Traditionally, love is seen as a profound and enduring connection. Yet, as Lacan and Deleuze describe, love is also a mad compulsion where we throw ourselves repeatedly against the wall between self and other. Insofar as love is necessary, Sinan Richards writes, it lies in identifying and seeking this madness in each other, and embracing imperfection.
While writing The Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan, I was living and teaching in Paris and would often travel to London by train to see friends and family. On one such trip, I was asked by a British Border Force agent at St Pancras International: 'What is it that you do, then?' When I explained that I was working on a book on Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan and how love was impossible, the border guard retorted scornfully, 'That’s the problem with you academics – you spend so much time thinking that you can’t get on with it.' This exchange still makes me chuckle, because, although rude, what if he was right?
Between 1988 and 1989, while filming L'Abécédaire, Gilles Deleuze linked a fundamental aspect of love to madness. Deleuze says: ‘if you don’t get the little kernel of madness in someone, then you can’t love them. If you don’t seize their point of insanity, you fall short. The location of someone’s insanity is the source of all their charm.’ Deleuze is right: there is a remarkably close proximity between madness and love, and this was also true for Lacan.
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We could even say that madness is love’s modus operandi.
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For instance, consider how we tend to deploy metaphors of madness when we describe love: ‘crazy in love’; ‘madly in love’; or as Alain Badiou often puts it, how love requires a fall, ‘fall in love.’ We could even say that madness is love’s modus operandi. And, although we earnestly use these terms, all this seems rather paradoxical and counterintuitive when we stop and think about it. Why exactly would love be linked to madness? And why is love – in a sense – multiple? For example, we can all agree that there is a difference between ‘I love you’ and ‘love ya’. So, what’s the difference?
Of course, in love there can also be sex. Clearly, sex is not necessary for all forms of love, but it is common enough with certain significant ones. So, when Lacan says 'there is no sexual relationship,' what does he mean? Why does he make a demonstrably false statement? Well, he certainly does not mean we can’t have sex. As Lacan explains in a rare moment of clarity, ‘there is no sexual relationship seems a bit nuts […] one would just have to get down to some good fucking to demonstrate to me the contrary.’ Yet, as Lacan explains, the physical sexual act does not disprove the idea that there is no sexual relationship, because, for Lacan, there is no way to translate the Act into speech and writing. There is no way, for Lacan to inscribe it in speech and language. By which Lacan means that the physical sexual act is never actually at stake – instead, he means we cannot inscribe it, write it down, or speak it in words. Lacan means in language. So, when he talks about love, sex, or most other things, he means as they are written or spoken in speech and language. In the sexual relationship, something will always escape any attempt to inscribe sex in writing, since, for Lacan, the impossibility of the sexual relationship contains the very disharmony between truth and knowledge.
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For Lacan, love has this double dimension, amur and amour.
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Let me explain, since, as our Border Agent once thought also, this all seems rather counterintuitive. Think of it like this: you can certainly have fulfilling and meaningful sex with a partner, but have you ever caught yourself fantasising about a stranger even while having sex with your partner? Or worse, saying the wrong name out loud? If so, you’re in good company because according to a recent poll, a majority of European and American respondents admitted to fantasising about someone else during sex with their partners. In fact, it’s so common its basically “healthy”; as healthnews puts it: 'The majority of people in relationships experience fantasies about someone other than their partner, called extradyadic fantasies. Extradyadic fantasies are completely normal and in most cases, are nothing to be guilty or ashamed of.' But would you systematically fess up to your partner in both speech or writing? Now we have a better sense of why the sexual relationship is impossible for Lacan. There is an unbridgeable gap between truth and knowledge. I fantasised about someone else (that can be a truth), but my partner thinks I fantasised about them (that can be what is known publicly). This gives a sense of what Lacan means when he says the sexual relationship is impossible. But how is this linked to love? For Lacan, love involves a similar contradiction.
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Love Is the Drug
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Between 1971 and 1972, the year of Lacan’s seminar entitled: …Or Worse, Lacan delivered a second, parallel seminar. It was in this second seminar, published under the title Talking to Brick Walls, that Lacan first seriously develops his concept of amur, a Lacanian neologism. In French, amur is almost homophonous with amour [love], except it has the word ‘mur’ [wall] in it, so in English, it is literally: “a wall” – or as we might rephrase it, a dead end. For Lacan, love has this double dimension, amur and amour. What are we to make of this double qualification of love? Why is love, for Lacan, split between what is a seeming dead end, a wall, and on the other hand love as amour, an opening?
To flesh this all out, Lacan reproduces a section from Antoine Tudal’s poem, Paris in the year 2000:
Between man and love
There is woman.
Between man and woman
There is the world.
Between man and the world
There is a wall.
Lacan comments that in French ‘entre’ can mean both ‘between’ and ‘interposing,’ suggesting that there might be something blocking, or preventing, a connection between the two sides: ‘there is a wall’, Lacan says. Lacan does not mean an actual wall – instead, it is simply the place of symbolic castration, which is, for Lacan, a normal psychic process of internalising the prohibitions of the father and inculcating us into a ‘normal’ resolution of the Oedipus complex. Therefore, the wall that separates knowledge from truth is nothing other than the same wall that separates Man from Love, Man from Woman, Man from the World.
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We so desperately want to break out, but trapped in our language and symbolic norms, it is simply an ‘impossible’ wish to go beyond.
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When Lacan picks up amur again in his famous seminar twenty, Encore, we can now better follow what he means; love is janus-faced. On the one hand there is a mode of love, amur, which is characterised as necessary because it follows the process of symbolic castration, and the proper development of the subject within societal norms. Amur is the form of love that is constantly demanding more, encore, because in this mode of love the subject faces a wall, and is never satisfied, and the subject keeps hurtling themselves up against this wall, it is something that “doesn’t stop being written.” For Lacan, we somehow sense that amur is merely a placebo for the real thing: amour. Amur merely placates the subject’s desolation in the face of the failed sexual relationship.
The subject’s life is characterised by this wall, and the Lacanian mode of life, in the end, is simply a process of keeping it together in the face of this impossibility of amur. We so desperately want to break out, but trapped in our language and symbolic norms, it is simply an ‘impossible’ wish to go beyond. Therefore, amour is another word for a kind of madness. As Deleuze explained, what we want is to touch the kernel of madness in the other, the real thing: love itself. So, we continually try to approach the truth of love and try to ‘get on with it.’ Again, and again. As the seventeenth-century novelist, Madeleine de Scudery, put it in Clelia:
Love is a pleasing Malady,
For which my heart no cure can find:
Yet if I could get Remedy,
I’le rather dye than cure my mind.
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