“
“Affective emotions”: Romantic love, absence
and jealousy in Roland Barthes’
Fragments d’un discours amoureux
Léonie A. J. Mol 5884780 rMA Cultural Analysis Final thesis
Supervisor : J. G. C. de Bloois University of Amsterdam June 17, 2016
2 Table of contents
Introduction: “Shimmerings”: Barthes, Romantic Love and Affect ... 3
Barthes, romantic love, affect ... 3
Methodology ... 9
Organization of the thesis ... 12
Chapter One: Love as absence ... 16
The Discourse of the Absent: Barthes’ Analysis of Absence, Discourse and Love ... 17
Truth and Absence ... 19
The Knight of Resignation: Romantic Love as Self-Containment ... 21
An Encounter between Me and the Other: Kierkegaard and Levinas ... 23
Splendid Isolation and Absence ... 24
Chapter Two: Love as Jealousy ... 29
Jealousy as Affect: Barthes’ Explanation ... 31
Love, Creativity and Concept Formation ... 33
Desire and the Annihilation of the Self ... 36
What Is there to be Jealous of: Ideas of Possession ... 38
Chapter Three: Love as Vulnerability ... 44
From Possession to the Annihilation of the Self ... 45
Love as Specific “Scene” ... 47
Love Politics ... 49
Love as Indomitable Force: Notions of Authenticity ... 52
The Future of Love: A Tentative Conclusion ... 57
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Introduction: “Shimmerings”: Barthes, Romantic Love and Affect
Bisher hat alles Das, was dem Dasein Farbe gegeben hat, noch keine Geschichte: oder wo gäbe es eine Geschichte der Liebe, der Habsucht, des Neides, des Gewissens, der Pietät, der Grausamkeit? (Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft §7)
So far, all that has given color to our existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or even of punishment is so far lacking entirely. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science §7)
Nue effacée ensommeillée Choisie sublime solitaire Profonde oblique matinale Fraîche nacrée ébouriffée Ravivée première régnante […]
Sommes-nous deux ou suis-je solitaire ? (Paul Éluard, Poésie ininterrompue, 9-10)
Naked wiped out fallen asleep Chosen sublime solitary Profound oblique early Fresh nacreous wild Revived first reigning […]
Are we together or am I alone? (Paul Éluard, Uninterrupted poetry)
Barthes, romantic love, affect
Writing about the things “that matter” in life is a difficult task, as Nietzsche remarks. In this thesis, I want to focus on one of the things that has made life “meaningful”: love.
What? Love, again? Did cultural theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and philosophers not write enough about this topic yet? Has nobody since Nietzsche’s aphorism was published in 1882, written a proper history of love? And why should we, the reader and I, care? Not surprisingly, my answer is we should. Cultural studies and cross-disciplinary analysis are
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the right tools to analyze such a complex human phenomenon as love. Because I think the answer to the question “What is love” is still unanswered – luckily for me, and all the real lovers outside of this text. But also because “love” is a concept which has inspired so many people, both inside and outside of the academic domain. It is therefore I want to scrutinize the concept of romantic love, not to write its history or give an exact definition of it, but how it can manifest itself and what this means for our understanding of love.
In this thesis, I focus on the concept of romantic love and its manifestation in particular relational or social settings. I use the concept of “romantic love” as portrayed in Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1975) and analyze it as a methodological tool, paying in particular attention to its possible affect. I argue that Barthes’ book has a particularly rich potential to develop valuable tools for critical analysis. I draw from Barthes’ affect as “effet de réel” and “sense” [of a text] that has an effect outside of this text itself (Le Plaisir du Texte, L’Effet de Réel). In these texts, Barthes discusses how literature can produce an “affect” that cannot be reduced to narrative or discourse. I interpret the concept of “romantic love” as such and use it as a methodological tool to analyze three cultural texts. Before introducing my main theorists, I want to slow down a bit and return to the quote I started with. Nietzsche writes the things that have “colored” life suffer from a lack of history. In line with Nietzsche, I ask: does the concept of love lack historical analysis? And if so, why? The field of cultural studies and cultural analysis – which, we should remember, were developed far after Nietzsche’s mental breakdown and death in 1900 – seem to have taken their task seriously. “Cultural studies” is an academic field of studies which originated in Britain in the 1980s, combing sociological and literary research methods to analyze contemporary social concepts and phenomenal. It is an interdisciplinary field of conducting research that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power.1 “Cultural analysis” is commonly traced
back to Mieke Bal, who coined the discipline as “cultural memory in the present”, by which she meant the attention paid to contemporary cultural “objects”. Bal has argued the notion of close reading is also a practice of framing; in old close reading, “critique is more important than the object” (Travelling concepts, 8-9). Newer or new close reading, Bal argues, takes the object as a starting point (ibid.:18). In this thesis, I refer to close reading as “new close reading”.
Contemporary scholars in the field of cultural analysis, sociology, but also biology and the neurosciences have by now written hundreds and thousands of pages about love as romantic illusion, social phenomenon tied to economic warfare, or as programmed in our brain, far from the spheres of what we think is our “free will”. In the Netherlands, debates are organized about
1 See http://culturalstudies.web.unc.edu/resources-2/what-is-cultural-studies/ (accessed June 14, 2016 and Literary Theory, 175).
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the future of love, monogamous relationships are being thoroughly questioned and polyamorous discussion evenings seem to have become mainstream in the capital Amsterdam.2 Books as We
Are Our Brains (Wij zijn ons brein, Swaab 2010), The Free Will does not exist (Lamme 2010) and biodeterministic analyses and tv-shows coining that “whom we will love” is a matter of predetermined genetics flourish today. Does this mean love has too much of a history by now? Romantic love and relationships have been discussed – and explained, in the eyes of many – as a socially or biologically determined phenomenon. What might there be useful to add, then? In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone writes: “[Love] is portrayed in novels, even metaphysics, but in them it is described, or better, recreated, not analyzed. Love has never been understood” (Dialectic of Sex, 126).
