What Does

Lacan Say
About… Love?
Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com June 27, 2016 What Does Lacan Say About… Love?2017-03-
26T21:23:33+00:00 Lacan 3 Comments

The following story, first told by Lacan in 1960, is exemplary of what he said about love. I
will call it the story of the fruit and the flame. It goes like this:

Imagine you see in front of you a beautiful flower, or a ripe fruit. You reach out your hand
to grab it. But at the moment you do, the flower, or the fruit, bursts into flames. In its
place you see another hand appear, reaching back towards your own. (Seminar VIII,
p.52; p.179).

In this story is condensed all the things that interested Lacan about love. The themes we
can pull from it fuelled his commentary on the subject over fifty years of his work:

– The suddenness, imminence or surprise that marks the appearance of love.

Reflected here in the bursting into flames of the flower or fruit we reach for, love is
presented as a mysterious and extraordinary Event, arising as if from nothing.

– The relation of beauty to satisfaction. The flower or the fruit could be taken to
represent the object of beauty, and their anticipated taste or scent satisfaction. This
opens the way to Lacan’s distinction between the object of desire and the object of the
drive.

– How in love the reach exceeds the grasp. Just as the flame bursts forth the moment
we reach for the object, whatever medium we use (words, images, or music) our
representation of the loved object always seems to fall short of the experience of love
itself.

– The narcissistic dimension of love. In place of the fruit or the flower, another hand
appears, a mirror of our own. The poetic beauty of the story allows for many
interpretations, and commentators seem to disagree on Lacan’s intention here. Fink
believes the hand coming to reach our own shows the reciprocity of love (Fink, Lacan on
Love, p.44), while Leader stresses the fundamental asymmetry in the story, that your
own hand is not reaching out for the other hand but for the object (‘Lacan’s Myths’, in
The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, p.45).

In this article we will look not just at what Lacan had to say about love, but at the way he
said it. This is because love, as Lacan recognises, is difficult to express. We sense that
love is somehow different – a feeling stronger than other emotions, perhaps strongest.
And yet it is also somehow less defined. Its strength does not lend it definition – love
remains chimerical, alchemical.

Lacan’s pronouncements on love – as we see in the story above – share this indefinite
quality. They index an impossibility of representation, an emptiness in the place of
something that might be shown or said. We find this expressed in different ways
throughout his work:

– “Love is a pebble laughing in the sun” (Écrits, 508; Seminar III, p.226)

– “Loving is to give what one does not have” (repeated across Lacan’s work, starting
from Seminar V, 7th May, 1958)

– “Love is nothing more than a saying, qua happening. A happening without any
smudges” (Seminar XXI, 11th June, 1973)
I. Speaking, Writing, Making Love

How then do we communicate love? Lacan was interested in three ways: speaking,
writing, and making love.

In Seminar XIX in 1972 Lacan insists that one cannot speak about love “except in an
imbecilic or abject manner” (Seminar XIX, The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, 3rd
February, 1972). There is a fundamental tension, he believes, between speech and love,
and if we take him seriously on this point it should lead us to question any advice that
encourages us to declare love in the form ‘I love you’.

Yet almost immediately Lacan adds a twist – the same tension does not exist between
love and the letter, that is, between love and writing. “That one cannot then speak about
love, but that one can write about it, ought to strike you”, he tells his audience in 1972
(Seminar XIX, The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, 3rd February, 1972).

But why is the ‘love letter’, as it were, more powerful than the act of declaring love
through speech? Lacan’s idea is that the letter has a materiality that speech lacks, a fact
that fascinated Lacan in his reading of Poe’s The Purloined Letter (Écrits, 11). In this
story, a letter is passed between the characters of the drama and has effects without any
of them opening it to read what it says. Lacan took this literally. Even if speech implies a
subject of language, the letter shows how someone can be subject to it. Such are the
“strange shapes” Lacan refers to when he says “The best thing in this curious surge that
is called love is the letter, it is the letter that can take on strange shapes”. (Seminar XIX,
The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst, 3rd February, 1972).

But if we cannot communicate love in speech, we might nonetheless use speech to

make love, to create it. Later that same year, talking about the situation of a
psychoanalysis, Lacan says that “it is in speaking that one makes love” (Seminar XIX,
4th May, 1972). This leads us to think of the transference, the prime example of the
creation of love ex nihilo. But, as the early psychoanalysts discovered through bitter
experience, this is not always a successful creation. “I have to tell you, for my own part”,
bemoans Lacan, “that I don’t know any example of it. And nevertheless I tried!” (Seminar
XIX, 4th May, 1972).

In the situation of the transference an odd thing happens: we speak about love, but
cannot communicate anything about it. And yet nonetheless through talking about it
alone we make it happen. This brings us back to one of the cryptic remarks Lacan
makes about love that we started with: “Love is nothing more than a saying, qua
happening. A happening without any smudges.” (Seminar XXI, 11th June, 1973). This
direct ‘happening’ of love might remind us of the description given in one of the best
recent works of love, Badiou’s In Praise of Love. It is an Event – something without
precedent, something that emerges as if from nothing, but is nonetheless imminent and
urgent.

II. Loving is to give what one does not have

And so we come to Lacan’s most well-known aphorism on love: ‘loving is to give what
one does not have’. How?

Although Lacan first introduces this formula in Seminar V (see sessions of 29th January,
23rd April, and 7th May 1958), his most thorough elaboration of it comes in Seminar VIII
on transference in 1960-61. From Plato’s Symposium – which we will return to later – he
pulls another story, this time about the birth of Love, apparently told nowhere else in the
texts of Antiquity (Fink, Lacan on Love, p.179):