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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Amorous jealousy is not a monster, as Shakespeare's venomous Iago claims. It is neither prickly and bitter fancy nor a cruel and mean passion, nor yet a symptom of feeble self-esteem. All those who have experienced its wounds are well aware that it is not callous, nasty, delusional and ridiculous. It is just painful. Yet for centuries moralists have poured scorn and contempt on a feeling that, in their view, we should fight in every possible way. It is allegedly a disease to be treated, a moral vice to be eradicated, an ugly, pre-modern, illiberal, proprietary emotion to be overcome. Above all, no one should ever admit to being jealous. So should we silence this embarrassing sentiment? Or should we, like the heroines of Greek tragedy, see it as a fundamental human demand for reciprocity in love? By examining its cultural history from the ancient Greeks to La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes, Kant, Stendhal, Freud, Beauvoir, Sartre and Lacan, this book demonstrates how jealousy, far from being a 'green-eyed' fiend, reveals the intense and apprehensive nature of all erotic love, which is the desire to be desired. We should never be ashamed to love.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Introduction: I am Beside Myself with Anger…
Notes
1: Being Medea
An aristocratic passion
Epic erotic anger
Unruly wives
Tragic erotic anger
Amorous sensibilities
Rain and tears: Andromache's art of love
What is more natural?
The total bastard
Comic jealousy: an excess of zeal
The Stoic turn
Revenge is the confession of pain
Now I am Medea!
A praise of repression
Medea, barbaric tigress
Let monsters abound!
She does not dare even to admit
Aristotelian Medea, Stoic Medea
‘We must make a masterpiece’
Jason was perfidious
To purge, moderate, correct, and even uproot…
A forbidden passion
Notes
2: A Forbidden Passion
A sudden stop
A new passion
Loving in the singular
Tranquil enjoyment
A primal passion
The invention of love
Émile
, in love and jealous
Imperious, jealous, deceitful, vindictive
The passion of an indignant and miserly animal
Delicate lovers are afraid to admit to it
A Tahitian in Tahiti
A Parisian in Paris
A dagger-thrust to the heart
Everyone jests and frolics
A trip to Salzburg
Does she love me?
Does he love me?
A modern affection
Notes
3: Sexual Objects and Open Couples
Desire of desire
Objectification theory
A human being is not a thing
Reciprocal usage and mutual possession
To have a person as mine
Reciprocity
Fidelity
Sex is incompatible with the perfection of a man
Veal roast
à la
Kant
Kantian jealousy
Coquetry and cannibalism
Shame on Kant!
Vaga libido
An object of desire is not a thing
Eros as hyper-personification
To see things everywhere
Sinking into the paste of immanence
To possess her in her flesh
Freedom, infidelity, jealousy
Transparency
Comedy
Cruelty
Rights, habits and bodies
Notes
4: The Despair of Not Being Loved
Neither imaginary nor sublime
I am jealous
More self-love than love
Suffering in love
Normal jealousy
The end of the tragic
A trembling hand
A burning hand
To deny is to repress
Jealous speech-acts
The door to truth
The green-eyed monster
Too sceptical or not sceptical enough?
Fugitives
The grip of agonizing pain
Some pleasure
Problematic narcissism?
My indelicacy was hateful
Notes
5: Art of Love, Art of Jealousy
The project to be loved
Masochism and sadism
The caress
Art of love
Pleasure, displeasure and jealousy
The Art of Love
The art of jealousy
Only you!
Ovid, the Epicurean
Pain, anger and love
The art of pleasure
When love hurts
Love and truth
Jealousy and truth
Love is a credulous thing
Notes
Conclusion: Confessing the Unconfessable
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Copyright page
First published in French as La jalousie: une passion inavouable, © Odile Jacob, 2015
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1184-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1185-3 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sissa, Giulia, 1954- author.
Title: Jealousy : a forbidden passion / Giulia Sissa.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017025320 (print) | LCCN 2017038667 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509511877 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509511884 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509511846 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509511853 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Jealousy. | Love. | Semiotics. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & & Theory.
Classification: LCC BF575.J4 (ebook) | LCC BF575.J4 S57 2017 (print) | DDC 152.4/8–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025320
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IntroductionI am Beside Myself with Anger…
Love gives us pleasure. Love makes us suffer. What turns exaltation into distress, trust into anguish, serenity into despair, is very often jealousy.
A sullen and sorrowful fantasy; a cruel and petty passion; the confession of a secret indignity; a forced feeling of how little one is worth; the agony of an indigent and miserly creature who is afraid to lack; a symptom which betrays a distrust in one's own merit and reveals the superiority of a rival; an anxiety which usually hastens the very evil it dreads; an emotion so base that it has to be hidden; a foolish pride, a feeble love, a wicked heart and a ludicrous bourgeois absurdity; a prejudice created by education and enhanced through habit; a pathology of the imagination; the projection of an unconscious penchant for infidelity; repressed homosexual urges converted into paranoia; a failing phallus, problematic narcissism, deep self-hatred, poor self-esteem, insecurity, envy.
Blame is unleashed. Contempt roams free. Laughter resounds. No one would boast of being jealous. ‘Pride, like other passions’, claims François de La Rochefoucauld in one of his famous Maxims, ‘has peculiarities of its own; while we are jealous, we feel ashamed to confess our jealousy, but when it is past we are proud of it and our capacity to feel it.’1
That says it all.
How many of us, during the course of our lives, could swear to never having experienced such shame? I, for one, must plead guilty. It is terrifying to call myself jealous. To the extreme numbness which comes upon you when a love eludes you and a life together disintegrates, jealousy adds the burden of humiliation. All the connections, familiar and unnoticed, which have bound together the habits and the hours suddenly dissolve. All the mundane small gestures of everyday intimacy remain, suddenly, in suspense. And even if this love was more of an ephemeral liaison than a common life, that does not prevent us from being thrown into disarray. Lies destroy confidence. The more we are surprised, the more we suffer. Our material, social or professional conditions may not change dramatically – that much we know – yet nothing will ever be the same as it once was. There will be nothing more. And, in addition to nothingness – the shame.
