Towards friendship-love

I. The two enjoyments

" Par Deu, qui l'air fist et la mer,
Ne me mandez nule foiz mais.
Je vos di bien, Tristran, a fais,
Certes, je n'i vendroie mie.
Li rois pense que par folie,
Sire Tristran, vos aie amé ;
Mais Dex plevis ma loiauté,
Qui sor mon cors mete flaele,
S'onques fors cil qui m'ot pucele
Out m'amistié encor nul jor¹ ! "

(By God, who made the air and the sea, / Never give me another rendezvous / I tell you plainly, Tristan, / Certainly I will come there no more. / The king thinks that out of folly, / Lord Tristan, I loved you ; / But God be witness to my loyalty, / May he inflict chastisement on my body / If other than he who deflowered me /  Ever had my friendship for a single day !)

This is how Yseut expresses herself at the beginning of Béroul's novel, at the end of the twelfth century, sharply marking the difference between two spaces rigorously exclusive of each other : on the one hand, Yseut's loyalty proceeds from her marriage to King Marc and commits her body exclusively and definitively to him. Her body is taken, and it is her body that will be punished for any breach : sor mon cors mete flaele, let blows rain down on my body. On the other side, the friendship Tristan offers her is what motivates their conversation, initiates a liaison, indicates that it could be que nos amors jostent ensemble, literally that our loves jouxtent together, i.e. are linked, that we have a love affair. This liaison is forbidden, denied by Yseut.

It's not just a question of being faithful or unfaithful, of loving one or loving another, or even of a love permitted and a love forbidden. The two relationships are not on the same level, they belong to two different worlds. On the other, a forbidden friendship could be given, two loves could come together, a liaison could take place, soul to soul, outside any social system. On the one hand, Yseut has been taken pucelle, cil qui m'ot pucele, has been forced into loyalty ; on the other she forbids herself to grant, but she could grant, from her movement, her love, vos aie aimé, her friendship, Out m'amistié. This last formula is essential because it opposes the other : Marc has eue her virgin, but Tristan could avoir her friendship, the husband has possessed her body, but she could give the lover her friendship.

Further on, Yseut seems to evoke her love for Marc : rather be burnt, and her ashes cast to the wind que amor aie o home qu'o mon seigneur, than have love for another man than for my lord². But it's important to understand this denial : if I absolutely had to feel love, it could only be for my lord, and that's why I'd rather be burned alive. Love is incompatible with this submission, love incurs the danger of being burned.

Love is spiritual, and it is forbidden. Love has nothing to do with marriage; everything opposes these two relationships : body and fidelity imposed on one side, friendship forbidden, but which could be granted on the other. If there are two loves, they are not two kinds of love, they are the two loves of the two lovers, which come side by side  the freedom of this relationship is in a way guaranteed by /// the prohibition against it. No one can compel either of the lovers to do so, since compulsion always goes against love, for conjugality.

In both cases, the woman is confronted with the man's desire. Through marriage, she is subjected to this desire, she gives her virginity, she receives sex from the man : she doesn't have to show desire, only her loyalty and fidelity. Conjugal desire is not reciprocal. It orders a single jouissance, which is that of the one who possesses to the one who is possessed, submits to possession  this is phallic jouissance. In love, on the other hand, in the forbidden love that contravenes the institution of marriage, the married woman responds to a request from her lover, defying the prohibition of marriage to grant him, sovereignly, heroically, what he asks without being in a position to demand anything. The woman's love thus comes to meet her lover's love, and this gives rise to that beautiful Old French expression, que nos amors jostent ensemble.

The point here is not to discuss, from a historical or sociological point of view, what the real value of these caricatured representations of marriage and love is. The schema, in its very caricature (its stupidity), has no real value, but rather the value of a symbolic foundation, carried by the novel, by medieval lyric poetry  from it a whole culture developed, the culture we inherit today. Nor is it a question of evaluating these representations, of determining, for example, whether one is preferable to the other, of judging. In fact, fiction's verdict is clear: it condemns them both, the conjugal state as a state of oppression, the love relationship as betrayal and transgression.

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There are therefore two mutually exclusive spaces, which our culture defines, from its medieval roots, as the space of marriage and as the space of love. In these two spaces, it is not love but jouissance that is cut in two: on the side of marriage, phallic jouissance, with possession; on the side of love, another jouissance, without possession. The institution of marriage may evolve, may disappear, but this fundamental structure of jouissance endures, defined in relation to possession, which it signifies without implying, of which it gives the simulacrum and indicates the necessary deception.

