Bruce Fink in Lacan on Love. Teaching this next semester in my film/lit class on love. Obstacle-to-posession as love object.

It is desire driven by structural situations (not the desire to actually be with someone in particular) that increasingly structures and activates people’s desires.

The fetish of an impossible situation, of the desire not to be satisfied, has severed the relationship between desire and action, desire and responsibility for one’s desires, as Lacan puts it in seminar XXV. Lack fetishizing. Melancholic.

Gillian Rose in Love’s Work: “To spend the whole night with someone is agape: it is ethical.

In an interview:

It’s more that eros is about desire and agape is about care. If you don’t simply make love with someone and then leave, but spend the night holding them, it’s much nearer to care than desire, or it’s the beautiful mix of the two. I don’t agree with Nygren who makes an absolute distinction between agape and eros. I think eros fulfilled always becomes agapic.

It brings to mind Adam Phillips’ essay in Missing Out (which I wrote about in Berfrois)— learning to love being frustrated in love. Seeing frustration as part of the work of love. If we can’t learn to live with and love being frustrated by the person we love, then it is because we are too busy “loving” not ever being close enough to anyone or anything to be changed or touched by it.

Crossposted with Love Dog.