I have known this shame. In the midst of the anguish, however, I also felt a strong sentiment of injustice. Why should the victim (for such one is) of an infidelity also have to bow down before this additional suffering? Whether he or she turns, in search of consolation, to philosophy or appeals to the various therapies of the soul, anyone who admits to being jealous will be very ill-received. The repertoire of available ideas is monotonous. The great pontiffs of the social sciences, of moral philosophy, of political theory and of psychology compete in speaking ill of amorous jealousy. It comes as no surprise that one hides, blushes, denies and proclaims with one voice: Jealous? What, me? Never!
I wanted to rebel against this nonsense. I wanted not only not to be silent, to attenuate or to embellish my jealousy but to recognize it for what it is – without euphemisms, without denials, without any kind of kitsch Stoicism. And I wanted to think jealousy historically. What, I asked myself, has happened to our experience of love that we have come to be ashamed to admit to what is, above all, a form of suffering? Has it always been improper to assert one's erotic dignity?
Duelling is no more, and crimes of honour have been outlawed. Adultery is no longer the end of the world, seduction is practised openly and desire circulates widely. We enter freely into erotic contracts. All of this is marvellous. But, in this casual and plural euphoria, the jealous – and, above all, jealous women – are alone. The disapproval once attached to sex has now been transferred to love. Love is a desire for reciprocity, in the singular. Love is the desire for desire. Love is therefore jealousy – but you must not say so.
Jealousy is a forbidden passion.
It has not always been so. It has become so. I have, therefore, dared to attempt what the great eighteenth-century philosopher Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, had intended to do – had begun but never finished – namely to write a history of jealousy.2 In doing so I discovered a curious fact. The ignominy which moralists of all stripes have attributed to the emotion itself is, on reflection, the predictable response to a massive cultural repression. We are ashamed only because we are made to feel so. We are afraid to look bad because we have been intimidated. We are afraid of ridicule because we have been ridiculed. We conceal our feelings because we lack the strength to suffer cruel comments, condescending advice or knowing smiles. Shame is a social passion.
Like all emotions, whose cultural subtleties we understand better and better, jealousy calls for careful thought. I'm not the first to become interested in it. Far from it. The philosophical and literary representations of jealousy are both immensely rich and very ancient. If we look at jealousy from the perspective of the seventeenth century we will discover that this emotion, for which La Rochefoucauld offers a brilliantly condensed description, is characterized by an altogether peculiar feature. On the one hand, unlike other states of mind such as courage or emulation, about which one is eager to brag, jealousy is a source of embarrassment, which demands discretion. ‘We are ashamed to confess [avouer] that we are jealous’, he wrote. The difficulty with this confession depends upon social perception. Of this La Rochefoucauld was well aware. ‘The reason why the pangs of shame and jealousy are so bitter’, he noted, ‘is that vanity cannot help us to bear them.’3 Later, Stendhal echoes this maxim and adds: ‘to let oneself be seen to harbour a great unsatisfied desire is to allow oneself to be seen as inferior, an impossible thing in France, except for those who are beneath contempt, and it is to expose yourself to all manner of mockery.’4 Vanity, for Stendhal, was a French national passion. Self-love precedes love. The shame of jealousy silences us.
And yet, on the other hand, unlike emotions such as envy which are always indecent, jealousy makes you talkative – when we remember a bygone experience or envision hypothetical situations. Inadmissible in the present, jealousy becomes praiseworthy, even honourable, in the past and in the conditional. Ignominious and respectable, abject and heroic, a shameful defeat and a surge of dignity. The experience of those who feel jealous changes over time and, above all, in the very expression of their feelings. It is unspeakable when it occurs, yet commendable from a distance. That is its paradox. And this paradox invites historical reflection.
Jealousy can be a triumph. There was a time when a self-respecting person, especially a woman, was expected to take pride in responding to amorous infidelity. The situation was the same – the loss, real or feared, of the singular desire of a beloved to another person – but the framing of the affect, the form it took in both thought and language, was entirely different. Jealousy was erotic anger.
What occurs is an injury: there is a breakdown, one feels disappointed, betrayed, humiliated, dishonoured, abandoned and derelict, but one takes the liberty to admit it and has the courage to speak it loud and clear. Multiple emotions concur in this complex state of mind: the pain of suffering a slight; the pleasure of planning a vengeance; the eagerness to discuss the injustice; the sympathy of all onlookers. This is how it was in ancient Greece. And this amounts to what the ancient Greeks understood as anger (orgê). Eros made that anger all the more excruciating. We will not start, therefore, from the premise that jealousy, being akin to envy and emulation, is invariably felt as a disadvantage in an unwanted competition and that sexual or romantic jealousy are merely specific forms of that pre-defined emotion, which is familiar to us.5 We will look at a situation, and at the affective experience of that situation, in its cultural context. This will demonstrate that anger is what we happen to call ‘jealousy’.
A history of amorous jealousy is a history of anger.
Anger was the unbound, dramatic, resounding passion of jealous women à l’antique. Grandiose and fully acknowledged, this passion was also noble, worthy of goddesses, warriors and queens. To be able to see this, we have to reread the classics, in Jacques Lacan's words, without ‘blinders’. In ancient Greece, he wrote, women ‘had a role that is veiled for us, but that is nevertheless eminently theirs in love: quite simply the active role. The difference between the woman of Antiquity and the modern woman is that the Ancient woman demanded her due – she attacked men.’6 The woman he probably had in mind, the woman who casts aside every social mask, and destroys everything for a man who was everything for her, is Medea.7
Medea will take us to ancient Greece.
