Lucky’s Reviews > Eros the Bittersweet > Status Update

The features that define this eros have already emerged in the course of our exploration of bittersweetness. Simultaneous pleasure and pain are its symptom. Lack is its animating, fundamental constituent. As syntax, it impressed us as something of a subterfuge: properly a noun, eros acts everywhere like a verb. Its action is to reach, and the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination.

On the surface of it, the lover wants the beloved. This, of course, is not really the case. If we look carefully at a lover in the midst of desire, for example Sappho in her fragment 31, we see how severe an experience for her is confrontation with the beloved even at a distance. Union would be annihilating.

“The breath of desire is Eros. Inescapable as the environment itself, with his wings he moves love in and out of all creatures at will. The individual’s total vulnerability to erotic influence is symbolized by those wings with their multisensual power to permeate and take control of a lover at any moment.”

There is at the beginning of life, in the Freudian view, no awareness of objects as distinct from one’s own body. The distinction between self and not-self is made by the decision to claim all that the ego likes as ‘mine’ and to reject all that the ego dislikes as ‘not mine.’ Divided, we learn where our selves end and world begins. Self-taught, we love what we can make our own and hate what remains other.

This attitude toward love is grounded for the Greeks in oldest mythical tradition: Hesiod describes in his Theogony how castration gave birth to the goddess Aphrodite, born from the foam around Ouranos’ severed genitals (189-200). Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons.

“When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons. Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less.”

“When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person.”

“Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. It moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.”

“The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.”

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me.