Luciano Lutereau
07/23/2021 11:00
Clarín.com
Culture
Updated 07/23/2021 11:00
In 1977, the French thinker Roland Barthes published the book
Fragments of a loving speech
.
In a few weeks, the first 15,000 copies were sold out.
Towards the end of the year, it was in its
eighth edition
.
Before long,
Barthes
would become the first philosopher to be interviewed by
Playboy
magazine
.
How is it that a book written by a specialist (and that is not so easy to read) became a bestseller?
The immediate answer is too obvious:
love sells
, it became one more cultural consumption.
However, where did all that public willing to read about love come from?
Fragmentos
is a book that is
still available in bookstores
and if it is not a best seller today, the truth is that it still interests many readers.
Written in the first person, it is presented as a great
catalog of the passions
, affections and crossroads that the lover lives.
01
Fragments of a loving speech
Author
: Roland Barthes
Publisher
: Siglo XXI
Price
: $ 1,600
Barthes
chose to speak of "figures", such as those that are recognized in dance steps, by which someone lets themselves be carried away, as in a movement.
Who has not ever found himself
in the despair of loneliness
, when the loved one is missing, or with words that are not enough to describe what in the other is "adorable"?
If there is a wonderful entry in this book, perhaps it is the one related to
jealousy
, when
Barthes
affirms that: “As jealous, I suffer four times: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will hurt the other, because I let myself be subjected to a trifle: I suffer
for being excluded, for being aggressive, for being crazy and for being ordinary
”.
Now, what kind of lover is he who is recognized in these terms?
On the one hand, I am interested in highlighting that
Barthes
tells us about someone who experiences love as a conflict;
who at the same time has a strong moral conscience and, for example, is capable of being
ashamed
;
it is a self capable of recognizing itself as aggressive, driven mad by its insecurities, even a bit vulgar.
Love is gone
Without a doubt, the experience of love that
Barthes
speaks of
already seems distant to us.
In contemporary society, our ties took on
another dimension, much more moral
.
Today we ask ourselves all the time: how do we get out of a toxic relationship (in which
the toxic is always the other
, of course)?
How do we recognize a healthy relationship?
And we don't wonder too much because love has become an item in the health sciences.
We are far from a phrase like that of the psychiatrist Robert Stoller, when he said: "It may be that we get closer to the truth if with regard to erotic behavior, we assume that
most people are abnormal
."
Barthes
and Stoller, for example, are of the last generation of authors willing to recognize love for its pathological character - insofar as this word comes from the Greek "pathos" (passion).
"Not having a body is driving many people crazy and is leaving us on the edge of 'the human'"
Luciano LuterauPsychoanalyst
By the way, the naturalization of love-passion had to be investigated, because under its wing there were
many forms of violence
that had to be exposed.
However, after this breakdown, this necessary distinction, what did our love speech become?
In recent years, before a discourse of fragments, of pieces in which a timid voice dares to say something about its intimacy, different monolithic discourses have emerged, like large blocks that build
a new morality of love
.
This is a central aspect: nowadays we talk about love, but has our experience of love become more complex or is it simply
impoverished
?
When I refer to "monolithic discourses", I make this difference: the lover
Barthes
spoke of
was a lonely being, who believed that things happened only to him (or her), even though he knew they could happen to others.
Who can understand what happens to me when I love?
Barthes supposes a fundamental misunderstanding of love, which makes the one who loves cling to his feeling
as if he were the only one
who can say something about it.
Ultimately, the lover that
Barthes
speaks of
is a strongly moral Ego, but it does not moralize since it does not say how things of love should be for others, does not impose ways of feeling,
does not classify passions
as good or good. bad.
01
Liquid love
Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: Economic Culture Fund
Price: $ 1400
Doesn't our time confront us more and more with theories of love that, instead of starting from the conflict that love implies, propose how it should be
so that no conflict represents us
?
Of course this does not happen in the abstract.
Society changed since the time of
Barthes
.
As Zygmunt Bauman argues in a propitiatory book for these times, called
Liquid Love
(2003), rather than relationships it would be convenient to speak of
“contacts”
.
Our ways of life are based on being “in networks” (or, better: entangled), in multiple interactions that are not consolidated,
fragile and ephemeral
.
In this way, the emergence of
moral discourses on love
is the effect of a clear social change.
This is something that the sociologist Eva Illouz also pointed out in her book
Why love hurts
(2011), in which she highlights how certain codes of love were modified from time to time.
01
Why love hurts
Author
: Eva Illouz
Publisher
: Katz
Price
: $ 1,300
For example, he says, if today we need greater security in the ways of bonding - if we want to ensure what the other wants before seeing each other - it is because we live in a society in which the relationship with the other has become much more instrumental, consumer and discard.
In another century,
standing a bride on an altar
implied being willing to leave the city, it was a shame.
Today, however,
shamelessness
is the order of the day.
The question is whether the way out for these new problems is in moral discourses.
For example, in recent years in our country the expression "affective responsibility" has become popular.
If we suppose that it means that we have to be sincere, conscious and consistent in love, we cannot help but wonder if these types of prescriptions do not propose a type of reflexivity
whose cost is deserotization
.
In other words, the notion, understood in these terms, seems to be closer to a defensive discourse that expects some kind of guarantee in love and that constructs the other
as a potential enemy
.