There we shall see the richness of a thought which values the expression and the recognition of pain. Anaesthesia, Aristotle tells us, is stupid, cowardly and fit only for slaves. Those who refuse to be covered in mud know how to become angry when it is right and necessary. Before Medea turns her anger on her own children, everyone sides with her as the aggrieved wife. We will have to wait until the Stoics before this passion is transformed into something horrifying, monstrous and inexcusable. In the hands of the Roman Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca, Medea's story becomes one of simple cruelty. Medea herself is reduced to nothing more than a furious and reptilian, jubilant and cloying creature. The tragedy sets before our eyes only the caricature of failed wisdom. Centuries later, Pierre Corneille's seventeenth-century version offers up a Medea who, although similarly ‘all wicked’, is yet capable of attracting the sympathy of a Christian audience. She has been so oppressed, and her just wrath is so eloquent, that it is easy to grasp her reasons. Nonchalant and insensitive, Jason couldn't care less. Although he doesn't have the last word, he does give voice to a new sensibility, one which will no longer understand erotic anger.
The jealousy of the moderns becomes something else. Competition with a rival acquires more importance. The nature of anger changes radically. Exclusive attachment relies, in the words of Denis Diderot, on the assumption ‘that a being which feels, thinks and is free, may be the property of another being like himself.’8 Jealousy now becomes an agonistic confrontation which provokes an automatic reaction of anger, whose effectiveness remains doubtful and whose claims are abusive. ‘Delicate lovers’, as Diderot says, ‘are afraid to admit it.’9 In the euphoria of the Enlightenment, French philosophers multiply their condemnations, of which we are the heirs. Immanuel Kant came up with the argument, now familiar, yet absurd, that all erotic relationships are the mutual use of sexual organs and faculties, and consequently that they transform people into things. An object of desire is therefore only an object/thing, ready for use, destined for exchange, available on the market, liable to be acquired, owned and put to work. The idea of ‘sexual object’ is one of the most compelling premises for our intolerance of jealousy.
Marxism is responsible for the subsequent consecration of the analogy between the possession of a woman and private property. It is a thesis which, although Jean-Paul Sartre rejected it, became for Simone de Beauvoir a guiding principle of feminist thought.10 The ‘objectification’ of women has since become canonical, to the degree that it crops up regularly in the daily press. The ‘hatred of the bourgeois’ inspires the denigration of jealousy. The bourgeoisie are accused of having turned love into a property transaction. This social connotation is particularly damning. Not many people have ever been proud of being called ‘bourgeois’. Greed, narrow-mindedness, conventionality and boredom: the bourgeoisie conjures up images of all these unsavoury attitudes. It is unsophisticated, distasteful, and – capital sin – laughable. So is jealousy.
The modern critic of amorous jealousy re-enacts, ironically, a very old aristocratic scorn. As the marquise de Rétel, in Charles Duclos’ Considerations on the Manners of the Present Age of 1752, jokingly observes, ‘We are not as jealous at Court as we are in the City. Jealousy is no more than a ludicrous bourgeois absurdity [un ridicule bourgeois].’11 The imaginary noblemen of Diderot's The Indiscreet Jewels share the same uncharitable views. The desire for reciprocity in the singular seems to be worthy of a money-seeking parvenu underclass. And yet erotic anger is actually very much part of aristocratic sensibilities. At the very beginning of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons, Mme de Merteuil announces to M de Valmont that her tenured lover is about to marry a young woman. ‘I am in a rage…,’ she writes. ‘But I calm myself and the hope of vengeance soothes my mind.’12 It is this furious ire (fureur) that sets in motion the intrigue of disingenuous adultery, corrupted innocence and self-serving strategies that fill this unabashedly unromantic romance. The marquise de Merteuil and the vicomte de Valmont are the paradigm of cerebral libertinage – yet they act because Isabelle cannot endure a highly predictable slight, her beloved's defection to a younger woman. Has she fallen prey to ridicule bourgeois? Not so simple. Laclos readily recognizes amorous susceptibility when he claims that ‘jealousy is born out of the love of beauty’.13 In the same vein, Montesquieu reflects that ‘Love wants to receive as much as it gives; it is the most personal of all interests. It is there that one compares, that one counts, that vanity mistrusts and is never adequately reassured.’14 Intelligence and anxiety go together. The nobility know how masterfully to manoeuvre between infidelity and jealousy, passion and calculus, pride and revenge, but they smother those frightfully common bourgeois with an imaginary disease. And we democratic moderns have followed in their footsteps. It has come to be assumed that the man who makes money and accumulates goods has also to be someone who buys women. We confuse singularity with property.15
What a misapprehension! What in fact we desire when we desire is not to possess another person but to arouse that person's desire for us. We try to become the object of their sexual interest and/or their profound amorous attention. It is reciprocity that makes recognition, gratitude and erotic dignity possible. From Euripides to Stendhal, from Sappho to Proust, from Ovid to Isabelle de Merteuil or Catherine Millet, it is literature and psychoanalysis – more than philosophy – which has taught us these simple truths, which we experience in every way in our ordinary love lives. We expect to be preferred by whomsoever our desire fastens itself upon, even if only partially or briefly. We do not like being treated like an interchangeable, meaningless, replaceable presence. The unfaithful may be jealous. The wives of polygamous husbands, whatever they may say, comply with a prohibition against reciprocity. And even contemporary individuals who form free, contingent, polyamorous relationships are not necessarily immune from the revelation of unforeseen vulnerability. Pleasure for all is great, as long as it is really for all.
