Marriage as a Fine Art

Julia Kristeva is a writer, psychoanalyst, and semiologist, professor emeritus at the University of Paris-7 Diderot, where I am the vice president in charge of cultural life and the university in the city. Julia Kristeva is doctor honoris causa at several universities abroad, a list to which the most recent addition is Haifa, Israel, where she was awarded that distinction on May 27, 2014. In 2004 she was the first laureate of the Holberg Prize, an equivalent to the Nobel Prize in the field of human sciences. She received the Hannah Arendt Prize in 2006 and the Václav Havel Prize in 2008. She defines herself as a “European citizen of Bulgarian origin, French nationality, and American adoption”—a cosmopolitan intellectual, in short. The best image for her trajectory is that of crossing frontiers, between countries, cultures, disciplines, and genres. Her motto? “I travel myself.” She is on her way.

The oeuvre of Philippe Sollers is well known: subversive, shimmering, nuanced, profuse, and veined with impudent elegance. On a worldlier level, let us recall that Philippe was born in Bordeaux, that he founded the magazine Tel Quel and its publishing arm in 1960, and then the magazine and publishers L’Infini in 1983; that he is the author of more than sixty books, a magazine director, an editor, an unearther of talents, and an insatiable reader. Philippe Sollers often muses on his singular “experience of limits” with regard to the words of the French language, apt to be buried under a flood of misunderstandings when writing, which is life, thinks its way through history and the passions in novelistic form. Among those words smothered by misunderstandings, the word love stands out. It is at once an insistently present word in contemporary society and a much abused one, since we live in a culture where sex is no longer an art but a technique, where encounters are often programmed on specialized websites, Prince Charming and his princess surfing the Internet in search of each other. They will recognize their mate according to compatibilities of age, weight, and height, to social criteria and financial standards; in no time they will be sharing their most intimate feelings with us in a television studio. And yet love, as we know, demands secrecy. This unstable object, this fragile thing, this dimly contoured thing is what we are going to explore tonight, with the help of woven words that will obey no preordained design. We have not conferred beforehand.

Julia Kristeva, on April 28, 2011, during our Festival of Enlightenment, you gave one of the “Encyclopedic Consultations,” entitled “Talk to Me of Love.” You spoke about love and the special place it occupies in your life, in our lives, in literature, in psychoanalysis. Tonight we are going to talk of love again. Philippe and Julia are a couple. We haven’t pronounced the word Joyaux [Jewels], that is, your real married name, but in all due secrecy and with all the discretion to which we are so attached, it’s true that there is a jewel in the story of this couple. We might be led to talk about it in retrospect, since one always talks about love in retrospect.

JK: Courtesy and parity oblige; I shall therefore sacrifice myself [laughter]. First of all, I thank the Cercle Bernard-Lazare for hosting this event and I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming along to listen to us this evening. It’s a hard test, for sure, to speak of love, because the subject eludes definition, as you just pointed out, Bernadette; so let me thank you as well, or you above all, for accepting the responsibility of introducing us and steering our exchanges. Love has not remained unchanged through the history that has stamped us, and it also varies over the course of our personal history. I presume you planned for me to speak first because I could be relied on to provide a general, brainy overview, and then the playfulness—there’s no avoiding play in love, is there?—might come into its own with the intervention of Philippe Sollers. Well, as it happens, I’d like to sidestep synthesis and solemnity, with the help of two dodges.

The first involves the feminine genius, supposedly expert on matters of love. Of the three women whose portraits I’ve sketched (Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette), Colette—the most renowned for “those delights so carelessly described as physical”—is also the one who didn’t like the word love. “That uninflected word,” she wrote, “is not enough for me.” She goes on to cite a “trans-Pyrenean philosopher” who only ever used one word for any negative experience or thing: filth. In the same way, she in substance went on, some people are so incapable of nuance that “they only have one word for ‘love,’ which is equally absurd.” So she vowed to avoid using that word, that “good fat love,” because the experience of love can only be conveyed through metaphors and stories. The depressive, jealous young woman of the early years in Paris, saddled with her fickle husband Willy, became a writer; she narrated Claudine’s life and her own, the dawning of the day, the pure and the impure, right down to the very fabric of the world composed of erotic shivers, flowers and animals, nudity and spells…And always love, directly and indirectly, as far as it’ll go.

