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The Enduring Kiss
Seven Short Lessons on Love
Massimo Recalcati
Translated by Alice Kilgarriff
polity
Copyright © Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano
First published in 2019 with the title Mantieni il bacio Published under licence from Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, Italy
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4250-5
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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
