seriously in love

Love is sustained in aporias, in irresolvable paradoxes: in giving what one does not have, as J. Lacan affirms in one of his seminars, or in accepting life until death, according to G. Bataille.

Far from what is usually thought, love is not an exchange but, quite the contrary, its essence consists in resisting it.

Loving we put ourselves at risk, in that of giving the foul, if we follow the psychoanalytic logic, which places us in the indissoluble game that always existed between Eros and Thanatos.

Some seem not to know it, and sing reproaches and spite, while others, touched by extreme sensitivity, write from that core.

Witold, in

of Coetzee, death is near.

It smells like bone.

Therefore, Beatriz finds it impossible to fall in love.

The Pole, a soloist, plays Chopin without romanticism.

They speak to each other in English, a foreign language for both of them, which widens their distance.

Coetzee, however, insists on a love between them, the actual love of a Dante for his Beatrice.

It is Beatriz who writes the chronicle of her story of her strange love, soul-destroying her, mistreating her, becoming oblivious to the absolute and insistent love of the pianist entering her old age.

I want to spend the rest of my life with her, he tells a woman (lady) whom he has just met and who does not consider him in any way worthy of being his lover.

It makes her uncomfortable to think of her bodies together in her bedroom, and yet Beatriz will follow him, in denial of her surrender, beyond death.

Coetzee nonchalantly narrates this relationship throughout the numbered epigraphs of the short pages of his latest book.

Like little hammers, austere and accurate, he outlines an unusual loving, icy and stubborn discourse.

You are seriously in love, his girlfriend tells the pianist, and we don't know, they don't even know, if grave means deep or heavy.

Come with me to Brazil, Beatriz.

The Pole loves without possession, only with the gratuity of giving himself.

And dryly, with few words and taking what he is given.

You can come to Mallorca, Witold.

She feels at the same time a certain revulsion for her meeting, but she summons him, inevitably, allows him to enter her bedroom, which he will leave when she orders him to, without a single reproach.

When he died, he left him some poems, not too good, that would make his contemporary Beatrice,

the same one that repels him, he crossed Europe to read them and find himself in them, looking for his name —not Beatriz but Beatrice— in the tangle of his serious lover's mother tongue, in the only one in which poetry can be written.

Beatriz / Beatrice will then begin a correspondence of love beyond death.

Paul and Prudence have been ghosts for years in the duplex they share near the Bercy park, avoiding touching, enduring silence and used to distances.

Houellebecq leads you on the walk of love and death of

.

For pages, peculiarities of French politics, ministerial tasks, computerized terrorism mixed with family matters are narrated.

But everything stops when Paul finds a discomfort in his gum.

Paul's mouth stinks, it's the cancer that's causing his jaw to rot.

At the same time and with the same rhythm, Prudence's mouth is closer than ever.

First kisses after years of lethargy.

Prudence kisses her entire body.

They make love more than ever, a sacralized love, surprisingly heated sex, slow and deep, taking care of the positions so that Paul's bones do not suffer.

I'm not going to have surgery, I don't want my tongue to be cut out.

The serious illness, of death, falls in love in their Paris of always, a married couple reunited under the umbrella of illness without salvation.

Melancholy and peace are born once the terror is accepted, while the morphine soothes Paul with pleasant sadness, the days that are shortened by the aroma of autumn and the completion injected with hope is expected.

In this mode of love, misfortune becomes redemption.

The union of Paul and Prudence, of Beatriz and Witold, grows when it becomes unproductive and grows when death and love meet again in the knot they always were.

Death, present in all the others, aggravates love.

This love is not an agonizing eros, it is the overcoming of narcissism, the resurrection of the other as a possibility of meeting, it is the negativity that Byung-Chul Han sees disappeared, the libidinal overflow.

As beings-for-death that we are —Heidegger

— our death is bolted to life and with it gives us the possibility of a serious, weighty love.

Barthes should have included in his

the entry “Gravely in love”, love elevated by the epiphany of death.

Eros and Thanatos always hand in hand.

Aurora Freijo

is a writer and professor of Philosophy.

Her latest novel is

(Anagrama)

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