In this thesis, I do not want to focus on the diachronic aspects of love. Just as Nietzsche, Barthes and Firestone, I think crucial and careful analysis of love in its contemporary manifestations is important since it tells us about how love as both a concept and practice travel and change through time. Analyzing how concepts travel through time, how their meaning and use changes and how this influences their manifestation is an important task. Countless historians, philosophers and social scientists have taken up this complicated yet fascinating task. How love is (said to be) experienced and what kind of expectations it creates in the cultural domain are important topic to study. They tell us more about the organization of (romantic) relationships in society, and about how public and private emotions and feelings are intertwined and influence each other. In the same vein as Firestone, I agree that studying culture and its manifestations is always linked to these normative practices; hegemonic discourses on love then inform us about dominant discourses (Orientalism, 239; Structure and Superstructure, 192-193). Analyzing narratives has, in this respect, both a political and an aesthetical dimension; it tells us about the contemporary ideas about love. The importance of narrative cannot be overstated, as Edward Said points out:
Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake “classical” civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. (Orientalism, 240)
Yet, my goal is not to lay out a grand narrative about love. Whereas Said and Firestone focuses in particular on narrative and on its hegemonic purposes, I want to move in a different direction. I
2 See http://www.debalie.nl/agenda/cinema/the-future-of-love%3A-the-lobster/e_9781926/p_11742710/
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fully agree with Saids characterization of narrative of powerful tool; yet, since his quote also highlights, the importance of narrative might also be found elsewhere than its discursive elements. To paraphrase Firestone, I boldly ask: should love be understood? Analyzing manifestations and ideas about love indeed might give us insights into how love is portrayed, characterized, justified. Yet, in this thesis I aim to undertake a different project. I do not wish to give a full explanation of romantic love. I want to analyze several “affective images” of it. In line with Firestone, I think the available analyses of love focus on a totalitarian, diachronic image of love. By doing so, these analysis relentlessly recreate and portray love as… biological, social, psychological phenomenon. Does this tell us about what love actually does? People do not seem to bother so much if love is “real”, a beautiful fiction or the inevitable work of neurons in our brain. So there must be something else, something more important, and this is specifically what I want to address. I am not interested in what love is, but what love does.
I try to capture this “does” by invoking the concept “affect”. The term “affect” has recently received a lot of attention within the social sciences and humanities; yet, it remains a quite difficult concept to understand or work with, since it lacks a clear definition. As mentioned, I draw from Roland Barthes’ use of the concept and will also relate it to how “affect” has been discussed within The Affect Theory Reader, a helpful volume in this respect, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregorgy Seighworth in 2010. In this book, Gregg and Seigworth distinguish nine approaches and uses of the term. I will come back to their discussion of affect a bit later in this introduction. As Barthes’ analysis of “the effect of reality” states, texts have effects that cannot be reduced to mere discursive elements. It is in this “affect” of love I am interested in this thesis, and that I will work out in my chapters. Important concepts that I will use are “romantic love” and “affect”. “Romantic love” is what I take to be the relationship between lover and beloved, drawing from Barthes Fragments. I take the Fragments both as a starting point for the analysis, as well as methodological tool. Just like Barthes, I oppose various cultural objects or texts in this thesis, analyzing them through a Barthian lens.
Within this thesis, I propose three “manifestations or “situations” of love. These situations will be analyzed in their context but also relate to how love is expected – and limited – in how it can and should manifest itself. The thesis consists of three separate chapters, in which a specific aspect or manifestation of love is discussed. These manifestations are figures taken from Barthes’ book A Lover’s Discourse (Fragments d’un discours amoureux), first published in 1975. In his Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Barthes lays out a fascinating analysis of romantic love, combining concepts borrowed from psychology and psychoanalysis, all sorts of literary works, zen theory and
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Buddhism, his personal life and literary criticism. This complex and rich compilation of concepts Barthes uses give, as I will argue, a possible counterhegemonic methodology for reading and thinking about love. By invoking such a variety of theories, Barthes is not simply assuming love is a chaotic emotion or feeling; rather, he is showing the complex interrelations between cultural ideas, objects, feelings and thoughts. “Romantic love” seems at first sight a quite simple or at least often used concept. It has been discussed by classical phenomenologists, structuralists, novelists, poets. It is the topic of many tv-shows and popular magazines. To highlight the possible meanings, uses, and effects love has, Barthes’ methodological approach which focuses on the affect of texts, is highly useful. Before I explain how I use the concept of “affect”, it is necessary to make a few remarks on Barthes’ different approaches and his shift towards affect.
Before Barthes published his Fragments, he was mostly known for his theory of semiology and analysis how signs produce meaning. He published his book titled Mythologies in 1957, in which he works according to his “semiotic” method, which aims to “demystify” signs (Mythologies, 9). What do cultural images and objects – such as the Citroën DS, steak frites, photo booths, de Tour de France, mean? What do they convey and what do they hide? Barthes meticulously analyzes a wide range of cultural phenomena, inspired by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of signs which claims that a sign only has meaning in opposition to another sign. Languages are internally organized structures, which can be disentangled. This method is most often referred to as semiotics, which means studying the cultural “text” as an autonomous phenomenon. The text is thus not explained by the message the author wanted to convey by it, but as an independent object. Semiotic scholars disentangle the different symbols “at work” in the text, look at how they relate to each other and how they produce meaning by interacting with each other. A text, as the Mythologies show, are not texts in the literal sense of the word. A photograph, painting and magazine are as well part of the cultural fabric of texts.
Barthes initially claimed texts are compilations of symbols, representing and carrying cultural myths, ideas and presuppositions. His method is most often referred to as semiotics, which means studying the cultural “text” as an autonomous phenomenon. The text is thus not explained by the message the author wanted to convey by it, but as an independent object. Semiotic scholars disentangle the different symbols “at work” in the text, look at how they relate to each other and how they produce meaning by interacting with each other. A text, as the Mythologies show, are not texts in the literal sense of the word. A photograph, painting and magazine are as well part of the cultural fabric of texts. In his later works, Barthes’ publications seem to shift in a different direction.
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Yet, in his later works, as for example Le Plaisir du Texte but also Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Barthes uses a different vocabulary and method to analyze the things he is interested in. From De Saussure and Lacan’s faithful student, constantly in dialogue with psychoanalysis, his work seems to be affected by what I call here “the affective turn” (‘Sensing the Image’, 71). It is with this Barthian concept of affect I will work, which is to be distinguished from his early analyses, inspired by structuralism.
