Marriage as a Fine Art

PHILIPPE SOLLERS: That word is used in such a ragbag of ways, to suit all the varieties of modern sentimental commerce, that one might flinch from it with embarrassment or contempt, like Céline, for instance: “Love is infinity made available to poodles.” But still, it’s a serious question that merits an answer. One word I dislike is the word couple: I’ve never been able to stomach it. It implies a whole literature that I loathe. We’re married, Julia and I—that’s a fact—but we each have our own personality, our own name, activities, and freedom. Love is the full recognition of the other in their otherness. If this other is very close to you, as in this case, it seems to me that what’s at stake is harmony within difference. The difference between men and women is irreducible; there’s no possibility of fusion. The deal therefore is to love a contradiction, and that’s what is so nice. I’m reminded of Hölderlin’s lines: “The dissonances of the world resemble lovers’ quarrels. Reconciliation lies in the midst of strife, for whatever is parted is reunited. The arteries of the heart split apart and reunite, all is life, one, eternal, and ablaze.”

JULIA KRISTEVA: Love has two inseparable components: the need for closeness and constancy and the dramatic imperative of desire that can lead to infidelity. The love relationship is this subtle blend of fidelity and infidelity. In literature the figures of the love relationship vary widely: from the romance of courtly love to the crude, intense probing of the modern period. Everything that defines our civilization, in terms of its meditations on sex and feeling, is based on the faithful/unfaithful axis.

NO: But how can you associate fidelity and infidelity?

JK: First of all, let’s try to define fidelity. One could call it stability, protection, long-term reassurance. Is fidelity a dated topic, a hangover from the past or our parents, a quaint relic fit to be swept away by the pressures of modernity and the power of desire? I don’t think so. I’m speaking as a psychoanalyst here: the infant needs two figures, two imagos without which it can’t face up to the world. The mother, of course, but also the father, who is less often mentioned: the father of the earliest infant identifications. Not the forbidding, oedipal father, but the caring father. In our later experiences of love, we are also searching for variants of those two images. There lie the psychic requirements for fidelity. Once in possession of these bearings, these elements of stability, it’s possible to free up one’s sensory or sexual relationships and give desire its head.

PS: I get impatient with the systematic reduction of infidelity to the sexual aspect. In the space of one century we’ve moved from regarding sex as the devil incarnate to having it foisted on us, technically and commercially, as something indispensable. Sex is supposed to be the truth, to be all there is to say about people, while ignoring the rest: the persistence of feeling through time, the relationship’s success in the mind. Our society, which used to treat sex as fiendish, is now making it compulsory and deadly dull. I’ve often been accused of writing novels that whip up this sexual inflation themselves. But that’s exactly wrong. I’ve always shown sexuality as lightly as possible, in a detached, ironic way, like a self-aware fancy that one can take or leave. I mean, sexual infidelity doesn’t cut much ice with me. There are worse things.

JK: I think sexuality has been understood as essentially a revolt against conventional norms, and this was no doubt necessary in a society where religious or puritanical prohibitions were oppressive for individuals. These days, though, you hear a lot about retrenchment into the private, reverting to the rules. It’s certainly a step backward, into a form of conservatism. But it also marks a greater awareness of what the sexual revolt was finally about. It had a meaning, which was liberty. But also a nonmeaning: the destruction, oftentimes, of the self and the other. In male-female relations, you can engage in “outside” friendships that are sexual and sensual while still respecting the body and sensitivities of your main partner. That’s what being faithful means. It doesn’t mean never being apart or never knowing another man or another woman.

PS: Can we add to that the word trust? I was very impressed by this wonderful phrase from Vivant Denon: “Love me, which is to say, don’t suspect me.”

JK: The danger in “love me but don’t suspect me” is that it’s really saying “be my Mom” or “be my Dad”; the idealized “mother” and “father.” Many couples who claim to be faithful, and indeed are an absolute storybook picture of devotion, have become frozen in maternalism or paternalism. For those of our generation who handle their joint life differently, it looks like a frightful game. At the same time, one wouldn’t deny that infidelity packs some horrors of its own. It is always an ordeal. It can wound; it can deal lethal blows. But you can also laugh at it.

PS: I want to say that faithfulness is a kind of shared childhood, a form of innocence. Here, in a nutshell: we’re children. If we stop being children, we’re unfaithful. The rest—the encounters, the fits of passion—doesn’t matter very much, in my view. True infidelity resides in the congealing of the couple, in heaviness, in the earnestness that turns into resentment. It’s an intellectual betrayal above all. While we’re on the subject, I must stress that I don’t believe in transparency. I’m against the kind of contract agreed between Sartre and Beauvoir. I’m all for secrecy.

