After “God is dead,” which at first sounded like liberation, after its martyrdom in Auschwitz and the gulag and in the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers in New York, we know that a single religion remains: that of Love. It is enough to turn on any screen on our globalized planet to see it: reality shows probe the secrets of love, soap operas fan the flames, quarrels, and tears of love, actresses and actors become bodies that sell love, when actors do not kill their actresses (the reverse has yet to be added to the repertory), always out of love, and for real—in any case, that is what is happening. That is life.
More than two thousand years ago, rabbis hesitated including the Song of Songs in the Bible, the amorous song attributed to King Solomon, uttered through the mouth of a woman, which would become the model of the romantic discourse of modernity. I tended to disapprove when I was younger and not yet psychoanalytical enough. Rereading these sage ancient debates today, it would be pretentious to say I understand them, but I’m getting there. I thank all those who have made this translation of my writings into Hebrew possible for the first time, and I will try to explain myself briefly.
1It is true that as an adolescent I already wondered what the glamorous word Love might actually mean, since it seemed everyone who used it, around me or in books, gave it a different meaning—an obscure meaning that could only be shared in its dazzle. I succumbed to love, naturally, and my sixties and seventies were as romantic and erotic as yours. However, I dare say it is not age that is making me more “rabbinical” today, but listening to history and the new maladies of the soul.
We attribute the subjective exaltation of the Western subject to romantic sentiment and to the focus of metaphysics on romantic sentiment, which ends up enclosed within its own psychical space and cultivates narcissism and egotism, the modern nihilistic ravages of which we are all too familiar with: destruction of values and other dismissals of the Concern for Being. I would say, on the contrary, that humanity has been made more lucid by the fact of finding Eros and its twin, Thanatos, at the source of the mental activity specific to the human race, the Western philosophical and aesthetic experience, from Plato by way of Judeo-Christian-Muslim monotheism, the troubadours, humanism, romanticism, not to mention Sade and Proust, a long trajectory to which I devoted Tales of Love (1985). More lucid, not better, certainly, but often more ambitious, active, cynical, and cruel, as well as more caring, compassionate, perverse, and complex. Human, too human, surely—the reason Nietzsche revolted—but “human” in the sense that, beyond any personalist complacency, the love of God inspired the inhuman ecstasies of St. Teresa as well as the laughter of Mozart and the extrahuman polyphony of Bach.
When Love gives itself an absolute object—after creating psychical space, as the carrier wave of language and the vector of inquiry that constitutes thought—and is strangled in the celebration of the Identical and the Absolute, in the veneration of dogma or the possession of Truth and the Other, thus signing the death sentence of thought and life, this Love becomes the troubled water that (I imagine) made the rabbis hesitate around the first millennium. I agree with them. Or, to be more precise, I agree with the most concerned, modern, cosmopolitan, i.e., paradoxical, among them—none other than Sigmund Freud, when, at the dawn of the twentieth century this time, he laid Love down on the couch.
It is not enough to say romantic passion is a neurosis, indeed, a psychosis, to denounce the sentimental impasses in which the speculative bubble has submerged human beings in the globalized world, or to lance the abscess of fundamentalism in which religious fanatics pour the coffers of various mafias who rejoice. Despite its patient listening, despite its detailed interpretations that engage countertransference (we might as well say the analyst’s love), psychoanalysis itself is not protected from the loss of control that the narcissistic psychosis of fundamentalists generate. Any more than it is protected, in a more ordinary way, from mental laziness. But it keeps watch over itself, too, and that is already a lot. Beside it, against it, or in complicity with it, could art and literature, philosophy and science, each in its own way, help x-ray, help weave and unweave this amorous tie without which human beings make no sense, but in which the sense of the human condition is also enchained, blinded, wasted?
Let’s consider three female geniuses: Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Melanie Klein (1882–1960), and Colette (1873–1954).
Arendt, while eager to defend the singularity of the “who” threatened by totalitarianisms, did not take refuge in solipsistic incantation. Against the isolation of philosophers, whose “melancholic tribe” she mocks, and against the anonymity of crowds, in which “one” is dissolved, this theoretician of imperialism and anti-Semitism, the persecutions of which she underwent, this woman “faithful and unfaithful” to Heidegger, this student of Jaspers, whose first work was a thesis on “The Concept of Love in St. Augustine,” calls for a political life capable of assuring the originality of every person in the bonds of memory and the narrative destined to others.
Klein, meanwhile, radically transforms the Freudian hypothesis of an original narcissism and posits an “ego” from the beginning of the baby’s psychical life capable of “object relations” (with part objects) before the object relationship to the “total object” following the “depressive position.” “Repairing,” i.e., loving, speaking, and thinking then become possible.
Finally, the amorous Colette, endlessly betrayed and endlessly betraying, declared herself beyond romantic passion, “one of the great banalities of existence” from which one had to escape, provided one was capable of participating in the plurality of the world—in a fulfillment of the ego through a multitude of “gay, varied, and plentiful” connections.
These philosophical, psychoanalytical, and literary female adventures—as experiences of the collapse of political, psychical, and aesthetic connections, and unconsciously of amorous ties—have surveyed the destruction of states, thoughts, and lives. With the conviction, however, that, in spite of everything, ties can be reconstructed. In politics: through pardon, promise, and discernment. In psychoanalysis: through the working out of the death drive that ruins the possibility of thought. In literature: through finding the mot juste that savors and shares the flesh of the world. So many variations on love. Differently and conjointly, Arendt, Klein, and Colette relieve it of its fanatic core and, by defusing it, transform it into availability, proximity, psychical, political, and aesthetic creativity.