In the chapters to come, I will work with the notion of affect Barthes introduces in works as Le Plaisir du Texte and his short essay L’effet de Réel. From De Saussure and Lacan’s faithful student, constantly in dialogue with psychoanalysis, his work seems to be affected by what I call here “the affective turn” (‘Sensing the Image’, 71). Barthes shift from structuralism to this new approach, in which he pays attention to very different effects and aspects of texts, is often characterized as “the affective turn” (“Sensing the Image”, 71). “Affect” here means the “sense” or “meaning” a text can produces out of the realm of text. “Affect” is what a text “does” which cannot be reduced to mere discourse (L’Effet de Réel, 89). In works such as Le Plaisir du Texte (The Pleasure of the Text) and L’effet de Réel (The Effect of the Real) Barthes introduces a different way of reading and appreciate texts. He lays out ways of reading with more attention to sensual and bodily affects of reading. In Le Plaisir du texte (Pleasure of the Text, 1971), Barthes writes that the production of meaning happpens through sensual perceptions (ibid. :61, see also ‘Sensing the Image’, 76). In the chapters to come, I will draw upon the loose notion of affect as an effect produced by the text which cannot be reduced to mere discourse. In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seighworth write: “Affect arises in the midst of in between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon” (1). In Le Plaisir du Texte, Barthes writes :
Le texte est un objet fétiche et ce fétiche me désire. Le texte me choisit, part toute disposition d’écrans invisibles, de chicanes sélectives: le vocabulaire, les références, la lisibilité, etc; et, perdu au milieu du texte (non pas derrière lui à la façon d’un dieu de machinerie), il y a toujours l’autre, l’auteur. (Le Plaisir du Texte, 45)
The text is a fetish object, and this fetish desires me. The text chooses me, by a whole disposition of invisible screens, selective baffles: vocabulary, references, readability, etc.; and, lost in the midst of a text (not behind it, like a deus ex machina) there is always the other, the author. (The Pleasure of the Text, 27)
In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth stress Barthes’ original use of the concept affect as following:
9 Here affect theory is, at one level, an “inventory of shimmers” while, upon another register, it is a matter of affectual composition (in a couple of senses of the word "composition" – as an ontology always coming to formation but also, more prosaically, as creative/writerly task). This is a passion for differences as continuous, shimmering gradations of intensities. Making an inventory (of singularities). And in the interval, is the stretching: unfolding a patho-logy (of “not yets”).? (Affect Theory Reader, 11)
This idea of “stretching” and “not yet” is interesting, since it both highlights the flexibility of the concept as well as its power to be applied to various themes, in various ways. The objects I have chosen each have their own cultural importance and relevance. In the first chapter, I read Barthes’ figure “Absence” with Kierkegaard’s concept of “resignation”. In the second chapter, I focus on the figure “Jealousy” which I analyze with Semir Zeki’s interpretation of love as striving for “unity”. In the third and final chapter, I discuss the figure “Vouloir-Saisir” and Emma Goldman’s essay Love and Marriage. I have chosen these objects to highlight the “affect” of love in a theological, scientific and political context. By drawing from several texts, I explore both the meaning of Barthes’ figure as well as reviewing hiss methodology of making and analyzing “affective emotions”. Like Barthes, in the chapters to come, I will juxtapose several texts and concepts, putting in dialogue ideas coming from very different disciplines. Therefore my thesis can partly be viewed as an analysis and experiment in Barthes’ literary theory.
Fragments d’un discours amoureux consists of haphazardly ordered “figures”, in alphabetical order (10). Barthes justifies the book in the prologue by stating that the lover’s discourse is characterized by “extreme solitude (Fragments, 5). This makes the book a double statement: it problematizes at one the solitude of love as a discourse and a practice. The fragments are an affirmation of a discourse which is talked by millions, but supported by no one (Fragments, 5). This becomes all the more clear in Barthes’ introduction: he refuses to approach the lover as “symptomatic subject”, but rather wants to show the “untreatable” aspect of his discourse (ibid:7). And love, for Barthes, it at least problematic in this sense that is seems to completely change the lover’s relation to the world (ibid:11). This “horizontal discourse” is important to analyze, Barthes argues. The lover’s discourse needs an affirmation. How is this affirmation conducted? And what does it look like? In the chapters to come, I will work with these questions and analyze several “affirmations” of romantic love.
Methodology
In this thesis, I will analyze the possible affects of romantic love, guided by Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux. I do so by proposing several close-readings of three figures, which I related to other texts. This approach of “close reading” in combination with an intertextual dialogue is
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based upon literary research techniques. From Gerard Genette’s analysis of narratology, I take the idea of texts as autonomous structures, but see its interpretation as an infinite process “at work”. This is different from Genette. As Derrida’s concept of “not yet” in Force the loi shows, interpreting texts is a task we can never “finish”. We stay in an infinite “not yet’ (pas encore) (Literary Theory, 133). In line with Barthes’ project, I aim to explore possible affective actions of the concept of romantic love, by putting it in dialogue with various other objects and theorists. I look at how Barthes’ figures can help us to create critical concepts for detailed analysis of romantic love and its affects. This project is therefore significantly different from both narratology and discourse analysis. Yet, drawing from methods such as close reading and using concepts such as “discourse” and “narrative” ask for a short introduction.
“Narrative” is often coined as a term introduced by the structuralist literary scholar Gérard Genette, who argued textual structures can be seen as a set or relations (Literary Theory). Genette, who wrote in the early 70s, was inspired by early twentieth century literary theories of the Russian Formalists, in particular Victor Schklovsky and Boris Tomashevski. Tomashevski’s theory distinguished the “fabula” and “suzhet”. The fabula is the actual series of events a text describe, the fabula is the narrative manipulation of a text (Literary Theory, 36). In Le discours narrative (Narrative Discourse), Genette argues there are three important relational aspects in (literary texts). First, there is the order of events, secondly the relationship of duration and thirdly the relationship of frequency (ibid:72). An important contribution of Genette’s critical theory is the introduction of the implied author. As a structuralist, Genette refuses to let the narrator(s) of a story coincide with the actual of the author. The introduces the implied author, “a third-person narration must have a narrator and that this narrator is always present in the story” (ibid.:73).
Just as Genette (and Barthes) I dismiss the notion of “the author of flesh and blood” to explain my analysis. I work with the notion of the implied author and it is to this author I refer when I mention Barthes’ name in the text. Structural analysis approach a text as speaking for itself and an autonomous structure that needs to be deciphered through scrutinizing analysis or, as I call it, “discourse analysis” and “close reading”. For the analysis I aim to undertake I will use theorists who refer to cultural or political dimensions of love. By “discourse analysis” I mean the analysis of discursive events as explained by the French scholar Michel Foucault (Les mots et les choses, 46). Discourse analysis tries to disentangle the relationship between discursive utterances. Foucault explicitly distances himself from structuralism: his analyses of discursive formations and the disentangling of genealogies if part of his analysis of the “philosophy of the subject” and how this is related to the “modern concept of the self” (Sexualité et solitude, 150).
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In three separate chapters, I will close-read the figures and highlight their meaning by involving several concepts I borrow from other theorists. I propose to combine each figure with a different cultural object or text. By doing so, I aim to create an intertextual dialogue between the different texts. In a way, this method is similar to how Barthes himself analyzes and explains his affective figures. I write “affective” here, since what Barthes aims for is precisely more than a correct “representation” or “description” of love:
Une figure est fondée si au moins quelqu’un peut dire: « Comme c’est vrai, ça! Je reconnais cette scène de langage.» (8)
A figure is established if at least someone can say : “That’s so true! I recognize that scene of language.” (4)
Thus, a text can claim a certain truth (reality) when it establishes something outside of this text. I use the term “affect” to designate this effect.
