the en-soi as defined by Sartre. Although its affirmation responds to an

45 Ibid., 146. 46 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 387. 47 Ibid., 426. 48 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 137.

16 epistemological concern, a reality independent of thought, it remains a critical point if we should take from Sartre’s assertion the notion that this reality is in fact ‘is what it is,’ something uniquely massive and stable, which somehow allows for a consciousness to bring nothingness into it. How do we know if this conception is reality as such? Sartre famously stated: ‘To be free is to be condemned to be free’ (L’homme est condamné à être libre).49 But it seems that Sartre’s conception of en-soi lacks support and perhaps freedom is not the ‘condemnation’ as Sartre would have it, precisely because its alienated condition is constitutive of the subject, which would mean that it does not stand on its own. With Sartre, we have seen that the reality of love is not a blissful mutual merging of ‘being-free’s’ that enhances the freedom of both lovers but, on the contrary, love is conflict. However, theoretically, this conflict seems to be the direct result of Sartre’s stern ontological distinction between subject and substance. In order to get a better understanding of Sartre’s insistence on conflict and contradiction, it is necessary to proceed by scrutinizing its underlying structure. I will do this by turning to an important influence on Sartre’s philosophy in order to get to the conflict that seems to lie at the heart of love.

49 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 152.

17 2. A RENDEZVOUS WITH HEGEL In the song Swing Life Away (2004) Tim McIlrath sings: ‘If love is a labor I’ll slave till the end’.50 From Sartre we can derive that love is indeed a labor, as it is an open project in which we continually have to work in our vain striving to become a ‘en-soi-pour-soi’. However, it is safe to assume that almost all lovers would say that they do not want to be seen as a slave by their beloved ones. Sartre concurs: ‘What the Hegelian Master is for the Slave, the lover wants to be for the beloved’.51 He refers to Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave here, an influence of which we will come to speak, as Sartre’s mention of Hegel throughout his work is as remarkable as it is infrequent, yet implicitly refers to an important configuration through which we will further come to understand how the lover relates to the other.

2.1. THE MASTER-SLAVE RELATION Although Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is most often approached as a phenomenological work, its ontology can nevertheless be viewed as a ‘disintegrated Hegelianism’ because of its insistence on conflict and contradiction.52 His reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology, in which he uses the Hegelian categories of ‘being-in-itself’ and ‘being-for-itself’, is similar in its opposition of consciousness and the world.53 For Sartre, we have seen, this is the opposition between a nothingness and a fixed being, or rather, between a free subject that is its own author and something substantial that is identical with itself. However, since intentionality is understood by Sartre as negation, shouldn’t we understand this opposition dialectically? In order to understand love’s conflictual structure, one particular Hegelian influence seems crucially important in Sartre’s description of love relations.

50 Rise Against: Neil Hennessy & Tim McIlrath, Swing Life Away, (British Columbia, Plumper Mountain Sound and The Warehouse Studio: Garth Richardson, 2004), 3:20. 51 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 392. 52 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 14. 53 Although Sartre himself evidently recognized some of his parallels with Hegel’s philosophy, his exact intellectual kinship is difficult to establish, because it is mediated by the Parisian esprit de l’époque of Sartre’s time. Hegelianism became very influential from the mid-1930s in Parisian intellectual life. Jean Hyppolite (1907 - 1968), Jean Wahl (1888 - 1974) and Alexandre Kojève (1902 - 1968) are widely considered the most influential in the French reception of Hegel. This caused an anthropological and existential revision which took the theme of ‘desire’ as its point of departure and reformulation.

18 [...] our description [of love relations] would fall into line with Hegel’s famous description of the Master and Slave relation. What the Hegelian Master is for the Slave, the lover wants to be for the beloved. But the analogy stops here, for with Hegel the master demands the Slave’s freedom only laterally and, so to speak, implicitly, while the lover wants the beloved’s freedom first and foremost. In this sense if I am to be loved by the Other, this means that I am to be freely chosen as beloved.54

Sartre refers here to a Hegelian concept which illustrates his point that our hostile disposition towards the other arises from the fact that the essence of the relations between consciousnesses is conflict.55 However, this conflict is constitutional for the self, since it only comes to be through the look of the Other, which affirms and creates this self, but also constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom. ‘It is in this sense that we can consider ourselves as “slaves” in so far as we appear to the Other’.56 Because of the omnipresence of the Other in relation to myself as the one through whom I become an object; ‘I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at the center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my being’.57 In love, I am inclined to make myself through seduction a fascinating object and my beloved into a loving subject.58 Yet, when this happens, my beloved is turned into a seducer. In turn, my beloved is now inclined to make me into an enslaved object, while I want to be a dominating subject and conversely. There is no resolution to this impasse between lovers, since according to Sartre ‘Man can not be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all’.59 With Sartre, we have come to a definite deadlock concerning the love relation, as the circular and opposed structure of his dialectical opposition cannot be overcome by love as the sublation of oneself and the Other. It is indeed in this sense that the master-slave relation reveals a critical description of our relations to others, as Sartre’s use of the analogy shows how lovers are fundamentally in a negative relationship of

54 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 392. 55 Ibid., 451. 56 Ibid., 291. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 394. 59 Ibid., 463.

19 difference to each other. This negativity also appeared as the driving force of the love project, in which I can love someone else only when I am recognized by this other person. But when I make this recognition mine, I am again surrendering my freedom. It seems that the love relation is subordinated by the desire to become a ‘en-soi-pour-soi,’ which is ultimately the ideal to be recognized as a master by the other. It is through the struggle that ensues from the lovers their desire that both master and slave are produced in a circular paradox, with no resolution that is not temporary or imaginary. We find this existential impasse in Alexandre Kojève’s master-slave relation when he takes the contradiction within the relationship as the motor of history.60 It is the master that suffers from an untenable position on Kojève’s account, as the master ends up cast aside while the slave is the one who drives history progressively forward.

The Master has fought and risked his life for a recognition without value for him. For he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him. The Master’s attitude, therefore, is an existential impasse.61

The master only desires recognition from someone who is worthy of recognition, yet cannot tolerate the existence of another master as it would undermine its status, while the slave’s recognition is unworthy. Hence mastery leads to an existential impasse or a historical dead end. If history is the struggle for recognition, then the master has no way to achieve it according to Kojève. It is the slave who has history on its side and through the forced and terrified work in the master’s service, the slave finds another route for recognition that cannot be taken by the master.62 After the slave(s) victoriously revolt, they are able to achieve satisfaction by establishing a society of mutual recognition.63

60 The Hegel of the twentieth century became to a great extent Kojève’s Hegel. His epochal intervention took place from 1933 to 1939, as he delivered in Paris an eminent lecture series on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he takes ‘Lordship and Bondage’ — Kojève dubbed Hegel’s Herr und Knecht into master (maître) and slave (esclave) — as his point of departure and retells Hegel’s narrative from a point of view that critically inquires into a relation repeatedly figured between desire and recognition. Kojève infamously takes the master-slave relation as the pivot on which Hegel’s thought turns. Kojève’s lecture series was edited and published by Raymond Queneau in 1947. An English translation followed in 1980 which, unfortunately, made significant cuts to Queneau’s edition. 61 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1980), 19. 62 Ibid., 29. 63 Kojève defines the key to human existence by emphasizing the Marxist theme of struggle and the Heideggerian theme of self-interpretation in Hegel’s philosophy.

