Intimacies: Bersani/Phillips

Intimacies
psychoanalysis has misled us into believing, in its quest for normative life stories, that knowledge of oneself is conducive to intimacy, that intimacy is by definition personal intimacy, and that narcissism is the enemy..."
"new story...that prefers the possibilities of the future to the determinations of the past."
"the question then becomes, what would it be like to expect nothing to take place?"
"lacan places the unconscious as between perception and consciousness, an intriguing alternative to the more orthodox view of the unconscious in depth psychology as behind or below the consciousness.
possibility of de-professionalizing and perhaps subsequent universalizing of the conditions of analytic exchange.
Only now, with their impersonal intimacy divested of sexual longings and anxieties, will they perhaps be able "to think and feel and speak freely."...a special talk unconstrained by any consequences other than further talk....it is conversation suspended in virtuality....as never more than potential being.
"In the analytic exchange, the self-hypotheses of the unconscious is realized-more exactly, suspended in the real-only in talk. And this talk may be the only imaginable form of nondestructive jouissance, the jouissance of giving and receiving, through embodied language, the subjecthood of others.
"we may judge the great achievement of psychoanalysis to be its attempt to account for our inability to love others, and ourselves...its greatness may lie in its insistence on a human destructiveness resistant to any therapeutic endeavors whatsoever."
FReuds most profound originality...is to propose not only that satisfied aggression is accompanied by an erotic excitement, that it produces narcissistic jouissance, but also, and more radically, that the sexualizing of the ego is identical to the shattering of the ego."
"What is uniquely psychoanalytic...is the notion that the pleasurable power of satisfied aggression is itself a threat to the agent of aggression."
"Thus, sadistically motivated narcissism is also masochistically satisfying."
psychoanalysis is certainly not-at least not in its most original and profound discoveries-an ego-psychology; and yet it recognizes the indispensable function of the ego's capacity to reason and judge in the subject's efforts to protect himself or herself from the drives-in particular, the drive toward destructive juissance-that are the distinctive discovery of psychoanalysis."
"The self-purifying move is the super-ego's 'morality'.
"There is very little evidence of a rational will effectively controlling the ego's expansions, arresting it at the size or stage of human sense of individual dignity and the equally humane respect for the worth of other, similarly restrained egos. Psychoanalysis has decisively discredited any such rationalistic dream"
"might the excitement of the hyperbolized ego be forestalled not by the rational will but by a nondestructive eroticizing of the ego? I will attempt to describe a narcissistic pleasure that sustains human intimacy, that may be the precondition for love of the other."
"every theory of love is, necesssarily, a theory of object relations"
"Love is transitive; to conceptualize it is to address not only the question of how we choose objects to love, but also, more fundamentally, the very possibility of a subject loving an object...from the very beginning psychoanalysis has been skeptical about that possibility."
"the resurrected object may really be the loving subject, a self we lovingly recover at the very moment we may wish to celebrate our openness to the world..."
"The person who will re-present this woman....is typically the object of an overestimaization, and idealization. "
"Freud traces the overvaluation of the loved one back to the subject's infantile narcisism."
Thus even in the case presented as the closest to pure object love, the loved one carries the burden of being identified with two other love objects that have nothing to do with her: the man's mother and his own idealized infantile ego.
"What, then, can it mean, from a Freudian point of view, to say that we should or even can love others 'for themselves'?
'the problem is how their can be love for another person'
"from the psychoanalytic perspective....a theory of love can't help but be a demystification of love. Other theories of all the different types of love share one assumption: in love, the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness."
"The theory of love adumbrated in Freud and Lacan is demystifying in the sense that it subverts the premise about being on which love is founded, the assumption that in love the human subject is exceptionally open to otherness. WE love only ourselves
"if we think about love seriously, by which I mean if we seriously take love to be a narcissistic extravagance, then we will acknowledge that, first of all, simply willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others will, in all likelihood, leave our murderous antagonism towards difference intact, and, secondly, that they myth of love can become its truth only if we reinvent the relational possibilities of narcissism itself'
"...no recognizably political solution can be durable without something approaching a mutation in our most intimate relational system."
"Might the ego also be an agent of impersonal narcissism?"
"...profound continuity, despite the great difference, between the modern and ancient concepts of love. In both cases, love is a phenomenon of memory, and an instance of narcissistic fascination."
"the soul that pursues "that which really is what it is" is, then, not pure lack, ....it has what might be thought of as a general, universal, individuation. The lover seeks to make the lover like himself, but this has nothing to do with the specularity of personal narcissism"
"He chooses a boy...who already has the lover's type of being....and then...'pours into the boy's soul more of the particular god's inspiration'....Lovers are at the same time attempting to make the boy more like himself.
"the lover narcissistically loves the image of his own universal individuation that he implants in the boy he loves, but he is implanting more of what his beloved is, more of the type of being they already share.
far from suppressing the other, the Socratic lover's narcissims suppresses accidents of personality so that the loved one may more adequately mirror the universal singularity mythified in the figure of the god they both served.
"...anomaly in Greek love: erotic reciprocity. The beloved becomes a lover as the result of being loved"
"The boy loves a soul that he both is and is becoming, the latter as a result of the lover's pouring more and more into him the qualities of the god whose nature the lover had already seen in the boy"

