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Overview
Renata Salecl explores the distributing and complex relationships between love and hate, violence and admiration, libidinal and destructive drives, through an investigation of phenomenon as diverse as the novels The Age of Innocence and The Remains of the Day, classic Hollywood melodramas, the Sirens’ song, Ceaușescu's Rumania and the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik, who acts like a dog and bites his audience. (Per)Versions of Love and Hate presents a unique and timely intervention in contemporary debates by questioning the legitimacy of the calls for tolerance and respect by multiculturalism and exploring practices such as body-mutilation as symptoms of the radical change that has affected subjectivity in contemporary society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781859842362 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Verso Books |
| Publication date: | 06/17/2000 |
| Series: | Wo Es War Series |
| Pages: | 194 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.02(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.42(d) |
About the Author
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Chapter One
"I CAN'T LOVE YOU UNLESS I GIVE YOU UP"
"Love for oneself knows only one barrier — love for others, love for objects." (Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego)
One of the greatest illusions about love is that prohibition and social codes prevent its realization. The illusionary character of this proposition is unveiled in every "self-help" manual: the advice people desperately in love usually get is to establish artificial barriers, prohibitions, and to make themselves temporarily inaccessible in order to provoke their love-object to return love. Or, as Freud said: "Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the libido to its heights; and in all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to be able to enjoy love." What is the nature of these barriers? What is the role of institutions, rituals and social codes in relation to the subject's innermost passions, their love? And why does the subject persist in loving a person who has no intention of returning love?
I will try to answer these questions by taking the example, first, of two novels, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, and, second, of a short story by Edith Wharton, "The Muse's Tragedy". While the latter deals with a woman using the love of a man to organize the symbolic space that would provide her with an identity and confirm her as an object of love, thetwo novels are about the opposite problem of love supposedly thwarted by society's symbolic power structure. Let me first focus on the novels, which offer an aesthetic presentation of what Louis Althusser called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs): "a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialist institutions" and are primarily part of the private domain, like families, schools, churches, parties or cultural ventures. In the two novels, it is precisely one of the most important ISAs, the family and "society", in the sense of codified social norms and the hierarchy of social relations, that dominates the private life of the protagonists: their love affairs are supposedly constrained by the influence of the oppressive ISAs that organize their lives.
The Age of Innocence is set in the extremely hierarchical high society of nineteenth-century New York, where every social act or movement is codified, and where it can be a constant struggle for an individual not to misinterpret the unwritten rules and become an outcast. The extent of codification in this society is visible in the way people organize their public and private lives: from the type of china they use at dinner parties, to the way they dress, the location of their houses, the respect they pay to people higher up the social ladder, etc. The Remains of the Day is set in the equally hierarchical aristocratic society of England just before and after the Second World War, with the central role played by the highest of servants -- the butler. This is also a society of unwritten codes, in which every part of life is fully organized. And the butler is the one upon whom the perfection and maintenance of this order depends. As the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day points out, by doing his service in the most dignified and perfectionist manner, he contributes significantly to the major historical events his master is involved in. The butler Stevens is the prototype of an "ideological servant": he never questions his role in the machinery, he never opposes his boss even when he makes obvious mistakes, i.e. he does not think but obeys.
Both novels imply there is something suppressed or hidden behind this ideological machinery — the passions of the individuals engaged in these rituals, their secret "true" loves. The film versions of the two novels especially stress this hidden terrain "beneath" the institution, the "real" emotions behind the fake, public ones. The main trauma of The Age of Innocence is thus the impossibility of love between Newland Archer, the young aristocrat, and Countess Ellen Olenska, the eccentric woman whose behavior is under the close scrutiny of New York society. Newland, who is engaged to be married to one of the "proper" women of this society, tacitly, because of its rules, gives up his hopes of fulfilling his desire for Ellen and becomes a devoted husband. In The Remains of the Day we have the unspoken passion between butler Stevens and housekeeper Miss Kenton, both of whom are also too obedient to the social codes to let their feelings out and to find personal happiness. In short, both novels reveal the oppressiveness of the institutions in which their protagonists live, and which prevent them from finding love. The question is, however, whether it is really the institution that prevents love. Is it not actually the institution that, in a paradoxical way, produces love?
