By ANNE DUFOURMANTELLE*
Postponing is our essential neurosis: thinking that real life begins tomorrow and, in the meantime, enduring sadness, avoiding thinking, ignoring the present.
“Unlearn melancholy and all sorrows, praise be to the spirit of storm, wild, good and free, who dances over the marshes and sorrows as over the meadows”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, the gay science).
Isn’t that what love is at its beginning? A certain joy. “One should never postpone any joy,” we can read in one of Herculano’s preserved writings.[I] Postponing is our essential neurosis: thinking that real life begins tomorrow and, in the meantime, enduring sadness, avoiding thinking, ignoring the present.
In Latin, joy is joys: like this, "dildo” [vibrator] comes from happy birthday, it makes me happy, Pascal Quignard reminds us.[ii] From the object of pleasure to the source of all voluptuousness, joy eludes us. Irreducible to pleasure and voluptuousness, joy is situated in the same register as the fear of death, much more than an emotion: an existential experience. No doubt because feeling alive – entirely alive – is something rare.
Joy is the only human feeling that makes us whole. To the question of what the purpose of life is, Seneca answers: “Cibus sommus libido per hunc circulum curritur – hunger, sleep, desire, this is the circle that drags us along”. We live almost permanently distant from ourselves, exhausted, tormented, absent from ourselves. “All men transmit their anguish to each other like an epidemic”, notes Epicurus. Anguish arises when the subject does not want to know what he is suffering from. A silent guilt creeps in until it prevents all desire. Can joy free us from anguish? Not always… sometimes it is painful to get rid of obstacles. Renouncing the symptom is the same as exposing oneself to bare life.
Philosophers are suspicious of emotions, on which no universal can be founded. How could joy illuminate our human condition, much less prepare us for death?! However, we can ask ourselves whether the very structure of consciousness is joy. Given that consciousness is always consciousness of something, directed towards something beyond itself, and that joy is an expansion of the soul, an expansion of the being beyond the boundaries of the self [soft]… We then say that it “floods” the soul, that it elevates it; it is a pure given. In fact, few philosophers, except Spinoza, have really thought about the proximity between joy (the joy of the troubadours) and the loving exultation, including mystical.
What if joy found its origin in the maternal body and voice (as world, space, resonance) when it transmits to the newborn the secret ecstasy of a love where body and thought are not separated? The capacity for transcendence of joy would be this vertiginous meeting point, within ourselves, with the other. And in this acquiescence, a disposition to intelligence and sharing – contrary to the hatred that polarizes the other as an external enemy.
It is childhood, without a doubt, that knows how to best welcome joy, when each event is a source of an almost hypnotic intensity. For, to experience joy is to inhabit a pure present. To accept being transported to the point of being lost – but without violence. Orpheus carries his song for Eurydice to the gates of hell with the order to “not turn back!”: to turn around means to lock the other in a kind of fixation, in the past, in nostalgia.
Joy makes us feel that moment in which the whole life, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, is approved. In Confessions, Saint Augustine[iii] says it in another way: “Love and joy are overwhelming.” Between joy and love there is the space of an encounter, of the rapture of love that makes us exult for having finally found this other, who attracts us and transforms us, whose sole presence magnetizes and colors reality with an unparalleled intensity. “Oh, my old heart: pain says: 'Pass!'/All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey, yeast, a midnight of drunkenness, wants tombs, wants the consolation of tears shed over the tombs, wants a red and golden sunset. / What does joy not want? It is thirstier, more cordial, hungrier, more frightening, more secret than all pain.”[iv]
*Anne Dufourmantelle (1964-2017) was a psychoanalyst and philosophy professor at European Graduate School. Author, among other books by Powers of softness (n-1 editions). [https://amzn.to/41Bh7Pj]
Translation: Joao Paulo Ayub Fonseca
Chapter “Love is joy” from the book En cas d'amour – Psychopathologie de la vie amoureuse. [https://amzn.to/3BtTOft]
Notes
[I] [NT] The city of Herculaneum was destroyed and buried by the volcano Vesuvius in 79 AD, along with the neighboring city of Pompeii. The city was buried by a layer of ash and lava about 15 meters deep and its inhabitants did not have time to escape. Herculaneum was rediscovered by chance in 1709, during the excavation of a well.
[ii] Pascal Quignard, Sex and the Devil, Gallimard, 1996.
[iii] Saint Augustine, The Birds, Pol, 2007.
[iv] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Gallimard, Follio.
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