I faced up in my own way to this perilous definition, this improbable encapsulation, by writing Tales of Love:¹ a book that intermingled the stories I was hearing from my patients, their accounts of obviously unbearable situations, with the metamorphoses undergone by the emotion of love in Western culture. Beginning with Plato’s Symposium, the priestess Diotima and the maze of homosexual affects that led to a universal philosophy of Goodness and Beauty, and moving on of course to the Song of Songs, my favorite text about being in love, which ushered in—for the first time anywhere, I believe—the possibility of a man and a woman being in love. Pure poetry, braided into a philosophy of the impossible and bursting with joy, even so. To me, the most fascinating thing about the Song is that, although many scholars agree that the author was King Solomon, it is the woman who is shown theatrically exulting in her love of their love. For the first time in history, the voice of a woman in love is heard! The amorous discourse in Judaism, and for all who are attentive to its message, is the work of a woman in love.

The Christian experience—“God is love,” “In the beginning was love,”—clearly takes up and develops this nuptial song, by way of an astonishing investigation into the bond of love, which is at once physical and rhetorical. While discouraging-cum-purifying the yearnings of the flesh, it comes up with a host of psychological subtleties and stylistic acrobatics. Henceforward love excels at languages and the arts; they become inextricable. And, as Catholic mysticism elevates the paradoxes of love (Everything-love, Nothing-love, Being-love, Void-love), the vocabulary of philosophy is forged and the way is prepared for baroque art.

The history of European civilization and its dissemination on other continents modulate this amatory idiom, diversify and propagate it: there’s courtly love, romantic love, Stendhal’s love in red and black, the amour fou of the surrealists, Artaud’s love in smithereens, Bataille’s incestuous love, and Joyce’s ironic Greco-Judeo-Christian love, the same as that hidden in the chuckle of Sollers’s concise French…Love leads us into a tireless investigation of language, and I ask you to consider that love only abides, only exists, by virtue of our capacity to strain toward the telling of this unfathomable, unnameable back and forth between two.

And the present? Modern life has trivialized hard sex,² which is not to say that it has altogether cleared it of guilt; around back rooms and S&M sessions, neurosis carries on undeterred, embedded in orgies, encysted into the lining of “sexual liberation.” Perhaps love can be found within “values” or what remains of them? But where are they? At the summit of the state? In the zeal of spiritual souls, themselves outflanked by fundamentalists and assorted fanatics? Love finds refuge in hidden complicities and in families, whatever else you may say about them, and it cohabits with hate, which a dash of affection, lightheartedness, and, most definitely, childhood can still salvage from disaster. Modernity’s luck turned up in the person of an atheist Jew, Dr. Sigmund Freud, who “discovered the unconscious,” or so the books tell us. But what did he really discover? That God is in the unconscious and hell as well? Theologians knew that already. That all men are babies, and women too, but somewhat less? Mothers have known that since time immemorial. The Viennese neuropsychiatrist discovered that unhappiness is a love blocked, in waiting. So he put it on the couch. Tell me what ails you; you will be addressing a discourse of love to me, but you don’t have to know that. Pain-love, failure-love, will be transformed into therapy by your remembered stories. It won’t heal you, in the strict sense, but it will truly make you feel better: new projects, new encounters…

Just before Christmas 1965, as the director of the literature institute had gone up to Moscow, my thesis supervisor advised me to apply to the cultural service at the French embassy. My parents had had the excellent notion of making me learn French, ever since kindergarten with the Dominican nuns, and my studies in Romance philology and the thesis topic impressed the cultural attaché: I could leave right away. I had to leave right away, before the director of the institute came back and foreseeably stopped me. The grant would only arrive at the end of January, my father could only come up with five dollars, and a friend would be waiting for me at Le Bourget—but he never showed…I’ve often told this story, you’ll find it in my novel, The Samurai.³