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On the side of phallic jouissance, there is no sexual relationship, i.e. no relationship in the sense of a true reciprocal relation, a true exchange of the sexes : sacred love, or chastity, or the conjugal state signifies this absence of relationship. On the side of the other jouissance, love is always reciprocal, and this reciprocity rests on the courtly schema of the Lady acceding to the lover's request ; she can only love if he asks her to, that is, she can only love in return, reciprocally : as for the lover's desire, it only becomes fully love at the moment of the Lady's consent.

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History, the legal origin of the term jouissance, teaches us that there is jouissance without possession and jouissance with possession. But this formulation is not Lacanian. However, Lacan formulates the same thing, in other words: phallic jouissance is jouissance with possession. It is jouissance of the petit a object, or even production of the plus-de-jouir petit a. The petit a is an object; it is what the subject symbolically appropriates in jouissance. First of all, the property that society grants him of his partner  then, in sexual performance, his own organ  finally, in the best of cases, a part of his partner's body. None of these successive appropriations is acquired definitively : love literature is largely based on the precariousness of these three possessions, the flip side of which is adultery, impotence and unlove.

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The other jouissance is jouissance without possession. What do we enjoy when we don't /// doesn't possess ? We enjoy the signifier, that is, the very essence of all jouissance  that's why I spoke of the other jouissance as pure jouissance. Because this jouissance proceeds from the signifier, it withdraws from the signifier some of its properties, linked to its nature as an element of language. In particular, it establishes a relationship with the big Other, while at the same time crossing it.

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At first glance, these characteristics strongly resemble those of symbolic castration, which conditions the Φ of phallic jouissance, which after all is also a signifier. The difference lies in the fact that the other jouissance is granted in return, from La Femme, i.e. from a position that is not that of the subject, but already that of the big Other. This is why the Other of the other jouissance, of pure jouissance, is neither the Subject nor the Other, but an Other of the Other, an Other squared.

Or to think of an Other squared, an exteriority of exteriority, is impossible. This Other of the Other is therefore noted A not because it is simply inaccessible, which is the characteristic of the big Other in general, but because it constitutes an unthinkable, and no place can be assigned to it. Topology is indeed essential here  it's because the other jouissance doesn't start from the same place that it's of a quite different nature.

Contrary to phallic jouissance, the other jouissance is therefore not jouissance of an object, but of what Lacan calls a locus, the locus of the big Other as a vacant locus, a locus marked by the fault, the gap, the hole of the real (really the big Other isn't there) supplanted by the imaginary production of love. As Lacan would specify in Seminar XXIII on The Sinthome, this other jouissance stands on the border between the imaginary and the real, while phallic jouissance occupies another border, that of the real and the symbolic³. Linked to the imaginary, the other jouissance imagines the place it enjoys, and imagines it as a non-place.

There is therefore no deception in this failure of the big Other, which must be understood as idealization of the impossible place of the Other of the Other.

II. The problem of the One

The model of the other jouissance comes to us from medieval culture. I've mentioned Tristan and Yseut  now I'd like to evoke a historical couple, Héloïse and Abélard⁴. The year is 1113, in the Latin Quarter of Paris. A brilliant professor of philosophy and theology from near Nantes, Pierre Abélard, falls in love with a young literate girl, Héloïse. He persuades her uncle, Canon Fulbert, to take him in as a boarder. The uncle is stingy, so he hopes to obtain cheap lessons for his daughter, entrusting her with his spiritual direction. Abélard spends his nights with Héloïse, neglecting his school. As word of his affair spreads, Fulbert catches them in the act and separates them. Héloïse is pregnant and Abélard takes her to Brittany, where she will soon give birth to a son. Fulbert is furious, and Abélard believes he can appease him by marrying Héloïse, despite her representations, which foresee scandal and insist on the incompatibility of professorship and marriage.