JK: The sentiment of fidelity goes back to childhood and its longing for safety. Personally, I consider myself someone who had reassurance lavished on her as a child, and that gave me a lot of confidence. When I was younger, I did feel bad when faced with sexual infidelity, but I can’t say I experienced it as a betrayal. In fact, I don’t feel that I can be betrayed. Or, to put it another way, treachery doesn’t really get to me. Even though, unlike you, Philippe, I don’t believe secrets can be preserved. Everything comes out sooner or later.

PS: I was talking about the honesty ideology in certain couples.

JK: Let’s be clear: female humans don’t have the same sexual and emotional interests as males. Men and women feel a different jouissance, just as their attitudes to power, society, and offspring are different. We two are a couple formed of two foreigners. Our different nationalities accentuate something else, which people often try to avoid seeing: men and women are mutual foreigners. Now, a couple who takes on board the freedom of these doubly foreign partners can turn into a battleground. Hence the need for harmonization. Faithfulness is like the harmonization of foreignness. If you allow the other to be as foreign as you are, harmony returns. The squawking becomes part and parcel of the symphony.

NO: Were the affairs you both went in for an explicit precondition of your union, or was it circumstance that led you one day to break the pledge that most young lovers make to each other: to be faithful forever?

JK: We never made that pledge.

PS: And we weren’t all that young when we met. Julia was twenty-five, I was thirty. May ’68 happened almost straightaway. It was a period of intense experimentation, in minds, in bodies. There were no contracts in those days. Freedom spilled out of its own accord.

JK: At the end of the sixties, which were the years of our youth, there was such a freedom in love relationships that what people call infidelity was not regarded as such. Today we live in another era, a time when unemployment, the dwindling of political activism, and the fear of AIDS all contribute to the new focus on coupledom and fidelity.

PS: History ebbs and flows. There are periods of opening and periods of closure. The restless liberty of the eighteenth century, then the Terror, then the Restoration. Intense mobility between 1920 and 1940, replaced all of a sudden by Travail, Famille, Patrie. A huge positive mutation around 1968, followed by fifteen years of numbness, drift, and now, finally, regression: witness all this anxiety and gloom.

JK: Yes, we’re certainly in a period when security considerations trump everything else and there’s little economic autonomy. One can’t indulge in a libertarian attitude to infidelity without a minimum sense of inner security. Plus, needless to say, of financial independence—which women, despite their efforts, are still far from possessing.

PS: Julia and I are completely on a par economically. In the absence of that prerequisite, there’s not much use in talking about the sophistications of love or the ins and outs of fidelity.

JK: We’re discussing the behavior of financially independent individuals. Otherwise we couldn’t have this conversation at all.

NO: You mentioned the famous contract between Sartre and Beauvoir, which stipulated that they would tell each other all about their extramarital adventures…

PS: I think that with them this honesty pact was actually a form of reciprocal inhibition, like signing a contract of joint frigidity. My own conviction is this: When you’re really into someone, you keep it to yourself. Besides, we don’t know how Sartre really ran his life, in what compartmented, watertight way…My feeling is that he, out of generosity and also indifference, let people say a lot of things. He had his clandestine life. It’s rather a pity he didn’t write about it. I can see him managing it on the sly. In any case, there’s not a female character in all his work who’s truly interesting. Nor in Camus either, nor indeed in Malraux. Nor in Aragon. What a century! I’ve learned a great deal more about women from Proust [laughter]. In reality, the whole business is pretty unconvincing.

JK: Sartre and Beauvoir were libertarian terrorists. Their books still display an intellectual and moral daring that is far from being understood or surpassed, even now. To carry out their work of libertarian terrorism, they turned themselves into a shock commando unit. This commando relied on their shared history as two wounded people. On the one hand, Sartre’s oedipal wound, what with his absent father and then his anguish at being so brilliant and yet so ugly. On the other hand, there’s Beauvoir, with her virile ambitions, her cold intelligence, and, I daresay, her depressive sexual inhibitions. And despite all that, they did something wonderful: they showed the whole world, to its dazzlement and envy, that a man and a woman can live together, talk together, and write together. You have a go, see if it’s easy! But their terrorism consisted in setting fire to anyone who ventured anywhere near their precious twosome and turning them into victims. Their famous “transparency” was like a charter of the powerful against the rabble of aspirants. Still, their relationship, which is unrepeatable, is to be interrogated; it shouldn’t be demonized, surely.

NO: What about Aragon’s relationship with Elsa?