I got to Paris on Christmas Eve; it was snowing; the French didn’t have a clue about snowplows; they still don’t; my thin boots let water in; the Parisians weren’t dressed the way they are in the (rare) copies of Elle and Vogue that ever made it to the Alliance Française, and I had no ticket home…Regardless, I went straight to the lectures given by Roland Barthes and then signed up for more with Gérard Genette. They explained to me that the “nouveau roman” had been supplanted by the “nouveau ‘nouveau roman,’” and that I absolutely must meet the top practitioner in that genre, Philippe Sollers. I’d never heard the name before, so I rushed to the national library in rue de Richelieu and looked up the last issue of Clarté (the Communist Youth magazine). There I found the photograph in profile of a most awesome young man, given that he set out in just one page how, in order to change a society, you first had to change its language. The surrealists and the Russian futurists (Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and the linguist Jakobson himself) had already put forward that idea, but I hadn’t expected to see it expounded all over again in French, and with such stylish aplomb. I asked him for an interview. He welcomed me in his small office at the Seuil publishing house. He was as handsome, if not handsomer, than in the photo, the antithesis of your typical writer, a skinny, stammering sort as a rule; he had the confident swagger of a soccer player. And to cap it all, here was someone who seemed to listen, who took an interest in my reading, in cultural life such as it is in a communist country…You have to remember the context of the time: France had just emerged from the Algerian war, everyone seemed so cagey—Christmas, wrapped gifts, the crowds in the big stores, Christmas mass in Notre-Dame, nobody looking at anybody else, and suddenly I meet this lively, genial writer…We stuck together from then on, he took me to the Île de Ré and introduced me to his family, and our encounter carries on: every day a fresh encounter. That’s about it…

PHILIPPE SOLLERS: In the office where I used to receive the writers and thinkers of the day, who do I see come in but a young woman of twenty-five, perfectly gorgeous, who claims to be a student from Bulgaria [laughter]. Well, now, have a seat, what’s your business? And though she’s a student, I find that she speaks impeccable French, with a faint accent that is sadly on the way out now, but was very musical and charming. I hold on to my cool…[laughter]. Later, but not immediately: there was no instant bid for appropriation. So, me keeping my cool, as I said; I’m listening and then I think: she’s about to ask me all kinds of trite studenty questions; it’s going to be a pain; college students are there to be manipulated, infiltrated, subverted, but this one being from Bulgaria, on a student grant, very sweet I’m sure, but then again she’s going to ask me all those idiotic questions, French-type questions. Give me a break…But suddenly (smart of her!) she starts on stuff I know something about, but not much, such as the Russian futurists, poets like Mayakovsky, people who back then were eliminated by Stalinism to make way for the monumental stupidity of socialist realism—you know the kind of thing, paintings of tractors and Picasso as decadent artist. So I’m listening with the greatest interest and thinking to myself, hey, at last someone with a different perspective or a different experience than everyone else. Naturally she brings up that great linguist Roman Jakobson—who we met later; he became a friend of ours—and I say to myself: Ah, remarkable scope, this girl is really very interesting, not only extremely pretty but highly intelligent to boot, so I’m going to ask her out to dinner [laughter]. Do you see? It’s what they call a coup de foudre, a lightning strike, but this one struck quickly and for keeps: like you meet someone and you know straightaway that it’s going to last. It was a weird feeling, because there are strikes that have faded away by morning and nocturnal strikes that are not necessarily of lightning. So something else must be going on. And sure enough we went to dinner, to La Coupole—a different place in those days—and it’s true to say we fairly stuck together after that. Did I kiss her that night, at Duroc metro station? I tried to. And she, very cleverly, because she’s a great chess player, in life as with her patients and in every way; she hung back awhile, to drive the pressure up, and that’s how a pretty major event finally took place.