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, OR, LOVE AS PROHIBITION
The Remains of the Day is the story of a butler, Stevens, who has spent his whole life serving in the house of Lord Darlington. In his old age, Stevens takes a trip to visit the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, who had worked in the house twenty years before, with a view to persuading her to return to service in the house. During this trip, Stevens writes a diary in which he recalls his relationship with Miss Kenton and life in the house in the turmoil of the years before the Second World War. These memories of butler Stevens are primarily a tribute to the principles of dignity and morality that define a perfect servant wholly devoted to his master. The subtle character of the novel lies in the fact that emotions are never expressed: although butler Stevens and Miss Kenton care about each other in more than a professional way, they never admit this to each other. Even at the end, when they finally meet again after many years and when there is no actual barrier to their relationship, nothing happens between them. Ritual stays intact and emotions never fully come out — why not?
One interpretation of Stevens's behavior, of his complete repression of emotion, is that he is, in some way, non-human. This is exemplified by his attitude toward his father's death: even as his father is dying, it is more important for Stevens to perform his duties in an impeccable way than to reveal his emotions. Such a humanist interpretation, of course, misses the point of the novel. To understand its logic, one should proceed in the opposite direction: rather than trying to discern the repressed passions that do not come out because of the rigidity of the social system and because of the butler's all too impeccable service, it would be better to begin by taking the ritual and institution seriously and then determine the place love has in them.
How should we understand the title of the novel? A number of explanations are hinted at in the text. First, "the remains of the day" might simply be the memories butler Stevens records in his diary every evening of his journey. The second answer could be that both protagonists are already old, so the "remains" are the few years of life they still have left to them. However, if we draw an analogy between "the remains of the day" and the Freudian "day's residues", a more interesting explanation can be given. In Freud's theory of dreams, the "day's residues" are the events, the residues, of the previous day that acquire a new meaning in dreams because of the unconscious structure into which they get embedded. By reading Stevens's memories in the light of this Freudian concept, it could be said that the remains of the day concern primarily the memory of his relationship with Miss Kenton. The memories that Stevens cherishes the most are of meeting Miss Kenton every evening in their private quarters for cocoa and to discuss the events of the day. These meetings were "the remains of the day" which in Stevens's memory function as residues that he cannot incorporate into the perfect construction of his obsessional style of life. Stevens's relationship with Miss Kenton is therefore the residue around which his unconscious braids, the residue that forces him to confront his desire.
Lacan characterizes the obsessional as one who installs himself in the place of the Other, from where he then acts in a way that prevents any risk of encountering his desire. That is why he invents a number of rituals, self-imposed rules, and organizes his life in a compulsive way. The obsessional also constantly delays decisions in order to escape the risk and uncertainty associated with the desire of the Other, the symbolic order, as well as the concrete other, the opposite sex.
Stevens never admits to himself that he is taking the trip because he wishes to meet Miss Kenton. He finds an excuse for the trip in the lack of servants in the house and in the possibility that he might solve his staff problem by convincing Miss Kenton to return to the house:
You may be amazed that such an obvious shortcoming to a staff plan should have continued to escape my notice, but then you will agree that such is often the way with matters one has given abiding thought to over a period of time; one is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event. So it was in this instance; that is to say my receiving the letter from Miss Kenton, containing as it did, along with its long, rather unrevealing passages, an unmistakable nostalgia for Darlington Hall, and — I am quite sure of this — distinct hints of her desire to return here, obliged me to see my staff plan afresh. Only then did it strike me that there was indeed a role that a further staff member could crucially play here; that it was, in fact, this very shortage that had been at the heart of all my recent troubles. And the more I considered it, the more obvious it became that Miss Kenton, with her great affection for this house, with her exemplary professionalism — the sort almost impossible to find nowadays — was just the factor needed to enable me to complete a fully satisfactory staff plan for Darlington Hall.
This passage is the most profound example of obsessional discourse. To understand Stevens's "real" desire, we have to turn each sentence upside down. The obsessional's speech always suggests meaning that desperately tries to cover his desire, or, more precisely, the obsessional speaks and thinks compulsively only to avoid his desire. When Stevens speaks about the need to solve the staff problem or when he detects in Miss Kenton's letter her wish to return to Darlington Hall, he creates excuses that prevent him from recognizing his own desire. Stevens deposits his desire into the Other: he presents it as the desire of Miss Kenton. The obsessional thus substitutes thought for action and believes that the events in reality are determined by what he thinks. But this omnipotence of thought is linked with a fundamental impotence: "His actions are impotent because he is incapable of engaging himself in an action where he will be recognized by other people." Freud observed that the obsessional's thought process itself becomes sexualized, "for the pleasure which is normally attached to the content of thought becomes shifted onto the act of thinking itself, and the satisfaction derived from reaching the conclusion of a line of thought is experienced as a sexual satisfaction". Stevens thus gets sexual satisfaction from his plan to solve the staff problem by taking the trip to visit Miss Kenton, not from thoughts about Miss Kenton herself.