There are a few domains in which love appears to be legitimately jealous. Freudian psychoanalysis has opened up a heuristic perspective on normal jealousy. French phenomenology, namely Jean-Luc Marion, invites us to think that jealousy is nothing but daringly enduring love, faithful to itself.16 Jealousy also finds favour in the eyes of evolutionary biologists, who are now reconsidering the previously shared hypothesis that women are allegedly jealous of their partner's affection while men are troubled more by sexual infidelity.17 The results of recent experimental research allow for a welcome revision of stereotypical assumptions. In fiction and in life, women are keenly responsive to the loss of physical, sensual, erotic love – unless they are prohibited from expressing their jealousy. Love is jealous. But what for the ancients was a wrong to be righted, and for modern lovers an inadmissible failure, has become for us a folkloric legacy, a moral flaw, a political error. To the injunction against the admission of jealousy has now been added one against being jealous, often coupled with the demand that we listen patiently to all our lovers’ confessions. Jealousy is now the most obscene emotion of all.
Today, in books and on blogs and websites, we are told that jealousy is a symptom of insecurity, a plea for approval or a mental disorder. All the mirages of a certain idea of the independent individual, confident in him- or herself, swollen with self-esteem – arrogant, in a word – come together in a set of psychological clichés, forever tinged with a tone of reproach. The insinuation is always that you are exaggerating. In the psychological register, if only you would learn to trust; if you loved yourself more (or, alternatively, less); if you had not been jealous of your little sister; if you had not gone through a bad Oedipal phase; if your parents had made you more secure; if, even better, you had had no parents at all – then you would definitely be immune from pain. In a more upbeat version, if only you could bring yourself to believe that you are incomparable, unrivalled, unbeatable, then you would be blissfully happy. Or, in the ethical mode, if only you got the point that desire is a rational choice, you would shed your stupidly high expectations. They don't love you? Why would you care? When we talk about amorous jealousy, all of a sudden the world comes to a standstill. Attraction, arousal, infatuation, seduction, passion, adultery: nothing ever happens. For, as everyone knows, there are no young and beautiful and charming people in the world. Of course, nobody would dream of flirting with your husband (or wife, or lover, or occasional mate), who, in any case, is, as we all know, sex blind, indifferent to sensuality, insensitive to admiration and unable to feel desire. It is all in your head. It is all in your past. It is always your problem. Enough!
Jealousy is normal. The more realistic one is, the more jealous one will be.
Jealousy is something that comes about. It comes as a surprise. And in most cases there is indeed a cause: an event sweeps you off your feet. Unlike the censorious, who are always ready to cry paranoia, those who have experience of love know full well its actual freedom of movement. Lovers are always fearful, as Andreas Capellanus, author of a famous twelfth-century treatise, On Love,18 put it, because they – and especially women – are fully aware of how mobile the desire of another person can be. At different times and in different situations, infidelity (and male infidelity, in particular) is, quite simply, commonplace. In ancient Greece, in Ovid's Rome, in Stendhal's Europe, always in Paris and, finally, throughout the Western world, desire leads the game. This, of course, suits me perfectly, as long as it is I who decide how, and with whom, to play. My own infidelity is entirely innocent; my lover's is intolerable. The erotic excursions which I allow myself are wholly insignificant; the adventures of my beloved are always ominous.
In the wisdom of love, we know that we never know. It is now time to recount the history of that wisdom.
Notes
1
François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 472, in
The Maxims of François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
, etc., trans. F. G. Stevens, London: Humphrey Milford, 1940, p. 147.
2
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, ‘On Jealousy’, in
My Thoughts (Mes Pensées)
, ed. and trans. Henry C. Clark, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012, paras. 483–509;
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2534
. ‘I had written a work entitled
History of Jealousy
; I have changed it into another:
Reflections on Jealousy
’ (para. 483). On the relationship between jealousy and the famous seraglio in Montesquieu's
Persian Letters
, see C. Martin, ‘Une “histoire de la jalousie”? Différence des sexes et différence des mœurs dans les
Lettres persanes
’, in Christophe Martin (ed.),
Les Lettres persanes de Montesquieu
, Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2013, pp. 185–209.
3
La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 446, in
The Maxims of François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
, p. 139.
4
Stendhal,
Love
, trans. Gilbert Sale and Suzanne Sale, London: Penguin, 1975, pp. 127–8.
5
This is the prevailing approach to jealousy in contemporary analytic philosophy. See Kristján Kristjánsson,‘Jealousy revisited: recent philosophical work on a maligned emotion’,
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
19 (2016): 741–54. See also Daniel M. Farrell, ‘Jealousy’,
Philosophical Review
89 (1980): 527–59; Michael J. Wreen, ‘Jealousy’,
Noûs
23 (1989): 635–52; Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, ‘Envy and jealousy’,
Canadian Journal of Philosophy
20 (1990): 487–516; Luke Purshouse, ‘Jealousy in relation to envy’,
Erkenntnis
60 (2004): 179–204. For a good example of a historical understanding of the semantic, psychological and legal definition of jealousy in connection with, and as a redescription of, anger, see Dawn Keetley, ‘From anger to jealousy: explaining domestic homicide in antebellum America’,
Journal of Social History
42 (2008): 269–97.
6
Jacques Lacan,
Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII
, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, Cambridge: Polity, 2015, p. 32.
7
Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Des semblants dans la relation entre les sexes’,
La Cause freudienne
no. 36 (1997): 7–15.
8
Denis Diderot,
Supplément au voyage de Bougainville
, in Diderot,
Political Writings
, trans. and ed. John Hope Mason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 50.
9
Denis Diderot, ‘Jalousie’, in
Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers
, 1751–80, vol. VIII, p. 439.
10
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology
, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 366–7: ‘The notion of “ownership”, by which love is so often explained, is not actually primary. Why should I want to appropriate the Other if it were not precisely that the Other makes me be?’
11
Charles Pinot Duclos,
Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des mœurs au XVIII
e
siècle
, London, 1752, p. 38. In a lively conversation, this charming person discusses the nature of love with an inexperienced young man. ‘We find the bourgeoisie reasonable enough,’ she tells him, ‘polite enough, or foolish enough not to be jealous.’ The
Considerations
end with the triumph of constant love. Madame de Rétel's diagnosis of jealousy – a prejudice induced by education and fortified by habit, a foolish pride, a sentiment brought on by a lack of merit, a bad heart, an insupportable tyranny and a cruel folly (pp. 37–9) – echoes those of Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
12
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos,
Les Liaisons dangereuses
, trans. Richard Aldington, London: Routledge, 2011, p. 14.