The first thing I noticed about Julia is that she was at once identified as a foreigner. Now, let me tell you what love is: love of the other, which happens to be the name for it tonight; something that develops very quickly in certain individuals, inasmuch as they feel alien not only to themselves but aliens in their country and as their very identity. If you don’t feel foreign yourself, you’ll never meet a person from abroad, not even if they live next door. In my case, for biographical reasons, I felt like a “stranger” from the start, which reminds me of the title of a splendid book of Julia’s, Strangers to Ourselves,⁴ posing the question about identity, because “I is another,” as Rimbaud said. If one hasn’t felt that way from early on, owing to language, to a bunch of experiences and so forth, one has absolutely no chance of escaping those prejudices and clichés that are historically so overwhelming and, by the way, have come back with a vengeance, as you’ll have noticed. It’s also a matter of politics, and one has to be aware, where that’s concerned, of the foreignness one carries inside. If I hadn’t been possessed by that fundamental feeling of foreignness, I’d never have become close to a strange foreigner. Roland Barthes published a splendid text in defense of Julia, during a period when she’d come under attack, called “The Foreign Woman,”⁵ which defines all that, all those xenophobic prejudices of the French. Plus, a woman who actually thinks, beware! So, episode one: the far-right press basically accuses her of being a special envoy of Soviet espionage—yes, pretty dumb, thank you very much; but what’s worse is that she falls sick. She has a Bulgarian passport, a hammer and sickle passport. We wait in Accident and Emergency together, at the Cochin Hospital, and it turns out there’s no room to put her in; she’s out in the corridor because, you know: “Who’s this person? Where’s she from? Do you know where she’s from?” Etc. We got married for thoroughly practical reasons, to be honest, because she was already getting offers from the United States; she’d fast been spotted as a brilliant scholar. Enough about that. “Honoris causa,” that’s her nickname at home, she’s honoris causa here and honoris causa there [laughter], there’s no end to it; she’s honoris causa in Haifa—what do the people demand? I can answer that: Julia Honoris Causa. I’m a traitor to my social class; I’ve deprived my lady suitors of a highly eligible chap, hence my dreadful reputation, no need to look any farther. Worse, I hail from an Anglophile bourgeois family who listened to the broadcasts of Radio Londres in 1940, “The French talking to the French, here are some personal messages…” Our first floor was occupied by the Germans we listened to Radio Londres in the attic, and in the cellar we hid the English airmen who had to be smuggled into Spain. Foreignness, foreignness…

PS: Together we fell into a dialogue that never stopped, we are still deep into a conversation with no end in sight, because it’s full of arguments; though we don’t always see eye to eye, the intensity of the conversation never flags. It was a physical coup de foudre without a doubt, but also an intellectual one—the two combined; I’d wish for everyone to experience the same thing, the essential encounter, really. So, regarding “love of the other,” what it means is that I expected the other—and still expect the other who is myself—to surprise me. That’s what keeps us together, more connected than ever, I’d say, for other reasons that have to do with each of our lives.

PS: Fusion? One of the two always winds up as the victim. No good. This is something we’ve actively thought about, of course. I always come back to the Chinese yin and yang: unlike what the West has always imagined, two people are not supposed to merge into one. Metaphysically, for the West, union means fusion. Whereas, from the Chinese point of view, as soon as you have two, you have four. How? Her feminine side will never be the same as mine; my masculine side will never equate to hers, so that makes four of us. A two-way dialogue in which respectful, loving parity between the two consists of knowing they’re a foursome.

Any meeting is first and foremost the collision of one childhood with another. Her childhood interests me, since we were born in such different countries. I ought to learn her language, but she is absolutely extraordinary in her understanding of mine. She comes from a damaged, tragic part of the world, witness the death of her father; she wrote a beautiful book about that, actually, The Old Man and the Wolves.⁶ It dealt with the totalitarian, Stalinist regime of the time…How can one become solidary with a childhood that wasn’t in the least bit shared, except by holding on to the ways of childhood? We two act like kids together, we communicate like kids: I make her laugh a lot, for example. You wouldn’t think so, but she can laugh her head off…I make her laugh, and she makes me scared when it’s called for, and so on. We play hide-and-seek in this relationship, like children. Here’s a possible definition of love: you only love someone when you recognize the child in yourself and in the other, for the other.

The romantic notion of couplehood hankers after osmosis, after fusion. It’s a charming, adolescent, fabulous idea: everyone loves a fairy tale, and I’m no exception, but I make fun of the clichés stuck fast to my eternal damsel’s skin—I often hum that Marilyn Monroe number, “I’m incurably romantic,” to entertain Philippe and our son David, who don’t actually believe a word: they think I’m all Doctor Honoris Causa. In the heat of passion, during orgasm, when the lovers project themselves into time and into death, fusion really does occur. It is ek-static: love and death, exuberant draining of energies and identities, “I am the other,” fusion and confusion of the man and the woman. Freud affirmed that only genitality “breaks through group ties,” and this acme of the “primal scene” is also the apogee of freedom, at once a mighty antidepressant and the occasion of greatest fragility. In parallel, the endurance of the couple in time is a permanent composition, in the musical sense, implying the tact necessary for recognizing the foreignness of the other and the self and allowing that to flourish. Not swallowing up the other in a pseudofusion that ultimately proves to be dominated by the narcissism of one partner alone, either the man or the woman, but continuing to construct the difference, and even the foreignness, of the partner. His strangeness—his oddities—can be disconcerting and annoying; I get mad sometimes, I show it, I let it out—a little, not too much—tactfully, because one can’t always be in harmony, and storms are part of the encounter. But the atmosphere clears as our deep-seated affinity sorts out any discord, and the rhythm of the composition resumes.