When Stevens informs his master about his plan to visit Miss Kenton, Lord Darlington mockingly comments that he did not expect his butler still to be interested in women at his age. This remark touches the core of Stevens's desire and he immediately has to organize a ritual to contradict its implication. His conclusion is that Darlington expects Stevens to exchange banter as part of his professional service. Stevens, of course, fails in this task, so he tries to learn the art of witticism: "I have devised a simple exercise which I try to perform at least once a day; whenever an odd moment presents itself, I attempt to formulate three witticisms based on my immediate surroundings at that moment." This is a difficult task because it presents him with the danger of encountering his desire. Stevens knows the danger witticism entails, the fact that its effects are uncontrollable, which is a real horror for an obsessional: "By the very nature of a witticism, one is given very little time to assess its various possible repercussions before one is called to give voice to it, and one gravely risks uttering all manner of unsuitable things if one has not first acquired the necessary skill and experience."
This avoidance of desire is linked to the profession of butler. For Stevens, the high principles of serving as a butler take the form of his Ego Ideal. The most important among them is the "dignity" of the "butler's ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits". While the lesser butler easily abandons his professional being for the private one, the great butler never does this regardless of the situation: "A butler of any quality must be seen to inhabit his role, utterly and fully; he cannot be seen casting it aside one moment simply to do it again the next as though it were nothing more than a pantomime costume." The butler thus has to give duty priority. Jacques-Alain Miller defined the noble as the master who sacrifices his desire to the Ego Ideal. The Ego Ideal is the place in the symbolic order with which the subject identifies. It is the place from which the subject observes himself or herself in the way he or she would like to be seen. For Stevens, this site is the principles or code of the butler's service, or, more precisely, dignity. When the subject sacrifices his desire to the Ideal, when he completely subordinates himself to symbolic identity and takes on a symbolic mask, it is in this mask that one can discern his desire. So when Stevens totally devotes himself to his profession, gives up his private life and renounces any sexual contact with women, when he, therefore, unites himself with the Ideal, it is in this Ideal, in this social mask of decency that his desire reveals itself. The Ideal, which has the meaning of adopting the figure of the Other, is also the other of the subject's desire: the traits of the masks of decency, professionalism and asexuality that form the Ideal are thus co-relative to Stevens's desire. For example, his intended, active ignorance of women can be read as the desire for a woman: "What the subject dissimulates and by means of which he dissimulates, is also the very form of its disclosure."
There is nothing behind the mask: it is in the mask, in the veil that seemingly covers the essence of the subject, that we have to search for this essence. In the case of Stevens, there is no "beyond", no suppressed world of passions hidden behind his mask of proper Englishness. It is useless to search in Stevens for some hidden love that could not come out because of the ritual he rigidly engages in — all his love is in the rituals. If he loves Miss Kenton, he loves her from the perspective of submission to the codes of their profession. Miss Kenton is also a very competent servant, but what actually attracts Stevens to her is her periodical hysterical resistance to the rituals, when she suddenly questions the codes but then again subordinates herself to them.
It would be a mistake to depict Stevens as the only culprit in the nonrealization of the love affair. It would be naive to conclude that Miss Kenton would have realized her love for Stevens if only he had been different, more human. Miss Kenton is an example of the hysteric restrained by her paradoxical desire. On the one hand she wants Stevens to change, to reveal his love for her, but, on the other hand, she loves him only for what he actually is — a functionary who tries by all available means to avoid his desire. If Stevens were to change, one might predict that Miss Kenton would quickly abandon him and would despise him, in the same way that she despises her husband.
Miss Kenton develops her first hysterical reaction when a young maid informs her that she is going to marry a fellow servant. Miss Kenton's reaction to this news is very emotional since she herself identifies with the young maid's wish to find love. The young servants realize what Miss Kenton would like to happen between her and Stevens. The next hysterical gesture is Miss Kenton's announcement of her intention to marry Mr. Benn. By this act, as she admits at the end of the novel, Miss Kenton intended to provoke a reaction from Stevens. The hysteric always confronts the question: "What will happen to him if he loses me?" As is further exemplified in Chapters 2 and 3, the paradox of the hysteric's desire is that she wants to have a master, the Other, that she herself can control.