20 There is no other route for recognition with Sartre, as from a Hegelian perspective his dialectical thinking forever oscillates between two opposing poles of an impaired triadic formula. In Sartre’s model, there is neither hope for the lovers nor surprises, as the result of failure is clear in advance. Like Kojève’s master, each individual caught in the Sartrean circle wants what cannot be attained, which for Sartre is the assimilation or the negation of the freedom of the other. Through Kojève it becomes gradually clear that the Sartrean motif of ‘love as conflict’ is more Hegelian — or rather more Kojèvean — than his Being and Nothingness makes it seem.

2.2. DESIRE IN THE CITY OF LOVE Reminiscent of Sartre, the human and the natural worlds are ontologically distinct domains for Kojève, who also asserts that in his nascent state, man is never simply man as ‘He is always, necessarily, and essentially, either Master or Slave’.64 Desire and recognition take upon an important dynamic relation within Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel. He thereby rejects the (Right/Old-)Hegelian premise of ontological harmony or unity, which allows him to freely extend the doctrine of negation, notably in the differences among individual lives that are established as negative relations which cannot be fully integrated in a collective identity. ‘The experience of desire becomes crucial for Kojève’s reading of Hegel precisely because desire thematizes the differences between independent subjects and the differences between subjects and their worlds’.65 Which is how desire becomes a permanent and universal feature of all human life and is the only mode through which the human subject can express and know itself.66 Hegelian dialectic is ‘the adequate description of the structure of Being, and of the realization and appearance of Being as well’.67 Humanization does occur through intersubjectivity, which makes the master-slave dialectic also the key to society. From the raw centre of human existence the process of humanization and socialization happens through a struggle in relations with Others. The condition of

64 Ibid., 8. 65 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 64. 66 Ibid., 66. 67 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 259.

21 self-consciousness is nothing other than desire, which goes beyond the natural state when it takes as its object another consciousness — another desire. Through the subjugation of one by the other, transformation occurs by each of their own desire, by which they pass the animal state in their desire of the other.

Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other; if he wants “to possess” or “to assimilate” the Desire taken as Desire — that is to say, if he wants to be “desired” or “loved,” or, rather, “recognized” in his human value, in his reality as a human individual. [...] all human, anthropogenetic Desire — the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, the human reality — is, finally, a function of the desire for “recognition.”68

The master-slave dialectic understood as the struggle for recognition is characterized by a number of paradoxical features, which are discussed by Kojève in meticulous detail. Throughout this discussion its existential and practical aspect becomes apparent, through his focus on the structures of desire, action, recognition, reciprocity and speech, in the sense that the relationship with the Other requires me to act, as the social relation is a determining factor in the meaning that I give to myself and to the world. ‘The human subject requires obstruction in order to gain reflection on itself in its environment, recognition of itself by Others’.69 I must therefore suffer my own loss of identity again and again in order to realize my fullest sense of self. The obstruction reveals itself as conflict in the mutual exclusivity of desire, as in desiring something else I lose myself, while in desiring myself I lose the world. ‘Desire is always revealed as my desire, and to reveal desire, one must use the word “I”’.70 The “I” is thus revealed by speech. Significantly for our purpose, Kojève explains how Hegel’s dialectic was first described by the younger Hegel in his “romantic” text as a dialectic of love.

[...] Hegel for a while believed he had found the specifically human content of Man’s existence in Love, and that it was by analyzing the relationship of Love that he first described the Dialectic of this existence, which distinguishes it from purely natural

68 Ibid., 6-7. 69 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 12. 70 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 37.

22 existence. To describe Man as Lover was then, for Hegel, to describe Man as specifically human and essentially different from the animal.71

By the time Hegel wrote his Phenomenology, Love and the desire for love had developed in the desire for recognition and the struggle for its satisfaction, while the mutual recognition in Love had grown into social recognition through action.72 To Kojève then, human love boils down to a desire for recognition, as the lover wants to be loved, which means in Kojève’s Hegelian explanation that the lover wants to be ‘recognized as absolute or universal value in his very particularity, which distinguishes him from all others’.73 Love is therefore regarded as a specifically human phenomenon because ‘in Love one desires another desire’ which is the love of the other.74 This seems to indicate that love and desire cannot be separated. It is crucial to note here how Sartre’s notion of human beings is practically verbatim that of Kojève’s Hegel: ‘Man is not a Being that is: he is a Nothingness that nihilates through the negation of Being’.75 This holds for Kojève that love is irreducible to substance because it is nothing and therefore differs from Sartre’s account and is closer to that of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek — of which we will come to speak. A point of convergence between Kojève and Sartre becomes apparent with Kojève’s association of Hegel with an existentialist turn.

Kojève’s central tenet was precisely to bring together Hegel and Heidegger, i.e., to read Hegel’s motifs of negativity and, in an exemplary fashion, the struggle-to-the-death between the (future) Master and Slave, through Heidegger’s thematic of being-toward-death.76

By implicitly referring to Heidegerrian notions, Kojève discusses how in Hegel, it is death which first realizes individuality and freedom.77 He thereby uses lovers as an example to illustrate that it is ‘only thanks to death that Lovers have an independent or

71 Ibid., 243. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 244. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 53-54. 76 Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, (London, Bloomsbury, 2005), 344. 77 Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 245.

23 autonomous, or better, free existence.’78 It is because of the mortality of the lovers that love realizes itself as a dialectical ‘reunion’ of the ‘the beings that are separated’.79 Therefore, to say ‘mortal’ is to say ‘free’ and inversely.80 We have come to see how the freedom of the slave is central in the Kojèvian interpretation of the master-slave dialectic precisely because it is the lack of an authentically human self-consciousness that causes the master’s project to fail, which shares a remarkable affinity with the conflict of individuals in Sartre’s account. Kojève also underscores consciousness as that which transcends rather than unites. For Kojève, our existence thus also responds to a desire, which expresses the lack of its fullness and stability, as he defines it as a nothingness and a void. After Being and Nothingness, Sartre went on trying to reconcile the relationship between the subject’s own project and political struggles in society, constituting disparate efforts in his later work, because he poses, contrary to Hegel, a sharp division between subject and substance. Kojève similarly has no dynamic conception of substance, as he considers natural existence to be static and non-dialectical.81 However, love becomes part of the subject on his account and consequently appears as a nothingness that constitutes a striving. In this way, the lover is its own pursuit for recognition by its beloved one. A love relation is then based on misrecognition, because the lovers both seek recognition through each other for something which they are not. Misrecognition then appears as the principle condition of the love relationship. Which raises the question whether there even is a direct interaction between the lovers.

