When Lost Love Makes You Angry

Anger is what happens in subjects when the little pegs won’t fit into the little holes.

Jacques Lacan

I have been forced recently to reflect on the experience of love among women who are on the borderline (a contentious word among Lacanians).

Genuine love cannot but be experienced as an aggression among those who have a priori rejected the Other. Thus, love, which is an an overwhelming experience that fundamentally disrupts a woman’s life, is conflated with victimization. The woman who has fallen in love today is the one who feels within that love a source of their victimization. Thus, the battle of love today seems to me to be a battle over who obtains the symbolic guarantee that their position is defined by the role of victim.

The event of love is such that it disorients. This was Alain Badiou’s thesis within his wonderful book In Praise of Love. He describes its real evental nature as if it were a fundamental rupture in the symbolic and imaginary fabric of a person’s life. The individual already has everything going well in her life: she has a career, a friendship network, casual lovers, a life-goal, spirituality, a family, and so on. Yet, love is the appearance of an unusual and unintelligible interruption to all of that. It introduces a traumatic new possibility.

Love can only be experienced by the individual, therefore, as a trauma.

Lacan said in his sixth seminar the following:

And it is very difficult not to perceive that a fundamental affect like that of anger, is nothing other than that: the real which arrives at the moment that we have constructed a very nice symbolic framework, where everything is going well, order, law, our merit and our goodwill. One notices all of a sudden that things do not hang together. This is the normal operation of the affect of anger.

Jacques Lacan, (Seminar VI, unpublished, 14.01.59, p.8).

Does this not explain why today more than ever the authentic romantic relationship consistently produces within individuals an affect of anger — often without an identifiable source. It is as if the more a man romanticizes and provides care and support for the woman, the more traumatic and intense will be her experience.

This is the tragedy of love today.

It is the reason I am more and more convinced that we are witnessing the disappearance of the love relationship, which — if I might be a bit more optimistic — implies that when love does happen, if it does happen, it will be extremely rare and potentially revolutionary.