Paradoxically, it is Miss Kenton who actually functions as the support of the institution. She is the desire of the institution. This is obvious from her relationship with her husband. When her husband abandons the institution she despises him. She herself cannot endure being outside it. At the end she returns to the institution of the family, although giving reasons outside herself — her husband, her daughter. Nonetheless, this is her true desire.
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, OR,
THE ETHICS OF ROMANTIC LOVE
At first sight, The Age of Innocence is a novel of unfulfilled romantic love, of the desperate longing of two people deeply in love (Newland and Ellen) who are unable to pursue their happiness because of the rigid society in which they live. Newland is a conformist, a decent member of New York high society, engaged to be married to May, one of the most eligible girls of this same society. When he encounters the eccentric Ellen and falls in love with her, Newland discovers that there might be something "outside" the societal codes which he so dutifully fulfills. This outside is presumably the world of pure passions, a world where love reigns unconditionally.
The external constraints of the society's codes and the fact that both lovers are married produce the conditions for romantic love to develop. Newland himself admits that the image of Ellen in his memory is stronger than the "real" Ellen. Ellen thus has a special value precisely as absent, inaccessible, as the object of Newland's constant longings. That is why he does not even intend to realize his relationship with her in any sexual form. During one of their emotional encounters, he thus says:
"Don't be afraid: you needn't squeeze yourself back into your corner like that. A stolen kiss isn't what I want. Look: I'm not even trying to touch the sleeve of your jacket. Don't suppose that I don't understand your reasons for not wanting to let this feeling between us dwindle into an ordinary hole-and-corner love-affair. I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true."
For romantic love to emerge, the real person need not be present; what is necessary is the existence of the image. Lacan first defines love in terms of a narcissistic relationship of the subject: what is at work in falling in love is the recognition of the narcissistic image that forms the substance of the ideal ego. When we fall in love, we position the person who is the object of our love in the place of the ideal ego. We love this object because of the perfection we have striven to reach for our own ego. However, it is not only that the subject loves in the other the image he or she would like to inhabit him- or herself. The subject simultaneously posits the object of his or her love in the place of the Ego Ideal, from which the subject would like to see him- or herself in a likeable way. When we are in love, the love object placed in the Ego Ideal enables us to perceive ourselves in a new way — compassionate, lovable, beautiful, decent, etc. Because of the Ideal invested in the person we love, we feel shame in front of her or him or we try to fascinate this person.
However, to understand the mechanisms of love, one has to look beyond the Ideal. Lacan's famous definition of love is that the subject gives to the other what he or she does not have. This object is the traumatic objet petit a, the object cause of desire. Behind the narcissistic relationship toward the love-object we encounter the real, the traumatic object in ourselves, as well as in the other: "Analysis demonstrates that love, in its essence, is narcissistic, and reveals that the substance of what is supposedly object-like (objectal) — what a bunch of bull — is in fact that which constitutes a remainder in desire, namely, its cause, and sustains desire through its lack of satisfaction (insatisfaction), and even its impossibility."
How does the subject relate to the object of his or her desire in romantic love? Newland wants to escape with Ellen to a place where they would be able to freely enjoy their love, where they would be "simply two human beings who love each other; and nothing else on earth will matter". Significantly, it is Newland — the conformist — who believes in the possibility of this place of fulfillment outside institutions, and it is Ellen, the nonconformist half-outcast, who dispels his illusions when she answers him by saying:
"Oh, my dear — where is that country? Have you ever been there? ... I know of so many who've tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations; at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte-Carlo — and it wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous ... Ah, believe me, it's a miserable little country!" ...
"Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?" he asked.
"For us? But there is no us in that sense! We're near each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we're only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska's cousin, and Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer's wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them."
"Ah, I'm beyond that," he groaned.
"No, you're not! You've never been beyond. And I have, and I know what it looks like there."
It is only at the very end of the novel that this message — and thereby the truth of Newland's desire — is brought home to him. Lacan points out that "desire is formed as something ... the demand means beyond whatever it is able to formulate". On the level of demand, Newland's passion could be perceived as his wish to unite with Ellen; however, his desire is to renounce this unification: Newland submits himself to the social code to maintain Ellen as the inaccessible object that sets his desire in motion. This logic enables us to understand the ending of the novel when Newland, now widowed, decides during his trip to Paris not to see Ellen and thus finally gives up the consummation of his great love. Newland, sitting in front of Ellen's house, tries to imagine what goes on in the apartment:
"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.
He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.