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Fulbert, however, plots his revenge : he reveals the marriage, which was to remain secret, and has two henchmen seize Abélard, emasculating him in 1117. Abélard and Héloïse enter holy orders. Abelard resumed his teaching, however, and wrote a treatise On the Unity and Trinity of God, which caused a scandal. His enemies convene a council in Soissons, and Abélard is nearly stoned to death on his arrival in the city, but turns public opinion in his favor. However, his opponents intrigue, the book is condemned without examination, and Abelard himself has to throw it into the fire⁵. Imprisoned, he was soon released and returned to his monastery at Saint-Denis, where further persecution awaited him. He escaped and found refuge with Count Thibaud in Provins, where he was threatened with excommunication. He was finally allowed to retire to a desert near Troyes. Disciples immediately flocked to him. In place of his makeshift oratory, they built a church, which Abelard dedicated to the Paraclete, "in memory of the fact that I had come there as a fugitive, and that in the midst of my despair, I had found some rest in the consolations of divine grace⁶ ". Abelard's fame continues to grow, and with it the rumor of the scandal of his teaching : fearing new persecutions, he accepts the direction of an abbey near Vannes where the anarchy of the monastery and the tyranny of the lord await him.

Héloïse and her companions, however, are expelled from their abbey in Argenteuil by the abbot of Saint-Denis. Abélard donated his oratory at Le Paraclet to them, and donations poured in as the community prospered. But in his abbey, Abelard was prey to all manner of persecution: within the walls or on his travels, attempts were made to poison or stab him. The letter he wrote to a friend, summarizing his life and persecutions, reached Héloïse. She in turn writes to Abélard: there follows an exchange of spiritual letters, which have come down to us, which is not the case with the love letters that the two attest to having exchanged at the time of their carnal passion.

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Héloïse requests these letters, invoking Seneca's testimony :

" How sweet it is to receive letters from an absent friend, Seneca teaches us by his own example in the passage where he writes to his friend Lucilius : You write to me often, and I thank you for it  you thus show yourself to me in the only way that is possible to you  I never receive one of your letters until at once we are together. If the portraits of our absent friends are sweet to us, for the memory they revive and the regret of absence they lighten with their vain and deceptive consolation, how much sweeter are the letters that bring us the true signs of the absent friend " Thank God, to make your presence known to us, by this means at least, you are not forbidden by any jealousy, prevented by any difficulty. You will, I beg of you, be delayed by no negligence⁷. "

The letter abolishes absence and creates the unity of a presence together : quin protinus una simus, which immediately /// we are together or, more literally, in one place. The letter brings this presence back to its essential quality, which is its quality of sign : it brings us the veras notas of the absent, its true notes, its true marks, its true signs. The letter is the sign of the Other insofar as it is absent⁸, and, through this sign, constitutes the other jouissance.

The Other is the unique : Heloise writes to Abelard from the Paraclete, which he has created from nothing, where everything is his work, where everything has been built by the force of his word alone, without foreign gifts, by the sole contribution of his disciples who have come to listen to him. Heloise stands in the place of the Other, for whom she regrets her condition as wife, and claims that of prostitute :

" And yourself as far as you're concerned, you didn't quite forget that in that letter I mentioned where you console a friend. You did not disdain to recall some of the reasons why I tried to dissuade you from uniting us in a disastrous marriage, but you said nothing of all those that made me prefer love to union, freedom to a chain. I take God as my witness, even if Augustus, universal commander of the world, had deemed me worthy of the honor of his alliance and forever assured the command of the whole earth, he would have thought me more estimable and worthy of being called your whore (meretrix) than his empress. For it is not true that the richer and more powerful you are, the better you are  the former is a matter of chance, the latter of virtue⁹. "

In love, Heloise retains her freedom  in marriage, she sells out and submits. In love, Heloise doesn't give herself away  to preserve this freedom, she was prepared to be called a whore  the real whore is the one who sells herself in marriage, which should confer universal sovereignty on her. To this institutional dignity of marriage, which is the dignity of the universal, she would have preferred the personal dignity, which she defiantly calls virtuous, of love. Heloise overturns all conventional indicators of carum, dignum and virtus. Her freedom is the remainder that cannot be sold, through which love takes on its full value : placed in the place of the Other, at the Paraclete, exalting the Other as the One on whom everything depends, she nevertheless defines herself as not-all, through this freedom that cannot be bought, exchanged or reduced. She then evokes a talent of Abélard's that he only speaks of with contempt: he's not only a philosopher, theologian and professor of genius  he's a poet and musician, and his love songs have made him world-famous. It's music that Heloise misses, it's this music of Abelard's love poems that gave her the other jouissance.

