In Praise of Forgiveness. Massimo Recalcati
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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 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 2. Paul Éluard, ‘Le dur désir du durer’ [‘The Firm Desire to Endure’], in Last Love Poetry, Black Widow Press, Boston 2006.
3 3. See Freud, ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’.
4 4. ‘Only love allows enjoyment to condescend to desire’ (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