Love is Blindness
Tsvetelina Ivanova
Love is blindness, I don't want to see…
U2, Achtung Baby, 1991
If the big secret of psychoanalysis, as Lacan puts it in Seminar VI, is that “there is no Other of the Other,”[1] it is a question if, nowadays, it still remains a secret. In today’s world, dominated by digitalisation, the imaginary order prevails over the discourse of the symbolic – reign of the Other. The weakness of the Other and its compromised presence is becoming more and more tangible. The effects of that can be ascertained even in regard to the shifts of the experience of love in the era of an Other who is blind.
“This Other, known as symbolic, does not really exist,”[2] but its presence is vital, and in it the subject locates its object a as a logical orientation of its fantasy, but also as a lost object, the cause of its desire.[3]
The practices of courtly love marked the style of love in Western societies for many centuries and are “[…] what Freud, in his analysis of love and the lover’s dependency resulting there from, called verliebte Horigkeit. The merciless lady is a man’s fantasy…”[4] The troubadour should prove himself in cruel tests proposed by his lady, sometimes for nothing but a sign, which makes the connection with the Other emerge, and which actually forms the presence of the Other as such. A sign, a gesture, a gaze, “[n]ot even a yes, but a response which suffices to reverse his decline, allowing him to escape from nothingness.”[5]
Nowadays, what is it that makes the Other exist? What sustains the relation between the subject and the Other in the era of the prevalence of the imaginary? Are there signs, or carriers of messages that could be deciphered? Are we speaking about an absence of the Other or about a presence of a blind version?
“S/he left me on “seen,” which means that the message is seen but not responded to, is a common expression of the young today. Usually said with a bit of disappointment and sometimes as merely even informative; it marks the specifics of contemporary modes of communication and even love, on social media, where “[t]he digital canvas multiplies the point from which I am seen … [and] the object can’t be localized,”[6] and I would add – where the presence of the Other is difficult to be sustained. The message is sent but does not return as inverted. The “seen” letters, on the screen, leave the subject without a response as they are neither a yes, nor a no. A sign comes from the screen – “seen,” but the Master is blinder than ever. The selfie posted on social media is seen by a lot of people, but very often nothing follows but the silence of the Other which makes us wonder if we can rely on the existence of the fantasy as a shelter from the real.
Contemporary love practices, influenced by the compromised presence of the Other, could be thought of as an attempt to bear its senseless empty gaze. For if, in bygone times the subject in love was taken as blind, nowadays the blindness is on the side of the Other.
REfErences
[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VI, Desire and Its Interpretation, trans. B. Fink, Cambridge: Polity, 2019, p. 298.
[2] Caroz, G., “The Degree Zero of Madness,” 2024 WAP Congress, p.1. https://congresamp2024.world/en/the-degree-zero-of-madness/
[3] Cf. ibid.
[4] Miller, J.-A., “Microscopia […]”, in Lacan, J., Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. D. Hollier, R. Krauss, & A. Michelson, New York: Norton, 1990, p. xv.
[5] Ibid, p. xiv.
[6] Holvoet, D., “The Blind Master,” NLS Congress Blog, 2024. https://www.nlscongress2024.amp-nls.org/blogposts/blindmaster