13
Laclos,
Des femmes et de leur éducation
, in
Œuvres completes
, ed. Laurent Versini, Paris: Gallimard, 1979, p. 422.
14
Montesquieu, ‘On Jealousy’, para. 509.
15
I borrow the expression ‘hatred of the bourgeois’ (
haine du bourgeois
) from François Furet,
Le Passé d’une illusion:
essai sur l’idée communiste au XX
e
siècle
, Paris: Robert Laffont/Calman-Lévy, 1995. For an example of the interpretation of jealousy as property, see Masha Belensky,
The Anxiety of Dispossession: Jealousy in Nineteenth-Century French Culture
, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008, pp. 3–5, and
passim
.
16
Jean-Luc Marion,
The Erotic Phenomenon
, trans. Stephen E. Lewis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008; Christophe Perrin, ‘La Jalousie à l’honneur: J.-L. Marion après Proust’,
Revue d’éthique et de théologie morale
, 278 (2014): 9–34.
17
Christine R. Harris and Ryan S. Darby, ‘Jealousy in Adulthood’, in Sybil Hart and Maria Legerstee,
Handbook of Jealousy: Theory, Research, and Multidisciplinary Approaches
, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 547–71.
18
Andreas Capellanus, On Love, ed. 2nd trans. Patrick Gerard Walsh, London: Duckworth, 1982, p. 282.
1Being Medea
The ancients fully understood the experience of sorrow, humiliation and the violence caused by the sexual inconstancy of one's beloved, a desertion which places us, against our will, in a position of loss, grief, disillusion, disadvantage and unwanted rivalry. This complex situation, and the passionate reactions that it triggers, formed a powerful narrative.1 We encounter it in stories, in poems, in the theatre and in philosophical theories of love. To appreciate how significant it was, we doubtless have to recognize its agonistic pugnacity, but first and foremost we have to grasp its affective and narcissistic coherence. If we do so, then we will discover that, in ancient Greece, serious jealousy was anger. It is a distinctive kind of anger – orgê – in which eros, sensual love, plays an essential role. Jealousy is erotic anger.
Aristotle, as is often the case, is the best cultural interpreter. It is he who offers the most illuminating definition. Orgê is the perception of an unjustified offence, which one suffers but intends to avenge. It is a deep pain, because we are forced to swallow our pride at being treated as someone negligible, worth little or nothing (oligôria); but it is also a pleasure because it arouses in us the hope of retaliation.2 Passive and active, painful and pleasant, this seemingly impulsive and thoughtless fury requires, in fact, a chain of thoughts about what actually took place, in what position we now find ourselves, and how we feel about this whole predicament. We are also eager to take action. Anger involves events, affects and agency. Something has befallen me, and I have to respond. It is a paradoxically reasonable and, above all, noble passion. Whereas, in Aristotle's eyes, irascible individuals exaggerate, people who never get angry whatever befalls them deserve only a stinging rebuke: their behaviour reveals not a placid nature but the temperament of a slave.3
An aristocratic passion
To find ethical qualities in anger may seem to be inconceivable, dangerous and pre-modern. We have passed the era of vengeance; we live in societies governed by law and respect for the freedom to love whom we want, when we want. Before we get too agitated about this, however, let us look a bit more closely at how Aristotle speaks about anger.
Whatever the degree of violence involved in the act of vengeance, what really matters is the social and emotional dialectic: I expect to be respected. I expect this for reasons that have to do not only with my status but also with my actions. Because of what I have done for the sake of a person, I am entitled to demand recognition and gratitude. Instead of receiving what I am due, however, I receive only contempt. I am ignored; what I hold most dear is belittled, or I am mocked. I cannot just sit still and mope. An insult is a challenge. An obligation has been breached. I have to overcome it: my honour is at stake. For Aristotle, this is why we praise those who, neither being excessively irascible nor allowing themselves to be carried away by passion, know how to be angry as one ought to be (dei), following reason (logos). Their character is serene (praos, atarachos). Since they tend to forgive, you would think they lean towards indifference. But they are not indifferent. On the contrary, their virtue consists in experiencing orgē for good reason, against those with whom anger is reasonable, at the right time and for as long as it should.4 Those who never get angry prove themselves unable to meet all these requirements. They are, literally, insensitive, stupid and slavish.
Those who do not get angry for reasons for which one needs to be angry seem to be fools [elithioi] as well as those who do not get angry against those against whom one ought to be angry, or when necessary. Indeed, it seems that they do not feel anything [ouk aisthanesthai] and do not feel pain [ou lupeisthai]. And it seems that a man who never gets angry cannot defend himself, because it seems that to be dragged through the mud, or not to worry about (the way others treat) his family is worthy of a slave [andrapododes].5
The person who gets angry probably knows why, against whom, when, for how long s/he ought to feel the emotion. But taking all these micro decisions – why, against whom, when, for how long – in order to become angry, as ‘one ought’, is very difficult. Some incline towards too little, others towards excess. We appreciate the latter, calling them ‘manly and capable of command’.6 Between irascibility and apathy, we must identify the middle position, which is virtue. But default is worse than excess. It is even ignoble. A small surplus of anger, by contrast, is associated with valiant and compelling manliness. The purest kind of courage is the willingness to overcome fear and to take risks in the pursuit of what is ‘beautiful’, to kalon. The intent to be courageous, however, must be accompanied by passionate energy, thumos. ‘Brave men act because of the beautiful, but thumos helps them [sunergei].’7 Those who act solely in the heat of anger, orgizomenoi, are bellicose rather than truly brave. And yet, Aristotle concludes, ‘they have something similar’ (paraplesion de echousi ti) – to true courage.8 Heroic action requires ‘synergy’: it needs thumos.
