LOVE IS A HILLARIOUS FEELING

de RAUBIAN Monica Vigo

Love is the first bond that the subject sustains with the Other: it demands love. It falls in the mistake of believing that the missing object has been found, the object of its desire. This detour one pays for it.-

It will either become an ignorant, a fool, a riffraff, or ....a comedian. But, for the one who is determined not to succumb to his desire, he will have to have things clear ang go foward. He will have to pay that price -not cheap at all- (to give up jouissance)., but still necessary to 'take posession over' it.

Desire, enigmatic, illusive, may show up under the mascarades of love. LOVE IS IN ITSELF JOUISSANCE. A solution? the proposal is to dispose of one other entirely for oneself.

Lacan states that what illustrates a dimension as being escencially comic, is the presence of what could be called 'the DEAL' WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A SUBJECT AS AN OBJECT?The subject being object of a DEAL, is precisely its COMIC DIMENSION. And this is not 'weird'. 'It always has to do with an exchange of social supporters' (subjects). If 'the truth of a subject...(which is not in himself,...but in an object of a veiled nature)...it makes that object emerge, that object being... THE COMIC ESSENCE IN ITS PURE FORM!

Hillarious strategies, crazy ways, love shows itself as a trully comic feeling. LACAN recommends. 'if you want to know about love....READ COMEDIES!'

Aristophane, the comic poet par excellance, who masters an unsurpassed language, tells us about the myth of love:'he was a double man, just splitted by half with the silvery thread of the gods. But, for lack of being properly divided, he does not know what to do with that half of which he can not get rid off;and -not willing to abandon it- he dies of inanity, at the edge of the thicket, where the scene originally takes place. Lacan challenges the myth, and states that what is lost, and being looked after, is not the other, sexual complement, but that part of oneself forever lost....inmortality.

To talk about love is not a matter of sex. The body became 'the poetic scenery' that the Freudian discourse has inaugurated with the creation of the subject of the unconscious -that is- a subject captured in its desire. (articulated only with the presence of the signifier, which has left its traces on the body and has established -for each one- which ones are likely to be their CONDITIONS OF LOVE).

The Body as signifier, aprehensible in the uncounscious, becomes the testimony of a knowledge, which is -in great part- beyond the one who talks. Though it still carries a desciphering, which it is supposed to have a certain skill, a 'savoir-faire', seizable in its formations: oblivion, puns, the joke...(if not equivalent to comedy, it is quite close to it):'The futility, the inanity, the unpoverished importance of the ingenious phrase that gains value from the moment that The Freudian Technique has allowed its creator to show that its own joy lays on the dominance of the signifier upon the heaviest significances -we carry upon our shoulders'.

Comedy approaches us to that trully human dimention 'of bieng the poor subjects of speech. When the comedian hero tumbles, finds himslf in a hurry, one says:'the poor little man keeps on living'- always reluctant to pay the price to stand for his desire. Such is the real human drama. Not tragedy, but comedy.

Man has eyes, yet not meant to see. It is not necessary to tear them off, like in the Greek tragedies. There is no anxiety in comedies. The love that is narcisist, never gets anyone out of oneself. One loves according to the image the phantasme itself offers, according to its vestures. Such is the blindness of the human escence. Love is a passion. As such, it supposes the ignorance of desire and it renders -to whoever falls in its hands- totally dependant on it. That blindness is what does not allow the man to see any further than his nose. Thereby his misfortune, because his world begins right there; and he cannot apprehend his desire in it, but in the same file that unables him to see his own nose....in a mirror.- Yet, as soon as he gets aware of his nose, he fells in love wth it, and this one becomes thus- the first meaning through which narsicism involves desire. And what is really funny is that, in the attempt to reach satisfaction, anything is valid.

Love is deceive, but one believes in it, as one may beleive, dangerously, in women.

Love and women are key issues in Molière's comedies, that unique master, who lived in the peculiar seventeenth century. He commited himself to inmmortalize those women, passionate for knowledge, seduced by the creative power of the word. In his plays (LES PRÉCIEUSES RIDICULES, LES FEMMES SAVANTES, L'ÉCOLE DES FEMMES) we will come across 'L' IDIOTE' -that foolish woman who confronts us with the embarrasing question regarding the priceless price that must be paid to support foolishness, ignorance ; and with 'les précieuses...', who atribute themselves that name for having given a 'price' to which had none, And under the irony of that time- even to themselves....

In that century, full of advances, with a still powerfull, yet decadent Crurch, 'LE MOUVEMENT DES PRÉCIEUSES' was born, with Madame Scudéry as one of its pioneers. These women became the hostesses of the 'salons' (that from 1642 onwards, proliferated in France), where the revolutionary authors were discussed and protected. Latin was starting to be displaced as a 'learned language', which made translations became imperative.

These women wanted to know!

They began to live and share with men in cultural issues. They became skilled artists concerning the creations of sense in the common speech (I miss the word, a quite habitual saying nowadays, 'it was a witty remark created by that kindsociety commited to the improvement of language').

Language always plays with ambiguity, and most of the time, one does not know what he says. It is always taken for granted that the other is really there, able to give the expected answer. In fact, most of the speeches pronounced are entirely ficticious.

At that historical moment, love was the formation par excellance. (as datable as it is, in the life of a subject, the event of an encounter). The woman had become a tool of conquest and not of pleasure. The demands of such an extremely refined and complex organization, imagined- by Madame Scudéry had to be respected. (LA CARTE DE TENDRE) Such love matters used to drive these women crazy. They did not doubt that love was just a saying. They focussed on the art of conversation, or rather, they made of conversation an art.

Matters of love, impasses of desire...Maybe, L'AVARE, famous character popularized by Molière, is the comedian hero par excellance (dimention of the subject of concern for psychoanaslisis). He believes in love in terms of 'a protected capitalization'.How does he reassure himself of the value of his object? He becomes a comedian when the gallant tells him about his daugther and hears about his treasure, turned into the object of desire (desire of the other).

The latter becomes the trace of a priviledged interest, 'his escence....but it is -at the same time- what causes his wreckage. For, as long as he is locked in the coffer, he remains out of the circuit of life, sustracted of it. HE DOES NOT OWN THE COFFER, HE IS POSSESSED BY IT. It is a dead wealth'. HE REMAINS OUT OF ALL RISK. But -what he ignores is that, while not playing the game and not paying the bet that desire proposes, he cultivates the funerary rite of love, but as such, he is a DEAD MAN.

Buenos Aires,Argentina.

e-mail: sarma@arnet.com.ar

tel: 54 11 4581 3844

Translation: Lic. Laura Sujoluzky