JACQUES LACAN by Massimo Recalcati (IV)

 Non è più come prima

“Più io ti do, più io ho.” — Romeo and Juliet

There is a phrase that runs through love like a paradox: the more I give, the more I have. It is not about accumulation, but dispossession. It is not about holding on, but about losing something so that something may exist. To love has never meant preserving the self intact; it has always implied a transformation.

But not every love operates in the same way.

Narcissistic love does not see the other: it looks at itself in them. The other functions as a mirror, as a reflective surface in which the self confirms its own image. There is no encounter; there is repetition. There is no alterity; there is self-affirmation. One loves to suture one’s own void, not to sustain a shared lack. The other is not necessary as a subject, but as a function. One does not seek one's desire; one seeks confirmation of one’s own.

It is a love that risks nothing. That loses nothing.

Oedipal love, by contrast, is organized around an earlier scene. It loves while searching for the father or the mother. In the love choice, a gesture, a tone, a detail appears that reactivates an infantile inscription. In desire, the object a becomes fixed: a minimal trait that sustains the fantasy. One is not faithful to the person, but to the scene that precedes them.

Both narcissistic and Oedipal love reduce the other to the support of an internal structure. In both cases, the encounter remains subordinated to repetition.

There exists, however, another modality of love. Not as a superior form, but as a distinct operation.

For Lacan, to love is to address oneself to the proper name of the other. Not to the trait that fits my history. Not to the attribute that satisfies my fantasy. To love implies recognizing a singularity that cannot be absorbed into my psychic economy. Desire is sustained by fantasy; love introduces a wager on the subject.

Love does not redeem or complete. But it knots. It orients. It introduces a chosen limit amid the dispersion of desire. Fidelity is not repression, but decision. It does not eliminate lack; it organizes it around a name.

In the obsessive structure, love may be experienced as a threat to the self's sovereignty. To surrender implies renouncing absolute control over possibilities. Keeping all options open seems to guarantee freedom, but that unlimited freedom ends up emptying the act. Without decision, there is no bond; only fantasy.

Idealization and aggressiveness sustain each other. When the other ceases to embody the image that sustained the fantasy, hostility emerges. Not because the other has changed, but because the imaginary consistency that enveloped them has fractured.

The only structural betrayal is not moral. It is a betrayal of one’s own desire. One may lie, deceive, or conceal. But the true break occurs when one evades that which constitutes us, when one prefers to know nothing of the desire that insists.

Betrayal may feel like a phantom limb: something that is no longer there yet continues to hurt. The body remembers even what it has lost. The relationship ends, but the scene persists. Not because the other remains, but because the fantasy has not been traversed.

To forgive is not to forget. It is not to turn the page. As Jacques Derrida suggests, to forgive is to confront the unforgivable. What can be calculated does not require forgiveness. True forgiveness does not respond to justice, but to a decision that exceeds exchange.

To love is not to repeat. Not to complete. Not to possess.

To love is to accept that it is no longer as it once was.

That something has changed.

And to decide, nonetheless, to sustain the proper name of the other… without reducing it to one’s own fantasy.