Abelard's response is a masterpiece of incomprehension. There is no protest of love, no nostalgia for the time of their fiery carnal passion, no poetic or musical evocation. What he does offer is confoundingly austere: his spiritual direction, in exchange for the community's prayers. Let them pray, let them intercede for him with God ! Abelard brings Heloise and her companions back to the very name of the Paraclete, the intercessor  he enjoins them to fulfill the program of this name, through prayer. Prayer is the object, the obstacle¹⁰ that needs to be produced. /// between God and the punishments that threaten him. Abélard, enjoins prayer after enjoining marriage : he places enjoyment on the side of the bond and the universal, on the side of the obstacle and its removal.

The One that Abélard claims proceeds from this bond : " for we are one in Christ ; one flesh through the law of marriage  nothing that is yours, I consider foreign¹¹. " Abélard possesses Héloïse, and recognizes himself possessed by Christ : this One there belongs to the phallic economy of jouissance, by difference with Héloïse's One, which is the locus of the One, that is, the locus of the absent Other, presentified by love.

There is thus an ambiguity of the One : in Héloïse, it manifests itself as the principle of a discourse of truth, the truth of her pain, of her love, the truth of a word that comes from the heart and that her mouth cannot stop¹² ; in Abelard, it is the horizon of a discourse of reality, which establishes a genealogy of origins¹³ to institute Heloise's monastic order as the new reality in which her existence becomes possible.

The courtly model and the neo-Platonist model

The letters of Heloise and Abelard establish, at the beginning of the twelfth century, the distinction between the two jouissances and their meeting point, around the imaginary elaboration of the One. But, strictly speaking, there is no discourse of love: the Epistolæ duarum amantium, if they are indeed the letters of the two lovers before Fulbert's revenge, constitute a separate corpus that does not communicate with the eight letters that date from the Paraclete, long after castration and definitive separation. The discourse of love, as the discourse of the passage from the promise of jouissance to its overcoming, will later elaborate, based on two models, that of service and that of asceticism.

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There is a courtly model, which is the model of service to the Lady, and a neo-Platonic model, which is spiritual elevation towards the One. In the courtly model, phallic pleasure is suspended, delayed, and becomes the ultimate prize that the Lady will eventually grant. This suspension allows for the development of the other jouissance, where poetic speech unfolds. But the respective places of the poet and the Lady remain clearly separated, and it is from this very separation that the supplement constituted by poetic speech is nourished. The fundamental disposition is that of face-to-face with the Lady, which establishes the hierarchy of amorous service, of the service the poet renders to his mistress :

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" IV. So pleasing to me is the sweet aspect
Of her persian eyes and radiant face !
And when I recall the beautiful poise
of her splendid body, my whole heart is enlightened :
She's so sweet and so good,
so loyal, so courteous so loyal, so courteous and so noble
that despite all my that despite all my efforts
my thoughts cannot be distracted from her.

V. May God grant my heart not to withdraw,
to love her all the days of my life!
He will do nothing, though madness may lead me astray,
for her beauty calls and invites me.
I have loved and served her for so long
. The time has come for me to reward her
. Then I'll see if she's loyal and frank
or if she's a false and disloyal friend¹⁴. "

Mult longuement l'ai amee et servie : service is what defines love ; this service establishes a contract, whose retribution, wage, la deserte, will be the Lady's gift of her body. This is the body the poet desires, la bele contenance De son gent cors, and this is the body he hopes to obtain at the end of his service. True, courtly love spiritualizes, idealizes the object relationship : but it is indeed the Lady as a body that constitutes the object of the lover's quest  she is and remains an object, the object of phallic jouissance, at the end of which the subject's position will be acquired. Indeed, we must follow the poem's emergence of the first person (in v. 37 only) from the impersonal turns of phrase that mark submission to amorous service.

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In the neo-Platonic model, it's not about this economy of subject and object at all. It's not a question of delaying phallic jouissance (the reward the courtly poet demands), but of renouncing it by converting it into spiritual love : the challenge is to think of love without jouissance : so, strictly speaking, there is no other jouissance. Neo-Platonic love organizes the destruction of the object of desire, destroys the object relationship, in favor of an impulse toward divinity, a fusion in the One :

" Hence the lover's ardor is appeased neither by the sight nor the touch of any body. Indeed he does not desire this or that body, but the splendor of divine majesty reflected in bodies, that is what amazes him, attracts him, astounds him. That's why lovers don't know the object of their desire or quest: they don't know what God himself is, whose hidden flavor has spread a little of its sweetest perfume in his works. [...] Hence, too, that lovers always both dread and venerate the face-to-face encounter with the beloved¹⁵. "

The object is somehow suppressed by love. The touch, then the very desire for the body of the Other disappears; it is no longer even possible to endure an encounter. The object vaporizes: it becomes flavor, perfume, the dissemination of a subtle essence, the essence of divinity, the apprehension of the One. The face-to-face encounter is replaced by the face-to-face veneration : contemplation of the beloved becomes divine adoration, and mystical fusion in the glory of the One.