2.3. THE LOVER’S IMAGINARY PURSUIT With Kojève the accent is placed on the intersubjective dimension of speech and language. We have seen how the “I” is revealed through struggle and through speech, which constitutes reconciliation in the medium of intersubjective recognition. Sartre also places the accent on the intersubjective dimension of language by stating that language is originally ‘being-for-others’.82 ‘I am language,’ yet ‘I never know exactly if I signify

78 Ibid. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 247. 81 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 244. 82 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 394.

24 what I wish to signify nor even if I am signifying anything’.83 With this formulation, the subject briefly appears as a result of language. The discussed themes of language, lack, desire and the imaginary — which we will come to discuss — markedly prefigure Lacan’s and Žižek’s post-phenomenological positions.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s dualistic ontology signals a break with Hegel’s postulated unity of the desiring subject and its world, but desire’s necessary dissatisfaction conditions the imaginary pursuit of Hegel’s ideal. Indeed, for Sartre and for Jacques Lacan, desire’s aim is the production and pursuit of imaginary objects and Others. And in the work of Lacan, [...] Hegel’s subject is criticized [sic] as itself a wholly imaginary construct.84

For both Sartre and Lacan, being someone is always being someone in the eyes of the other, which means that we imagine ourselves to be something — ergo the ‘self’ is a result of the subject’s imagination. With Sartre, we have seen that for the lover, love consists of becoming the lover in the eyes of the beloved. Therefore, the lover wants to receive love rather than to give it in its desire for the other, which is ultimately traced back to the desire ‘to be’. Love thus seems to be an imaginary pursuit by lacking subjects that long to become a ‘en-soi-pour-soi’. The lover thereby acts upon its desire, because it is desire, a lack, that in its vain project freely attempts to unite with its beloved. With the love project, Sartre implicitly seems to take up the loving subject from the perspective of a kind of narcissism, a self-love, since it wants to see itself through the eyes of the other and to receive love rather than to give it.

Until his late teaching, Lacan also insisted on the narcissistic character of love: in loving an Other, I love myself in the Other; even if the Other is more to me than myself, even if I am ready to sacrifice myself for the Other, what I love in the Other is my idealized per fected Ego, my Supreme Good — but still my Good.85

Contrary to Hegel and Sartre, Lacan argues against the postulation of an autonomous subject. According to Žižek, Lacan affirms ‘love as a contingent encounter between two

83 Ibid., 394, 395. 84 Butler, Subjects of Desire, xxvi. 85 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and The Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, (London, Verso, 2012), 773.

25 subjects’, but it is an encounter ‘of their unconscious nesses, subtracted from narcissism’.86 Although the psychoanalytic inevitability of dissatisfaction also results from the sujet du désir that is being understood as a lack, Lacan contends that there is a split between the consciousness and the unconscious ‘as a chain of signifiers that interferes repeatedly with the coherent, seamless self-presentation of the conscious subject’.87 The unconscious is thus structured like a language. With Lacan, the ‘notion of negativity appears as that which must be superseded from its Hegelian and Sartrian context; the negative must be transposed from the domain of the subject to that of the signifier’.88 From this Lacanian perspective, desire comes to labor under the demand for love, existing in its shadow as ‘the discrepancy between need (biological drive) and demand (which is always the demand for love, for thorough recognition through the recovery of preoedipal union)’.89 Lacan thus maintains a different relation between desire and language against his post-Hegelian precursors that will be formative to Žižek’s outlook on love, as he follows Lacan in his formula that ‘intersubjectivity can never be dissolved in the direct interaction of individuals’.90

For us, Lacan ‘does not know at what point he is Hegelian’, because his reading of Hegel is inscribed within the tradition of Kojéve and Hyppolite. It would therefore be necessary, in order to articulate the connection between the dialectic and the logic of the signifier, to bracket for the moment any explicit reference by Lacan to Hegel.91

Žižek is clearly aware of the crucial role of Kojève in Lacan’s development, as he mentions that Lacan referred to Kojève as one of his two great masters — the other being psychiatrist Clérambault.92 Žižek’s two great masters are Hegel and Lacan and his philosophical endeavor is to read them both with and against each other. From Kojève to Žižek, Hegelian dialectics is understood not as some process of final sublation, of doing away with all difference in a completed unity but, on the contrary, one

86 Ibid., 773. 87 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 189 88 Ibid., 200. 89 Ibid., 192. 90 Slavoj Žižek, Disparities, (London, Bloomsbury, 2016), 36. 91 Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 11. 92 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 507.

26 in which contradiction is a constant, to which Žižek adds that being is as contradictory as subjectivity; substance is also itself subject, which offers us a new dialectical perspective beyond the concrete master-slave relation as the model of love, that is, a dialectical view outside the phenomenological limitation of fixed intentionality that caused the love relation to be determined by a disparity, which led to a hostile disposition between lovers. Rather than the conflict being a result of the direct interaction, with Žižek following Lacan, we will come to a different understanding of intersubjectivity and how love is able to appear as a nothingness that constitutes a striving.

27 3. ŽIŽEK: ASSUMING THE MISTAKE The specific kind of love we are concerned with is by its very nature a catastrophe according to Žižek. He is opposed to the idea that love is in itself a positive, harmonious power and then something bad happens which oppresses it. ‘If there is a lesson to be learned from Freud, it is precisely that love is itself, twisted, perverted’.93 In this sense, Žižek problematizes love as a conflict but, more specifically, a conflict between our specific, particular, passionate-individual love (Eros) and our general, universal, sociopolitical-collective love (Agape), between which there is a gap. It is precisely this gap which is arguably the reef on which Sartre’s later project after Being and Nothingness ultimately foundered, as he tried to find a way to reconcile the relationship between subject and substance, which he radically divided in his phenomenological ontology. This gap is also how Hegel relates to it; ‘his underlying problem is, from the very beginning of his thought, that of love’.94 All thinkers discussed so far share this concern which is also to be found at the heart of Žižek’s theory, which he most extensively discusses in his Less Than Nothing: Hegel and The Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012). We will see how falling in love is closely considered a traumatic event and how trying to consider the notions of ‘love’ and ‘freedom’ will constitute a destructive spoiling of our illusions.