JK: That emotional and intellectual attunement between us struck me at once—we both felt it, I think. We found so much to say, to share, to learn…For it wasn’t just the marquis de Sade profile and the sporty legs that seduced me. It was even more, perhaps, or certainly just as much, the speed at which you used to read, and still do…The first book we read together, in bed in your study at Le Martray, was Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: I was still on the first paragraph when you were turning the page…And saying to me, “You don’t weigh anything, how strange, a body with no weight.” What could a young Bulgarian student from Sliven have in common with you, you with the left-wing Catholic family you mentioned just now, your schooling at the Lycée Montaigne, then with the Jesuits; a survivor of the Algerian War where your friends lost their lives, then Mauriac–Aragon–Le Seuil, a Médicis Prize, “the beloved of his fairies” (the words are Breton’s), and all the rest of it. You who transcended asthma and other frail-little-boy illnesses by throwing yourself headlong into rugby and soccer…

I was talking about our irreconcilable, but sharable, forms of foreignness. The son of Bordeaux, and proud of it, that you were, along with your Bordeaux family—they, admittedly, after some minor qualms—made me generously welcome. Exile continued to be a trial, of course. I am addressing an audience who knows about exile and knows that this tragedy can also be a stroke of luck. Because the rejection, the exclusion, the sense of being an intruder or usurper imposed on us by the “entitled,” those who “belong by rights,” push us to the margins: we’re not “one of them.” And from that boundary a critical gaze is possible, the freest of all gazes in that it’s detached from the belonging assumed to be normal and natural. Provided, of course, one doesn’t fall into the cult of “origins,” wallowing in nostalgia for some long-lost “native homeland”…Only then does foreignness become a necessary condition for independent thought. “The thinking life is an outsider’s life,” said the Greeks, echoed by Hannah Arendt, and Proust anticipated her by including among the “outsiders” homosexuals, artist, and writers…

Of course, for each one of you, for each of us, there will be different reasons for the pain inflicted by exile and for the reversal of that pain into liberty of thought. For my part, the metamorphosis that I’m sounding out with you here is owed, firstly, to the person of Philippe, who incessantly writes his own foreignness, but also to his family, and to my own family, whom I don’t forget, and who surrounded me with love. This “portmanteau” word should here be understood as a linkage that instills in the child the indispensable trust that I call the “need to believe”: the foundation and condition of the “desire to know,” which is then in a position to scrutinize the “belief” to the point of abolishing it if need be. In this way, given that I believe—in the sense of an impregnable certainty—that I am loved, that Dad loves me, say, that Mom loves me, well, then, not even jealousy has the power to poison me. So-and-so doesn’t love me, he prefers someone else, a rival or rivals, competition muddying my path? So what, he’s wrong! I don’t care!

JK: Or she, of course. She, my sister, my mother. Such prototypes of my relationships with women taught me to respect difference on this terrain, too, to recognize my deficiencies, but also to place my bets on solidarity and devotion or, may I say, the gift of self? My sister was a brilliant violinist, a student of Oistrakh’s at the Moscow Conservatory. Whereas I, alas, while adoring music and admiring her artistry, couldn’t sing a note. It never once occurred to me to get upset about that failing. To each their kingdom, their uniqueness. Was it my mother’s capacity to give herself to her two daughters, to her husband, her family, that impressed on me the value of giving, intrinsic to love, and superior to excellence?

