Love Versus
"Symptomatic Love"

Alan Rowan

 

[...]Lacan termed love a "passion of being," there being two other such passions, namely hate and ignorance. This immediately highlights for us the contingency of love, the fact that the subject may or may not encounter the surprise of this passion seen as an emergent property of a particular relationship. He further situates love at the juncture of the symbolic and imaginary—and thus partaking of both—which we experience, for example, when captivated by the image of the beloved and when we discover that loving has the structure of a gift. In the latter case, as Lacan states, one gives, not what one has, but what one does not have, meaning one's lack or "want-of-being." It is thus this precious sense of incompleteness that goes beyond one, that one places in the other, which of course means there is no love without risk, as one risks, precisely, this most intimate and precious object. This idea that symbolic exchange is necessary also implies that there is a "labour" in love, in other words, something unique that must be constructed and then made to exist between two subjects. [...]

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