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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
The kiss is the image that, perhaps more than any other, encompasses the beauty and poetry of love. Every love is required to maintain the kiss, to make it last. When they kiss, lovers carve out their hiding holes, finding their peace from war. When they kiss, the noise of the world is silenced, its laws broken, time is stolen from its normal continuity. They fall together in their distinct, embraced tongues. The kiss joins the tongue that declares love with the body of the lover. And the extinction of the kiss and, most importantly, of the desire to kiss one’s beloved announces the demise of love.
In this short book, Massimo Recalcati – one of Italy’s leading intellectuals and bestselling authors – offers seven brief lessons on the mystery and miracle of love, from the serendipity of the first encounter to its end or its continuation over time, as mysterious and miraculous as the first encounter itself.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The Promise
To Burn or To Last?
Saying ‘I Love You’
The Miracle of the Encounter
‘Amur’
The Light
Being Expected
Forever
Notes
2 Desire
The Fire of Sexual Desire
Desire and Love
Eroticism and Fetishism
When a Body Becomes a Book
Notes
3 Children
A Child Comes into the World
More than One
Sacrificing Ourselves for Our Children
Libidinal Confiscation
Notes
4 Betrayal and Forgiveness
Jealousy
Every Great Love Can Die
The Atrocity of the Work of Forgiveness
The Wound that Became Poetry
Notes
5 Violence
Hitler’s Bitch
Freedom and Ownership
Violence as a Profanation of Love
The Refusal of Femininity
Notes
6 Separations
Indifference and Deceit
‘Separtition’
Destinies of Separation
Notes
7 Enduring Love
To Burn or To Last?
The Intimacy of Strangers
At First Sight, Once More
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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The Enduring Kiss
Seven Short Lessons on Love
Massimo Recalcati
Translated by Alice Kilgarriff
polity
Copyright © Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, MilanoFirst published in 2019 with the title Mantieni il bacioPublished under licence from Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, Italy
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
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: 978-1-5095-4250-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
To Roberto Benigni, who understands the poetry of endurance
Acknowledgements
My warmest thanks to Stefano Coletta, the director of Rai 3, for having believed in the power of the word and having challenged the stifling stereotypes of commercial television with a decidedly anti-televisual programme, reiterating the social and civil role of public television. Thanks also to Gianluca Foglia, who since The Telemachus Complex has been a valued interlocutor of mine. And last but not least, to Arianna Bayre, who unwittingly provided me with the right words.
Introduction
The title of this book comes from a dream I once had. The day before, my Pilates teacher Arianna, who has long helped me to mend my poor back worn out by thirty years of practising psychoanalysis, had given me a particular exercise to do. Lying on my back and holding my knees together, I had to rotate one leg at a time. Whilst holding this uncomfortable and unnatural posture, Arianna told me to ‘maintain the kiss’ between my knees, which the leg rotation tended to break. ‘Massimo’, she told me sternly, ‘maintain the kiss.’
In the dream, this day residue (as Freud would define it) developed in a surprising way. At that time, I had a provisional title for this book that I was not entirely happy with, and my dream developed both the day residue of the Pilates lesson and this dissatisfaction. In the dream I am at the Fondazione Feltrinelli in Milan. I am striding up the stairs to the floor where the publishing house is. No one is there apart from the editorial director, who is waiting for me in his office. I am meeting him to tell him the title of my next book, which will be ‘Enduring Kiss’. His reaction is incredibly positive. Then he asks me, ‘Where does it come from?’ I answer, ‘The same place as the others.’ ‘Which is?’, he asks. ‘My unconscious.’
I wake up with a feeling of childlike happiness and a new title for my book, one that I am entirely happy with.
The kiss is the image that, perhaps more than any other, encompasses the beauty and poetry of love. It’s no coincidence that the kiss doesn’t feature in contractual love; even in pornography it is rare. The kiss is a moment of intimacy that unites the place of the word and that of the body in a remarkable way. If there is no love without a declaration of love, equally there is no love without a kiss. If there is no love without you or I saying ‘I love you’, there can never be love without a kiss.
Every love is required to maintain the kiss, to make it last. Only the kiss joins the tongue that declares love with the body of the lover. There is no loving kiss that doesn’t involve the tongue. We are well aware of this. It is the tongue that distinguishes a loving kiss from other kinds of kisses. One can kiss a child, a friend, a sibling or parent with affection, but only the presence of the tongue implies the eroticism of desire.
Love binds this eroticism – the eroticism of the tongue, of the kiss ‘of’ or ‘with’ the tongue, that can also be simply sexual or sensual – to the declaration of love, to the words of love, to their declaration: ‘I love you.’ Every loving kiss, always and silently, declares ‘I love you.’ It is from the silence of the tongue that the kiss’s declaration of love emerges. To feel the beloved’s tongue is like feeling their heartbeat: it is the declaration of my love, it makes love exist. It is like making love.
Whilst I maintain the kiss, I touch your tongue, your voice, your word, your name. Whilst I maintain the kiss, I transform your body into a new language and a new alphabet. I feel the whole history of your body deposited on the unique mystery that is your tongue. I feel all the life I have lived pass into this new tongue that we have now become.