One day there was a game on Bulgarian radio; you had to answer the question: “What is the fastest form of transportation in the world?” and send in your reply with an illustrative drawing. “A plane,” said my little sister. “A rocket,” I corrected. “Thought,” was our mother’s answer. I was at the age when girls try to act like cheeky boys, so I retorted smugly: “That doesn’t work, you can’t draw thoughts!” Mom was very good at drawing. With a few strokes of the pencil she sketched a snowman with a droopy head—the snow was melting under a sunbeam—being orbited by a Sputnik released from a rocket. “Man may die, yet his thought conquers the Universe.” We sent in the answer and the drawing…under my name. I won. For my mother, this devotion was simply normal: it wasn’t any kind of sacrifice, nothing but the transmission of the gift of self. We transcend ourselves together; you can receive without fear of losing your way; thought belongs to women, too, moves between women, yin or yang; it’ll never melt; we are part of it, co-present for evermore.

I think back to that incident whenever, in our couple or family life, love becomes care. The loved one is never an “object of care”; he or she provides it along with me.

JK: Concern for the childlike part of the other, which prompts me as a woman—wife or mother—to identify with this infant state, its avidity, its distress, its desire for an ideal performance. I participate in that alchemy; I shadow the impulse; I turn into a tot or a teen myself. All of the temporal phases of life are telescoped, revoked, suspended in that instant of…of love, if we still want to use that unwieldy word. But such an enigmatic, such a singular instant…No, it can’t be turned into a model or held up as a pattern, certainly not! It makes me think of that outside-time that maybe I encounter in the transference-countertransference process, which then becomes communicable…

BB: Exactly. In Treasure of Love—I adore that title, dear Philippe—you write with reference to Stendhal: “Love is like finding a relative who had passed away. His gaze pierces through death, and around him teems a wealth of vivid details: shapes, sounds, colors, scents. Love is born of life being written.”⁷ And what we glimpse in Julia’s very beautiful, very rich contribution, especially toward the end, is the thread linking love and creativity. So maybe we’ll go back to the theme of love in analysis, since every love story is written on the couch…Well, that’s not how you write it, Philippe. A psychoanalyst knows that all stories come down to talking about love, but: “Love is born of life being written.” When you were twenty-one, you wrote in A Strange Solitude: “When we are very young we want love to have an ambiguous, unfamiliar character, as if derived from a magical tradition.”⁸ Once again we’re in the land of childhood. I’d like you to say more about the link between love and creativity.

Stendhal wrote the following amazing sentence, casually, just like that: “Love has always been the greatest concern of my life, or rather, the sole concern.” You know his epitaph, which he wrote in Italian: “He lived, he wrote, he loved.”⁹ Love grows out of expertise. Expertise in what? Well, I’m going to use a word that…oh, too bad: in magic! That’s right, it’s magic, or something like magic. Now you don’t come across magical people very often, but still, there are a few. It’s in Shakespeare, you know, magic, so there you go. Mustn’t say it too loud, but it’s true for a fact, love consists in making magic. White magic, of course: when it’s black, it’s dreadful. Magic exists: there are fairies and there are witches. I prefer fairies.

BB: Julia, in Tales of Love, you suggest that deep down all human stories are love stories. After all, if there’s one subject we never tire of, it’s that one! With regard to the topic that has brought us here tonight—“Love of the other”—I might perhaps formulate the matter another way: the incredibly strong and beautiful experience you just described lifts one out of oneself, out of one’s territory, to approach the foreignness of the other, forge ties to the other, to their difference. It makes us bring a different gaze to bear on those around us and on our relationships with others. In our fragmented societies, too many walls are put up, boundaries, exclusions. You mentioned them in the context of young Julia’s arrival in France, but it seems to me that this has hardly changed. In fact, it’s become worse.

JK: Is love implicated in the social realm, or not? Can there be any possible deployment or extension of amorous logics across the public sphere? I’ll start my attempt at an answer by emphasizing, firstly, as ever, the destructiveness which love is helpless to staunch or eradicate; the best love can do is adjust it, contain it, or, best of all, sublimate it. Hatred never disappears in love nor in ourselves as speaking creatures: all living beings have aggressive urges, and humans of both sexes are inhabited by affects consisting of urges accompanied by psychic representation, and, of these, hate is older than love. This is something discovered by psychoanalysis; could that be one reason for the distrust leveled toward it by religious and even humanist moralisms? What’s more, the hate object, unlike the love object, never disappoints. Sentimental idealism imposes the myth of “pure love” (I’m thinking of quietists like Mme Guyon). However, as soon as the love bond acknowledges the partner’s foreignness and “plays the game” as a doubles match (taking the psychic bisexuality of both sides on board), then aggression and hatred rise to the surface again.

