In Praise of Forgiveness E-Book

Massimo Recalcati

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 200

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Relationships fall apart, marriages fail, couples break up - it happens to us all. Time corrodes passion and the routines of daily life kill the excitement that surrounds the emotion of the first encounter. The difficulty of uniting sexual pleasure with love, which Freud considered to be the most common neurosis in any love life, has become emblematic of a truth that seems undeniable: desire is destined to die if its object is not constantly renewed, if we do not change partner, if it is closed for too long in the restrictive chamber of the same bond. And yet what happens to these bonds when one of the two partners betrays the other, when the promise fails, when there is another emotional experience cloaked in secrecy and deceit? What happens if the traitor then begs forgiveness? Are they asking to be loved again and, having declared that it is not like it used to be, now want everything to go back to how it was? Should we make fun of lovers in their attempts to make love last? Or should we try to face up to the experience of betrayal, with the offence caused by the person we love most? Should we not perhaps attempt to praise forgiveness in love?

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Front Matter

Introduction

Notes

1 The Ideology of the New

The Contemporary Degradation of Love Lives

Resignation or Dopamine?

Narcissistic Love

Two Lies for Our Time

The New Libertine Ideology

Love as Resistance to the Libertine Worship of the New

Notes

2 Encounter and Destiny

Love as Oedipal Repetition

Falling in Love with Ourselves

The Scream of Life

The Discussion about Barolo

The Sexual Relationship Does Not Exist

We Are Loved Not Because of Something, But ‘Because of Everything’

The Loving Encounter is the Birth of a World

Disappointed Love

The Eros of the Encounter

Fidelity

The Face and the Eternal

Notes

3 Trauma and Abandonment

A Captive Freedom?

Albertine

Is the Promise of Love Always False?

‘It’s Not Like It Used To Be’

What Is a Trauma?

The First Blow

Trauma is the Flipside of Repression

Trauma in Love

Falling into Non-Sense

The Fall This Side of the Mirror

A Wound With No Cure

Abandonment

Notes

4 The Work of Forgiveness

Courageous Love

The Adulterous Woman

To Forgive the Unforgivable?

Reflection by the Subject

The Impossibility of Forgiving Out Of Love

The Work of Forgiveness and the Work of Mourning

Forgiveness and Gratitude

Why Men Find It More Difficult to Forgive

Violence Without Law

Violence and Love

The Tender Assassin

Absolute Exposure to Love

Virgil’s Gloves

Narcissism and Depression

Woman’s Foreign Language

‘They Are All Whores!’

Killing Them in Order to ‘Love’ Them

The Joy of Forgiveness?

Forgiving Oneself

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Dedication

To Luciana Sica, to her strength

In Praise of Forgiveness

Massimo RecalcatiTranslated by Alice Kilgarriff

polity

First published in Italian as Non è più come prima. Copyright © 2014, Raffaello Cortina Editore. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with The Italian Literary Agency.This English edition (c) Polity Press, 2020

Excerpts from REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, VOLUME III: THE CAPTIVE, THE FUGITIVE, THE PAST RECAPTURED by Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, and by Andreas Mayor, translation copyright © 1981 by Penguin Random House LLC and Chatto & Windus. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3491-3

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Recalcati, Massimo, author. | Kilgarriff, Alice, translator.Title: In praise of forgiveness / Massimo Recalcati ; translated by Alice Kilgarriff.Other titles: Non è più come prima. EnglishDescription: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, 2020. | Summary: “An original reflection on betrayal and forgiveness in modern relationships”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2019038645 (print) | LCCN 2019038646 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509534890 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509534906 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509534913 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Forgiveness. | Interpersonal relations.Classification: LCC BF637.F67 R43 2020 (print) | LCC BF637.F67 (ebook) | DDC 158.2--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038645LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038646A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my friend and editor Raffaello Cortina for having believed in me over these last few years, and Maria Egidi with whom I share a great deal of my working life and who, over ten years of working together, has supported me with patience, affection and happiness. Federica Manzon and Lucrezia Lerro for their friendship and for having read and commented upon the narrative parts of the book, giving me invaluable advice. My thanks also to Mauro Grimoldi for having listened to me discuss this book since its conception during our morning runs through Parco Sempione and elsewhere. Last but not least, Enzo Bianchi for his silent presence in me.

