According to Lacan hysteria is defined by the question, what is it in ME that you love? Why am I worthy of being the object of your desire? Valentine’s Day is a ritual designed to temporarily answer that question and relieve the anxiety pulsating within the hysterical question. However, the question itself is a form of impossibility – one can never articulate why one desires or loves the beloved. To provide a concrete answer is always to fail what love truly demands – a caring acceptance of the imperfections and incoherencies of the beloved. Enumerating the reasons for loving covers up the radical non-knowledge at the heart of intimacy, at the same time as it therapeutically allows us to function as subjects worthy of being loved.
Loving another person also calls self-knowledge into question. Love ruptures the known, comfortable and routine. It is in an experience of the radically new, in which the lover leaves behind familiar landscapes in order to share a new geography of existence with the beloved. However, there is no returning home to one’s previous sense of self before love’s advent. When the connection falters, and the two break apart into solitary trajectories, the landscapes change again marked with loss, regret, joy, and a pressing need to learn how to inhabit and reconnect to the world again. The bodily gestures, fantasies, and thoughts of the beloved become an abandoned city the lover will continue to live in.
During the reign of Claudius II in the Roman Empire, soldiers were forbidden from marrying, so that they would direct their attachment to defending the patria, without the distraction of domestic commitments. Opposing this law, Saint Valentine would secretly marry soldiers with their beloveds. As a result of violating the prohibition against marriage, Saint Valentine was imprisoned and later beheaded. The contemporary ritual of Saint Valentine’s Day, by contrast, domesticates the violent disruptions of love (the loss of one’s head) by transforming love into a commodity. Love’s upheaval is contained in a performance, providing momentary reassurance that the ground on which we are standing is permanent.
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Does that me that instead of sending cards we should send disembodied heads on 2/14? Seems more appropriate.
Ok, an analytical exposition of love, I can dig it. And I suppose we can be safe in assuming that we’re not talking about eros here (or are we?). Here’s the line my eyes keep returning to: “However, the question itself is a form of impossibility – one can never articulate why one desires or loves the beloved.”
It’s not that I disagree per se, but rather that I think you may be giving this form of hysteria short shrift. Perhaps there is a finitude of expressing both the desire of the beloved (or, for that matter, to be loved by the beloved), but in your final analysis, you’re throwing out Shakespeare, Manet,Johnny Cash, and pretty-art in general with the Whitman’s sampler and a Hallmark card. Honestly, is there anything MORE human than that longing to feel like the ground is permanent? Perhaps not, and perhaps our philosophic forefathers knew the dangers of this even better than Lacan. Still, having received neither this year, it doesn’t sound quite so paltry at the moment.
*pretty-much art in general.
Is it really impossible, as you say in the first paragraph, to articulate why one desires or loves the beloved? I thought this was the easy part. Isn’t the real leap of faith when you believe that your lover really loves you? I see this entire post as addressing self-knowledge (para. 2). That is–it is irrational to believe that you *know* someone else loves you; thus, love requires faith–a profession of knowledge regarding something that is impossible to really know. Given this, by ritualistically acknowledging the spiritual component of love, those who feel they are in love rightly celebrate St. V and the evocation of the principles that his martyrdom embodies. Whether anyone in contemporary society knows what they are celebrating, or whether chocolate, flower, and greeting card vendors care, is another question entirely.
Love, like a good joke is destroyed by analysis- it begins and ends in loss; it’s what happens in between that matters.
Dad, that’s an analysis.
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