Love, Desire and Transcendence in French Literature: Deciphering Eros (review)

Addressing what it sees as a progressive 'semantic inflation and confusion' of the idea of love, compounded by the reduction of eros to a synonym for the Freudian libido, this study takes the long view of its theme. Its historical perspective is built on three foundational chapters dealing with the androgynous origins of love related in Plato's Symposium, the lyrical eroticism of the Song of Songs and the Creation and Fall narrative of Genesis 1-3, the latter two accounts greatly indebted to 'the arduous, but uniquely indispensable, Paul Ricoeur'. Frequent references to these three texts in subsequent chapters give coherence and shape to the whole. Two further focuses bring this huge project within the ambit of one volume. The first is the insistence on maintaining love, desire and transcendence as an inseparable triad throughout. Secondly, Gifford plots the development of these indivisible themes in terms of Anders Nygren's bipartite classification of love as eros and agapē. This binomial focus allows him to draw comparisons between the most important ways in which French literature has addressed his theme, though it necessarily occludes other forms of love (storgē or natural affection, philia or brotherly/sisterly love). The absence of these additional inflections is itself a symptom, though quite understandable given Gifford's aim, of the impoverishment to which the book draws our attention. Gifford leads his reader in one chapter through a swift historical sketch of the fin' amors of the troubadours, through concupiscentia, amour-passion, and libertinage to Rousseau's 'passionate but virtuous natural love', before slowing down for the remaining readings, which deal with twentieth-century writers (Proust, Valéry, Claudel, Breton, Bataille, Duras, Emmanuel) and theorists (Barthes, Irigaray, Kristeva). Through the theme of transcendence, Gifford explores and challenges 'the idolatries of eros' (the title of the Proust chapter), framing this 'idolatry' as a sustained but problematic attempt to replace a 'vertical' relation to the Other with a 'lateral', immanent substitute. We are offered textually rigorous and beguilingly insistent readings of writers like Bataille and Barthes that gently foreground in their work unexpected sympathies for Judeo-Christian notions of love, but constraints of space mean that these interpretations remain tantalizing rather than conclusive. Gifford's approach puts the premium on letting the texts under discussion speak in their own terms, and a sure-footed theoretical lightness of touch (though a little faltering in its occasional allusions to a vague notion of 'deconstructionism') ensures that Nietzsche, Freud and Lacan, though frequently present, never ventriloquize other authors. Gifford's arguments for the abiding relevance of a Genesis too often (mis)read through Augustine, and of a Song of Songs occluded in the refrain which chimes the Judeo-Christian attitude to love with superego tyranny, do present a welcome contrapuntal harmony to the insistent foregrounding of libidinal desire. This book provides, particularly through its tracing of the interplay of desire and transcendence, an important perspective on wider trends in the history of French literature and thought, while also offering a timely contribution to the current re-appraisal of religious themes in the field.