Help, I have done it again
I have been here many times before
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Social loc 2883:
Barthes (1977) explains that the death of desire begins the minute the lover perceives in the beloved object a small “speck of corruption”—a minuscule detail that somehow renders the object banal or unoriginal, thereby connecting it to a “commonplace” world. When the image tears, the magic mirror shatters, and the lover finds itself caught in the nightmare of a “counter-rhythm”—something like “the noise of a rip in the smooth envelope of the Image” (p. 25). The other is suddenly embarrassingly ordinary, a source of shame rather than of narcissistic gratification. The “bad” image is therefore not a wicked image, but merely a paltry, trivial, or worthless one; it shows the other “caught up in the platitude of the social world” (p. 26).
From Mari Ruti’s contribution to Critical Theory Between Lacan and Klein loc 2631:
…the realization that the other won’t redeem my lack leads to the failure of romance by introducing what Roland Barthes astutely describes as a crack, or a “speck of corruption,” in the perfect image of the other (the other as mirror).13 All of a sudden, the (imaginary) other is fractured, stained, smudged, tarnished, or revealed to be banal and commonplace. This is to say that the other is shown to be just as lacking as I am, which is a reality that romance can’t tolerate.
It’s interesting that in her engagement with Klein the deployment of Barthes feels slightly more optimistic. From a Lacanian perspective, encountering the speck of corruption comes with a sense of repetition (“help I have done it again” as Sia sings) whereas with a Kleinian spin it becomes something much more ambiguous. To recognise the imaginary other as fractured also entails a fracturing of the imaginary: the rip in the image reveals it as an image. It potentially heralds the depressive position in which the sublime features of the love object can co-exist with its mundane imperfections. But it also requires trust in that Other to stay with that rip because the imaginary is what underwrites the emotional stability of the lifeworld. Yet it is precisely the otherness of the Other which constitutes the psychic force of the rip in the imaginary.
It's just so easy it's hard
It's just so easy it's hard
Pull me closer, I can't feel you
You'll have to trust me, I can't steal you
The possibility of longer oscillating between the sublime and the imperfect, moving beyond either/or, entails a reconfiguration of the imaginary and our relationship to it. This relates to what Alenka Zupančič describes in the The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two as the “miracle of love”. From pg 175:
The miracle of love is not that of transforming some banal object into a sublime object, inaccessible in its being – this is the miracle of desire. If we are dealing with an alternation of attraction and repulsion , this can only mean that love as sublimation has not taken place, has not done its work and performed its “trick”. The miracle of love consists, first of all, in perceiving the two objects (the banal object and the sublime object) on the same level; additionally this means that neither one of them is occulted or substituted by the other. Secondly, it consists in becoming aware of the fact that the other qua “banal object’ and the other qua “object of desire” are one and the same …. one becomes aware of the fact that they are both semblances, that neither one of them is more real than the other … The other whom we love is neither of the two semblances (the banal and the sublime object); but neither can she be separated from them, since she is one thing other than what results from a successful (or “lucky”) montage of the two.
What matters I think is the suturing of these moments, the movement through them, rather than the brute fact of their occurrence. Neither pole is the problem, getting stuck is. The crisis arises when the spec of corruption or the sublimation harden into a fixed stance towards the (imaginary) other. “Help, I’ve done it again” is a story about the rip. It’s the story rather than the rip which produces the repetition. If we can stay with it the tear becomes a passage, as opposed to an ending. The same is true of the sublime. Remaining with yearning and idealisation are the problem, not the states themselves. What matters is moving through both and coming back to the mundane, which is the place where the other actually is.
Cold sheets
Oh, where's my love?
I am searching high
I'm searching low
In the night
Does she know that we bleed the same?
