Romantic Love

Before Lacan and Zizek devoted attention to courtly love, there was Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World, which was popular reading among French intellectuals among whom postmodernism arose. It’s an exaggeration to say that postmodernism ontologizes courtly love, but it’s the kind of exaggeration that gets at the truth.

Like many others, Rougemont argues that romantic love is a specific paradigm of love that is specific to Western civilization. It’s a matter of falling in love with love.

In a pure form, it scorns sexual love. It aspires to something more ideal, pure, and perfect, indeed infinite. Part of the problem with the concrete, actual beloved is that she is limited, and seeking her response means getting to know a particular, finite person. Courtly love is an aspiration for something beyond this. As de Rougemont puts it, there is “a factor having the power to make instinct turn away from its natural goal and to transform desire into limitless aspiration, into something, that is to say, which does not serve, and indeed operates against, biological ends.”

This infinite longing necessarily entails suffering. You want something that is by definition unattainable, and so the longing leaves you unsatisfied. To achieve the longing would mean that the love is finite; to give up the longing would be to give up the center of your desires. It is, in de Rougemont’s words, a “complete Desire, luminous Aspiration, the primitive religious soaring carried to its loftiest perch . . . a desire that never relapses, that nothing can satisfy, that even rejects and flees the temptation to obtain its fulfillment in the world.” So you keep longing, suffering in longing.

If love is infinite, love for the infinite of love, then it is sustained not by the achievement of the love, but by the absence of the beloved. Courtly love, this infinite love, needs obstacles to keep it infinite: “Their need of one another is in order to be aflame, and they do not need one another as they are. What they need is not one another’s presence, but one another’s absence.”

This infinite desire, or desire for infinite, is love for love itself, more than love for the object that you love. Rougemont again: “Passion means suffering, something undergone, the mastery of fate over a free and responsible person. To love love more than the object of love, to love passion for its own sake, has been to love to suffer and to court suffering, all the way from Augustine’s amabam amare down to modern romanticism.”

De Rougemont considered this sort of consuming passion an impoverishment of life, rather than an enhancement. It is love with no possession of the beloved: “To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one’s being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession.” And it limits and leads to an obsessive single-minded focus on the object of love, much to the detriment of the life of the mind: “passion is by no means the fuller life which it seems to be in the dreams of adolescence, but is on the contrary a kind of naked and denuding intensity, verily, a bitter destitution, the impoverishment of a mind being emptied of all diversity, an obsession of the imagination by a single image.”

(For an excellent summary of de Rougemont, see Michael Novak’s 2011 FT essay.)