“What makes up for the sexual relationship is, quite precisely, love.”
Jacques Lacan, Encore.
Patriarchy is collapsing, and woke discourse is at the same time its effect and amplifier. In this discourse, we witness a fading of the differences of the sexes in favour of a “non-binary” scattered into a dizzying multiplicity. There is something for each taste!
The body is targeted, exposed, scrutinised to its limits, and is, at times, as if reset by the statement “I am…”. An “I am” that excludes any interlocution. The possibility of addressing disappears… It is difficult to speak when speech is scrutinised, suspected of carrying a bad intention, a desire to hurt, offend or aggress.
Thus, relationships between those we still call men and women become more perilous than ever. Today, men must wave the white flag of deconstruction – the “deconstructed” man dear to Sandrine Rousseau – to dare to seduce. And besides, seduction has a bad reputation among young women who sometimes associate it with manipulation. This is not entirely false, as every word resonates with a demand, as Lacan taught us, and it is naivety to believe that it is possible to extract oneself from it, except by not speaking at all to each other.
We are undoubtedly only at the beginning of a new clinical approach to romantic relationships between so-called men and so-called women. When speech itself is under attack, when everyone tends to take refuge in the closest safe space available, out of fear of encountering the Other, it is feared that the discourse of love will lose its vitality, its inventiveness, and even its delightful misunderstandings, for misunderstandings to occur, at least one speech must be heard.
“[T]o speak of love is in itself a jouissance”[1], Lacan said in 1973. Will this precious jouissance, and the illusion it conveys, disappear? I recall the chilling quote from Paul B. Preciado that Sylvie Berkane-Goumet noted in her orientation text on February 3, 2023: “love is not an emotion. It’s a kind of government technology of bodies, a politics to control desire, its goal is to capture the power to act and take pleasure from two living machines in order to put them at the service of social reproduction”[2]. This quasi-paranoid conception of love resonates with a sad future, a new version of the “facade of romantic life”, far from the one so precisely outlined by Freud.
However, Panayotis Pascot[3], the young stand-up comedian who begins his show by confessing that he “doesn’t know how to kiss girls” – an action that has “terrified him since he was little” – provides a counter-example. We recognise the struggles of approaching the opposite sex, the vulnerability that love plunges us into, the anxiety that precedes and sometimes prevents the act, whether it is a word of love or a gesture that tips us into the aftermath. We hear the courage mobilised, courage highlighted by Lacan twice in the Seminar Encore[4]. For lack of an instruction manual, all that is left is to be daring. And a bit of humour?
[1] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore (1972–1973), ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, New York and London, W. W. Nortong & Company, 1999, p. 83.
[2] Preciado P. B., « La Saint-Valentin est une ordure », Libération, 13 February 2015, available online at: liberation.fr. See also: Preciado P.B. Un appartement sur Uranus, Paris, Grasset, 2019, quoted by Berkane-Gourmet S., “Le discours woke, un nouveau rapport?”, orientation text, Nobodaddy [Pipol 11 blog], 3 February 2023.
[3] Pascot P., « Presque », Comedy Show, 2022, available on Netflix.
[4] Cf. Lacan J., The Seminar, Book XX, Encore, op. cit., p. 78 & 131.
Translation: Adeena Mey
Proofreading: Benjamin Wimmer
Picture : © Elena Madera