III. The Enlightenment revolution : system of love in La Nouvelle Héloïse

Rousseau, like indeed all classical culture, inherits these two systems, which do not overlap. In the courtly system, the relationship with the Lady organizes a conflict between the sphere of marriage, devolved to enjoyment, and the sphere of love, where a competing enjoyment develops  in the neo-Platonic system, love in no way threatens the social institution : it organizes the sublimation of desire, its spiritualization into a desire for knowledge and a mystical impulse. In this, it does not exactly repeat the Platonic discourse of the original Banquet, for whom love converts to philosophy, which does not necessarily imply fusion into the One.

La Nouvelle Héloïse rewrites the story of Abélard and Héloïse from this heritage, and twists it to reconcile it with the new conceptions of love and enjoyment initiated by the Enlightenment. Saint-Preux is Julie's tutor, as Abélard was Héloïse's; and, as in courtly society, Saint-Preux's love for Julie clashes with his love for her. /// marriage to M. de Wolmar, imposed by Julie's father. But Saint-Preux is not the brilliant Parisian professor who pays Fulbert his board; he's a young man of modest means, employed as a servant. And Julie is not the Yseut already married into submission to her husband  it's after she falls in love with Saint-Preux that her father, the Baron d'Étange, with whom Milord Edouard has interceded on his friend's behalf, refuses to marry his daughter to her tutor and summons her to take Wolmar as her husband.

In other words, at the end of the first part of La Nouvelle Héloïse, Rousseau introduces the possibility of a choice between two spouses : this possibility only very slowly and gradually takes hold in the novel. First comes M.d'Étange's violent refusal, which leads to his wife's death and his daughter's illness. It's not until the end of the third part, after the celebration of the marriage to M. de Wolmar, that Julie retrospectively formulates her situation in terms of a choice that was in her hands.

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" Sadness and love consumed my heart ; I fell into an abatement from which my letters felt. The ones you wrote me from Meillerie¹⁶ made it all the worse  my own pain was joined by the feeling of your despair. Alas ! it is always the weaker soul that bears the sorrows of both. The party you dared to propose to me put the finishing touches to my perplexities. The misfortune of my days was assured, and the inevitable choice I had to make was whether to join it to that of my relatives or yours. I could not bear this horrible alternative; the forces of nature have an end; so much agitation exhausted mine. I wished to be delivered from life. Heaven seemed to take pity on me  but cruel death spared me only to lose me. I saw you, I was wounded, and I perished¹⁷. "

Julie's starting point is the expression of a mixed feeling, " sadness and love ". In fact, this sentiment already contains the terms of the alternative : her sadness results from renouncing her love for Saint-Preux in favor of marriage to Wolmar, while her love should be able to ward off her sadness. Sadness implies acceptance of the paternal prohibition, which bars access to Saint-Preux, and places love outside the realm of social propriety, in an imaginary elaboration without possible concretization. Expressing the alternative in the form of " et " and not " ou " marks from the outset that the choice has already been made, that the starting point is a choice already made, which determines the very unreal, asymbolic nature of love.

Love contaminates sadness, which symptomatizes it : consomption, despondency, despair, are the stages of this contamination of the soul. However, Saint-Preux proposes that Julie take him away  it is this romantic " parti " that precipitates the choice. Whatever she chooses, Julie is condemned to misfortune. But to hers, depending on her choice, she will add that of her parents (whom her flight would dishonor and despair) or that of her lover (whom her refusal to flee will plunge into despair).