What this affect precisely is and why a Barthian analysis of the texts I propose highlights different aspects of these texts will be discussed more in depth in each separate chapter. I do so because the concept “affect” lacks a clear definition, which, in this context should not be interpreted as a simple “lack”. Yes, the question “What is affect?”, is not so easy to answer. It knows different uses in literary theory, classical philosophy and the neurosciences. Yet, I take this as a possible strength of the concept rather than a weakness. Originally, the concept is traced back to Baruch Spinoza, whose concept of affect is closely related to a forceful encounter, a tension or suspense because of the infinite “not yet” that is inherent to affect (ibid.:3). “Affect theory” has further developed several approaches, which Greg and Seighworth initially categorize as two distinct directions; the first line of theorists interpreting affect as a prime “interest motivator”, the second as a “entire, vital and modulating field of becomings” (5). Greg and Seighworth distinguish five approaches and uses of “affect”, varying from the critical study of emotions to contemporary neurosciences.3 But an important first move in the use of affect is to
state that it “…emerges out of muddy, unmediated relatedness and not in some dialectical reconciliation of cleanly oppositional elements or primary units, it makes easy compartmentalisms give way to thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs” (4).
3 The first one found in post-phenomenal theories of embodiment, the second in the analysis of the intertwined
relations among humans and non-humans, the third in a non-humanist and non-Cartesian philosophical tradition, the fourth in contemporary psychological and psychoanalytic approaches, often underpinned by biologism, the fifth in the stream of science portraying the everyday and every-night life with a focus on performativity, the sixth as the school of thought attempting to move away from the linguistic turn, and is also influence by neurophilosophy. The sixth line of thought is characterized as the critical study of emotions, and the eighth, finally, in practices of science and science studies (8-9).
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Seighworth and Gregg characterize this as the promise contained by affect theory: “…casting illumination upon the “not yet”” (4). In their introduction, the authors distinguish eight different approaches, as an attempt to give a concise overview of the use. These are characterized as affect as used in post-phemenological theory, cybernetics, non-humanist philosophy, psychological inquiry, political theory, pragmatist theory, post-cogito inquiries and science studies. My approach can be situated somewhere in between the sixth approach, focusing on “practice” literary theory and the seventh, critical discourses of the emotions. Barthes’ structural approach of how love and emotions inspired by love are clearly intertwined with the cultural display of emotions is both linked to this idea Seigworth and Gregg coin as “contagions of feeling” as well as an idea of performativity and social constructionism (The Affect Theory Reader, 7). Barthes’ analysis moves past the binaries of structuralism, as Seighworth and Gregg point out, in order to “…register a form that is rarely taken into account: the stretching” (10-11).
In this thesis, I quote from texts written in different languages. This is why I want to make a final point about the notion of “translation”. In Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers (The Task of the Translator) Walter Benjamin wonders if a translation is meant for those who do not understand the original (9). “[K]ein Gedicht gilt dem Leser.”4 Translation is a form, and to understand this form, we must go back to the original. The original is not directed towards the reader: a translation intended to serve the reader can therefore only be a bad translation (ibid.:9-10). Benjamin writes: “Übersetzungen dagegen erweisen sich unübersetzbar nicht wegen der Schwere, sondern wege der allzu grossen Flüchtigkeit, mit welcher der Sinn an ihnen haftet” (ibid.:20).5 This is why I quote all the sources in the original language and have quoted their English translation in the footnotes.
Organization of the thesis
The thesis will be structured as follows; 1) Chapter One: Love as absence
The beloved person and love itself as something that “cannot be grasped”, a liminal experience almost, is one of the “classic” interpretations of love. It has been portrayed as such from Plato on (love as the ultimate goal of the philosopher, almost impossible to attain), idealists and romantic poets whose ultimate dream it was to die for love. Barthes writes: “L’absence amoureuse va
4 “No poem is intended for the reader” (The Task, 253).
5 “Translations, in contrast, prove to be untranslatable not because of any inherent difficulty but because of the
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seulement dans un sens”, affirming love as a lonely – think of the introduction – experience. The “I” is always present, while “you” are always absent (Fragments, 19).
In the first chapter, I take this idea of the ever-present “I” and always-absent “you” and analyze how these relate to each other, what this absence means for the relationship and how it can be linked to a narrative of “ideal” love. I use Barthes’ figure and read it through Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the “other” as someone I can never know (Mörgenrote §126). I also use Kierkegaard’s analysis of the “knight of infinite resignation” as described in Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard’s concept is particularly relevant since it describes what happens to a “failed” lover, who keeps his beloved one forever present in his mind and is faithful to the love story, but at the same time is condemned to repeat the same movements of despair forever. Kierkegaard portrays the knight of resignation as someone who never gives up upon his love; however, the destiny of his love story is sealed (Fear and Trembling, 55). The love is entirely dependent of how the “I” nourishes it, idealizing a present beloved in vain. I use Barthes’ figure of “Absence” to lay out some thoughts about how absence ins conceptualized as self-containment in Kierkegaard’s texts. I invoke Levinas’ concept of hospitality to counter this analysis, and shows to reading Kierkegaard and Levinas with Barthes offers possibilities to read absence other than a deprivation.
2) Chapter Two: Love as jealousy
Barthes’ figure of jealousy describes the feeling of dissatisfaction the idea that the loved one has to be “shared” makes arise. “I am not alone”, Barthes writes, and neither is the person I love: there are always others around us (Fragments, 172). In the second chapter, I analyze this idea of love and exclusiveness further. Barthes describes jealousy as “the norm”: not being jealous would mean to be perfect, which is a transgression per se (ibid.). This implies jealousy is a common experience, but also a “bourgeois” (as Barthes portrays it) norm, an expectation people have about their romantic relationship (175).
I use Semir Zeki’s analysis of love as the desire for unity. Zeki, a British neurologist, has written a book in which he interprets love as the desire of lovers to “become one”. This desire for unity is, according to Zeki, a universal aspect of romantic relationships. In his book Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness (2009), Zeki combines neuroscientific research and practice, and literary and cultural works to elaborate a theory about the human brain. Zeki argues that the main function of the human brain is to produce knowledge, and that this knowledge is acquired through the formation of concepts. The concept of “love” is an example of a “universal concept”. According to Zeki, disappointment (“miseries”)
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come forth out of “dissatisfaction” mismatches between “the real world” and the ideal concepts our brain has produced (Splendors and Miseries, 47).
By critically reviewing Zeki’s analysis and discussing his uses of literary texts, I use Barthes’ figure to highlight how jealousy might be read as a corollary by-product of love, but in a different sense than Zeki’s biological determinism argues. I use Eva Illouz’ concept of “love markets” and Shulamith Firestone’s analysis of love to interpret jealousy differently.
3) Chapter Three: Love as Vulnerability
The third situation is love as a space for multiple intimacies. If not being jealous would not mean “to be perfect” but just “to be different”, to paraphrase Barthes’ figure on jealousy, what kind of love can be presented as an alternative? What happens when love is not about “absence” nor “jealousy”? Barthes’ figure “Vouloir Saisir” is a fascinating description of the lover “letting go” of his jealousy. The lover who finally understands that all the difficulties of the relationship are inspired by his wish to fully “appropriate” his loved one, decides to give up (Fragments, 273).