JK: The myth of their couple protected him, in the same way as their membership in the Communist Party. There can be many reasons for joining a party, but in Aragon’s case it was clearly a way of ensuring himself against sexual risks. Against the distress inflicted by his own infidelity, in fact. He had a heartbreaking affair with Nancy Cunard that drove him to the verge of suicide and that he papered over in his worship of Elsa. Here is an ambivalent, unhappy instance of the sham couple, with extra poetry on the side. Other forms emerged following the death of Elsa Triolet, when Aragon owned up to his homosexuality. But we mustn’t forget the magnificent passages he wrote before that, on the female body and female jouissance, in Irene’s Cunt. Where he somehow cannibalizes the feminine, gobbling it up from inside. In this kind of infidelity tale one must keep in mind the bisexuality of both partners, which makes standard fidelity even more difficult. There again, truths that aren’t easily acknowledged.

PS: Bisexuality, there’s a subject with a future [laughter]!

JK: It certainly is! Although most people try to hide their bisexuality behind a mask, everybody’s thinking about it.

PS: I used to visit Aragon at home sometimes. Elsa Triolet was always barging unexpectedly into the study where we were chatting. It was strange. One day, she signed one of her books for me: “To Ph. S., maternally.” We never saw each other again.

NO: Another couple who made a mark on their time was Danielle and François Mitterrand.

JK: The mythical representation of coupledom responds to a social need. The unity of the group, especially a national group, is nurtured by the fantasy of the primordial union, the parental pair. This original cohesion myth, cracks and all, is what the political apparatus throws at the “popular masses” like wool over their eyes. We saw that in vaudeville mode in the United States, when rumors of Clinton’s cheating tainted—and rebooted—his career, and in Britain with the Charles and Diana saga. Nowhere but in France will the wife be seen standing next to the mistress at the funeral of a president.

PS: It would have been way more revolutionary to see at least three women—or five or ten, why not?—lined up for the funeral scene. Two comes across as rather stingy, a bit petit bourgeois, I find. France can boast of a grand tradition in that line. It deserved better. I felt let down, frankly. Mitterrand once told me he was a reader of Casanova. He seemed to be on the right path…Well, if the Americans were shocked, that’s something, at least!

NO: At the beginning of the century, the philosopher Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa swore an oath of abstinence. Wasn’t that a lovely way of keeping desire intact?

PS: Desire, what desire? You’re forgetting the third partner in the matter, namely God!

JK: Belief in God seems to steady a great many couples. The question is, who takes God’s place, now that people don’t believe anymore. I see quite a few people on the couch who replace God with the cult of arts and letters. Many couples who work together replace him with their business…

PS: Saying to each other: Let’s abstain for the good of the business [laughter]!

NO: So would you prefer, to Maritain’s faithful abstinence, the all-consuming passion extolled by Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World?

PS: There’s no whys or wherefores to passion. Fidelity responds to the question why, but passion is unjustifiable. Passion does what it wants, for good or ill. Rougemont’s thesis, as I recall, remains out-and-out romantic—Wagnerian. Amorous passion as inescapably leading to sacrifice and death. It’s a highly structured ideology and still hugely powerful today. As if passion necessarily had to be punished, as if love could only end in disaster. I object to that notion, quite violently. That’s not my idea of love. I’m more “Mozart for ever,”¹ as Godard put it; I’ve never been a Wagner man. No gloom, please. Fidelity, infidelity, those are concrete, social questions. Nothing wrong with them. But passion is redolent of a different era.

JK: Passion aspires to the absolute, while at the same time calling the absolute into question. We’re helpless against the violence of its excesses. They belong as much to the order of pleasure as to the order of destruction. Passion is enthusiasm and the proximity of death. It is joy and it is death. It is annihilation and jubilation. It is Shakespearean. An explosion, a fragmentation outside time. Whereas fidelity is inside time. I think Rougemont goes back to the pre-Freudian, premodern experience of love. From before Picasso, before Artaud, or, if you will, before sex shops and drag queens. It’s impossible not to know, these days, how fundamentally perverse and polymorphic sexuality is.

NO: Have you ever thought that one or other of you could succumb to passion, and are you prepared to fend off the unjustifiable, should it happen?

PS: In case you hadn’t noticed, let me point out that we’re in the middle of a grande passion right now [laughter]!

JK: We’re so imbued with ourselves, as individuals and as a couple, we find it hard to imagine that kind of situation [laughter]. Or at least to imagine any passion that could jeopardize the understanding between us. Things can be difficult when one parallel affection emerges more strongly than others, but due to our tacit philosophical collusion the other relationship fades out, or maybe it persists but in a lower key. My female patients often say, “He betrayed me” (men don’t complain so much; they’re too proud). As an analyst I understand them, but not as a person. To feel betrayed implies zero self-confidence, a narcissism so battered that the slightest affirmation of the other person’s individuality is felt as a crippling blow. The least mosquito bite has the impact of a nuclear bomb.

PS: To me, the idea that one passion contradicts another is a deplorable piece of sloppy thinking. I always see it as a throwback to the religiosity that poisons this kind of thing. The word passion should be employed in the plural. Up with the plural!