3.1. STRUCTURES OF IMBALANCE In the opening scene of the documentary Žižek! (2005), we meet Žižek as he explains his spontaneous attitude towards the universe, which he regards as a ‘kind of total vanity’.95 Žižek’s on the spot answer, in which he rapidly summarizes his conviction based upon his theory, introduces us with the fundamental structure of love and how it is thought of as a disturbance that sets things in motion, which echoes his notion of the universe as ‘a kind of primordial ontological dislocation or différance on account of which, no matter how peaceful things may appear sub specie aeternitatis, the universe

93 “Slavoj Žižek on Love,” Youtube video, 12:22, “Progressive International,” February 19, 2021, retrieved from https://youtu.be/IBKRZCgtz6k?t=482. 94 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 9. 95 Atra Taylor (director), Žižek!, (New York, Zeitgeist Films, 2005).

28 is out of joint and eppur si muove’.96

There is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally, like… ultimately… there are just some fragments, some vanishing things. If you look at the universe, it’s one big void. But then, how do things emerge? Here, I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where, you know, the idea there is that [the] universe is a void, but a kind of a positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. And I like this idea spontaneously very much, that the fact that it’s not just nothing — things are out there — it means that something went terribly wrong, that what we call creation is a kind of a cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe, that things exist by mistake. And I’m even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract it is to assume the mistake and go to the end. And we have a name for this. It’s called love. Isn’t love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of “I love the world,” universal love. [...] Love, for me, is an extremely violent act. Love is not “I love you all.” Love means I pick out something, and it’s, again, this structure of imbalance. Even if this ‘something’ is just a small detail… a fragile individual person… I say “I love you more than anything else.” In this quite formal sense, love is evil.97

With this explanation it becomes clear that Žižek’s notion of love is dialectically structured, as it is constituted on the negation of that which is not loved. When I say ‘I love you,’ it is based on a knowledge of that which it stands in contrast with; that which is not loved. Moreover, it involves the logic of the signifier. Love how Žižek understand it was developed by Lacan in his Le Séminaire Livre XX: Encore 1972-1973 (1975), in which it is explained how love involves the paradoxes of the not-All (pas-toute).98 For our purpose, the ‘not-All’ can be understood as the One that is lacking from itself, something castrated, disparate, incomplete, inconsistent, a non-totalization. Žižek thereby adds an ontological dimension to Lacan’s notion of the not-All, by which these paradoxicalities emerge when substance is also thought of as subject. He thus embraces the incompleteness of materiality and, subsequently, that of love and knowledge, to the extent that material reality presupposes a void. We experience reality as One — as a Whole — only virtually, because it is structured as a differential system

96 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 377, 756. 97 Taylor, Žižek!, 2005. 98 Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 361.

29 of referring signifiers — a chain of signifiers — that have no essential meaning on their own, but derive their meaning by referring to each other. This is the Lacanian symbolic order, in which a meaning that relies on the “real” inexorably escapes us, and it is precisely this defect which makes the symbolic order possible. The way in which this virtual quality affects us is twofold; as the world in which we live is virtual and, within it, we only exist as lack, as someone who is never fully present and will remain virtual. In short, ‘being as a lack’ is the seeming contradiction of Lacan’s subject theory that Žižek uses as a formal scheme for interpreting Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804). According to Žižek, the decisive moment in philosophy came with Kant’s idea of the transcendental constitution of reality, that is, with his introduction of the ontological concept of the ‘transcendental’, which marks the formal subjective conditions which experienced reality must necessarily meet.99 This new conceptualization of experienced reality introduced the difference between ontic reality and its ontological horizon, which constitutes an a priori network of categories that determine how we understand reality, or rather, that which appears to us as reality.100 The focus thus shifted from the structure of the world to the structure of how we imagine the world to be and make statements about it. The emphasis is now on the subject and on how it is constituted by its entry into the symbolic. The subject is the result of a self-articulation in an already existing network of signifiers and exists only formally and transcendental as represented by signifiers to other signifiers, that is, insofar as one is alienated from the Other (l’Autre) — the symbolic order — and determined by its law. This constitutes our position with regard to our social reality, which is the symbolic Other that structures all of our wishes, wants, fears, and so on. This means that desire is always ‘desire of the Other’, which has multiple implications as Žižek points out; ‘I desire what my Other desires; I want to be desired by my Other; my desire is structured by the big Other, the symbolic field in which I am embedded; my desire is sustained by the abyss of the real Other-Thing’.101 However, this condition is not a proper determination, since this alienated condition is constitutive of the subject and enables freedom. It is neither a Sartrean ‘condemnation’

99 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 9. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 706.

30 because freedom only exists by virtue of the leeway that is given to it, as it does not stand on its own; it is the ‘nothingness’ on which everything is founded and its defect, its gap, is what makes the symbolic order possible. The symbolic order is supplemented by the imaginary order, as the latter conceals all the gaps that the symbolic order cannot provide with meaning, and makes reality appear as a coherent whole. The symbolic-imaginary order functions as a disparate structure that ‘is universal, constitutive of (what we experience as) reality: reality which we experience is never ‘all’; in order to generate the illusion of ‘all’ it has to be supplemented by a disparate artificial element which fills in its gap or hole’.102 As a result, ‘the Self’ emerges as ‘a fetishized illusion of a substantial core of subjectivity where, effectively, there is nothing’.103 ‘The ‘fullness of a person,’ its ‘inner wealth,’ is what Lacan calls the fantasmatic ‘stuff of the I,’ imaginary formations which fill the void that ‘is’ subject’.104 Fantasy thus receives a ‘kind of transcendental status’, Žižek explains, as it is ‘constitutive of reality itself, a frame which guarantees the ontological consistency of reality’.105 Because of the Lacanian imaginary order, reality takes on a perceived substance as it is constructed by fantasy as a narrative structure that manifests itself in a phenomenal form. It is in this sense that the stage is set for desire, as it forms a matrix which operationalizes desire and compels us to selectively approach what we eventually hold for reality. The fundamental premise of fantasy derives from the notion that desire is not given but rather constructed. Hence, fantasy acts as the structure that provides the coordinates for the sujet du désir. More specifically, it offers the representation of a privileged object upon which desire is fixed, in order to represent the subject’s position with regard to the object. This privileged object acts as the Lacanian object-cause of desire (objet petit a), also known as the unattainable object of desire, of which the difference in name reveals its functioning, as it is a paradoxical figure that gives substance to the very lack-of-being of the subject.106 It is thus an ‘impossible’ object in the sense that it is the embodiment of nothing and always eludes the subject. We can only desire insofar as we become bearers of an illusion. We think we desire another

102 Žižek, Disparities, 13. 103 Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 324. 104 Žižek, Disparities, 43. 105 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 177. 106 Ibid., 668.