I argue this fatalistic figure and abandoning jealousy does not have to necessarily represent the end of the romantic relationship. Can we oppose something different to this “Vouloir-saisir”? Barthes’ concept of “Non-Vouloir-Saisir” seems to be giving up the possibility of a romantic relationship altogether. Are there also different alternatives that can be drawn? I contextualize this figure with Emma Goldman’s essay Marriage and Love (1912) to highlight possible alternatives for love and romantic relationship. Goldman applies an anarchistic interpretation to modern love and marriage and lays out a different view on love, which also comes with other underlying ideas about what love “is” or is “supposed to be”.
I draw from Nietzsche’s idea of reality as “grades” of truth as opposed to authenticity and put this in dialogue with both Goldman and Barthes’ idea of true love. I also use Alain Badiou’s analysis and critique of the romantic ideal of love as becoming one. In Éloge de l’amour (2009) Badiou argues this conception of love is preoccupied with death (the two lovers, against the world, in an ultimate union, as the myths of Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde show) (Eloge, 40). This radical interpretation of love is “too metaphysical”, according to Badiou. “After all, love happens in the world” (ibid., emphasis mine). Rethinking love and what love does is for love engaging the lover’s into a new kind of temporality (ibid.:42). Love is a “reinvention of life” (ibid.).
What I aim to do, is explore and analyze different manifestations of love. I draw from Barthes Fragments to develop a notion of “affect” of romantic love, which in turn I will put into dialogue
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with several cultural texts and objects. In the chapters to come, I want to see if Barthes’ method can offer us the tools to re-think affect in the context of romantic love, evaluating Barthes’ own methodology in turn. By invoking a variety of texts on and about love, I aim to show the many facets and explanations of romantic love, and examine the potential of Barthes’ critical reading methodology.
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Chapter One: Love as absence
Ils méditent leur absence Et se cachent dans leur ombre Ils ont été au présent
Ceci entre parenthèses.
(Paul Éluard, Poésie Ininterrompue, 29) They mediate their absence And hide within their shadows They have been in the present This between brackets.
(Paul Éluard, Poésie Ininterrompue, 29)
What our age lacks is not reflection but passion. (Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 47)
In this chapter, I analyze the affect of love in the domain of the theological. I do so by setting up a dialogue between Roland Barthes’ figure of “Absence” and Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of endless resignation. I invoke Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism on the other as ungraspable entity and Emmanuel Levinas’ meditations on the other as representing a moral encounter and duty. The goal of this chapter is to highlight the possible affect of love within a theological context. I want to highlight how interpreting love as a tool for analysis with both attention for the discursive effects and effects outside of this discourse, which I coin as “affect”, open up a space to understand love in the theological domain.
As I mentioned in the introduction, I take affect as an effect which cannot be reduced to discourse. “Affect” is a complicated concept, described and portrayed from Spinoza to Deleuze en Barthes. As Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg write in the introduction of The Affect Theory Reader (2010), “…How to being when, after all, there is not pure or somehow originary state for affect?” (1). Yet, as cultural analysts before have critically asked and reviewed before me, I question the use and need for a “pure” or “originary” definition of a concept. Instead, like Seighworth and Gregg write, paraphrasing Deleuze and Barthes, maybe this complicated and undefinable “affect” can be turned into the strength of the concept instead of its weakness. Barthes’ use of the concept as bodily and sensual experience, overthrowing the binaries of structuralism, as a means to pay attention to plus-minus (instead of the structural “yes” or “no”), “…accounting for […] shimmer, the stretching of process underway, not position taken” (10-11). In the chapters to come, I take from Barthes the notion of affect as effect outside of discourse.
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In Le Plaisir du Texte, Barthes discusses a particular sensual, bodily effect a text can establish (63). I take, in line with Barthes affect as an effect or consequence of produced by, in this example, a text or a concept. This affect produced cannot be limited or reduced to mere discourse itself. In this chapter, I focus on the figure of absence. Questions that I will ask in this context are: How can absence be viewed as an affect of romantic love? And what kind of effects is absence producing itself?
To highlight these questions, I have chosen to discuss several theorists which I will relate to Barthes’ figure. I invoke Søren Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling (in Danish: Frygt og bæven) (1843), Emmanuel Levinas’ Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (1971) (translated as Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority) and Jacques Derrida’s book Donner la mort (1999) I use Jacques Derrida’s work to bridge between Kierkegaard and Levinas.
Whereas Kierkegaard and Levinas can, and rightly so be interpreted as respectively an iconic, classical Christian-humanist thinker, whereas Levinas’ work has precisely anti-European, Jewish philosophy, reading those texts through Barthes’ lens opens up possibilities with regard to the concept of “Absence”. How the “absence” of the other relates to a possible encounter with the other, and how this encounter as particular event is related to responsibility, transcendence and hospitality is what I aim to highlight in this chapter. I focus therefore in particular on specific concepts of the theorists mentioned above. Kierkegaard’s “knight of resignation”, Levinas’ notion of “hospitality” and Derrida’s concept of the secret are all related to a kind of Absence, as I will show in the sections that follow.
The Discourse of the Absent: Barthes’ Analysis of Absence, Discourse and Love
Barthes’ figure of “Absence” starts with a short definition of the concept:
Absence. Tout épisode de langage qui met en scène l’absence de l’objet aimé – quelles qu’en soient la cause et la durée – et tend à transformer cette absence en épreuve d’abandon. (19)
Absence/absence. Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object – whatever its cause and its duration – and which tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment. (13).
This definition portrays the absence of the loved one (or object) as a drama. The absence is staged as ordeal: absence is interpreted as abandonment. Whatever the cause or length of this experience are, it is experienced as ordeal. The situation is actively transformed and manipulated by the lover. This definition of absence entirely rests upon this manipulation of the lover. The loved one – described as mute object – does not speak back. This might at first sight seem logical since this loved one is absent, but is important to emphasize. Who stages what, and how, will help us
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understand what is going on in this scene. “Scene” is an important concept in this respect. Barthes uses it to describe the manipulation of the lover, who understands (and presupposes) the absence is abandonment. The lover imagines that he has been abandoned.
Barthes description of “Absence” continues with the staged and framed abandonment. The lover imagines all sorts of scenarios of abandonment. The other moves, I remain (19/13). Absence only goes in one direction: you leave, I stay. This absence is not only about what is missing; the absent you partly constitutes the remaining I (ibid.). These positions cannot be permuted, Barthes writes. “You” and “I” can never be present at the same time at the same place. This means to say: “I am loved less than I love” (ibid.). The ordeal seems to come forth out of a manipulated interpretation of the absence. Absence is interpreted as “rejection”. This rejection and being expulsed (out of the romantic episode with the beloved) constitutes the “I”.6 Even if
the beloved is not present, the “I” should remain faithful. Forgetting the beloved’s absence is “betrayal”. “Je suis, par intermittence, infidèle.”7 Being intermittently unfaithful is necessary to
stay alive; lovers who do not forget die of exhaustion (ibid.). This complex relationship between the act of forgetting, infidelity and normality is important to scrutinize further. “Being normal” means not being obsessed with someone’s absence in this context, or: not transforming someone’s absence into abandonment. The absence of the beloved is so possessive since the lover both desires and needs the beloved; this is also why forgetting this is characterized as treachery. If the lover does not remember who he needs and desires, he cannot perform his identity as a lover.
