The Element of Sacrifice in Romantic Love
[excerpt]

 

 

Russell Grigg

 

To resume again...

A Reading of the Seminar From an Other to the other
J
- A MILLER

Towards a New Concept of Existence
A
LAIN BADIOU

35 Propositions from Logiques des mondes
A
LAIN BADIOU

Desublimation
G
ÉRARD WAJCMAN

The Element of Sacrifice in Romantic Love
R
USSELL GRIGG

Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Revolutionary Marxism
I
AN PARKER

Materialism, or the Inexistence of the Big Other
S
LAVOJ ZIZEK

Janine Antoni
J
OSEFINA AYERZA

Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens
J
OSEFINA AYERZA

[...]

In romantic love, the link with transgression is made very frequently indeed, so frequently that we cannot simply be dealing with a way of construing as real an obstacle that is imagined because the actual satisfaction is prohibited. Rather, the fact that access to the object is seen as transgressive must be due to the fact that the object itself has something that prevents the relationship from occurring. That is, it is not the case that the object is merely imagined to be inaccessible when in actual fact there is no obstacle to satisfaction by means of it. Rather, the relationship to the object as source of love is also and at the same time a perverse relationship that, at least for a neurotic, causes anxiety.

The link between romantic love and transgressions recurs in literature. No statement could be a greater truism than to say that in the 19th century it is transgression that sustains the novel. Most obviously in Anna Karenina and Madame de Bovary, and the novels of Balzac and Stendhal, but it is also true of the novels of Jane Austen and Henry James, where the transgression may simply be implied or suspected, or present as a mere possibility of betrayal and dishonesty.

[...]



Art: Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens
The Wild Duck - still, 2006
courtesy Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, Helsinki.


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