Love - Ch 1
With the usage of words like "love," "desire," "hate," "cherish," etc., a romantic lexicon is established that can be perpetually reused. This lexicon - which is nothing short of the central engine powering the mechanism of the Relationship as we know it - is in fact a hall of smoke and mirrors employed to disguise the fact that the emperor has no clothes; pronouncements involving these terms are empty of any meaningful signification. The usage of this romantic lexicon carries out one of two tasks, and sometimes both. One task is the task of the placeholder, and the other is the task of the future promise through speech act.
We can start from Jacques Lacan's famous pronouncement that "love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it." Bearing in mind that one does not posess love, let us examine the nature of the sign "love." It is accepted that love is not something that can be put into words; faced with the task of attemtping to explain why the subject loves this particular person (why not this one instead? or that one?), the subject may fall back on the technique of naming some key characteristics of the loved person, and then saying, "see? This is why I love you!" This overlooks the obvious point that it is not these qualities that make the subject fall in love with the object of his desire - indeed, who knows how many of these traits he was even aware of when he fell in love with the object? - but that these qualities become endearing only due to the fact that the object is the object of the subject's love.
So then, what to make of the word love? The subject cannot ever explain why he loves someone through his feeble rationalizations. Indeed, any attempt to explicate the love he has for his love may very well serve to kill whatever love he has for the object. The inscription of his specific love for a specific person into specific language marks the death of the love it attempts to explain. In language, his love is only safe when the signifiers used are placeholders - namely, in the phrase "I love you" and many other variations. "I love you" is the shifting phrase to end all shifting phrases, insofar as it is certainly the most "meaningful" phrase containing pronouns to be used as often as it has been. In this phrase, the subject is able to express his love with a placeholder - but a placeholder for what?
"I love you" is a phrase that speaks more volumes than any rationalization of a specific love ever could. Imagine pitting "I love you" against anything. "I love you because of that thing you do just after you wake up in the morning," etc. These statements may be cute but there is a certain thundering power in "I love you" that cannot be matched - indeed, is not one of the key milestones of any relationship the moment at which one partner decides to tell the other, "I love you?" Not "because of that thing you do right after you wake up in the morning, I love you," but "I love you" on its own. This is because, for all of its vague generality, "I love you" is closer to the nature of love than any specific statement.
It is safe to say that, while the feeling we associate with "love" is certainly something that exists, and exists incredibly powerfully, it is an emotion caused by a chemical reaction that the brain produces due to unconscious mental processes. How many people really see something a sexual partner does in the morning, or hear something they've said, or etc., and decide that yes, now I love this person? Certainly unconscious processes may use these moments to spring these feelings, produced in the unconscious, upon the consciousness of the subject, but think of this way. Imagine something someone who you were once in love with said or did that you consciously believe strongly aided in the process of you falling in love with them. Now imagine someone else (who you are not in love with) doing this very same thing, or any number of them. Clearly, the result is not the same, because you do not have the same unconscious feelings about this person.
So, we can conclude that Love is an Other to us - it is something foreign, something we never will have the ability to grasp. It is something whose presence we will never revel in. We may enjoy its effects, but the process by which it functions is a complete mystery. In this case, to have the vague statement "I love you" be the defining mark of Love makes perfect sense, for the vagueness of the statement, the gap inherent between the statement and ourselves, is indicative of the gap between our consciousness and the unconscious functioning of Love. Love is a placeholder, an empty signifier, because we do not grasp what it entails. As such, we must reach our key Derridean point - that the subject never experiences the full presence of love, love is always absent, it cannot be signified, and the word "love" signifies little other than our own confusion over a perplexing mental process.
Bearing this in mind, we can understand what Lacan meant with his famous pronouncement - or at least, for the moment, the first half. If love is something that cannot be signified, we cannot identify it; and if we cannot identify it, we cannot give it. We can attempt to give it by using placeholding signifiers that attempt to inscribe it into the present situation, but in the end this structure will collapse upon itself.