31 individual because of the person they are, that is, we are not aware that this desire is caused by that ‘which is more in the person than the person itself’, which has nothing to do with the person as such.107 Which is Kojèvian in the sense that desire and recognition are entwined, as the subject requires the obstruction of the Other in order to gain reflection on itself and the world. It is this obstruction that revealed itself as a conflict. The same goes for love, in which only the lover sees in the object of love that unfathomable ‘X’ which causes their love. ‘This nothing — whose stand-in (or place-holder) is objet a — is the focus of love, or, as Simone Wen put it: “Where there is nothing, read that I love you.”’108 That is to say, love is not solely imaginary as the coming into play of the Other’s desire shifts things into the symbolic register. But if we consider love solely as an imaginary phenomenon then it is opposed to desire, which is inscribed in the symbolic field of the Other. Love is based upon a figment of oneness with the beloved, which eradicates the difference which gives rise to desire. Nevertheless, love and desire are similar in the sense that neither can ever be satisfied. Also their structure is similar, as ‘wanting to be loved’ is similar to that of desire, in which the subject wants to become object to the desire of the Other. Love constitutes a demand to be loved in return and one needs proof of the Other’s love. Moreover, desire stems from the unsatisfied part of this demand, that is, the demand for love in the dialectic of need-demand-desire. Characteristic for each subject is the way in which fantasy structures the relationship with the trauma of lack — which is determined by desire. In this way, fantasy gives reality an illusionary coherence and consistency in order to fill the gap that makes up social reality. This lack in the symbolic order is the ‘nothingness’ to which the subject owes his freedom, and by positioning itself in the place of this deficiency, the subject fulfills its function as a bearer of this order. It is thus because of the failure of the symbolic order to be a complete system that a certain amount of leeway is possible for the subject, in which its freedom lies, as freedom is only possible with regard to something from which it can be free, which is the symbolic order that presupposes free bearers and simultaneously guarantees a margin of freedom to its subjects.

107 Ibid., 655. 108 Ibid., 105 [emphasis added on ‘read’].

32 Intertwined with the symbolic and imaginary order remains the order of the Real, or rather, the limit of the completeness of the symbolic and imaginary order, which can only be known through the structural effects it produces. I have already referred to the level of this order with ‘lack’, ‘nothingness’ and ‘deficiency’. The three intertwined orders of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real together schematize the Lacanian constitution of reality and never operate simultaneously on the same level.109 Although the orders are all intertwined, there is no synthesis. Lacan shows how it is not a self-sufficient structure, and cannot be if there is to be a subject, ‘by positing a barred Other, incomplete, ‘not-all’, an Other articulated against a void, an Other which carries within it an ex-timate, non-symbolizable kernel’.110

3.2. A TRAUMATIC AFFAIR It is in the Real that opposites coincide, as it is simultaneously that which cannot be symbolized, nor dialectized, as well as the obstacle itself which resists its symbolization.111 The Real can only be grasped as an entity that is constructed retroactively, in order to justify the deformations of the symbolic structure.112 The paradox of the Real resides in the fact that it concerns an entity which possesses a series of properties although it, properly speaking, does not exist as it is not actually located in reality. These are the structural effects by which the Real exerts a certain structural causality and produces a series of effects — displacements, repetitions, and so on — in the symbolic reality of subjects.113 This is why it is called traumatic, as the system of the symbolic is haunted, as it were, by ‘a traumatic Real’. This traumatizing quality of the Real can be imagined as a confrontation, in which one comes face to face with an unbearable Truth underlying the subject. For both factions of the symbolic subject and the imaginary Self, immediate contact with the Real is beyond reach, as the connection that exists precisely undermines it. This is because trauma is that which cannot be directly approached by the subject and can only be perceived in a distorted way, through a defense mechanism, and can only be alluded to, never directly

109 Ibid., 799. 110 Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 13. 111 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 841. 112 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (Londen, Verso, 2008 [1989]), 182. 113 Ibid.

33 confronted, and so on.114 Trauma functions as something whose effects alter, distort, twist and in some way disturb our particular perspective on reality and can only be known through its effects.115 Žižek uses the analogy of someone who has been brutally raped and humiliated, who cannot just instantly recall the rape scene; the repressed memory of the rape also disrupts one’s approach to reality, making one hypersensitive to some aspects, ignoring others, and so on.116 In short, the traumatic event is in fact a fantasy that fills a certain void in a symbolic structure and becomes, as such, the retroactive effect of this structure.117 At first glance, the Real is a shock of an unforeseen encounter with an unbearable Truth that disrupts the automatic circulation of the symbolic mechanism, like a grain of sand that prevents its smooth operation, or in other words, a traumatic event that disrupts the equilibrium of the symbolic universe of the subject.118 However, as we have seen with regard to Žižek’s analogy, the Real is exactly like a disruption of a totally unforeseen event. Such an event is nowhere given in its positivity and can only be logically constructed afterwards, as the thing which escapes symbolization.119 The Real thus emerges here in the guise of an illusory spectacle.

And the same goes for love — that is to say, what is it to find oneself passion ately in love? Is it not a kind of permanent state of exception? All the proper balances of our daily life are disturbed, everything we do is colored by the underlying thought of “that.” The situation is properly “beyond Good and Evil”: we feel a weird indifference towards our moral obligations with regard to our parents, children, friends — even if we continue to meet them, we do so in a mechanical way, in a mode of “as if”; everything pales into insignificance compared to our passionate attachment. In this sense, falling in love is like the blinding light that hit Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus: a kind of religious suspension of the Ethical, to use Kierkegaard’s terms. An Absolute intervenes and derails the normal run of our affairs: it is not so much that the standard hierarchy of values is inverted, but, more radically, that another dimension enters the scene, a different level of being.120

114 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 535. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 535-536. 117 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 191. 118 Ibid., 192. 119 Ibid., 191. 120 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 33.

34 Love constitutes an unforeseen encounter that is traumatic in the sense that it disrupts the smooth operation of our social reality, as it upsets the balance of our symbolic universe. Which is why, from the perspective of others, people in love often start to act like fools. Love and trauma are structurally similar in the sense that both do not let themselves be immediately symbolized and can only be structured retroactively. Love in this sense has the structure of what Žižek calls an event.

[An event is when] something shocking, out of joint that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation. There is, by definition, something ‘miraculous’ in an event, from the miracles of our daily lives to those of the most sublime spheres, including that of the divine.121

Falling in love has the same immanent logic, as Žižek explains; when you fall in love, you do not simply know what you need or want and look for the one who has it, but ‘the ‘miracle’ of love is that you learn what you need only when you find it’.122 Thus, the fall into love never happens at a certain moment but has always already happened, usually after an undetermined period of subconscious gestation. Suddenly we become aware that we are — already — in love. ‘The process is simple,’ according to Stendhal; ‘you are surprised, and as a result you ponder over the event that surprised you. You are already halfway to the state of mind in which crystallization takes place’.123 The fall in love (coup de foudre) has always already happened, the ‘thunderbolts’ already struck. We do not fall in love for specific reasons such as physical characteristics, it is because we already love the person that their physical characteristics attract us. This is a manifestation of a circular structure in which the ‘evental effect’ retroactively determines its causes or reasons. The love event is therefore a change of the symbolic-imaginary framework through which we perceive and deal with reality.124 Such an event can therefore be understood as a sudden emergence of something new that is incompatible with the previous order.125 That is to say, falling in love is a contingent event that, once it

121 Slavoj Žižek, Event: Philosophy in Transit, (Londen, Penguin Random House, 2014), 2. 122 Ibid., 133. 123 Stendhal, On Love, (London, Penguin Books, 2004), 71. 124 Žižek, Event, 10. 125 Ibid., 78.