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Introduction

The psychoanalyst hears the woes that accompany love lives on a daily basis: emotional isolation, sexual inhibitions and symptoms, the compulsive quest for relationships that fail to satisfy, the ensuing disappointment, the initial ecstasy of falling in love, infidelity, boredom, jealousy, a decline in desire, separation, abuse, the inability to love, the difficulty of finding the right man or woman. And yet today’s trials and tribulations of love seem to be different from those of the past. Sexual freedom and female emancipation, to cite just two of the most relevant phenomena of the last few decades, have upset a certain stereotype of amorous suffering. The desperate Platonism of those who, faced with a frustrating reality, cultivate their inhibited passions in secret has given way to a diffuse disinhibition and the multiplication of sexual and loving experiences in an entirely liberated way. Everything seems to be consumed far more quickly, without moral censure or obstacles. Criticism of any institutionalization of bonds between the sexes seems to have become the politically correct norm, whilst the collective cult of a love without ties is an illusion that has generated nothing more than will-o’-the-wisps. The invocation of absolute freedom and the intolerance shown to any form of bond that implies responsibility have led to a new master. We no longer have the master who carries the stick of prohibition, but one who demands an enjoyment that is always New and that consequently experiences a long-term relationship as a gas chamber killing off the mysterious fascination of desire. One father dies and another takes his place: the time of mourning is maniacally rejected as unnecessarily sad and extravagant. Rather than painfully processing the loss of a beloved object, it is preferable to replace it as quickly as possible, conforming to the dominant logic that governs the capitalist discourse: if an object no longer works, you mustn’t feel nostalgic about it! Exchange it for an upgraded model!

At a time in which everything seems to respond to the perverse siren song of the New, this book aims to be a song dedicated to love that resists and that persists in its vindication of the bond with what does not pass, with what is able to stand the test of time, with what cannot be consumed. It does not deal with those infatuations that burn out without a trace in just one night. It delves into that love that lasts a lifetime, that leaves its mark, that does not want to die, that disproves Freud’s cynical belief that love and desire are destined to lie apart because the existence of one (love) necessarily excludes that of the other (sexual desire).1 It looks at that love in which desire grows and does not fade with the passing of time because with it the horizons of the lovers’ bodies, and the world itself, are erotically expanded. That love in which the ecstasy of the encounter insists on repeating itself, on wanting the other again, on staying faithful to itself, in which the headiness is not diluted but gives meaning to time, rendering it eternal. This is a love animated by what the poet Paul Éluard, once cited by Jacques Lacan, defines ‘le dur désir du durer’ [‘the firm desire to endure’].2

This book asks what happens to these bonds when one person cheats on the other, when one falls short of the promise made, living another emotional experience mired in secret and deceit. What happens to those loving relationships crushed by the trauma of betrayal and abandonment? What happens when the person who has cheated then asks for forgiveness? What if they ask to be loved once more, despite having decreed that it was not like it used to be, and want everything to go back to how it was before? Is forgiveness truly possible in these cases? Or must we limit ourselves to repeating the Freudian sentence according to which all love is a narcissistic dream, a promise that does not exist, a love that never lasts ‘forever’, there being no love for the Other that is not love for ourselves? Must we spit on love, making fun of lovers in their efforts to make love last?

Freud’s analysis, developed in his ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’,3 is only interested in describing the neurotic version of love. His theory on the gulf between sexual desire and love that leads human beings to split the object of their erotic enjoyment from that of their love has often been misunderstood, as if reconciling the level of the body’s sexual enjoyment with that of love as a gift of oneself to the Other were a structural impossibility. We must be clear: if psychoanalytic treatment deals with this (neurotic) split between sexual enjoyment and loving tenderness towards the Other, this does not mean that such a split is the structural cipher of love. What is the point of psychoanalysis if not precisely to make bonds possible that allow loving desire towards the Other to converge with the erotic enjoyment of the body? Isn’t this one of the most relevant issues at stake? We know it from experience: love in which loving desire is not in any way split from sexual enjoyment but grows exponentially alongside erotic passion for the body of the Other does exist. This was what led Lacan to define love as the only possibility of allowing desire to converge with enjoyment without any neurotic disassociation.4

This book does not delve into the pathology of the split between desire and enjoyment, but examines an aspect of love that is as important as it is strangely sidelined by psychoanalysis: forgiveness. It treats forgiveness as one of the most noble and difficult tests awaiting lovers.