So, I maintain the kiss; I trap it in memory and time. Your tongue like roses or caramel, like rain or snow, like sea or wind. Your tongue like a new frontier. I tie and untie myself from the memory of all the times and first kisses I have experienced. I discover my body is made to be opened up, to host a new tongue and to combine mine with yours. I discover that my body is exposed to the new event of your unpronounceable tongue.
This is the immense joy of the Two, when it occurs: feeling your entire body in your tongue. Learning to talk in a new way. Learning a new presence in me. Experiencing the tongue that, like the world, is born once more.
The kiss does not unite. It doesn’t penetrate, it doesn’t meld the lovers into a single body. In the kiss, the bodies stay divided, separate, distinct. The intimacy of the kiss causes One to fall deeply into the Other, but the bodies remain Two.
Rather, it is only because the bodies remain Two that the kiss is possible. A rapid descent of the stairs or a mountain valley, of a drop onto the sea. The plunging heart.
I kiss you as if wrapped in a spring breeze, and I pour my whole tongue, my entire world, my very being into you. My whole being is in the tongue that kisses you and talks to you. I am in every point of your mouth, of your voice, of your body, of the unknown words of your tongue.
I maintain the kiss in the dark of night and the light of day. I maintain it in the time that passes. I maintain it in the burning rage of the world, in all its ferociousness. Lovers carve out their hiding holes, finding their peace from war, from the infinite pain of being. When they kiss the noise of the world is silenced, its laws broken, time is stolen from its normal continuity. They fall together in their distinct, embraced tongues.
I carry my first kiss from when I was a boy with me like an amulet. When I kissed the girl for the first time, she tasted of mint. She had pulled close to me in the dark oratory cinema room. Our hearts between us, beating. I had passed a threshold, and no other has ever been so sweet and mysterious. My tongue was in hers. I can still see her half-closed eyes and her face abandoning themselves on my shoulders. I found a tongue I knew nothing about. Did it even have an alphabet? A dictionary? A code?
Though there are long, drawn-out kisses, kissing competitions, Guinness world record kisses, the kiss is only ever fleeting when compared to the love story of the Two. The extinction of the kiss and, most importantly, of the desire to kiss one’s beloved is always an indication of a crisis, announcing the imminent demise of love.
To maintain the kiss means keeping the promise of the tongue, the promise of a secret that cannot be dissolved. The foreign and inappropriable nature of the tongue as that of the Other.
In the exercise Arianna asked me to do, a tension that came from the contraction of the abdominal muscles should have kept the knees from drawing apart. Indeed, as she explained, a certain tension is required to ensure an ‘enduring kiss’, to maintain that kiss. This tension is the same one that overwhelms lovers: will they know how to keep the secret of their foreign tongues? Will they know how to value the direction of their travel, the continual creation and dissolution of their kisses?
You know that when I kiss you, you who did not share that first kiss, you who became my woman, my wife, every one of our kisses is like the first. You know that when I kiss you, I still feel my heart in my tongue like in that first kiss. So, I maintain our kiss, holding my knees tight. I still hold your heart on my tongue and my heart on yours.
Is it really possible to give lessons on love? Obviously not. It is never possible to explain love, never possible to reduce love to a concept. It is, however, possible and necessary to speak of love, to keep on speaking of love, to the point that we can even say speaking of love is the only thing we can do when it comes to love. We speak so much of love because no one knows what it is. This book talks about love using a number of lessons that are not, in fact, lessons at all. It actually comes from a sort of ‘script’ written for the television series shown on Italy’s national broadcaster, Rai 3, entitled Lessico Amoroso [Lexicon of Love] (January–March 2019). A script that was so extensive, so rich in references, thoughts and themes, that it could not be fully developed using this format, given the fatal limitations of television.
So, here we have a series of seven brief ‘lessons’ that investigate the mystery and miracle of love, from the contingent event of the encounter to that of its end or its endurance, as mysterious and miraculous as the event of every first encounter.
Milan, January 2019
1The Promise
Love demands love. […] It demands it … encore.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX
To Burn or To Last?
Does it burn or does it last? If it burns out it consumes itself quickly and cannot last. In order to last it must not burn brightly, but instead lower the intensity of its flame. But what becomes of a love that no longer burns? Can a love still exist when there is no longer fire? Is that love worthy of still being called ‘love’? As Roland Barthes asks, why is it better to last than to burn?1
The figure of the person in love seems to be different to that of the husband, the figure of the sensual lover different to that of wife and mother. Does the lexicon of the family signal the end of the lexicon of love? On the one hand, we have the fire of the person in love, whilst on the other we have the affectionate presence of the father or husband. On one hand, we have the eroticism of the lover, on the other the attentive care of the wife or mother. One side burns, the other endures. Isn’t this perhaps one of love’s greatest paradoxes? We will see it in all of its different guises in this book.
We can attempt to grasp things from the outset and simply ask ourselves: how is love born? How does it happen? How is it that the Two meet and declare their love for one another? What is love’s secret? What does it mean to declare one’s own love? What do we mean when we say, ‘I love you’?2