"the miracle in all this is that when we describe this love as narcissistic, we must also say that it is pure object-love."
What both the beloved and the lover love are 'secrets' about themselves and the truth about the other.
"narcissistic love in both the lover and the beloved is exactly identical to a perfect knowledge of otherness."
"I call this love impersonal narcissism because the self the subject sees reflected in the other is not the unique personality central to modern notions of individualism"
"In the generous narcissism of the exchange between Socratic lovers, each partner demands of the other...that he reflect the lover's type of being, his universal singularity (and not his psychological particularities, his personal difference), by recognizing and cultivating that singularity as his own most pervasive, most pressing potentiality.
If we were able to relate to others according to this model of impersonal narcissim, what is different about others (their psychological individuality) could be thought of as merely the envelope of the more profound (if less fully realized , or completed) part of themselves which is our sameness.
experience of belonging to a family of singularity...might make us sensitive to the ontological status of difference...I called the nonthreatening supplement of sameness in Homos.
Socratic ideality is more cultivated than it is contemplated.
cultivated through dialogue-intrinsically unending dialogue, for we are always either moving toward or falling away from the being it is our greatest happiness to 're-find' in others.
"Transference love, as Freud says, 'consists of reissuing old components and repeating infantile reactions. But that is always the essence of falling in love."
"most striking...the violence entailed in the move from narcissism toward a so called object"
"there is, one might say, a tragic flaw in this absurdly self-defeating story. In promoting the developmental necessity of overcoming narcissism, object relations theorists have been, as it were, encouraging the greatest possible violence between people."
"in talking against narcissism...psychoanalysts have created the problem they have been trying to solve."
"why is self-destructiveness equated with self-hatred? why is self-love equated with hatred of reality?
As a clinical practice, psychoanalysis is committed to the unsettling of the individual's hard won (i.e., defensive) self knowledge; so called self knowledge become....becomes the stark reversal of traditional priorities, becomes the obstacle rather than the instrument of the individual's satisfaction.
"masochism...as a developmental achievement-that for Bersani through Freud, is the way to go."
What massochism makes possible is the pleasure in pain; or rather what masochism reveals is the capacity to bear, the capacity to desire the ultimately overwhelming intensities of feeling that we are subject to."
"freud, like lacan, is struck by how difficult it is for the modern individual to maintain his appetite for appetite; that the acquisition of (modern) identity involves the sacrificing of desire, and identity without desire is a futile passion."

"knowing what one wants is an incitement to violence"
"Bersani famously remarked in his 1987 essay, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?' 'There is a big secret about sex: most people don't like it.'
If selfhood is your object of desire, sexuality will be definition become a persecution; it will make a mockery where there should have been satisfaction.
So there is selfhood or jouissance: the (sadistic) ego with its developmental achievements, its masterful plausibility, or the self-shattering (masochistic) ego....
the ways in which we are invited to 'resists projects of subjection' are likely to subject us to something.
"if sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart, it could also be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of non violence."
"we have to imagine a social world...as Bersani intimates...in which the fundamental question, the abiding concern is, 'do you want to have sex with me?' everything follows from that answer.
once the sexual is staged as the losing of self rather than its assertion or consolidation or indeed triumph, the obsession with sex becomes an obsession with a certain kind of love."
Bersani want to imagine forms of desire that are not forms of revenge.
The primary loss to be mourned is for the violence necessitated by the protection of selfhood....we would have to learn to stop taking sex personally.
the fears to be faced, are inextricable from the losses to be mourned. The fear of jouissance, ...not to mention the dread of 'modes of ascesis'...is not to be underestimated....
Bersani seems to suggest....that we tend not to be sufficiently narcisistic.'
"To have the courage of one's narcissism-to find a version of narcissism that is preservative ate once of survival and pleasure-would be to have the courage of one's wish for more life rather than less.
what bersani calls 'willing ourselves to cherish the difference of others' may not be a commitment to others-to the so called otherness of others, to other people as so-called ends in themselves- but a commitment to our own hatred. Love is nothing personal, difference always is.
psychoanalysis may have relieved us of the ridiculous demand to love others for themselves, and at the same time demanded that we do nothing less. Bersani wants to keep ope....the question of what we might love others for, what in others we might love that would curb the violence in our human-all-too-human personal relations.
'essentially it is the function of judgment to make two kinds of decision. It has to decide whether or not a thing posseses a certain property, and whether or not an imagined thing exists in reality.
"do I love it because it is inside me, or is it inside me because I love it?
the original version of the question do you want to have sex with me? would be the question do I want to eat you or spit you out?
for something to be loveable it must be already inside one, or we must want it to be inside.
it is as though the ego already knows its own mind. Nothing can be unrecognizable, nothing can be paradoxical, nothing can be a mixed bag, nothing can be both inside and outside.
...our preferred model of love relations, this loving of the other for their difference. It is a picture we cannot afford not to do without....
love as recovery-love as restoration of the earlier self, the early mother-is bound to be a furious project.
what we call love is our hatred of the future, and it is because other people represent our future objects of desire, what might happen next to us, we fear them.
the ego, for its very survival, has to seek out new (i.e. other) objects that it cannot bear because they are new; and it is prohibited by incest taboo from seeking out the old object that it desires, and cannot bear because they are forbiddden.
if the ego's project is (psychic) survival, rage is going to be the order of the day.
we need a new vocabulary, new ways of putting what can go on between people that do not presume a lethal antagonism.