(Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X: Anxiety, Polity, Cambridge 2014, p. 179).
1 The 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
Faced with this cynical, scientific demolition of love, it seems there are two remaining options: to accept the inevitable corruption of the bond and regularly change partners in order to revitalize one’s own love life (a change that can also lead to a parallel love life being maintained, as is the case with affairs), or to resign oneself to a life without desire, to the monotony of the family charade, guaranteeing oneself monogamous emotional security as a counterpart to the acceptance of the mortal desiccation of desire.
But are these really the only paths we can follow?