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The choice doesn't come from Julie, it imposes itself on her from outside as a precipitation of one misfortune or another, in a relationship not of two, but of three terms, which are not three people, but the constituent elements of La femme : Julie defines herself by her misfortune, /// misfortune is the mark of the line that bars her as La woman and precipitates her towards forced choice, the constitutive structure of renunciation of love and submission to marriage. For the moment, this choice involves no freedom, no positive determination of the subject. It structures the bar of La femme, through which manifest the three elements that constitute it, Julie's misfortune in the real, from which manifests and to which always returns the disappointed aspiration to jouissance ; the renunciation of Saint-Preux and of love, which feeds the imaginary sadness of the soul and installs the reserve of the not-everything  finally the submission to parents, to lineage and to the name of M. d'Étanges, which sets up Julie's body as a currency of exchange, and thus as a sign (sign of name, semblance of love) administered by the symbolic institution of marriage.

Choice does not, therefore, first open up any freedom of a subject who is offered different possibilities for choosing an object. Choice begins as a structural element, structuring La femme as crossed out, as not-all, as sign. Julie rebels against this forced choice : " I could not bear this horrible alternative. " She falls ill, and installs the contamination of sadness in her body, which holds the tripartite structure imposed on her. The illness is resolved by this lapidary and enigmatic formula: "I saw you, I was cured, and I perish...". Saint-Preux's kiss heals Julie, but kills her at the same time, preventing her from definitively renouncing her love. Forced choice then becomes aporia, the impossibility of choosing.

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Julie then imagines a stratagem : she could, by becoming pregnant, force her father to accept the marriage with Saint-Preux.

" However this state of opprobrium was odious to me. By dint of wanting to stifle the reproach without renouncing the crime, it happened to me what happens to any honest soul that goes astray and enjoys its waywardness. A new illusion came to soften the bitterness of repentance; I hoped to draw from my fault a means of repairing it and I dared to form the project of forcing my Father to unite us. The first fruit of our love was to tighten this sweet bond. [...] I knew that my father would give me death or my lover  this alternative had nothing to frighten me, and, one way or another, I envisaged in this step the end of all my misfortunes¹⁸. "

Fortune and her lament have turned to opprobrium, which carries social condemnation : by giving herself to Saint-Preux, Julie has raised the barrier that separates, for La femme, the sphere of the body, governed by marriage, from that of the soul, where love can develop, privately and despite the ban. It's not simply a matter of disobedience that precipitates Julie into " this state of opprobrium " ; if a child (" the first fruit of our love ") were to be born of this affair, it would open up the possibility of a symbolic catch-up. By objectifying the misfortune, by publishing the opprobrium, it would force the Baron d'Etanges to choose between the dishonor of a misalliance and the even greater dishonor of bastardy, or even infanticide. In other words, Julie responds to the forced choice imposed on her with another forced choice of her own. She appropriates the structure of the forced choice, and she does so from her body, i.e. precisely from the part of herself whose ownership, in the structure of La femme, she is denied. The stratagem of pregnancy thus constitutes, /// paradoxically, a feminine reappropriation of the body, which remains the domain and prerogative of phallic jouissance in the structure of La femme.

Julie formulates the paradox in the following way : "  j'esperai tirerai de ma faute un moyen de la réparer " ; this formula refers to a general mechanism of Rousseauist thought that Jean Starobinski has defined as remède dans le mal. Its most famous formulation can be found as early as the Discourse on Sciences and Arts (1750) : the arts have perverted the state of nature, which was man's ideal state  the arts are therefore an evil for man. But in the corrupt social state we find ourselves in, it is in this very evil that we can only seek to improve our condition  art (the technique, the industry of man) supplements social corruption, remedies it. In so doing, however, it further aggravates this corruption : it's the vicious circle of the state of society.

The remedy in evil is not a remedy. It establishes a logic of supplement in a vicious circle of corruption. The supplement, the objet petit a in this circle, is not the child as a person, but what La woman's body produces, what it can produce as a remainder at the end of jouissance, this remainder being susceptible to symbolic conversion. Strictly speaking, the supplement does not produce a something  rather, it symptomatizes the origin, each time referring back to the aporia of the original choice : between sadness and love, between parents and Saint-Preux, between marriage and flight. To this first aporia, Julie substitutes a second: M. d'Étanges would be placed by the unborn child before the alternative of killing Julie or allowing her marriage to Saint-Preux. He could obviously choose neither of these options : this imaginary alternative, moreover, dissolves of its own accord with Julie's miscarriage, which brings her body back under her father's control (note Rousseau's capitalization).