By transforming the absence into an experience of “forgetting”, Barthes emphasizes the practical (and exhausting) experience being in love is. These moments of forgetting (these infidelities) last, most of the time, for only a short period of time: “De cet outbli, très vite, je me reveille. Hâtivement, je mets en place un mémoire, un désarroi” (21).8 The lover’s identity and
memory have to be restored after the experience of forgetting. The “discourse of the beloved’s absence is restored,” addressing myself to the other, invoking his presence as person to whom the lover speaks, however absent as referent (as physically present). The “I” (re)starts to blame the absent beloved, shifting between two temporal regimes (tense of reference and tense of allocution). The lover shifts back and forth, fearfully trying to avoid the present, which consists at that moment “a pure portion of anxiety” (22/16).
This anxiety makes time an ordeal to endure; the lover needs to manipulate it in order not to be suffocated by it. “Le langage naît de l’absence”, the active practice of absence creates a
6 This is similar to Freud’s analysis of the constitution of the “ego”, which can only take place after the child
separates from the beloved Mother.
7 “I am, intermittently, unfaithful” (14).
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business which keeps the lover so preoccupied he cannot do anything else (ibid.).9 This business
and practice is staged in order to deal with the “pure” anxiety, but, more importantly: “Manipuler l’absence, c’est allonger ce moment, retarder aussi longtemps que possible l’instant où l’autre pourrait basculer sèchement de l’absence dans la mort.”10 The absence is thus a shifting between
tenses, a dialogue between the absent “You” and waiting “I”. It is also reinforcing the different positions the lover and the beloved occupy, as I mentioned above. But most important, it is a defusing practice, trying to keep the beloved present, and to delay the moment “the other might topple into death”. Drowning because if the absence of the other, the “I” is almost asphyxiated and reconstituting his “truth” (brackets in the original text) preparing what is “intractable”, which, in turn, consists of what is the lover’s identity and his “truth” (the truth of his love).
Important in this figure are the idea that absence possibly can contribute to an – imagined – dialogue between the two entities. The “I” turns the beloved’s absence in a practical matter, a pastime. The discourse coming forth out of this absence is also a topic I will come back to. And the relation between absence, reality and truth will be addressed more in depth, invoking in particular Kierkegaard’s notion of finitude.
Truth and Absence
The figure problematizes the romantic relationship as a confrontation between non-permutable actors. The “you” and “I” can never really meet, which urges the “I” to stage an act of self-torture and abandonment. Absence is therefore not only a result of romantic love: romantic love actively produces and maintains this absence. The lamentation of being abandoned is not coming forth out of irrational fear or jealousy only; “speaking absence” gives form to the static relationship between the lover and beloved. The infidelity Barthes writes about is threefold: it is about the “forgotten” beloved, the truthfulness to the love itself, and finally, to the truth the lover cultivates in himself. This “truth” can be interpreted as how Barthes portrays the intractable and truth in two other figures:
Envers et contre tout, le sujet confirme l’amour comme valeur. (29) Against and in spite of everything, the subject affirms love as value. (22)
If we take this alienating aspect of love into consideration, it becomes clearer what the absence of the other means. The “absence” refers to the distance (physical, psychological) between me and the other: it also refers to the absent of “the world” in the love story. “Love” creates and isolated
9 “Language is born of absence” (16).
10 “To manipulate absence is to extend this interval, to delay as long as possible the moment when the other might
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“I”. This perception of truth holds in itself an alienating force per se, since the value of love is something that is affirmed in spite of the objections of the (normal, rational) world. Indeed, just as Barthes describes in the introduction, the “love story” is that which the lover must pay to the world in order to reconcile himself with it (11/7). But this “truth” Barthes mentions is also related to the unique and exclusive relationship that the I wishes to establish:
L’autre est mon bien et mon savoir: moi seul le connaît, le fait exister dans sa vérité. […] L’autre me fonde en vérité : ce n’est qu’avec l’autre que je me sens « moi-même ». (271)
“The other is my good and my knowledge: only I know him, only I make him exist in his truth. […] The other establishes me in truth: it is only with the other that I feel that I am “myself”” (229).
Absence is related to the other and what I “know” about him, and also how the “I” conversely is established. The other establishes “me” in my truth. In psychoanalytic and literary criticism, this position has been theorized by Freud, Lacan and Levinas. I briefly position Barthes in this discussion before moving on.
In psychoanalysis, the constitution of a subject (“me”) is preceded by the mirror phase; the infant sees itself in a mirror, and enchanted by the wholeness and beauty of the reflection, creates a (fictional) image of himself (Theory and criticism, 1281). For Freud, this marks also the beginning of language. The discovery of the infant that the continuity between himself, the world in the mother is an illusion creates feelings of loss,, which result in (insatiable) desires, and language (Literary Theory, 918). Lacan takes this analysis further and argues that the mirror stage marks the entering of the “Symbolic”, in which the real is represented through language. This “Real” (the real world) remains inaccessible to us, because it can never be fully represented. Language is the consequence of this fragmented and incomplete subject we are, as opposed to the whole subject we would want to be. Derrida’s analysis of the subject as created through linguistic practices adds to this analysis that the real outside of language is not only inaccessible, but that all our encounters (with others and ourselves) also happen through language (Marges de la philosophie, 16).
Language, in these theories, is a means to deal with absence. . “Love” is a affective transfer, in Lacan’s vocabulary (Les quatre concepts, 139). Love are projected desires onto the other. Barthes claims that the other establishes the “I”. Yet, how “real” this establishment of the “I” is, is questionable: the relationship between the two lovers is repeatedly conceptualized as incompatible with the real. For Barthes, love means creating a different kind of real, or reality. In the third chapter, when discussing Alain Badiou’s Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love), love as new
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temporality, simultaneously criticizing love as solely romantic encounter or experience, I will come back to this idea that love establishes a different kind of reality. Badiou explicitly dismisses the romantic, utopian idea of love as fusional emotion. Love is the celebration of “Two” (Deux) (Éloge de l’amour, 38).