JK: Foreign, alien? Right from the start, I realized that my conduct in love, too, had to be of a kind suited to times of war. I found out much later that “my” saint, Teresa of Avila, thought the same way. “I don’t agree with you”: on the subject of China, perhaps, embraced by Philippe with all his vast cultural memory, so that he’s apt to transfigure the constraints of global finance and Confucian bureaucracy; or maybe on the subject of humanism, skewered by Philippe as flabby thinking, while he mocks my wish to refound it through the transvaluation of religious legacies—well, you can imagine the furious rages that erupt between us in the course of such apparently abstract disputes…Our tempers are just as much fired by disagreements over our social circles or the elections or celebrities, etc. And yet our clear-cut positions eventually align into harmony without necessarily getting planed down.

There. Thank you. And if one can’t bear that silence or can’t hear it—because it’s not a matter of endurance but of hearing, accompanying, seeing it, even…

JK: From that point on, in the psychic space thus constructed in tandem, movements and actions may unfold that, notwithstanding their private nature, also have a social implication—coming back to the “fragmented societies” you mentioned before, Bernadette. Responsibility, solidarity, care, friendship, these become more lucid and committed, as much between ourselves as with our close relatives, colleagues, and friends, or in civic involvement. And let’s not forget parenthood, which is absolutely crucial: our closeness to our son David, to his early learning, his schooling, his love affairs, his coming to maturity…The underlying love experience is refracted through such multiple facets of our “living together,” as people say now. And do you know what it all leads to, this depth and diffusion of love? To work, to works, and to actions…Work, works, actions…That’s all. Clearly.

In the end, you’ve brought me from the deeps to the surface, and I realize that I’m talking about a love that’s not paraded. One that stands apart from chimera love, I’d say, in the intelligence or plenitude of love, in a place that is not always accessible to what’s commonly called “love.” What should it be called, then? An insight from “my” Teresa comes to mind: “We cannot be liberated from demons without being liberated from God, that is, from love.” Well, then, perhaps the crimes and technologies of modern times invite us to chase after demons, to transvalue the divine, and, without liberating us from love, to liberate love, infinitely. To become the point where this infinite liberation acquires body and meaning.

PS: Ah, yes, hatred…The more you hear of love bandied about in vacuous, rom-com, show-biz, magazine-flogging, commodified terms, be warned, the more hatred lurks beneath. The falser the love—and it’s very seldom genuine, by the way—the greater the hate, which is older than love, as Freud points out. Lacan came up with a very fine formula which is his concept of hainamoration, “hatelove”: a form of love, but love unto death, crazy love. Not amour fou in the surrealist sense; Breton’s book of that title is a magnificent work; Breton stands for freedom, love, and poetry. What I should have said earlier is that, for me, love is freedom; it’s the opposite of slavery. Hate, Madam questioner, well, yes, it keeps popping up, over and over: look, there it is again. But I don’t see why everyone gives it so much publicity. For example, I find it very strange how people keep going on about the Front National, however critically. If I had the power, something God forbid, I’d put a stop to it: new subject! Haven’t you got anything else to talk about? There are periods, I feel, when the whole world rushes with righteous and hypocritical indignation to denounce hatred, racism, antisemitism, and all that. It rings curiously false; to my ears, it’s like everybody wants the same thing. Of course, they’ll say, “Oh, not at all!” but, when I hear “Not at all!” chorused over and over on every TV channel, I get a weird feeling, and that’s what I’m feeling now as I try to give you an answer.

JK: What I’ve attempted to express tonight is based on my personal experience, but it won’t have escaped your notice that psychoanalysis has been subjacent throughout, with Freud often being cited, even though I didn’t always make my allusions explicit. Allow me to insist on the point. By putting symptoms and traumas on the couch, Freud turned amorous folly, amorous failure, want of love, and hate itself into objects of observation or, better said, of interpretation; in other words, of forgiveness. The word should be written with a hyphen: to for-give¹¹—to give meaning to the ill-being that is rooted in your particular love disaster. It can be achieved if we transfer love on the couch, you and I, during our encounter; if we try to elucidate, revive, and rebirth it, make it new again. It doesn’t always work, but it can work: for-giveness opens up time to infinity.