35 occurs, appears as necessary, as something towards which my entire life was moving. It imposes on a lover the work of love, the continuous effort to inscribe into someone’s being all the consequences of love, to structure its love around the fidelity to the love event.126 It is this structure that also constitutes the basic paradox of love and freedom.

If I am directly ordered to love a woman, it is clear that this does not work: in a way, love must be free. But on the other hand, if I proceed as if I really have a free choice, if I start to look around and say to myself ‘Let’s choose which of these women I will fall in love with’, it is clear that this also does not work, that it is not ‘real love’. The paradox of love is that it is a free choice, but a choice which never arrives in the present — it is always already made. At a certain moment, I can only state retroactively that I’ve already chosen.127

Our experience of actual freedom is also properly traumatic because it disrupts our understanding of a time-spatial reality determined by natural laws. ‘Lacan moved from Hegel to Kant, insisting on the inaccessible (‘impossible’) character of the Real that forever resists symbolization’.128 Kant viewed freedom as an “irrational” fact of reason, something like an umbilical cord that inexplicably hooks our experience into the unknown noumenal world.129 Kant, according to Žižek, is mistaken in seeing freedom as an epistemological obstacle, an irrationality that cannot be explained in phenomenal reality. Hegel rejects this obstacle by describing this epistemological limitation to be a positive ontological feature. Žižek goes on to state in Hegelian terms that the Real is simultaneously presupposed and stated by the symbolic.130 The impossibility, the paradoxical status of the Real, is therefore not to be regarded as a limit, but as a positive feature.

3.3. FAILURE AS A FEATURE With Žižek, the subject again appears as a lack that wants-to-be. Yet a feature is to be found in the negation of the negation, which is the shift of perspective that turns failure

126 Ibid., 145. 127 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 187. 128 Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 330. 129 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 266. 130 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 193.

36 into realization. ‘A subject tries to articulate (“express”) itself in a signifying chain, this articulation fails, and in and through this failure, the subject emerges: the subject is the failure of its signifying representation’.131 The whole problem or obstacle retroactively presents itself as its own solution. ‘Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion’.132

In a love letter, the very failure of the writer to formulate his declaration in a clear and effective way, his vacillations, the letter’s fragmentary style, and so on, can in themselves be proof (perhaps the necessary and only reliable proof) that the love he professes is authentic — here, the very failure to deliver the message properly is the sign of its authenticity. If the message is deliv ered too smoothly, it will arouse the suspicion that it is part of a well-planned approach, or that the writer loves himself, the beauty of his writing, more than his love-object, that the latter is effectively reduced to a pretext for engaging in the narcissistically satisfying activity of writing.133

Love is defined by Lacan as ‘giving of that which one does not have’, that is, something not backed by any symbolic guarantee.134 It presents itself to the lover as conflictual, but it is precisely this disposition that allows for desire because, as we have seen, desire can only exist in a universe in which nothing is as it is, but in which everything keeps referring to something else. The effective result seems similar to that of Sartre, as our relation to the other is such that ‘what I see in the other is his or her desire for me; that is, I read in his or her eyes my own status as an object (of desire), the way I appear to the other’.135 But with Žižek, there is a full identification of a particular object with the inaccessible Thing136, the unfathomable ‘X’ or the je ne sais quoi which causes the lover’s desire and which only exists for its gaze. And it is precisely this closure that

131 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 259. 132 Žižek, Interrogating the Real, 298. 133 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 259. 134 Ibid., 590. 135 Ibid., 666. 136 Thing (Ding) is a raw Real outside of or preceding the Symbolic, whose status is thoroughly libidinal. It is radically external to the Symbolic while simultaneously radically internal to it; ‘it is a spectre of absolute Otherness generated by the distance from the Real introduced by the Symbolic’. The Thing is that to which the subject adds its fantasmatic projection/construction as the absolute point of reference behind and beneath particular material things. Žižek, Disparities, 66-67.

37 makes love possible. Love fully assumes that ‘this is that’, or rather, that the person with all its weaknesses and common features is the Thing I unconditionally love. However, we end up coming to love the objet a that we find in our beloved one. The real conflict of love for Žižek is that one love — universal or particular — always betrays the other if it is actual love, that is, love that is realized. The ultimate act of love is therefore betrayal, as Žižek provokes.137 This predicament is the result of the relationship between universality and particularity, which is a dynamic one, in which the dialectic relationship is such that difference as universal cuts across all particularity. Žižek identifies how there is an irrational kernel in Hegel’s system that violates its internal logic and that there is no system that can function without it. The universal is therefore ‘not the encompassing container of the particular content, the peaceful medium-background of the conflict of particularities’ but is similar to the Real in that the universal-in-itself is ‘the site of an unbearable antagonism, self-contradiction, and the stellar parallax: the traps of ontological difference (the multitude of) its particular species are ultimately nothing but so many attempts to obfuscate/reconcile/master this antagonism’.138 Our notion of the universal as One, a Whole, arises from a self-relating negativity of the particular-to-itself, from the way in which every particular identity is split from within. It is in this sense that we could identify Love at the irrational heart of Hegel’s dialectical system. As the old Maoist slogan from the 1960s goes; ‘One divides into two, two doesn’t merge into one’.139 Is this the case with Love? The communal lesson of the thinkers we have discussed seems that we only get to love through conflict. If love was the solution, it would immediately drive all things back to nothingness, or into All, which amounts to the same result. Instead, we abandon ourselves to the catastrophe by accepting that we do not want things to be (re)solved, but assume the impossibility and perpetually strive to the end of it. Because ‘true’ love is always beyond the love that is realized, it is always ‘somewhere else’. This dynamic becomes explicit in the Žižekian example of an extramarital affair, in which the cheating husband divorces his wife to get direct access to his mistress, after which, either the

137 “Slavoj Žižek on Love,” Youtube video. 138 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 782. 139 Mladen Dolar, One Divides into Two, eflux, journal #33, March 2012, retrieved from https://www.e-flux.com/journal/33/68295/one-divides-into-two/.

