In Praise of Forgiveness. Massimo Recalcati
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Lies for Our Time
Our time is built upon two fundamental lies about the nature of human beings. The first sees them as independent, free, autonomous, free from symbolic debts to the Other from which they hail. This is the narcissistic lie that feeds the individualistic cult of one’s own image and that, in turn, lays the basis for the fantasy of liberty and self-generation, the ideal of making a name for oneself without passing through the Other.
The second lie exalts the New as the guiding principle in the life of desire. This lie maintains that goodness, salvation and satisfaction reside in what we do not yet possess: in the new object, the new partner, the new sensation. From this comes a purely nihilistic version of desire, which works to breathlessly pursue that which, in reality, is destined to always be lacking.10
These two great lies of our time are bound together, reinforcing one another. Making a name for oneself without passing through the Other – misrecognizing the symbolic debt that ties us to it – feeds a purely perverse version of freedom as being able to do exactly as we please. The crazed racing of desire between one object and the next seems to therefore take on the traits of a genuinely collective hallucination. Desire is pulled like a magnet towards the new object, the new sensation, the new encounter, the new love. Goodness is never found in what we have but always deferred, to be found in that which we do not yet possess. And it is precisely here that the machine of the capitalist discourse finds the principle of its own function: not to meet needs but to transform them into pseudo-desires that are impossible to satisfy and that, precisely because of this impossibility, appear to be perennially enticed by the siren song of the New Object. This is the hyper-modern version of the capitalist machine that carries with it the absence of care for what we have and the compulsive urge to reach that which we lack, reducing lack to a void that yearns mindlessly to be filled, though this is, in reality, always deferred.11 Total satisfaction is postponed in a beyond that reveals itself to be inaccessible. So boredom sets in even more quickly, living off relationships like a parasite, feeding the unsatisfied urge towards that which we do not have. This framework obviously also has an impact on loving bonds, with devastating and, paradoxically, illusionistic consequences. Isn’t this perhaps the radical disenchantment that, as we have seen, reduces the kiss to hygienic safeguarding, and falling in love to an onslaught of dopamine destined to rapidly run out, before creating a new form of enchantment? The hypnotic suggestion provoked by the New turns love that lasts, love that wants to be forever, into nothing more than a meaningless word, or worse, an advertising slogan. Shouldn’t we then think today that the great illusion is no longer that of an everlasting love, but the destruction of love as an effect of the exaltation of a freedom made of nothingness? And if this were the case, would love that refuses to retreat when faced with commitment, at risk of absolute exposure, not be a unique point of resistance to its cynical liquidation as promoted by modern cynicism?
The New Libertine Ideology
The libertine regime is sustained by the enchantment of the New, which dissolves any representation of the eternal, considering it a childish product of the human imagination. It aims to render any lasting encounter impossible. It wants to unmask fidelity to the Same as if it were a lie. The desire that wants to be entirely free rejects any idea of fidelity and constancy in the name of a permanent spontaneity. The capitalist discourse experiences every kind of bond as an obstacle to its unquestioned affirmation. In this sense, humans are reduced to nothing more than goods in an even more radical way than that described by Marx. Bonds seem to be unable to hold in the face of a freedom that wants to be absolute, rejecting any experience of the limit. The generalized hyperactivity fed by the capitalist discourse deludes us, causing us to believe that there are no second chances, that what counts in this is not even the accumulation of enjoyment, as the ascetic-Weberian version of capitalism would have it, but its multiplication.12 For this reason, every bond becomes a limit, a point of resistance to the crazed motion of the capitalist discourse’s unchecked machine. Everything is rendered volatile in a purely nihilistic regime of desire, in which, as Lacan wrote, it is not so much the subject that confuses its prey with its shadow, as if there were some kind of visual defect, but the subject itself that is prey to the shadow.13
This maniacal acceleration of time makes the loving promise that it be ‘everlasting’ laughable, naïve, even stupidly superstitious. Bonds are shredded by the logic of the New, which, in increasingly short time frames, makes the Same a leftover from the past that must be replaced as quickly as possible. The simple epidemiology of relationships demonstrates this: human beings are struggling more and more to remain in one bond for any length of time. Separations abound, married or long-term couples leave each other with increasing frequency in order to create new bonds or to live out their own freedom in a more carefree manner. It is a sign of the times. As Bauman rightly asserted, ours is an age of liquid loves.14 This is the age of libertinism as an unprecedented duty of the Super-Ego. In the place of the symbolic pact that binds two lovers, of which the marriage bonds are the greatest symbol, a disenchanted cynicism establishes itself, one that views every bond as time-limited, destined to spoil and be exchanged for a new one. We search for the New to break the routine, the boredom of the familiar, the anonymous ordinariness of our lives. We search for the spice of falling in love in order to add flavour to our desire-less lives. The growing refusal of the symbolic pact of marriage, to which living together is increasingly preferred, is a telling sign. Couples unite and fall apart without passing through the Other, without pondering the symbolic value of the pact. At play here is a purely pubescent view of desire that wants to avoid any assumption of responsibility. The presence of the symbolic pact with the Other would kill the freedom and vitality of desire. The disarming consequence of this new libertine ideology is the decline of the loving bond into little more than the stuff of gossip about summer love affairs. The ideological distortion of love is evident and it gives rise to a refrain that never changes: the intensity of loving passion stands in relentless opposition to the length of the relationship. The time spent together would fatally extinguish the flame of desire, which would supposedly always require the storm of emotion that is by its very nature profoundly anti-institutional. The merry-go-round of bonds makes a mockery of the expectation of eternity contained within the promise made by lovers. However, psychoanalytic practice is stating the obvious when it finds that the compulsive search for the New is not in any way an expression of freedom, but a new slavery, the result of an ideological social injunction (‘Enjoy!’) to which the subject must radically submit.
Love as Resistance to the Libertine Worship of the New
The demand accompanying every real love, notably that it be everlasting, resists the nihilistic tendencies of our time. It upholds, in an old-fashioned way, the assertion that the loving bond is not destined to dissolve over time, but that in that bond time appears as a sudden and powerful figure of the eternal.15 It does not follow the current trend, it does not deride the promises made by lovers, and it does not want to reiterate the relativity of every loving bond in a politically correct way. Here we have love as an erotic force, a manifestation of Eros, the force of the bond according to Freud, a force that resists time and that introduces time to the single experience of the absolute conceded to human beings: that of the loving bond as a bond with a unique Other, an Other that is irreplaceable, impossible to reproduce. Love that lasts reveals the entirely illusory nature of the Super-Ego’s injunction of the New, demonstrating to us how the most authentic experience of the New can only take place within the Same. The psychoanalyst sees this every day: the New as an (illusory) cure for the bored repetition of the Same always leads life back to the same lack of satisfaction. This is what patients caught in the spiral of continually changing partners complain about. Each time they describe the new love as ideal, full of promise, different and unique, each time in just a short, if not incredibly short time, they find it to be disappointing, inadequate and sadly identical to all the others.
Love that lasts resists the corrosive urge of enjoyment as an end in itself and refuses the illusion that happiness lies in the New, in what we do not possess. Thus, love is the New which, rather than attacking the bond, transforms itself into