The One in The Couple

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The One in The Couple

The explosion of all these characteristics happens precisely in Love, because the main feature of Love is non-logo-centrism, which means that Love happens as an ontological opposition of the Law. That is why for the Love we can always say that is love-out of– law, transgression love, or adulterous love. (Kristeva, 1987:209) And what about the marriage? I think that we can employ Foucaultan analysis on the marriage, because the marriage represents extended legal form of love– although marriage is essentially antonym of love. The marriage equals the Foucaultan celled units, at least in two crucial instances: 1. The married couple is capillary in structure, and the family, even childless, represents a capillary unit of the society. 2. The married couple is never an intimate category and is always sanctioned by the city, the society, and the law. As a legal couple, the married couple is always supervised, controlled and subject to the same series of punishments and appraisals as the structures analyzed by Foucault.
There is another issue that is very interesting, an issue that Kristeva raises in her analysis of Romeo and Juliet. Although love is always outside the law, the lover craves to legalize his/her love. As opposed to the incompatibility between the idealization and the law, the Law represents a synonym of power and therefore, appeal. “… The reason may be that the law, which is external to the Subject, is an area of power and attraction that can merge with EgoIdeal”. (Kristeva, 1987:209) The given legal form of love is marriage. In the marriage, as well as in the Law, from which the marriage results, the negative notions are in force: restriction, prohibition, limitation, and control. The marriage is based on daily stereotypes, whose goal is socialization of the couple, practical transformation of the couple into social Contract. Lets go back to the problem of secrecy and obscurity and invisibility of the lovers before the Law, that we addressed a few lines above.
The Shakespearian story of Romeo and Juliet is such a game between Love and Law. The Law says that the families Capulet and Montague nurture century-old hostility. That is why the challenge that the lovers face is protected with the veil of secrecy. That secret is the initial condition for their love. Kristeva says: “Do they joy in the fullness of being together or in the fear of being reproved? … Take away the third party, and the whole construct often crumbles, lacking a cause for desire” (Kristeva, 1987:211)
The secret becomes foundation for Romeo and Juliet’s love. The third party, which Kristeva writes about, protects that secret: the families, relatives, the Law. The couple is utopia, says the Shakespearian drama, the real love happens after the death, with the corruption of the Law; love exists only outside the law, which sanctions life. The couple is utopia, and its roots are in the childhood.
Kristeva says that the couple mania (Kristeva, 1987:222) is the essential state of the child who wants to become one with the ideal father and the protective mother. This couple mania, mania to be in the couple, is the antediluvian desire of the child, who wants to make 2 out of the 3. From the condition Me-> Father-> Mother there should remain Me->FatherMother. This formula, from Kristeva’s essay, may be presented in this way:

3=2

The couple is everything, except dual, implies Kristeva. Lets imagine a situation like this: Romeo and Juliet defeat the hostility; they overcome the century– old misunderstandings between the families, and get married. There are two possible options for the end of this marriage: 1. The cynical answer: after the tension has gone, and the secrecy and the obscurity of love, the couple Romeo-Juliet has transformed into a banal marriage, the passionate love disappeared into thin air, only the obligation of the Law remains, which overbears the couple. 2. They continue to love in a passionate relationship, for which Kristeva says that the only definition is sadomasochism. Spawned from the battle with the law, this love can only continue through the endless libidinal charges and discharges, love and hate. In this structure, the female energy of Romeo and the male energy of Juliet will be exchanged. I will summarize this structure in the formula:

4=2

Because it is outside of the Law, the lover seeks to destroy the Law, in order to make his/her love possible. He/She has to destroy the loved one as well, in order to confirm the Law. The lover has to defeat the Name, which supports this Law. When Juliet meets Romeo, her monologue goes like this: “ ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;… it is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part, belonging to a man… O, be some other name!” Kristeva interprets this as a need that the lover has to de-fragment the body of the loved one, so that the loved one becomes total, one, complete entity. The same destruction must strike the Name, i.e. the Name must be lost. The series of murders that are happening in the tragedy – Romeo kills Tybalt and Paris – these murders leave Romeo unsatisfied and he says: “O, I am fortune’s fool!” This shows, says Kristeva, that death has missed its object, because the object of death is Juliet. The death of Romeo and Juliet is a series of misunderstandings in itself– the aim was for Juliet to be produced in rigid, but not dead, only sleeping body. Her body is supposed to be beautiful and rigid, because it is that precise body did not make way for the intended violence. When Romeo dies by his own hand, he doesn’t embrace Juliet. “The dark cave is their only common space, their sole true community. These lovers of the night remain solitary beings”. (Kristeva, 1987:216) Briefly, the love formula is 1=2
The math of the Subjects in the couple swings between the need for multiplication and the ultimate need for destruction of everything in the couple, except oneself.

4=2
3=2

1=2

As we can see, Kristeva analyses/ “reads” the love couple as a fundamentally impossible category. The couple is the one in the couple, who always searches his/her self– actualization in the act of the coupling. Having said this, we will continue to analyze the novel “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann.

2018-08-21T17:23:34+00:00 November 1st, 2002|Categories: Reviews, Literature, Blesok no. 29|0 Comments