The Baron d'Etanges then changes tactics. Instead of raging and threatening, he throws himself at his daughter's feet : this is the scene known as " la Force paternelle ", one of the twelve scenes to which Rousseau decided to assign an illustration. In this scene, a fundamental shift takes place, involving a decisive semiological revolution : Julie's father holds the master signifier and expresses it  he is the S₁ of a device that implements the S₂ of Julie's knowledge (what she knows of love, which is incommunicable to her father), the a of plus-de-jouir (the function of the letter) and the $ of the amorous subject, of Saint-Preux the lover barred by the paternal interdict. The father surrenders to his daughter's reason, placing himself as S₁ under the jurisdiction of her S₂. The letter is Julie's letter, in which Julie assumes the decision made and the choice. The signifier that occupies the position of agent in the new situation thus created is S₂, Julie's signifier, disposing of, bearing the responsibility for what the Father's position becomes from then on, no longer the position of commanding, but that of embodying the truth of the forced choice.

This new disposition of discourse, S₂/S₁, has the effect of a signifier, producing the signified according to an equally new disposition. It's no longer a question of the Baron subjugating Julie, but of Julie herself, placed in a position of mastery, subjugating her body, subjugating the petit a of her jouissance, insofar as this petit a rests on Saint-Preux, on Saint-Preux's acceptance of the precedence of the jouissance de /// Julie. And this is the meaning of the whole of this letter XVIII : to obtain from Saint-Preux his ravalement to the position of effect of the effect, which is the position of the production of meaning. Julie's discourse will produce its signifier effect through the confession she makes to Wolmar of her love for Saint-Preux ; but this confession is only possible on condition that, in this love, Saint-Preux subsists only as an effect of the signifier of jouissance.

The gesture of the Baron d'Étanges throwing himself at his daughter's knees establishes the following discourse pattern :

S₂/S₁ → a/$

where S₂ designates Julie placed in the position of the agent who knows, while S₁, the master signifier of Father the Baron of Etanges, defers to S₂, places himself in the position of embodying, beneath him, the truth that Julie by her decision will enunciate. The arrow → indicates the effect of the signifier (of the letter XVIII itself), what the discourse thus constituted comes to signify, which is that the other to whom it is henceforth addressed is Julie's jouissance petit a, which itself rests on Saint-Preux's submission.

Evidently, in the context of Rousseau and La Nouvelle Héloïse, it makes little sense to characterize this discourse as university discourse, if not with the spelling that Lacan suggests as a pun, " uni - vers - Cythère¹⁹ " and again not as a vulgar discourse of sex education, but as the discourse of knowledge of La woman, insofar as it objectifies the bar of La and institutes through it a tripartite topology of jouissance : La woman as barred, as not-all and as sign, enjoying or producing jouissance in the forms Φ, petit a and S(A). As we shall see, this discourse aims at the One in love not as a simple fusion of the two lovers, but as a fusion of marriage and love, and to do so, of the three terms of jouissance.

The choice, the alternative, are resolved by and annulled in this fusion. From the moment Julie is no longer subjected to a paternal injunction, but receives responsibility for her actions and motivations, marriage to Wolmar is now inescapable :

" The closer I came to the fatal moment, the less I could uproot my first affections from my heart : they became irritated by my efforts to extinguish them. Finally, I tired of fighting in vain. At the very moment when I was ready to swear eternal fidelity to another, my heart still swore eternal love to you, and I was led to the Temple like an impure victim, who defiles the sacrifice where he is to be immolated²⁰. "

Julie does not renounce her love for Saint-Preux to marry M. de Wolmar. Quite the opposite, in fact: the two oaths are superimposed on each other, to form the new structure from their superposition.

S₂/S₁ → a/$

On the left is stated the oath of eternal fidelity in marriage, pronounced by Julie as the truth of the paternal master signifier  on the right, and mirroring this first oath which it reflects in reverse, is stated the oath of eternal love towards Saint-Preux, as the signifier of jouissance resting on the beloved and forbidden subject. Julie swearing fidelity swears it as S₂ to the reserve of a, and thus manifests the structure of La femme, as not-all, which she figures through the image of the impure victim led to sacrifice.