38 mistress loses interest in the ex-husband or conversely. This is because the love relationship — the affair — has to be sustained by a phantasmatic supplement; it was sustained by the obstacle of the marriage, while the marriage was sustained by the obstacle of the secret love relationship. The lovers initially thought that they loved the other because of the person that they are, that is, they were not aware that their love is caused by the objet a, which, as we have seen, has nothing to do with the person as such. Therefore, when we lose our fantasy, we lose ourselves and then love is lost.

39 4. TILL DEATH DO US PART Lacan is said to have stated that it ‘is not possible to say anything meaningful or sensible about love’ and that ‘the moment one begins to speak about love, one descends into imbecility’.140 However, similar to Lacan, I ended up dedicating a great deal speaking about it, while exposing the dialectical reason why imbecility is ultimately inevitable concerning our subject matter. What first appeared as the sign of our inability to understand what love really is, turns out to be the fundamental feature of — the reality of — love itself. In a properly dialectical reversal, our limitation to fully know, which prevented us from achieving a notion of love, proved to indicate the antagonism of love as such. The paradox in love relations is that we have a basic antagonism, which necessarily appears empirically as multiplicity. This is due to the dialectical structure that keeps love in motion, as it is only the process of perpetual change that can preserve love’s continuity. Yet, the dynamic intersubjectivity that ensues may lead to the dissolution of love as well as its preservation. Love founders on contradiction and ultimately becomes a passion divided against itself.

4.1. LOVE IS CONFLICT In the words of Žižek’s beloved Chesterton: ‘Love desires personality; therefore love desires division’.141 Love means precisely the constitutive impossibility of an Absolute Love, of the achievement of symbolic realization, because there is a void, a lack of love, that accompanies the movement of symbolization. Love thus must be apprehended in its experience of rupture, between perception and consciousness. On Sartre’s account, there is no language without experience, whereas Žižek following Lacan, theorizes that there is, on the contrary, no experience without language; we experience through language. This resulted in two different Hegelian accounts of love as conflictual, which both share the underlying premise that there can be no experience of love outside the context of intersubjectivity. However, due to a different ontological interpretation of subject and substance, Sartre and Žižek fundamentally differ in whether this constitutes a direct interaction between lovers.

140 Darlene Demandante, Lacanian Perspectives on Love, Kritike, volume 8 number 1, June 2014, 103-104, retrieved from http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_14/demandante_june2014.pdf. 141 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1995), 139.

40 All the thinkers which I have discussed share the Hegelian conception of negativity as the founding gesture of subjectivity and desire. First it was Kojève who freed the concepts of recognition and desire from Hegel’s assumed absolute idealism by wresting them out of their epistemological and metaphysical context, by which abstruse complexities are avoided and through which we got to the more immediate and practical concerns of freedom and autonomy. With Hegel, the deceptive pursuit for the Absolute is ‘a progressive cycle which reveals every deception as permitting some grander act of synthesis, an insight into yet more regions of interrelated reality’.142 The idealized synthesis that ends each cycle is characteristic for Hegel’s dialectical movement, in which renewal is always close at hand in our pursuit toward a supposedly ultimate dialectical harmony with the world. However, our demise is perpetually revealed as ‘a function of a tragic blindness’ as ‘every effort at identification is finally subverted’.143 With Sartre, we have seen this in the love relation. Through his model, we have seen how consciousness is a ‘permanent source of negation’ and how human desire is understood as the ‘vain passion’ that informs all of intentional consciousness.144 The absolute non-coincidence of subject (pour-soi) and substance (en-soi) dissolved the idealized Hegelian synthesis altogether and revealed a dual antagonism, a struggle of tendencies that do not carry in themselves the promise of a resolution. This dialectic of self and Other, which we have found in the love relation, revealed that there can be no experience outside the context of intersubjectivity. It is therefore that the Other becomes the general object of desire.145 Our Sartrean motif of ‘love as conflict’ revealed itself to be more Hegelian — or rather more Kojèvean — than his Being and Nothingness makes it seem. However, this conflict is a result of Sartre’s stern distinction between subject and substance. We have seen how the perpetually failing subject must struggle with the barrier that the en-soi erects to its projects, while it remains uninvolved with the en-soi and in structure distinct from it. Žižek’s Lacanian reading of Hegel intervenes at precisely this point, as according to Žižek, the en-soi also lacks the resources to reconcile itself with

142 Butler, Subjects of Desire, 23. 143 Ibid., 21. 144 Ibid., 14. 145 Ibid., 47.

41 contradiction and, consequently, the en-soi suffers from a lack even more than the subject itself. Sartre’s perpetual failing of the subject ‘to be’ due to its lack therefore turned out to be not strictly reserved to the subject, as it ended up becoming a feature of Žižek’s substance. With Žižek, we might argue against Sartre that love is therefore irreducible to any substance. Whereas Sartre’s phenomenological ontology rejects Kant’s noumena and the notion of the unconscious, it reappears with Žižek in the guise of the Lacanian Real and the unconscious that is structured like a language. From this Lacanian perspective, love turns out to be an unconscious, imaginary strategy that enables us to remain blind to the structural inability of desire to ever be truly satisfied. The important criticism waged by both Sartre and Žižek against Hegel is the insistence on the inevitability of dissatisfaction. Yet where Sartre attributes this inevitability to the lacking subject due to an ontological limitation, Žižek’s point is that we should fully and explicitly accept the gap which manifests itself in the incompatibility of subject and substance. This shifts the Sartrean motif of ‘love as conflict’ from a distinction between the particular and the universal to that of a fundamental gap between universality and particularity. According to Žižek, we should assume this gap and our task is to think of this impossibility itself as an ontological fact, not only as an epistemological limitation.146 The fundamental feature of love is the irreconcilable antagonism between social unification and individuals. The real conflict at the heart of love is thus between general, universal, sociopolitical-collective love and specific, particular, passionate-individual love, which turns out to be a dynamic relationship in which the dialectic of universality and particularity is such that difference as universal cuts across all particularity. Because of the conflictual kernel at the heart of Hegel’s system which perpetually exceeds itself, love comes into being. Which is the reason why Love is not harmonious and peaceful, but rather similar to the Real, in that it is the site of an unbearable antagonism through which it makes itself possible. The Real of Love is therefore partisan, one-sided, interested, but for precisely this reason universal, all-encompassing, that to which everything, including its own position of enunciation, is subject.

146 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 239.