Because, unlike religious forgiveness, interpretation during transference does not erase or suspend the ill-being, the fault, the guilt, or even the crime, it merely elucidates and strives to unpick them. Lacan put us on guard: psychoanalysis must not become an “understanding moralism.” Instead, an accompanying—a companionship in love, if I may put it like that. On condition of taking that concept to the edge of the unconscious and of biology, where war, hatred, laughter, and silence play out. A unique companionship, tailored to each individual, to help one become once more capable of forging the ties of love, according to a greater or lesser aptitude for this infinite reconstruction.

If you’ve followed me thus far, it will be clear that psychoanalysis, as I understand it, with and after Freud, has something to say to religions, nationalisms, and fundamentalisms. All of them, in effect, expound “lovers’ discourses”—about God, the identity of a people, the absolute—that are clenched into hatred of the other, of identity, of the nation, of the absolute…

JK: These forms include gangster fundamentalism or jihadism. The spreaders of this “radical ailment” are mostly very young men, fragile, uncertain youths; but there are also splintered adults, prey to the same yearning for ideals and hunger for absolute satisfaction, “madmen of God” and/or of love. In this way I seek to underline, along with Kant and Arendt, the propensity of some human beings to declare other human beings superfluous and set about exterminating them. Wars without front lines, viral wars are breaking out in our cities, subways, Jewish schools, editorial offices; hostages are beheaded and the inevitable videos posted, to instill abject terror in miscreants around the world.

These fanatics, patching up their crumbling psyches with odds and ends of religion taken to extremes, these gangster fundamentalists who have lost all sense of right and wrong, of self and other, of inside and outside, embody a real anthropological disintegration and thus a radical phase of the nihilism that threatens all globalized cultures. Family breakdown; displacement or exile; educational failure; unfulfilling jobs, social discrimination, and sexual frustration, all these whip them into near-hypnotic states, bereft of both the self and the other: desubjectified and deobjectified at once. It’s no solution condemning and bombing them while exhibiting them onscreen before, during, or after a decapitation as they revel in the victim’s humiliation and death. It is possible to preempt this dehumanization: to step in as soon as a child seems disturbed at school, in the community. It’s not true to say that they were “average, normal kids” and “nobody noticed anything wrong.”

JK: The fanatic’s “difference,” which is the compensation of pain in maniacal mode, exalting a wishful neoreality, climaxes with the fantasy of an absolute paradise—possession of every female, access to every amenity, lavish wealth, compliant and restorative community, etc.—in short, total Love on tap. In this unbounded neoreality, killing acs like a drug, on top of the substance abuse encouraged by the arms and drugs mafias. In my view, of all the “sciences of the mind,” psychoanalysis is the best equipped to spot and diagnose such dangers before their morbid effects take hold. And it’s through the analyst’s involvement in transference—that is, through the therapist’s psychic affective proximity and her clinical knowledge of this radical illness, that she or he can become the linchpin of the process of screening and accompanying these morbid agents engaged in their viral war on civilization. Because, I repeat, analytic interpretation is consubstantial with the transference-countertransference love upon which it relies and from which it springs.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What do you think of Lacan’s statement, that “love is giving something one doesn’t have to a person who doesn’t want it”?

I often felt he was misunderstood by those he cared for, unlucky in love. The sentence you quoted, like the one where he says “There is no such thing as sexual rapport,” was targeting the fantasies of complete fulfillment harbored by lovers who deny lack and the set of negative emotions at work in the sexual act and the bond of love. Furthermore, in his theory, the role of instinctual urges and the investment of transference by the analyst’s countertransference are not given their due place. As for jouissance, which according to him can’t be uttered—any more than truth—it seems to me that both the history of literature and the ethics of psychoanalysis have set themselves the challenge of uttering and writing it: without end in sight, certainly, but without restrictions either. His assertion that in love “one gives something one doesn’t have to someone who doesn’t want it” is only valid for the dance, or trance, of seduction. There are lasting love relationships, of the kind we’ve discussed tonight, that go beyond this vaudeville. These other forms of loving, while always being errant, search and innovate by means of a sensitive, reciprocal intelligence, to which the love you were referring to has no real access.