This is when the second revolution  occurs: " I thought I felt inwardly a sudden revolution²¹ ". The defilement disappears, the contradiction of the aporia falls away, fusion takes place :

" ... I felt I loved you as much and more, perhaps than I ever had /// but I felt it without blushing. I saw that in order to think of you, I didn't need to forget that I was someone else's wife. When I told myself how dear you were to me, my heart was moved, but my conscience and my senses were tranquil  and I knew from that moment that I was truly changed. What a torrent of pure joy flooded my soul! What a feeling of peace, erased for so long, came to revive this heart withered by ignominy, and spread throughout my being a new serenity ! I thought I was reborn  I thought I was starting another life. Sweet and consoling virtue, I begin it again for you  it is you who will make it dear to me  it is to you that I want to dedicate it. Ah ! I've learned too much about the cost of losing you to abandon you a second time²² ! "

It might seem as if the courtly sharing of soul and body is being repeated here. To M. de Wolmar, Julie would have sworn fidelity, that is, offered the submission of her body  to Saint-Preux would remain the commerce of the soul, which is the true, equal and reciprocal bond of love.

It's something else entirely, though. Julie doesn't share herself. She doesn't stop being her husband's wife to think about her lover. On the contrary, she nourishes her virtue, i.e. her fidelity as a wife, with her love for Saint-Preux. Here the bar of La femme falls and the reserve of pas-tout opens up, in the experience of joy, the feeling of peace and the serenity of being, that is, in access to the unity of being. Julie's love, in the form of love-friendship, makes up for the lack of reciprocity in marriage and establishes the relationship. Julie will love M. de Wolmar through Saint-Preux, by introjecting her affair into the conjugal relationship.

We can therefore consider that the stakes of the novel will henceforth be the establishment of this liaison-retour, which completes Julie's discourse,

S₂/S₁ ↔︎ a/$

where S₂/S₁, Julie's oath of fidelity pronounced in the temple, and more generally her word as wife, then mother, produces signifying effect only in the sense of an inflection of the discourse of love, S(A), towards an administration of jouissance, a/$, which itself is received in return by introjection into S₂/S₁. A system is thus set up, and even a real circuit, which inherits the courteous service, but completely rearranges it.

This system is actualized in fiction by the scene from " la Confiance des belles âmes " which plays out in the fourth part of the novel in front of the gate of the Clarens estate, where Saint-Preux comes to meet the two newlyweds at the invitation of M. de Wolmar. In front of the gate: Saint-Preux has just got out of the carriage, his trunk is being unloaded, the Wolmar family are returning from a walk, arriving from outside like him. The gate doesn't separate anyone; set back, it doesn't intervene in the circulation of hands and glances that seal the trio's bond. Instead, it sets up the background of the estate, the place of the Other from which to project the impossible Other of the Other who incarnates as a trio on this unlikely threshold.

.

M. de Wolmar then lays down the terms of the relationship to be constructed, in the manner of a Kantian imperative :

" I have," he continued, "two parties to propose to you. Choose freely whichever suits you best ; but choose one or the other. Then taking the hand of his /// Our friendship begins, here is the dear bond, may it be indissoluble. Embrace your sister and your friend  always treat her as such  the more familiar you are with her, the better I'll think of you. But live in the tête-à-tête, as if I were present, or in front of me as if I weren't  that's all I ask of you. If you prefer the latter, you can do so without worry  for, as I reserve the right to warn you of anything that displeases me, as long as I say nothing you will be sure not to have displeased me²³. "

Proposing a party is what Saint-Preux was doing in Meillerie's letter, when he suggested that Julie flee : the formula is found in letter XXVI of the first part, which we have quoted. Julie had to decide between two parties  the party introduces the division of the choice, of the alternative, and quickly blocks it in aporia. Here, de Wolmar slips into a discourse that has been the discourse of the entire novel, the discourse of the assumption of choice. But between the two parties, he establishes the mirror structure by which the structural and constitutive antinomy is overcome and resolved. In fact, it's not a question of choosing between Julie's one-on-one solitude and Julie's company with M. de Wolmar as a third party: solitude and company become equivalent, with M. de Wolmar's absence becoming a ghostly presence in one, while his presence in the other is reciprocally spectralized. Mr. de Wolmar will be there and will not be there at the same time. He is the figure that condenses the aporia, he is the name of the antinomy.

Whatever the conversation between Julie and Saint-Preux, it will take place both in twos and threes, allowing their relationship to develop simultaneously as a bond of indissoluble friendship in threes and as a discourse of love in twos, where Wolmar will never intervene as long as the rules are respected. Isn't this where, from the listening silence of the invisible husband, the analyst's discourse is invented ?

 

 

Notes

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