At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
This last act is an ethical one in the Lacanian sense of "not giving up on one's desire". All previous renunciations of the love affair between Newland and Ellen depended on an "ethics with the excuse". Thus we can read Ellen's statement, "I can't love you unless I give you up", as a declaration of romantic love and not as an ethical act: the love becomes romantic because of the suffering it involves. Similarly, Newland's giving up on Ellen in his youth is still linked to the expectation of a "future" when he will stop lying to his wife and when the reality (of his love) will take a true form. Only the last renunciation has the meaning of an ethical act because there is no utilitarian demand any more. From a pragmatic point of view, this renunciation is stupid: Newland is celibate, as is Ellen; he still loves her; presumably she is also far from indifferent to him; even Newland's son wants his father to rediscover his great love. Not only are there no social obstacles to their relationship, it is even Newland's society's expectation that a young widower find a new life companion.
Why did Newland decide not to see Ellen? The answer could be traced in "the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge". Our perception of reality is linked to the fact that something has to be precluded from it: the object as the point of the gaze. Every screen of reality includes a constitutive "stain", the trace of what had to be precluded from the field of reality in order that this field can acquire its consistency; this stain appears in the guise of a void Lacan names object a. It is the point that I, the subject, cannot see: it eludes me insofar as it is the point from which the screen itself "returns the gaze", or watches me, that is, the point where the gaze itself is inscribed into the visual field of reality. For Newland's reality to retain consistency, this object has to stay closed in the room in Paris. That is why he can leave the scene when the man-servant closes the window. This gesture of closing the window is a sign for Newland: a sign that the object is securely precluded so that his reality may remain intact.
Throughout his life, Newland perceived his married life with May as a necessity to which he must submit because society expected it of him, and because of the "innocence" and "purity" of his lovely wife. At the very end of the novel, however, he encounters another duty: the recognition that there is no "other country", that there is no "beyond" the codes and rituals that have suppressed him throughout his life.
The other person who is aware of the lack of any "beyond" is May. After May's death, Newland learns that she knew about his great love for Ellen. However, May responded to this fact in her "innocent" way: she never revealed her knowledge or reproached Newland, but manipulated the situation with the help of the social rules and codes. This recognition of the non-existence of anything "beyond" the institutions is what May paradoxically has in common with Ellen.
THE BIG OTHER IN LOVE
How does it happen that people subordinate themselves to the logic of the institution and obey all kinds of social ritual that are supposedly against their well-being? Althusser points out that individuals, in their relation to other individuals, function in the mode of transference. Transference is thus the "stuff" of social relations. But what is transference other than a specific form of love? What then is the function of love as a social bond?
In his writings on psychoanalysis, Althusser refers to Stendhal's The Red and the Black. This novel is an esthetic discourse composed of a series of utterances, presented in a certain order. This discourse is the very existence of Julien and his "passions": Julien's passions in their affective violence do not precede the discourse, nor are they something uttered between the lines -- his passion is the discourse itself: "The constraints which define this discourse are the very existence of this 'passion'." The same goes for the discourse of the unconscious: "the unconscious is structured as language" means that the unconscious is the constraints that are at work in this discourse, that these constraints are the very existence of the unconscious — there is no unconscious hidden behind the discursive constraints that "express" themselves in the discourse.
The effect (of the unconscious, of "passions") is therefore not exterior to the mechanism that produces the effect: "The effect is nothing other than the discourse itself." For each discourse can be said to be defined by a system of specific constraints that function as the law of the language; and the effects of this discourse are the products of the constraints. In the case of the unconscious, the constraints that function in this discourse produce the libido as its effect; in the case of ideological discourse, the constraints produce the effect of (mis)recognition.
Similarly, it is the constraint (of discourse, of the social symbolic structure) that actually produces love. This institution concerns what Lacan names "the big Other". In his seminar on transference, Lacan pointed out the role that the big Other plays in love: "the divine place of the Other" consecrates the relationship between subjects, as long as the providence of the desire of the loved one inscribes itself in this divine place.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Other is a symbolic structure in which the subject has always been embedded. This symbolic structure is not a positive social fact: it is quasi-transcendental, and forms the frame structuring our perception of reality; its status is normative, it is a world of symbolic rules and codes. As such, it also does not belong to the psychic level: it is a radically external, non-psychological universe of symbolic codes regulating our psychic self-experience. It is a mistake either to internalize the big Other and reduce it to a psychological fact, or to externalize the big Other and reduce it to institutions in social reality. By doing either, we miss the fact that language is in itself an institution to which the subject is submitted.
(Continues...)