Mantieni il bacio. Lezioni brevi sull’amore

Because “yet” is the word of love. Who said that empathy is necessary to ground a good relationship? That love is first and foremost dialogue? What if those of “dialogue” and “empathy” were watchwords aimed precisely at averting the Otherness of the Other, its radical and irreducible difference, its being a stranger? What if the condition of all love was not dialogue but the encounter with an indecipherable secret, with a mystery that resists all empathic effort? Lacan stated that sexual intercourse is impossible, it is always failed. I can never feel what the other feels, confuse myself, coincide, be him. But it is precisely from the experience of this failure that love as love for the heteros becomes possible. It is about trying to share the very impossibility of sharing the relationship. If I love you, it is not because I dialogue with you but because there is something in you and in me that escapes me, impossible to reach. That is, I discover in you a secret that surpasses me and distances itself from all possible empathy. This is why Lacan identified love with woman, if woman is-as she is-the most radical name for the secret impossible to decipher. In an intimate and profound quest, Massimo Recalcati investigates the miracle of love, the most mysterious feeling of all. “Fidelity is not a prison, nor a cage,” he explains, “if it turns into a sacrifice one must free oneself. Fidelity becomes a posture of love because it transforms the same into new, there is no need to go elsewhere to find it. Like when we watch a sunrise rise: we have seen it a thousand times but we would never tire of admiring it, each time it appears different, new.”