42 4.2. MITIGATING THE FALL There is no such thing as a “natural balance” in love relations, since it is precisely “nature” as such that is destroying its own balance all of the time. Love is neither an energy without words that starts deep within ourselves, because if that would be the case, then this energy can suddenly change from one moment to the next. If love was indeed an energy — which is One — then we cannot understand why, if a lover is cheating on you, love immediately turns into hate. For we have seen, as soon as love is everything, it becomes violent, since love as love is unbearable. Love interrupts the ordinary run of things. It does not “express” the entire “per sonality” of the subject, but functions as a break in the continuity of “personal identity”. We therefore experience falling in love as a rupture, to which Žižek also adds how the violence of falling in love is nicely captured by the Basque term for falling in love — ‘maitemindu’ — which, literally translated, means ‘to be injured by love’.147 Stendhal remarks that there is ‘more scope for indulgence of violent desires in love than in any other passion’.148 Which is why love always has been pacified within societies through culture, for instance through religion or ethics, otherwise, without pacification, one could become a stalker or a killer, as one can lose oneself in love. The latter is, of course, not necessarily the ultimate fate of love, because after the fall it is a long work in which you can try to build out of this rupture some kind of relationship which can somehow function. Žižek briefly mentions this kind of pacification of the violence of love within society.

French philosopher Alain Badiou examined the parallel between today’s search for a sexual (or marital) partner through the appropriate dating agencies and the ancient procedure of arranged marriages: in both cases, the risk of falling in love is suspended. There is no contingent ‘fall’ proper, the risk of the ‘love encounter’ is minimized by prior arrangements which take into account all the material and psychological interests of the concerned parties.149

We have seen why finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent, even traumatic. Human society has therefore always attempted to suspend the risk of falling

147 Ibid., 446. 148 Stendhal, On Love, 60. 149 Žižek, Event, 81.

43 in love by organizing it through arrangements, for instance, via contracts and institutions — contemporary manifestations being internet dating and marriage agencies. The implicit message is that if we are too much in love with somebody, we should get married and ritualize our relationship ‘in order to cure yourself of the excessive passionate attach ment, to replace it with boring daily customs — and if you cannot resist passion’s temptation, there are always extra-marital affairs...’.150 Marriage is thus a means of re-normalization that cures us of the violence of falling in love, for if we get caught up in love relationships too intensely, it exposes the very traumatic kernel of our being to the other. ‘When the other sees in me “something more than myself,” the path is wide open for the paradoxical short-circuit between love and hate for which Lacan coined the neologism l’hainamoration’.151 Which is why, as de Sousa notes, great love stories seldom have happy endings.

The greatest love stories usually end in death. The lighter ones, known as romantic comedies, end in marriage: but the convention that marriage is a happy ending also hints that marriage is indeed an ending, which is a kind of death.152

The love relation in the passage from Coelho’s The Alchemist with which I started my introduction does seem to have a happy ending. But the question remains if it was ever really ‘true’ love, since there seems to be no conflict nor betrayal. The illusion of harmonious Love is sustained by the use of ‘universal language’, ‘the pure Language of the World’, which has nothing to do with the lovers’ particular love as such. Žižek discusses the issue with such a notion of universal language.

There is only one actually existing language, the language of humans, and the tension between language in its universality (‘as such’) and actual particularity (language effectively spoken by humans) is inscribed into the language of humans, splitting it from within. In other words, even if there is only one language, we still have to distinguish between the universal (language as such) and the particular (human language) – language is a genus with only one species, itself as a particular actual language. This brings us back to the notion of Fall: ‘human language’ designates the Fall of the divine

150 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 446. 151 Ibid., 685. 152 De Sousa, Love, 2.

44 ‘language as such,’ its contamination with all the filth of envy, power struggle, and obscenity.153

Again, there is no such thing as a ‘pure language’, for language as such is always ‘out of joint’, in the sense that there is a constitutional ambivalence within the relationship between signifier and signified. The universality of the signifier is determined by the oppositions between signifiers themselves, and not because they are firmly anchored in something which is outside of language. Žižek’s Hegelian ontological affirmation of the inherent self-division of being constitutes that there is no being that is entirely independent and self-sustaining. The very act of speaking testifies to this lack in both ourselves and in what we are speaking about. With Žižek we have learned that this is the very reason why there can be love; for where there is no lack, there can be no love.

4.3. APROPOS OF EVIL We have come to see that love constitutes a rather violent act and that it is by privileging something over anything else that love, in this quite formal sense as Žižek declared, is evil. Love as such always divides into Two; ‘when I am in love with someone, my love is neither One nor Three (I do not form with my beloved a harmonious One in fusion, nor is our rela tionship grounded in a Third, a medium which would provide predetermined coordinates for our love and thus guarantee its harmony)’.154 Love is not primarily Good or harmonious but, on contrary, it is first of all a rupture and therefore primarily Evil, as ‘every true Beginning as a radical break with the past is by definition Evil, from which the Good can emerge only afterwards, in the space opened up by that Evil’.155 The Good thus emerges as a possibility and a duty only through this primordial or constitutive Evil. That is why our proclamations to our beloved are often latently evil in our desperate attempt to fill in the gaps and inconsistencies caused by love, for instance; ‘You are everything to me!,’ ‘I cannot live without you!,’ ‘You belong to me!,’ ‘There is nothing more important than you!,’ ‘I am nothing without you!,’ ‘You are the lack in me!’ (Tu me manque!), ‘I will hate you if you cheat on me!,’

153 Žižek, Event, 37. 154 Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 111. 155 Ibid., 107.

45 and so on. It all boils down to ‘I do not care about all these others!,’ ‘I do not care about anything but you!’. Hence the need for pacification and the hard labour of love to work things out, and to try and build a functioning relationship with our beloved one after the fall. Habit becomes a way of stabilizing the imbalance of love. But at least some tension will always remain necessary, since too much pacification kills love, as it can never become habit(ual); if love becomes a habit, it is no longer ‘true’ love. Therefore, love becomes a duty once you declare it. But ethics is about duty and the Freudian lesson is that this ultimately leads to repression. We should not forget that love itself is twisted and perverted...

Maudit soit à jamais le rêveur inutile Qui voulut le premier, dans sa stupidité, S’éprenant d’un problème insoluble et stérile, Aux choses de l'amour mêler l'honnêteté!

Cursed be forever the useless dreamer, Who wanted to be the first, in his stupidity, To take on an insoluble and sterile problem, To try and mix love with honesty! 156

156 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Femmes damnées (Delphine et Hippolyte)’ in Les fleurs du mal, 1857 edition, retrieved from https://fleursdumal.org/poem/180.

46 REFERENCES

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Demandante, Darlene. 2014. Lacanian Perspectives on Love. Kritike, volume 8 number 1. June 2014. Retrieved from http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_14/demandante_june2014.pdf.

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47 Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2003. Being and Nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. Abingdon: Routledge Classics. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. Originally published as: L’Être et le néant: Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique. 1943. Paris: Gallimard.

Sousa, Ronald de. 2015. Love: A Very Short Introduction [415]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Taylor, Atra (director). 2005. Žižek!. DVD. Zeitgeist Films.

Youtube. 2021. Slavoj Žižek on Love. 12:22. Progressive International. February 19, 2021. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/IBKRZCgtz6k?t=482.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2016. Disparities. London: Bloomsbury.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. Event: Philosophy in Transit. Londen: Penguin Random House.

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