Can this love attained by the genius of Arendt, Klein, and Colette—a gay, varied, and plentiful love—still be labeled love?
A report on television told the story of a song in six countries in the Balkans, my place of origin. The single melody everyone in this region knows had become the basis of six different texts celebrating six meanings of love, a spectrum that went from eroticism between a man and a woman to a prayer addressed to Allah to a warlike exhortation to conquer a threatened territory and uncertain national identity. Each of the nations surprisingly enamored of this song, each of the singers transfixed by the words of his/her desire, thought he or she was the origin, source, and truth of this melody, at times languishing and tender, at times quick and saucy, at times vengeful or flirtatious. Each was persuaded that the neighboring and opposing version was a usurping of this national purity that each was alone in possessing, as a result of which the singers (sometimes female, more often male) in love with their song, itself in love with the beloved and/or God, said that they were ready to go to war with their neighbor so as to allow their own voice, history, and … love to triumph. “Make love, not war,” we chanted, not so long ago. Is anyone still unaware that this antinomy is not one?
I am persuaded, and I think I have demonstrated with Colette, that the path of romantic connection realized by this writer is the private face of her atheism: vindictive and showy in her youth, serene and firm in her maturity.
2 Colette’s deconstruction of the amorous link, which is the basis of faith, probably constitutes the most precious, most unexpected gift she bequeathed not only to feminists but to our civilization as a whole, which clings to passionate neurosis as if it could rise up as a substitute for the loss of transcendence and values.
Similarly, I would like to think that when Sartre conducts his philosophical inquiry to the ends of atheism—which he calls “a cruel and long-range affair”—he suspects that the double of this ambition is situated in the experience of the relationship he forms, already with his mother, no doubt, but above all and scandalously with Simone de Beauvoir. Far from the romantic idyll devoured by amateur existentialists, it was also a deconstruction of the amorous link, bound by cruelty and melancholic tenderness.
Eroticism—the religion of eighteenth-century France, more so than other eras and other cultures, whose modernity knew a limitless explosion—is not this maniac incapable of love who ruins families (moralists have stigmatized it as much as churches have, if not more so). However varied the figures of Love throughout history and civilizations, and despite the Platonic and religious tendencies that try to encapsulate it within a single idealization, Eros and Love cross paths, cross swords, ignore each other, and reconnect: mystics know this; Freud came to explain it.
From then on, the risky path of love—which is neither an inability to love nor the intellectual denial of affect, any more than its brutal exaltation in “hard sex”—is a working out of eroticism in search of its sense and nonsense. A search, a working out, a passingthrough: they sketch the profile of a humanity to come, fragile and lucid. A nonidealized humanism, yet available to others. Utopia? Certainly. What else remains, if God is love and He fuels desire to the death?
Art and literature and, more specifically, the novel, have assumed the role of alchemical crucible in this civilization dominated by the romantic imaginary: they compose and decompose the laws and figures of the amorous adventure. What is a novel? The unbearable elevated to the savors of language. Novelists revel in it, distilling it in the labyrinth of romantic intrigue. But what is left of “love’s unbearableness” after a century of psychoanalysis (however few those with access to this experience are, and however debatable certain practices may be)? Everything, transcended in a state of weightlessness. As well as certain mysteries: the impasses of politics, the enigmas of sublimation, the virtuosity of great crimes. In all these knotty issues, love conceals its failures, which are nevertheless the companions inherent in its fate.
Because the insolence of the Freudian discovery was to show this: there is no love but failed love. Nevertheless, far from despairing, the disenchanted and still resistant atheism that results creates new ties, modulations of this indispensable pleasure to the death that the speaking being feels in otherness and sharing. Pleasure to the death that the moderns, when they manage to analyze its logic, temper and defuse. If we dare hope to one day be done with the fundamentalist terror the amorous knot contains, we will have to tirelessly analyze this bond that allows speaking beings to be: the bond of maternal, paternal, adolescent, conjugal, professional, political, religious, familial, group, national, endless love! The way out of religions is not the Jacobin or Stalinist materialism imposed by the massacre of believers. If it were possible, it would require patient knowledge and a meticulous dismantling of the amorous ties: mama-ego, papa-ego, sister-brother-ego, Godideal-future-singing-tomorrows-or-not-paradise-success-relationship-glory-posterity-bank-account-ego … In short, a surpassing of my relationship to the Object and to the Other that only exist if (and only if) this Object and this Other are an Object and an Other in Love—sensorial, sensual, intellectual, religious, aesthetic, living Love.
The dispassionate humanity reborn from this experience would not necessarily be boring or robotic. Perhaps it would simply have a gay, varied, and plentiful lucidity. And it would preserve the laughter of Love: to the point of making light of Love itself. Apparently, the Jewish God is a laughing God.
Freud (a much more scientific mind than his ancestors, the rabbis, suspicious of love) wanted to believe in a humanity rid of its illusions: without really believing in it. As for me, I would like to preserve one illusion: that of a humanity capable of laughing, out of love, and making light of love.