This can be seen in the way in which in different texts on affective responsibility it is made to revolve around the mandate of
“not ghosting”
(not stopping responding to the other's messages).
Put like this, an extremely rich notion becomes overwhelming, especially since its field of application seems to be more at the service of the prosecution than of the construction of a more solid bond in times of instability.
01
Self-help eroticism
Author
: Eva Illouz
Publisher
: Katz
Price
: $ 990
In this vein,
another book by Eva Illouz
advances
, which starts from the reading of another bestseller (not one on the level of
Barthes
, but
50 shades of Gray
) and is entitled
Self-help Erotism
(2014).
With it you can reflect on how our experience of love seeks more and more slogans every day and
thickens our feelings
.
For example, we are much more willing to think about what the other does, but aren't we the other of the other?
We think about what the other does (to us) and that is the victimization matrix on which motivational phrases such as "Be strong", "He does not deserve you" are supported, the correlate of which is the proliferation of ways to
diagnose the psychopathy of others
(That of our boss, our partner, even our children! But we never saw any book called
How to recognize my psychopathic attitudes with others
.
Instead, why not reclaim the terrain of love
as a field of conflict
, based on desire, that is, in which even when two people desire the same, they do not do it in the same way?
If the notion of responsibility does not recognize the conflict, it only remains a direct way to judge the actions of someone who does something that I did not like and as an indirect way to authorize revenge.
Because if the other one behaved "badly", why couldn't I get revenge?
As is well known, people who think they are good are also those who are capable of committing all kinds of evil.
As Byung-Chul Han says
Along this same line of thought, another recent book to consider is
The Agony of Eros
(2014), by the philosopher
Byung-Chul Han
, which raises –as in several other of his books– the growing deserotization of the world, the depletion of the Desire engrossed in a
vindictive narcissism
, when love –if it has any kind of horizon– is based on the need for something different, on what it challenges.
01
The Agony of Eros
Author
: Byung-Chul Han
Publisher
: Herder
Price
: $ 1,280
"Love disrupts the perspective of one and
brings the world into being from the perspective of the other
, of difference," says Han.
In love life, this implies re-admitting
conflict as a starting point
, so that responsibility is something that cannot be reduced to a set of maxims, but a situation in which, even when something unwanted happens to us, we have the option to show that we are up to a dignified act.
If we redirect this situation to the growing discomfort experienced by people who suffer from the disagreements produced by
social networks and the "applications of love"
, instead of promoting a morality that is a reactive reflection of the
helplessness
to which they subject us, perhaps it is better reflect on your conditions.
I would like to illustrate this with a concrete situation.
Every so often a page asks us to confirm
that we are not a robot
;
our demonstration (clicking a button) forgets that the person asking us
is a robot
.
So, whoever proves not to be, could be perfectly so or, in other words, there is
nothing more robotic than wanting to prove that one is not
.
Now, if this applies to a simple procedure, let's think about
how it is reproduced in a chat
, for example, between two people who meet through an application or social network: human interaction is quickly exchanged by
a desperate code
of stimuli And answers.
Typical example: someone receives a message and must prove receipt, but for that they need to respond. In a human conversation, no one - unless they have a psychic problem - asks another repeatedly "Are you listening to me?", Because sometimes we can even dispense with the attention of the other when we speak to them. Sometimes his presence is enough. In a chat,
the other has to show that he is there
, even if he is not, but he does not have to offer a human exchange, it is enough for him to answer that he is not a robot; but we already know what happens when this happens.
My concern is that we continue to evaluate with “human” categories - sorry to say so, but we do not ask a robot for affective commitment but rather that it works, although sometimes we become fond of some artifacts (such as our telephone) -
interactions of another tenor
, although we consider them under the general title of "seduction".
A whole recent vocabulary to describe "virtual irresponsibility" (from ways of commenting on networks, pseudo conversations in forums, declarations of love and intensity of love with strangers, fierce anger with ideas not compatible with their own) runs the risk of being a moralist who neglects the background: the removal of
interaction at its most basic links
.
Not having a body
is driving many people crazy and leaving us on the edge of being "human";
For this reason, rather than a punitive use of categories that would have to come to re-found a bond, it would be better to carry out a more in-depth analysis of the loss of bonding conditions in today's world.
It is in this spirit of problematization that I would like to mention
the last book that I will recommend.
01
Capitalism of the self
Author
: Constanza Michelson
Publisher
: Paidós
Price
: $ 1,390
I am referring to the recent
Capitalism of the Self. Cities without Desire
(2021), by Constanza Michelson, an essay that uncompromisingly makes us think how many current discourses, those that say they want to free us, do nothing more than
produce new oppressions
, because they are functional to the liberal hyper-individualism that objects to the relationship with the other, when he is not from my tribe.
In a world of increasing segregation,
what place for Eros?
If there are chances that love wants to visit us again, it is not through moral codes that tell us how to love; but rather recognizing –as Michelson says– that “'I wish', for example, is an impossible phrase. Where the self is, there is no desire, because it has nothing to do with the controlling morality of 'I do what I want'. Desire is uncomfortable precisely because it is ambiguous ”.
Enduring ambiguity, being hospitable to
discomfort
, giving rise to conflict are the avenues for a love life that does not install in the 21st century a Victorian morality, which would no longer be for humans (crossed by desires) but for robots.
To conclude, today's question is whether we are going to ask ourselves about the bonding conditions that begin to make
love an experience of the past
.
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