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PARTISAN REVIEW
yet said anything about the feeling itself. Of what does it consist? One
answer to this question, provided by classical antiquity, is paradoxical: love
is the desire for something, a being that I need or lack; yet if I possessed it,
I would desire it no longer. As Socrates says in Plato's
Symposium,
"Who
has a desire desires what is not at hand and not present, what he does not
have, and what he is not, and that of which he is in need; for such are the
objects of desire and love." I love an object that I lack; I can love
only
in
its absence. The
only
Albertine you can love is the one that is gone. It fol–
lows that in order to live, love must remain frustrated, and that once it is
attained, love is dead.
This singular property of love would explain, according to this con–
ception, the bizarre strategies in which lovers, more or less consciously,
involve themselves. The more its object is accessible, the more love is
extinguished; the more difficult the object is to attain, the stronger love
burns. Love, in this scheme, is thus intrinsically tragic, giving us the choice
of two evils: to suffer because our desire is unsatisfied (She loves me not!),
or to be miserable because my desire, now fulfilled, is dead (She loves me,
hence I love her no more!). A closer look also reveals the egoism inherent
in this view: I must have the other, naturally, but only as a means to keep
myself in the state of being in love, not as a value in itself. Here the lover
desires love itself more than its object, aspiring to death, the ultimate
absence, rather than to life. All of us have experienced this paradox: I am
willing to do anything for this person, but only provided she loves me. If,
on the other hand, she should cease to love me, then love would turn to
hatred: in the end, I would rather have her dead in my arms than alive in
those of another.
The paradoxes of desire are seductive to the mind, and lend themselves
perfectly to narrative treatment: a quest, suspended then reinitiated, a dis–
covery of unanticipated obstacles. Western literature from Plato to Lacan,
from Ovid to Proust and beyond, has not refrained from exploiting these
possibilities. Yet it is enough
to
examine the manifestations oflove that we
see around us every day to confirm that they are not all of the type that
prefers absence to presence, taking to giving, passion suffered to action
taken.
Indeed love, which consists of wishing the good of another without rec–
iprocation, coincides with the definition we generally attribute to the good.
As Aristotle remarks, to be a good person is to be capable of wishing the
good of others without aiming at any particular utility or pleasure (which
come anyway when I see the happiness of my friend). Love stands above all
moral systems, for when one has love, one needs no moral framework. Is it
a moral force that inspires a mother to care for her infant, or a lover to pro–
tect his beloved? Morality is merely a supplement for the absence of love.