With the usage of words like "love," "desire," "hate," "cherish," etc., a romantic lexicon is established that can be perpetually reused. This lexicon - which is nothing short of the central engine powering the mechanism of the Relationship as we know it - is in fact a hall of smoke and mirrors employed to disguise the fact that the emperor has no clothes; pronouncements involving these terms are empty of any meaningful signification. The usage of this romantic lexicon carries out one of two tasks, and sometimes both. One task is the task of the placeholder, and the other is the task of the future promise through speech act.
We can start from Jacques Lacan's famous pronouncement that "love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it." Bearing in mind that one does not posess love, let us examine the nature of the sign "love." It is accepted that love is not something that can be put into words; faced with the task of attemtping to explain why the subject loves this particular person (why not this one instead? or that one?), the subject may fall back on the technique of naming some key characteristics of the loved person, and then saying, "see? This is why I love you!" This overlooks the obvious point that it is not these qualities that make the subject fall in love with the object of his desire - indeed, who knows how many of these traits he was even aware of when he fell in love with the object? - but that these qualities become endearing only due to the fact that the object is the object of the subject's love.
So then, what to make of the word love? The subject cannot ever explain why he loves someone through his feeble rationalizations. Indeed, any attempt to explicate the love he has for his love may very well serve to kill whatever love he has for the object. The inscription of his specific love for a specific person into specific language marks the death of the love it attempts to explain. In language, his love is only safe when the signifiers used are placeholders - namely, in the phrase "I love you" and many other variations. "I love you" is the shifting phrase to end all shifting phrases, insofar as it is certainly the most "meaningful" phrase containing pronouns to be used as often as it has been. In this phrase, the subject is able to express his love with a placeholder - but a placeholder for what?
"I love you" is a phrase that speaks more volumes than any rationalization of a specific love ever could. Imagine pitting "I love you" against anything. "I love you because of that thing you do just after you wake up in the morning," etc. These statements may be cute but there is a certain thundering power in "I love you" that cannot be matched - indeed, is not one of the key milestones of any relationship the moment at which one partner decides to tell the other, "I love you?" Not "because of that thing you do right after you wake up in the morning, I love you," but "I love you" on its own. This is because, for all of its vague generality, "I love you" is closer to the nature of love than any specific statement.
It is safe to say that, while the feeling we associate with "love" is certainly something that exists, and exists incredibly powerfully, it is an emotion caused by a chemical reaction that the brain produces due to unconscious mental processes. How many people really see something a sexual partner does in the morning, or hear something they've said, or etc., and decide that yes, now I love this person? Certainly unconscious processes may use these moments to spring these feelings, produced in the unconscious, upon the consciousness of the subject, but think of this way. Imagine something someone who you were once in love with said or did that you consciously believe strongly aided in the process of you falling in love with them. Now imagine someone else (who you are not in love with) doing this very same thing, or any number of them. Clearly, the result is not the same, because you do not have the same unconscious feelings about this person.
So, we can conclude that Love is an Other to us - it is something foreign, something we never will have the ability to grasp. It is something whose presence we will never revel in. We may enjoy its effects, but the process by which it functions is a complete mystery. In this case, to have the vague statement "I love you" be the defining mark of Love makes perfect sense, for the vagueness of the statement, the gap inherent between the statement and ourselves, is indicative of the gap between our consciousness and the unconscious functioning of Love. Love is a placeholder, an empty signifier, because we do not grasp what it entails. As such, we must reach our key Derridean point - that the subject never experiences the full presence of love, love is always absent, it cannot be signified, and the word "love" signifies little other than our own confusion over a perplexing mental process.
Bearing this in mind, we can understand what Lacan meant with his famous pronouncement - or at least, for the moment, the first half. If love is something that cannot be signified, we cannot identify it; and if we cannot identify it, we cannot give it. We can attempt to give it by using placeholding signifiers that attempt to inscribe it into the present situation, but in the end this structure will collapse upon itself.
posted by Z. Wigon at 2:59 PM
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