How we relate to each other is isolating (because it is exclusive) but also produces a specific kind of reality, a truth to which only the lovers have access. That is, how this constitution takes place remains rather vague. Barthes characterizes the beloved “you” as someone who does not speak back and is always absent (7, 21). The intense loneliness resulting from this process is also enabling the lover to prepare his “truth”. This truth holds the midst between a monopoly of the knowledge I have over the other, but is intertwined with the value of the love story. Important to stress, finally, is the manipulative power the lover tries to exert: on the one hand, he wishes and needs to “forget” the beloved, which Barthes describes as temporal infidelity. On the other hand, the lover’s manipulation also changes the absence in “ordeal”; the lover interprets absence as abandonment, in turn modifying the love story and experience as a whole.
The Knight of Resignation: Romantic Love as Self-Containment
I now turn to Søren Kierkegaard’s knight of endless resignation. Kierkegaard’s knight of resignation enters the stage when Kierkegaard has explained the interpretational difficulties of the story of Abraham as introduced in the Old Testament, offering his son Isaac. In Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard discusses Abraham as religious figure and possible interpretations of the offering of Isaac. How is it possible that we admire Abraham as a hero, if we recognize the tension between the ethical and religious plights he had to fulfill? (The “we” in this respect refers to Christian believers.) The book is written from the first-person perspective (I), whom is referred to as Johannes de silentio and which is used as pseudonym throughout the whole book.11
From an ethical perspective, Johannes de silentio explains, Abraham must be interpreted as a father who attempted to kill his son. But from a theological point of view, Abraham is perceived as a hero. Consequently, Kierkegaard argues, the Christian faith must be able to change this action from a possible murder into a holy action. How does this transformation from murder to offer work? We need courage to understand the real implications of the above. We need courage and we need faith, for if we leave faith out of our analysis, the only interpretation left is the ethical meaning of the series of events. This would make Abraham a murderer. Understanding Abraham’s actions requires two moves: that of resignation, which one makes in a first leap, and the second leap towards faith. Resignation is unconditional faith in God’s love and
11 In literary theory, a concept to describe the distance between the actual writer and narrator is solved by the
concept of the “implied author”, whom is the narrator of the storyline. In this context, Johannes de silentio is referred to as a pseudonym since he is actively presented as protagonist and narrator (Literary Theory, 73).
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goodness: but it remains a fixed, a finite move, whereas Abraham’s offer can only be understood if one has made the second leap and reached the “infinity of the real faith”.
In the “Preliminary Expectorations”, Kierkegaard introduces the knight of endless resignation. The knight of endless resignation stays within the first regime, that of finitude. “A young man fell in love with a princess”, Kierkegaard writes, “and this love contains his whole life” (46). This love, however, is doomed to fail. It cannot be realized, never, not in this world. Does this refrain the knight from loving his princess? Far from it. He will never give up his love. “He is not a fool.” Nor is he a coward: he is not afraid to live his love and let it perpetrate him in every fiber of his body (ibid.). If the love he experiences turns out to be unhappy, doomed and impossible to realize, so will he be. This “leap” the knight of endless resignation makes, is a move of infinitude. But still, the knight remains within the domain of “finitude”. Johannes de silentio writes:
Deep natures never forget themselves and never become something different than they were. The knight will remember everything, and precisely this remembrance is his grief. (44)
The knight of resignation remains faithful, although he had realized that the love he cherishes is impossible to realize. He continues to love and to remember the princess, in vain. The fact that his love is vain does not refrain him from loving her. This is a courageous act, according to Johannes de silentio, yet it is not enough to make the second leap of faith:
He has understood the deep secret that a human needs to be enough for himself in love. (46)
This is precisely the heart of the problem, and at the same time explains why the knight of endless resignation loses his princess. This endless resignation means the knight resigns; he makes an infinite move and is condemned to repeat this movement forever. He has made the first leap of faith: now, he is caught in the infinitude of endless resignation. He does not reach out anymore, not to the princess but to nothing else. Romantic love isolates, because the knight believes in his love and nothing more than that. The impossibility of realizing this love leaves him with nothing than being faithful to an idea that will never become “true”. “Who has resigned endlessly, is enough for himself”. And this, according to Johannes de silentio, is precisely what the knight of faith does not.
Kierkegaard’s analysis points out endless resignation is isolating since the one who resigns is not reaching out and has locked himself up within his own finitude. The knight who resigns makes the first move necessary for “true faith”, but gets stuck thereafter. “By means of faith
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Abraham did not offer Isaac, but by means of faith he got Isaac back” (40). The point is to make the first unconditional move, Kierkegaard writes, and then move on. If one does not (such as the knight does not), one loses “finitude”. And it is precisely this finitude that should not be lost (54). The knight of faith, as opposed to the knight of resignation, regains this finitude by making a second move after having resigned. The knight of faith knows that his love is impossible, but still believes it will be realized (51). This second move is what characterizes as recognizing the impossible but still believing by virtue of the absurd (ibid.). This absurd is incommensurable with man’s rationality, since it presupposes putting one’s faith in a different entity than oneself. Endless resignation is possible to do on your own, but the second move requires believing in something different. The knight of resignation does not let himself be “affected” by the absence, by containing his grief to himself. This makes the creation of a different reality, to think of Barthes, impossible. Kierkegaard’s knight of resignation does not let himself be affected. The absence of the beloved is here resulting in self-containment. In the sections below, I explore different options.
An Encounter between Me and the Other: Kierkegaard and Levinas
I interpreted affect as an encounter, an open space where “what affects” and “what can be affected” meet. Barthes’ figure of “Absence” characterizes this by invoking the notion of two tenses, in between which the lover tries to shift. The absence of the other, in Barthes’ work, results in a break between me and the world. Yet, this absence could also result in a new type of encounter, if this very absence is not interpreted as abandonment, I claim below. “Absence” is a possible opening up, if it is not viewed as a deprivation of something (the other, in this context).
The discourse of absence gives form to the privation of the beloved, and both invokes his presence and laments the fact that he is physically not there (22/15). This discourse tries to set up a kind of relationship, but utterly fails. In the introduction of the Fragments, Barthes already touches upon this problem. By portraying the lover’s discourse as ignored and disparaged, Barthes underscores the needs for his affirmation. Barthes’ Fragments as affirmative discourse addresses precisely this problem; the necessity for the book is because of this solitude (5/1). As ignored and driven into the “unreal” (inactuel), the lover’s discourse can only be affirmed.
