From Bruce Fink’s Lacan on Love loc 3440:
Although ordinary love has eternity within itself, it can nevertheless wane over time (Kierkegaard, 1995, p. 31). But a change in the form of love can occur: “when love has undergone the change of eternity by having become a duty, it has gained enduring continuance, and it is self-evident that it exists.” “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured.” “This security of eternity casts out all anxiety and makes love perfect, perfectly secured” (p. 32). Kierkegaard’s biggest concern seems to have been that his beloved might become fickle and jilt him; yet we might suspect, in a more psychoanalytic vein, that this worry about his beloved actually grew out of the vacillating, uncertain state of his own love for her.
“It is the same love that loves and hates” (p. 34), he writes, indicating that he is aware, long before Freud, of the flip-flopping of the one into the other and of their common libidinal source. Eternal love is, however, unchangeable, he argues. “Never has any greater security been found, and never will the peace of eternity be found in anything other than in this [commandment: thou shalt love]” (p. 34). It seems that he will never rest easy unless he is absolutely sure that his beloved will not stop loving him, and that he will never stop loving her (yet it seems he stopped, or foresaw the end of their relationship, almost right from the beginning). If they are both obliged to love, he can relax.
I’m struggling to find a version of this which doesn’t end abruptly but it illustrates the Lacanian point rather effectively about declarations of eternal love and the disavowed sense of an ending which accompanies them. There’s an existential uneasiness, which Lacan would describe as hysterical, inherent in the impulse to fix a connection in place imaginatively, institutionally and symbolically*. Recognising this doesn’t mean we invoke what we lack in order to explain away what we care about. I still find the hermeneutics of suspicion every bit as existentially problematic as I always did, even if I’m much more receptive to them analytically than I once was. But it does mean recognising how the velocity of our coming to care, the precise ways in we formulate it and the meanings they hold for us, reflects psychodynamics which are relatively autonomous from the moral-existential commitment itself.
In a more neo-Aristotelian vocabulary we could say the movement from care to commitment is likely to be less self-defeating if we can exercise some insight over how we are moved by an object of our care and why. In this sense you could incorporate Lacan (possibly kicking and screaming) into a humanistic conceptual vocabulary which (a) recognises the vast socio-psychic machinery underpinning our capacity to care and commit (b) accepts the self-defeating outgrowths which can result from this and seeks to cultivate wisdom in relation to them. The problem with such a view of course is that it ignores how the self-defeating quality is something sought rather than an obstacle to be overcome. But even this could be reframed in the sense of distinguishing between repeating and transcending a pattern.
*Obviously the institutional would be counted as within the symbolic in Lacan’s sense but I increasingly think a sociological incorporation of his concepts needs to distinguish more firmly between the two. There is more to law than language etc.
Mark Carrigan 