JK: Well, yes, but that assumes an individual who isn’t “one,” a plural individual. Is everyone able to live out several passions at once? I’m not sure they are. You’re speaking from the viewpoint of an artist or writer. The standard individual aims for a coherent, unified ego. The passions he or she experiences tend to cancel each other out.

PS: Well, I call that a mistake. Endless romanticism, endless nineteenth century…None of that stuff holds water today, I don’t think.

JK: Some people repress one passion to choose the other: they have an unconscious. Others separate and accumulate: they’re the polymorphic ones. I feel closer to the first. I guess I’m more conservative than you.

NO: But have you ever felt jealous?

JK: I don’t like other women enough to be jealous of them. It may be my problem, but still, what a relief!

PS: I say likewise: I’m not sufficiently attracted to men.

NO: While unfaithful men raise a smile, adulterous women are still severely judged. Has the lifestyle revolution of the last thirty years changed anything?

JK: Only on the surface. Feminism, along with the development of libertarian ideologies and the advance of technologies such as contraception, helped to liberate female sexuality. But I’d say that women are still being held back. A woman who gives free rein to her sexuality is tolerated, so long as she doesn’t have any other assets. But, if she exercises so-called responsibilities or has a good brain or is in a position to make a difference in social matters, as soon as she indulges her desire she becomes perceived as a threat. She becomes worse than unfaithful—she becomes a slut. That word is off limits these days, people use terms like unconventional or erratic or confine themselves to a knowing smirk…Most of the women who have been brought down in French political or media circles owe their disgrace to gossip or slander about their sex lives. There’s still this assumption that a woman must have slept her way to the top.

PS: Why, the staying power of that prejudice is appalling, it’s a secularized form of religious mania. Even so, I think that women’s scope for choosing their partners has considerably increased. And the more financially independent they become, the freer they’ll feel to assert what they do and don’t like.

NO: Choose their partners, yes. But have they really been accorded the right enjoyed by men, to have several partners at once?

PS: A certain degree of concealment remains the order of the day.

JK: Women obstinately prefer secrecy, no doubt to protect themselves. They won’t be caught shouting their affairs from the rooftops, the way men do so readily. This fear of female sexuality, this disapproval arises from the need for security. Society clings to the maternal image of a woman as someone who stays home to look after us. That’s why as soon as a high-profile woman indulges in sexual freedom, we feel threatened. The need to be kept safe by a faithful woman is deep-seated in Homo sapiens, in the archaism of the human makeup. We’re beginning to cast off this image, but there’s still a long way to go!

NO: To confess one has strayed or to keep it a secret, that’s the great dilemma for the couple even now.

JK: I don’t believe there can be secrecy, at least not total. Our skill at decoding sensations and behaviors is extremely subtle, and one can easily grasp a situation without it being spelled out. Besides, there’s no shortage of sneaks and gossips to spread the news. So, one always knows, definitely. Now: to tell or not to tell? Or, if you prefer, to confess or not? One can say things in a wounding manner, and one can say them in a way that shows respect for the other person. We’ve all met the kind of hyperliberated couple who detail each fling to the other with such sadomasochistic relish that the relationship finally breaks down. “Making a clean breast of it” can conceal the desire to crush both the secondary and the primary partner. It’s best to examine one’s personal motives first. Why tell? To what end? It’s often impossible to keep an affair secret, but honesty where that’s concerned is just as much of an illusion. A certain analytical attitude to passion is required, therefore.

PS: I’m all for secrecy (it so happens that one of my books is called The Secret) or at least for the utmost discretion. I don’t believe humans should ever have to justify their sexuality. It’s entirely their own responsibility. There’s no need to mention it, unless it is making them sick, in which case they’re welcome to go lie on your couch. One may be accountable in social, material, intellectual, emotional life—but never in sexual life. The notion of sexual control is inadmissible. I think, too, that social surveillance always tends to want to curb individual sexual freedoms. Totalitarianism was a nightmare in that respect, but the radiant democracy we are promised is given to repressive lurches all the time. At the present historical moment, one senses the resolve to bring us back to heel by whatever means, including religious fanaticism, closing in from everywhere. Secrecy is therefore necessary. It’s the very stuff of liberty. Now, let me amuse you with a dash of Kierkegaard, from his Diary of a Seducer: “As a woman, she hates me; as a talented woman, she fears me; as one with a good mind, she loves me.” Isn’t that splendid?

JK: Kierkegaard hijacks everything, doesn’t he [laughter]! Coming back to secrecy: it can protect, for sure, but it can just as well harm not only the person who is shut out but also, in another way, the “secret” pair themselves, huddled away in their asocial mystique. Lucidity is relevant here. I feel that people who have encountered analysis, and that includes those who’ve only read about it, are better at harmonizing the murderous side of their desires and the violent part of their passions. One mustn’t idealize freedom. Freedom can be lethal, too.