The work of forgiveness is always preceded by the trauma of betrayal and abandonment. The loved object vanishes, it is transfigured, it moves away. We know that all trauma, in a single seismic movement, affects the very meaning of the world and our existence in it. It is not just the loved object that is missing, but the very order of the world smashed to pieces by that loss, becoming unrecognizable and descending into pure non-sense.

How can the ashes of this retreat by the other be inhabited without destroying everything? How is it possible to resist betraying the promise? Much like the work of mourning, the work of forgiveness requires extra time in order to be carried out. Sometimes this hits a wall that can be impossible to overcome, that of loss of trust in the word of the Other. Forgiveness can then become impossible precisely because of love. This is one of the theories posited in this book: the failure of forgiveness is no less important than a successful work of forgiveness. Various patients talk about an irreversible collapse of their trust in the Other that can never be fixed. Who can blame them? In these cases too, the subject finds themselves facing the wall of impossibility: they cannot forgive, they cannot forgive the wound left by the deceit because to forgive would mean to forget, to not want to know, to pretend nothing had happened, to not face up to all the consequences that the traumatic truth of betrayal and abandonment have unleashed. At other times, the work of forgiveness challenges the unforgivable and saves love by resisting the temptation of revenge. This is its mysterious joy: the one that allows for a brand-new beginning, an absolute new beginning.

No love, not even that which exists within the promise to last ‘forever’, is safe from the risk of ending, because every human love always implies absolute exposure to the Other, and never excludes the possibility of its retraction and disappearance. In all of those situations in which the traumatic impact of betrayal has brought love to its knees, is it truly possible that the work of forgiveness can restore life to that which seemed to be irremediably dead? This is the real question at the heart of this book.

Notes

1.

See Sigmund Freud, ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’, in

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

.

Vol. XI (1910): Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works

, Vintage, London 2001, pp. 163–90.

2.

Paul Éluard, ‘Le dur désir du durer’ [‘The Firm Desire to Endure’], in

Last Love Poetry

, Black Widow Press, Boston 2006.

3.

See Freud, ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’.

4.

‘Only love allows enjoyment to condescend to desire’ (Jacques Lacan,

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X: Anxiety

, Polity, Cambridge 2014, p. 179).

1The Ideology of the New

The Contemporary Degradation of Love Lives

Love is a trap, a hoax, an illusion destined to melt like snow in the sunshine, the result of a sleep of reason, a deception, a trick played on us by our neuroendocrine system. Every love dies a death sooner or later, revealing its artificial nature. Time corrodes passion, proclaiming its end, demoting it to an administration of goods and services. After the initial ecstatic upheaval provoked by the influx of dopamine into certain parts of the brain, every loving bond flattens into a routine lacking in desire. Time inevitably kills the enthusiasm that surrounds the emotion of that first encounter. Without the stimulation offered by the New, every love ends up in the quicksand of an alienating intimacy, deprived of eroticism. For entire generations, the white vest worn by the head of the family was, according to Adorno, the symbol of this decline of desire into the charade of family life.1 This traditional version of the alienation of family ties is probably best represented today with the image of a couple lying on a sofa watching television, or a man and a woman who, rather than conversing or sharing enthusiasm for their own projects, immerse themselves autistically in the closed-off worlds of their own iPhones.

In modern life, erotic desire appears to be rigidly alternative to the family bond. The existence of this bond causes it to fade or vanish, because it is constructed on the very interdiction of that desire. There is no escaping this. Either desire or family: this seems to be the refrain of contemporary hyper-hedonism. What about psychoanalysis? Hasn’t it also contributed to the emergence of this truth? Has its own doctrine not demonstrated how the split between love and sexual desire has accompanied human life from its very first loving relationships? Is this not the split referred to by Freud when he theorizes about the most common degradation of loving relationships? The mother’s body as the locus of the child’s first intense loving experiences is forbidden to desire. This irreconcilability between love and sexual desire leads men to transform their partners into mothers and search for erotic passion in women outside the family, fantasizing about these women offering sex without love. This is the classic disjuncture between the loved woman, mother of his children and life partner, and the woman-whore with whom he can live out all kinds of erotic passions with great intensity. It is the Freudian disjuncture between the loving flow of tenderness and that of sexual desire.2 It is as if desire’s condition of vitality were nothing more than the perverse staging of the Law’s transgression. If the Father’s prohibition strikes the woman-mother, this feeds the subject’s urge to search for the object of desire beyond the jurisdiction of the family as the locus of prohibited objects. It is from this original prohibition that the split between the flow of tenderness and that of sexual desire takes shape, drawn in the subject’s life like two parallel lines that, despite being stretched out infinitely, will never meet: the loved woman can never coincide with the woman of desire.