But what is this affirmation about? Barthes writes:
C’est un portrait, si l’on veut, qui est proposé ; mais ce portrait n’est pas psychologique ; il est structural : il donne à lire une place de parole : la place de quelqu’un qui parle en lui-même, amoureusement, face à l’autre (l’objet aimé), qui ne parle pas. (7)
24 What is proposed, then, is a portrait – but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak” (3).
An important parallel to make here with Kierkegaard’s knight of endless resignation is the question of to whom the lover speaks. Both Barthes and Kierkegaard portray the “other”, the loved one, as silent entity. The other does not speak, Barthes write (7). As the figure “Absence” bitterly states, the loved object is always absent (21/15). The lover’s discourse tries to bring the other back, invoking it in discourse, but precisely this discourse isolates and intensifies the experience of loneliness. Romantic love produces loneliness: “Je ne suis pas un autre, c’est ce que je constate avec effroi” (142).12 In the first place, this loneliness can be interpreted as the
inevitable distance between the lover and the beloved. But the lover’s discourse actively cultivates this distance. This is where the notion of affect comes into play. The isolating experience of “romantic love” is produced and maintained by the lover’s affirmation. “Le désir n’est-il pas toujours le même, que l’objet soit présent ou absent ?” (21), Barthes rhetorically asks.13 This
forever-absent object of desire is clearly inspired by how Lacan framed the “objet a”, a projection of our desire that we can never grasp (Les quatre concepts, 89). By asking if the lover’s desire remains the same, independently of the object of desire is present or absent seems at first sight or reading a reinforcement of Lacan’s analysis of the objet a. Yet, if we think again of absence as produced by romantic love because of the longing for a different kind of real, it becomes clear how Barthes pays with this psychoanalytic notion of desire. Barthes writes how the discourse “of” absence – produced by the very absence – keeps invoking the other’s presence as the one who is addressed (through speech). Barthes, then, offers a frame in which we think of language as actively producing the lover’s discourse, and therefore making absence an “active practice”.14
This discourse can be interpreted as an attempt to make the other present.
I now turn to absence as affective consequence and its relation to romantic love as something taking placing also outside of discourse.
Splendid Isolation and Absence
Compared to Barthes’ analysis of absence as both an endeavor because of the isolating experience as well as constitutive factor, the possible affect of love in as a theological process gets more sense. For Kierkegaard, the romantic love the knight of resignation for his princess is
12 “I am not someone else: that is what I realize with horror” (121). 13 “Isn’t the object always absent?” (15).
14 Classical psychoanalysis as developed by Freud and later Lacan work with the concept of “Imaginary”, which
refers to an imagined phantasy of an ideal continuum between Mother, baby and the world (Literary Theory, 86, 158-159). As we grow up, we realize this is a phantasy but this yearning for completeness never ends.
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isolating because it makes him retire into himself. This kind of romantic love refuses communication and is therefore doomed; it gets stuck in “finitude”. Barthes’ absence consists of a similar experience: by invoking and addressing the other, the lover affirms the lover’s absence and the inability of the two lovers to meet. For Kierkegaard, the knight of resignation is lost because he confines within self-containment. A lack of trust (“Believing in the absurd”) means that the knight of resignation cannot move further and make the second leap of faith.
For Barthes, language is born out of absence. The “discourse” produced by absence is thus confirming the lover’s isolation. Absence gives form to privation: the lover desires and needs simultaneously without ever being satisfied (22/16). The meaning Barthes gives to language is twofold here: it isolates the lover from the lover and it shapes a tensions between presence and absence. “Tu es parti (de quoi je me plains) tu es là (puisque je m’adresse à toi” (22/16). But this absence and language both are also constitutive of this “I”, or at least a form of this “I” as well. In Totalité et Infini (1971), Levinas writes that language can also be used to share a world with the other (230). Naming things, designating them, shows a possible joint world and the description of this world. Language is used to reach out and relate to the other. In Giving an account of oneself, Judith Butler writes: “Let us remember that one gives an account of oneself to another, and that every accounting takes place in the context of an address. I give an account of myself to you” (31). Language is a means to establish a relationship with the other.
Barthes, on the contrary, problematizes the lover’s discourse as being in a state of extreme solitude. If a discourse is structurally being driven into to “unreal” (inactuel); the only recourse possible is its affirmation. This affirmation needs to be recognized by someone outside of the text:
Le livre, idéalement, serait une coopérative : « Aux Lecteurs – aux Amoureux – Réunis » (9) Ideally, the book would be a cooperative: “To the United Readers and Lovers”. (5)
The book serves as a confrontation, but not only between lover and beloved, but between the expulsed (ignored) “I” who speaks amorously, and the reader. The book therefore actively reaches out to the reader. The affect of the figure absence becomes the possibility of an encounter between the reader and the “I”. “Absence” is not only a deprivation, but also a possibility to reach out (to the reader, or the beloved.).
Consequently, Barthes figures need to be recognized by the readers. The success of the project depends on this re-actualization of the portrayed figures. If we put this next to respectively Kierkegaard’s knight of resignation and knight of faith, this opens up an interesting
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space for analysis. Kierkegaard’s knight of resignation resides within self-containment. He is doomed to repeat the same move forever, lost within infinite. Because of his self-containment, the temporal aspect of his movements is lost. The knight of faith however acquires this finitude again, after having made the first move of resignation. This acquiring of finitude happens through believing “by virtue of the absurd”. “It drives me out of my mind, and if not because if another reason, than because of jealousy”, Kierkegaard’s narrator exclaims (45). This jealousy comes out of the impossibility to understand this “by virtue of the absurd”. The absurd makes the move unable to understand. Secondly, the knight of fait actually makes the second leap, something which the narrator is not able to do.
This “absurd” is not absurd because it is senseless (38). It rests upon the knights faith, his believe, his trust. “Absurd” refers to the incommensurable relationship between “faith”, the second leap the knight of faith makes, and our human minds (43). Just as Barthes trusts his readers to recognize the figures he has so haphazardly assembled, the knight of faith handles out of a secret arrangement. Love as affect within the theological domain and more specifically within Kierkegaard’s work therefore underscores the necessity to trust. The knight of faith is everything but self-contained. He acknowledges his own finitude, without limiting his beliefs to this same finitude. This acknowledgment can be read as a reaching-out: “absence”, in this respect, becomes the opposite of “lack”. It is the opportunity for something else to enter. But this “entering” requires a certain attitude, which Kierkegaard’s knight does not have. The knight of faith knows how to relate himself to the “infinite”. This leads towards isolation and, finally, self-containment. Remember Barthes’ figure in which the other’s “Absence” is not only used to imagine abandonment, but also to instore an (imagined, for that matter), dialogue. The lover continues to address the beloved, even if he is not there.
InTotalité et Infini: essai sur l’extériorité (translated as Totality and Infinity: Essay on Exteriority), first published in 1971, the French-Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas portrays subjectivity as hospitality. The encounter between the other and me is a transcendental moment per se: the face of the other being something that cannot be grasped, opens up a space to the infinite (9, 23). The moral task of the “I” is to welcome this other (23).
Discourse, for Levinas, is linked to signification. Meaning possibilizes signs; meaning therefore precedes language (226). “La signification c’est l’infine, c’est-à-dire Autrui” (227). Language is constituted because of a face-to-face encounter (228). It is the face of the other that makes the first meaning and signification possible (ibid.). Meaning is thus linked to infinity and to the welcoming of the other. Barthes’ analysis of language as born out of absence thus might be interpreted not as a “lack” of presence of the other. Precisely the fact that the other is absent
