He made of her a thing. Not anything as superficially offensive as a pornographic thing – far worse. Something without even the solidity of image, without even the slippery worm of words. And yet he did not make her nothing because he would not let her go.
He would not let go of her hair. Not when her eyes began to stream, not when her nose began to run, not when she gagged and gagged and was sure she’d bring her lunch up all over his groin. Only when something inside her gave way, and she no longer felt responsible for keeping her lunch down, did he let her go.
He let her go because the room was too close. She could not sleep in his embrace, could not pull enough oxygen from the air he’d breathed. Love pressed on her chest even as her hips arched upwards, tricking his fingers deeper. Until her cunt had eaten his wedding ring and she could taste metal through the bloody membrane of her chewed-up cheeks and swallowed the chalky impossibility of it all.
I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—I mutilate you.
J. Lacan, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”
The last quote reminds me of that Oscar Wilde line about every man killing the thing he loves.
I went off to see what more I could find about this idea and on Lacan. Apparently I’m not the only one struggling with his writing –
http://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles/Lacan-PP-revised.htm
I’ll have to read that one in more depth, but my initial thought is that paranoia, or fear is important. You’ve written a lot about the need for transgression in eroticism. Fear of what a partner could do to hurt us, fear of what one could find inside oneself, and perhaps most of all a combination of the two, could be added to the mix.
I’m also reminded of a TED talk by Esther Perel called “Mating in Captivity”. One of the ideas is that for desire to exist there needs to be some sort of distance between lovers. This business about merging with the beloved and knowing them inside out, is, in the long term is likely to be counterproductive to desire.
On a personal note, this brought back some happy memories.
Hi MinimalEase,
Sorry for the lagged response. God yes, Lacan is hard and so much of it sounds like gobbledygook that I think there is a tendency to dismiss him out of hand. I’m very interested, however, in the way he discusses the issue of desire. It really does provide a rich landscape and language for exploring how our desires and the desire of others for us fundamentally affects who we understand ourselves to be.
The Esther Perel vid is outstanding. Damn that woman is smart.