To behave not like a slave, who is insensitive to pain and dignity; not to allow oneself to be ‘dragged through the mud’, without flinching; to live like a manly man; to feel a passion – courage – which contributes to the political virtue par excellence, and to feel that passion exactly ‘as it should be’, so that the affect, well-tempered, becomes a virtue in itself: this is anger, in all its moral and psychological complexity. Aristotle offers a true phenomenology and a theory of the emotions as experiences to be felt, although they hurt. Aristotle is clearly not Hegel, but we can see here the outline of a dialectical movement, of a struggle for recognition. People have to fight, sometimes, in order to be acknowledged. The will to recover one's honour requires that one is conscious of its loss. For Aristotle, anger leads me to action, but to reach the remedial act I must become fully aware of the offence itself. The whole process starts because it appears to me that someone has failed to acknowledge that I deserve mutual love and the fulfilment of an agreement. I have been slighted, and this perception causes me pain. The slight is presented to me (phainomenē). I recognize it as such. I wish for revenge, and that thought gives me pleasure. I will get over it.
The very experience of the passion itself is twofold: pain and pleasure. Consequently, it is absolutely crucial not to pretend that I feel nothing. That would be a stupid form of numbness. It would be the worst of servilities. Indifference, above all, would prevent me from acting. It is therefore up to me to register the infringement of respect and reciprocity. I must acknowledge the fact and, above all, its painful quality. It did happen, and it is a blow. Pain triggers the dynamic of anger.
Now pain and pleasure are essential in Aristotelian ethics: happiness requires pleasure – the pleasure of what one ought to enjoy. Aristotle is not Freud. But we can see here the centrality of a ‘pleasure principle’ and the precariousness of our hedonic equilibrium: we are ‘unprotected’ (ungeschützt) from narcissistic wounds. Our image of ourselves is fragile and vulnerable, not on account of individual ‘insecurity’ but simply because we live in a social world, exposed to the feelings of other human beings. And we are never so defenceless, Freud woefully argues, as when we are in love. Aristotle accepts the fundamental dependence of our sense of ourselves upon the way other people – friends or foes – deal with us. The phenomenology of orgê proves this sensitivity. It also calls for an offended person to have the courage to suffer, because only the lucid recognition of our own suffering – felt, expressed, articulated – will enable us to prepare a response. In order to understand that this response is required, one must first take stock of the horror. Instead of activating protective mechanisms such as repression, denial, displacement, hypocrisy or self-deception – It's nothing, I'm imagining it, I'm exaggerating, It will pass, It is ridiculous, It is useless, It is bourgeois, I am not jealous, but…etc. – one must admit to the sense of annihilation, until the bitter end. And finally, at the right time and the right place, one strikes. I will get over it, to be sure, but first I must go through it.
That is why anger is a high-level and high-risk passion. It is an aristocratic passion.
Epic erotic anger
Aristotle's definition accounts for the great tumults that we find in Greek poetry.
Think of The Iliad! The cause of the Trojan War is adultery. Helen, wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus, elopes with Paris, a handsome prince from Troy. The wronged husband convinces his own brother, Agamemnon, the king of Argos, and all the other lords of the Greek cities to mount an expedition against Troy and its royal family. The goal is to recover Helen and to punish her lover. Strife, death and misery for innumerable men will ensue from that one act. In the poem itself, the action begins when King Agamemnon is forced to give back a young captive, Chryseis, to her father, who is a powerful priest of Apollo. In order to recover his honour (geras), Agamemnon deprives the best warrior in the army, Achilles, of his own enslaved mate, Briseis. Now Achilles is angry. It has become a commonplace that mēnis (another term for anger) is the very first word of the poem. It is even the subject of the entire story, since it is Achilles’ vindictive retreat from the battlefield that sets in motion the ensuing events. Achilles refuses to fight; his dear friend Patroclus does so in his place and is killed; Achilles returns to the war, so that he can slaughter Hector in response. Once again, all this tragic butchery takes place because of one unforgivable, initial offence: the demand that Achilles give up a woman.
True, we do not have here a romantic triangle. But this does not make the erotic source of Menelaus’, Agamemnon's and Achilles’ anger insignificant. It is a point of honour, of course. It is a slight. But the warlike, aristocratic and competitive context that makes this kind of insult intolerable does not obliterate the subjective tone of the pain. On the contrary, a king's dignity is at stake in his wife's fidelity. Erotic ownership of a female prisoner is essential to a warrior's standing. Together with precious material objects, women signify prestige. Their aesthetic quality adds value to that prestige. Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world. Captured concubines tend to be young and good-looking. These women provoke sexual desire. Now desire is mimetic. An object of desire causes more desire. Rivalry surges.9 In a highly competitive group, sensual appeal creates attraction. And attractive women are sexual trophies. Certainly, Chryseis and Briseis are not pampered mistresses, described in a language of sentimentality and idealism. But they are not bronze tripods either. Agamemnon is furious, and this, he explains, is because he prefers Chryseis to Clytemnestra, his own wedded wife, ‘since she is not inferior to her, either in form [demas] or in stature [phuē], or in mind [phrenes], or in what she does [erga]’.10 Achilles is incensed because he is erotically interested in Briseis. She was a ‘dear wife’ in his heart, he said. Although she was conquered with the spear, he loved her (philein) passionately, with its thumos. He even cared for her, exactly as a husband cares for his wife. And was not the war itself, asks Achilles, ‘for fair-haired Helen's sake? Do they then alone of mortal men love their wives, these sons of Atreus?’11
Thumos is the affective component of a warrior's personality. It is also the source of courage and ire. By handing over part of their booty, these men had lost face. The total value of their war prize matters a great deal. But the human and female quality of their prisoners matters specifically. The Greek princes want to hold on to women who are desirable and comparable to wedded wives. They have regular sex with them. This is not the infatuation of starry-eyed paramours, but it is not brutal rape either. As Ruth Scodel has persuasively argued,
epic seems to assume that concubinage, even though it begins as rape, becomes something else.…Agamemnon says that he prefers Chryseis to his legitimate wife (1.111–115). Achilles claims to love Briseis, and explicitly compares the feeling he has for her to the feeling that is proper for a man to have for his wife.…Agamemnon and Achilles both received these women as prizes, and the narrative never indicates that the victors selected women they particularly desired; Achilles implies that his feelings arise within the relationship itself. From Briseis herself we hear far less, but the narrator does say that when she leaves Achilles she is ‘aekous’ (1.348). She does not want to leave him; at any rate, she is not completely indifferent to who has her.12
The erotic and affective connection makes it particularly difficult to give them up.
