Читать книгу In Praise of Forgiveness - Massimo Recalcati - Страница 13

The libertine regime is sustained by the enchantment of the New, which dissolves any representation of the eternal, considering it a childish product of the human imagination. It aims to render any lasting encounter impossible. It wants to unmask fidelity to the Same as if it were a lie. The desire that wants to be entirely free rejects any idea of fidelity and constancy in the name of a permanent spontaneity. The capitalist discourse experiences every kind of bond as an obstacle to its unquestioned affirmation. In this sense, humans are reduced to nothing more than goods in an even more radical way than that described by Marx. Bonds seem to be unable to hold in the face of a freedom that wants to be absolute, rejecting any experience of the limit. The generalized hyperactivity fed by the capitalist discourse deludes us, causing us to believe that there are no second chances, that what counts in this is not even the accumulation of enjoyment, as the ascetic-Weberian version of capitalism would have it, but its multiplication.¹² For this reason, every bond becomes a limit, a point of resistance to the crazed motion of the capitalist discourse’s unchecked machine. Everything is rendered volatile in a purely nihilistic regime of desire, in which, as Lacan wrote, it is not so much the subject that confuses its prey with its shadow, as if there were some kind of visual defect, but the subject itself that is prey to the shadow.¹³

This maniacal acceleration of time makes the loving promise that it be ‘everlasting’ laughable, naïve, even stupidly superstitious. Bonds are shredded by the logic of the New, which, in increasingly short time frames, makes the Same a leftover from the past that must be replaced as quickly as possible. The simple epidemiology of relationships demonstrates this: human beings are struggling more and more to remain in one bond for any length of time. Separations abound, married or long-term couples leave each other with increasing frequency in order to create new bonds or to live out their own freedom in a more carefree manner. It is a sign of the times. As Bauman rightly asserted, ours is an age of liquid loves.¹⁴ This is the age of libertinism as an unprecedented duty of the Super-Ego. In the place of the symbolic pact that binds two lovers, of which the marriage bonds are the greatest symbol, a disenchanted cynicism establishes itself, one that views every bond as time-limited, destined to spoil and be exchanged for a new one. We search for the New to break the routine, the boredom of the familiar, the anonymous ordinariness of our lives. We search for the spice of falling in love in order to add flavour to our desire-less lives. The growing refusal of the symbolic pact of marriage, to which living together is increasingly preferred, is a telling sign. Couples unite and fall apart without passing through the Other, without pondering the symbolic value of the pact. At play here is a purely pubescent view of desire that wants to avoid any assumption of responsibility. The presence of the symbolic pact with the Other would kill the freedom and vitality of desire. The disarming consequence of this new libertine ideology is the decline of the loving bond into little more than the stuff of gossip about summer love affairs. The ideological distortion of love is evident and it gives rise to a refrain that never changes: the intensity of loving passion stands in relentless opposition to the length of the relationship. The time spent together would fatally extinguish the flame of desire, which would supposedly always require the storm of emotion that is by its very nature profoundly anti-institutional. The merry-go-round of bonds makes a mockery of the expectation of eternity contained within the promise made by lovers. However, psychoanalytic practice is stating the obvious when it finds that the compulsive search for the New is not in any way an expression of freedom, but a new slavery, the result of an ideological social injunction (‘Enjoy!’) to which the subject must radically submit.