Freud had perhaps failed to predict that this common degradation of a love life is no longer today the exclusive burden of the male sex, but also extends into the female world. Antonia tells me during her analysis about how her emotional life is entirely split from a marital bond that has become boring and deprived of enthusiasm, and a relationship with a colleague that pushes her to have sexual encounters that border on abuse. The deep esteem in which she holds her husband is irreversibly detached from desire and is equally matched by the contempt for her lover, which seems paradoxically to feed it. Antonia is clearly split: the tenderness of her husband is as impossible to give up as the transgressive erotic charge that she finds in the other man. In this way, her life appears to be afflicted by the very split pinpointed by Freud as the paradigm of degradation in the male love life. The hard-earned sexual freedom of women thus risks following the missteps taken by the male neuroses: experiencing one’s partner as a limit, aspiring to a bond that goes beyond the family unit as the only experience of practising one’s own sexual desire in a vital and non-repetitive way.

But there are many variations on the Freudian framework. For example, one man in analysis told me of his need to cheat on his wife, whom he declared he loved deeply. In this case, the libidinal and erotic value of this couple’s sex life had remained intact after many years of marriage. At play here was not, then, the classic disarticulation of emotional life and erotic passion, of the flow of tenderness and that of sexual desire. Rather, it appeared evident that the condition that had preserved the sexual understanding and family love in this couple was the very reason this man had always cheated on his wife. In this way, he would repeatedly make her a lost object and, therefore, extremely desirable. He required the existence of a lover in order to de-complete his wife, rendering her lacking and therefore activating her once more as a subject of desire emancipated from the family routine.3

Resignation or Dopamine?

Couples separate, marriages fail, the length of bonds is shortened: this is a fact. The birth of a child often coincides in particular with a crisis in the bond on both sides. The man has trouble locating the woman with whom he fell in love in the woman who has become a mother, and the woman, identifying the man as the father of her family, remains sexually unsatisfied and searches for the object capable of resuscitating her erotic desire in an other.4 Psychoanalytic practice can offer infinite examples of this tendency. But its basis lies in the falsehood that today endorses the equivalence between the New and happiness. This lie forces us to live in desperate search of the New with the (false) supposition that in the New we will find full self-realization. The ridiculing of loving pathos towards the absolute, the promise of lovers that it will be ‘forever’, not only comes from cynical disenchantment, but also and most significantly from the social imperative of the New and its explosive combination with a reductively machine-like version of the human being that scientific research seems to corroborate. An eloquent example of this is given by the great biologist and neuroscientist Robin Dunbar when he reminds us, rapidly cooling the boiling spirits of naïve lovers who experience a kiss with romantic abandon, that the kiss is probably, more than anything else, a test of the health and genetics of future partners. That it concerns health is obvious because poor health often results in bad breath and an acidic taste in the mouth, two things that are easily ascertained when we kiss.5

The point is that in our time the difficulty of uniting sexual enjoyment with love, which as we have seen was considered by Freud to be the most common neurosis in any love life, has become emblematic of a truth that seems undeniable: desire is destined to die if its object is not constantly renewed, if we do not change partner, if it is closed for too long in the restrictive chamber of the same bond. The proliferation of divorce and separations seems to support this truth beyond any doubt. It is beyond discussion. In a long-term conjugal bond, or even when simply living together, the erotic urge of desire is destined at the very least to grow numb, if not to disappear altogether. The materialistic cynicism of modern hyper-hedonism seems to find support in the most advanced scientific research. Falling in love is much like doping, its effects destined to fade in the space of a few months (between three and eighteen, apparently). In a loving encounter, the areas of the brain that deal with judgement and critical analysis are clouded by a rise in dopamine, the hormone that activates our most irrational and euphoric urges. But this cloud is time-limited and must either evolve into a state of monogamous calm, as promoted by the activation of oxytocin receptors, or feverishly revive itself through a new encounter.6