This mix can only sound disturbing in sentimental, democratic, egalitarian erotic cultures. In the pathetic apparatus of an honour culture, however, such feelings are unsurprising. According to Julian Pitt-Rivers's classical definition, ‘honour is the value of a person in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society. It is his estimation of his own worth, his claim to pride, but it is also the acknowledgement of that claim, his excellence recognized by society, his right to pride.’13 On account of such a claim, social status is not just a matter of one's stable station in society. An individual, especially a man, is constantly worried about his status, and this uncertainty generates powerful narcissistic passions, such as pride – more precisely, the sense of self-worth and the anxious expectation of proper deference. In these societies, female sexuality is crucial for men's honour, hence the significance of women's premarital virginity and conjugal faithfulness. A monopoly on women's bodies and women's devotion enhances men's self-importance. Sexual appetite and a claim to sexual exclusivity are felt with great satisfaction, therefore, as personal emotions as well as signifiers of status. Sex becomes a particularly sensitive issue. Men prove to be extremely prickly in this domain. They are prone to erotic anger.
Unruly wives
The Iliad offers us the very first example of the passion that is unleashed by amorous disappointment. Fifth-century bce Athenian tragedy deployed a wide range of scenarios and nuances on the same theme. These are not merely literary genres. They are staples of popular culture. The Homeric poems were the cornerstone of education in the classical polis and were recited in front of the people during the official celebration of Athenian power, the Panathenaia. The theatre was not a private space, home to a marginal or elite form of entertainment. It was a public forum, hosting widely attended festivals. The performance of epics and drama infused ancient mentalities with their language and their content. But this infusion was no complacent conformity with common sense. In tragedy, the constant re-elaboration of the same plots and characters allowed playwrights to create possible worlds and conduct thought-experiments in all possible domains, from politics to love. One major feature of such creativity was the focus on the feminine. In the theatre, women are frequently the protagonists. And they are angry.
The shift from one gender to another is no accident. Anger in the feminine creates a radically new perspective. The archaic conjunction of licence and dominance, promiscuity and jealousy, as a twofold prerogative of men only, finds a renewed legitimacy in the classical polis. Both the aristocratic past and the democratic present sanction the belief that women should accept the obligation of premarital chastity, the duty of conjugal fidelity and the prohibition of jealousy. They have to submit to a non-egalitarian erotic culture. Women must be faithful, whereas men are not bound by the same rule. Their submission is unilateral. It is, moreover, the condition of possibility of men's own behaviours. Women must enable their men's ordinary unfaithfulness by renouncing any pretence to jealousy. If women were jealous, they would challenge men's rights and disturb the tranquil enjoyment thereof. If women were to voice their jealousy, they would be asking to be treated equally, at least in bed. Jealousy is a claim to reciprocity.
In the theatre, however, this matrimonial compliance is endlessly questioned, challenged and upset. Women, especially wedded wives, take the lead and revolt. Tragic wives denounce the unfairness of their own condition. They were constrained to virginity, destined for marriage and, once married, had to observe absolute fidelity and tolerate their men's systematic promiscuity. Their jealousy is a resounding ‘no!’ to this arrangement. It is still, more than ever, erotic anger, but it is now a struggle for recognition within the heterosexual couple. From the standpoint of their own loyalty and their own eros, these slighted spouses fight for mutual love. They, too, refuse to be ‘dragged through the mud’.
On the tragic stage, Deianira, Clytemnestra, Hermione and especially Medea ‘were honoured’, to paraphrase La Rochefoucauld, to proclaim their erotic dignity. A variety of words – thumos, cholos, orgē – express the fury of violated pride. Achilles was angry; now Clytemnestra and Medea are angry. Once again, the erotic situation does not change the structure and the dynamic of the passion. Anger in love is still what the (Homeric and Aristotelian) Greeks understood as ‘anger’ in its generic definition: the sense of having received an affront (oligōria), which is unfair and unjustified because it denies respect and destroys reciprocity. Love, however, makes anger specific. The same emotion becomes erotic. This means that eros is the remote cause of what occurs and the trigger of what is felt. As eros is a strong emotion, it brings about a particularly intense response. More to the point, tragedy shows that love makes us intrinsically vulnerable to wrath. Since love is the desire to be desired in return and, therefore, to be admired, preferred, praised, lovers are exceptionally sensitive to respect and extremely keen on reciprocity. What matters is that our beloved should love us. And this is what seems to be lost. This is, therefore, what really hurts. Like any other slight, infidelity causes offence and pain, and one that we are eager to repair. The repair will be targeted. We suffer; we will make suffer – in love as in war – that is to say, valiantly and intelligently.
In tragedy, a woman who has been replaced in the marital bed by a mistress, or another wife, receives an injury that she will not tolerate and which she intends to redress – hence dejection, prostration and collapse but also lucidity, wisdom and a determination to act. In Greek, in short, all this is anger. Confronted by men who do not hesitate to behave as they wish, tragic women take up the challenge. First, they shout loud and clear that this is not right. Because, they say, what touches them so painfully in the domain of erotic love is truly an injustice. This claim is often represented as a physical place: the marital bed, where marriage is consummated in intimacy and lovemaking. To speak of the expectation of gratitude at the heart of their eros, these offended wives say that there is a ‘justice of the bed’. These women can be dangerous. I am not attempting here to make murderesses into models to emulate. Tragic choruses are categorical on this point: murder (voluntary or involuntary, of an unfaithful husband or innocent children) is not a good thing in itself. But these women are not bound by a prohibition against what they feel; even less are they bound to remain silent. Of their distress, they have no shame. They are not afraid to confess. They suffer and they are proud of it.
