3rd Global Conference
Wednesday 29th November - Saturday
2nd December 2006
Pugetow Palace, Cracow, Poland
Session 9: Cross-Disciplinary Conversations 2
Chair: Jodi O'Brien
Little Love Affairs
Fiona
Peters
Department of Cultural Studies, Bath Spa University,
United Kingdom
Traditionally at least, psychoanalysis as a discourse
has not been particularly vocal about the question of love, concentrating
instead on attempts to understand desire and sexuality in their various
intertwined (and pathological) formulations. Indeed, many of Freud’s critics
critiqued (and continue to critique) him as being ‘obsessed’ with
sex, ignoring the ways in which both the theoretical and clinical aspects
of Freudianism work together to undermine and challenge the conception
of sexuality as being ‘about’ sex in the generally accepted
genital meaning of the term.
However, on closer reading it is clear that psychoanalysis is in fact,
all about love, from the first manifestations of subjectivity as narcissistic
to the ‘love affair’ of transference that dominates the
analytic situation.
This paper will take up the question of the role and function of sexual
love in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan argues that love ‘touches
the other in the Real’. This does not mean however, that for
Lacan love has a ‘true’ reality, on the contrary he means
that it is something always tantalisingly beyond our grasp as human
subjects trapped within a world of symbols and words. Love,
for Lacan, is the condition that reveals most about the ‘impossibility
of the sexual relation’ insofar that it reveals both the desire
to engulf and dominate the object into the self, and the ways in which
the loved one can never ‘live up’ to the projected fantasy
invented by the besotted lover. As Lacan puts it: ‘I love you,
but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you – the objet
petit a – I mutilate you.’ Here, love becomes inexorably
bound not to any transcendent aspects of the loved one, but remains
on the side of the ‘victim’ of the ‘sickness’ that
Freud believed constitutes ‘falling in love.’ As Slavoj
Zizek puts it: ‘…man’s love for a woman – his
very ‘spiritual’, ‘pure’ love as opposed to
sexual longing – is a thoroughly narcissistic phenomenon:
in his love of a woman, man loves only himself, his own ideal image.’
These examples illustrate a masculine relationship to love within a
Lacanian framework; the paper will conclude by explicating the different
relations of the masculine and the feminine to the paradox of
love
Best of Friends? Workplace Friendships of Gay Men and Straight Women
Nick
Rumens
Southampton Solent University, United Kingdom
No abstract is presently available