Tragic erotic anger
In this world, it is not ignoble to admit to suffering. Quite the contrary. The greatest of these vocal women, Medea, lays claim to it and exalts in it: ‘I am in my torments, and I do not fear that they may be insufficient.’14 For to express her ponoi is, for her, to denounce the outrage, the mortification and the injustice. It is to demand recognition from the beloved. On stage, the whole extent of the damage is brought into full view. Firstly we hear about a ravaged body, an emaciated face, a sickly pale skin. Then the raw affect explodes into inarticulate cries. Finally poignant sentences explain in detail what happens, what has been done, how it feels. Lament gives the measure of a lived experience in real time. Medea screams: ‘Woe! Distraught, destroyed by pain, Woe is me, me! How to die?’15 Everyone hears her voice, phone, and her cry, boa, and her chant, melpein. The theatre of Dionysus must have resounded with all of those Io!Aiai!Pheu! Pheu!
Medea is not ashamed. Many passions shake her: anger in all its forms (thumos, orgē, cholos), but also fear (phobos), love (eros), maternal affection. Among all these passions, however, there is not the slightest trace of a ‘shame to confess’. La Rochefoucauld's maxim would make no sense to her. In the pathetic language of ancient Greece, shame, aischunē, is a torment caused by ‘evils’ – that is to say, actions and vices, such as cowardice, flattery, weakness, greed – which bring dishonour.16 Medea has done nothing of the kind. Instead, she plays the role of the innocent victim, proud of her pain. It is her outspokenness that drives the drama because what she says gives weight to Jason's acts – while Jason himself seems to be unaware of the effects of what he is doing. Her words convey the severity of his act: unforgivable gratuitousness/ungratefulness of such an act, its devastating impact and, ultimately, Medea's own reasons for reacting. Here's what it is for me, she keeps on saying; these are the consequences! She has nothing with which to reproach herself except to have loved her husband too much. Jason is the only one to blame. She has no hesitation in letting him know.17 Everything Medea feels goes into speech.
No awkward silence, therefore, but rather an explosion. Medea complains of suffering badly from many things: the breakage of the ‘contract’ with Jason, who fails to honour his promises and oaths; the breach of trust, symbolized in the ritual gesture of the handshake; the ingratitude of a man who, after all she has done to help him, is now rewarding her by breaking all his oaths and promises, by renouncing gratitude and reciprocity. Jason has disavowed himself. All this is a matter of amorous disillusion as well as of social disintegration: Jason is guilty of a violation which, while affecting the most intimate place of sensuality, the bed, dishonours Medea before the world.18 The justice of the bed has been shattered.19 Medea's complaint has a moral and social content, therefore, but it responds to an event that is sexual and endured with great emotional intensity. Her humiliation is a loss of face and its cause is erotic, otherwise the ‘injustice’ would not concern the bed. The bed signifies the specificity of her social shame. Medea's pain is about justice, honour and carnal love, all at the same time.
Seen through an Aristotelian lens, this scenario corresponds perfectly to the dialectic of anger. Medea's nurse explains to the public the cultural implications and the pathetic symptoms of her mistress. She fears that all this pain, although understandable and warranted, will lead to a frightening plan of action: something one cannot predict in detail, but something new and unheard of, worthy of a great and terrifying woman. ‘For she is terrible…because I have seen her throwing onto the children the eye of a mad bull, as if she were to go and commit a crime. She will not give up her anger [cholos], before coming down on someone.’20
The reading of the symptoms is clinical. Anger, as we said, with Aristotle's help, is an emotion defined by a perceived insult, a narcissistic wound, and the desire for revenge. Before anything else, anger involves assessing what hurts. This is an insult! And this insult is undeserved for reasons of social status and recognition. In the past, the injured party has acted in favour of those who now wrong them. They are benefactors, but they are badly treated. Medea finds herself in exactly this situation. She is the target of contempt and the victim of ingratitude, the subjective consequences of which come together into a passion, which the Greeks call thumos, orgē, cholos – namely, ‘anger’. Euripides’ language is full of such words.21 But there is even more: the deployment of anger commands the very structure of the tragedy. Medea discovers the insult done to her, a scorn she feels she does not deserve. She admits what she is feeling, with foresight and objectivity. She sinks into a pain that crushes her. But she rebounds with a double project of vengeance. First, she wants to kill Jason and destroy his ‘new home’. Then she changes her mind. When Jason claims that he is leaving her not for the love of another woman but for the sake of their children – more precisely, for the sake of his own beloved sons, who would have a better life in a new family – Medea decides to kill them instead. She now prefers to let the father survive, so that he will be able to feel the loss. He has revealed his soft spot. That is where she will strike. Medea's words, the symptoms of her body, the comments of the other characters and, above all, the plot of the play converge towards one coherent diagnostic: Medea is angry. Which means that she's jealous.
Medea is angry in a complex and yet unambiguous fashion. Her rage is not to be confused with that of other tragic heroes such as Ajax, Achilles or Hecuba. Hers is a specifically erotic anger, caused by the ‘great eros’ that Jason, she says, now feels for his new wife.22 Her own eros for this man, who is all for her, brought her to leave everything for him, to harm her dear ones, and to venture into an unknown world.23 Jason repays her eros by another eros – for another woman. This is the slight. If Medea did not love that man erotically, she would not feel what she feels and how she feels. If her passion were not overpowering, disproportionate, totalizing, then she would not ache so much.
