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MINOR AND MAJOR LOVE IN OVID AND KUNDERA Radu Turcanu Writings on love, from Plato to psychoanalysis and postmodern literature, are often variants of an interpretive paradox: the desire for bodily pleasure may connote in men and women an urge similar to the quest for the Utopian wholeness of being. Following this dichotomy, the idea of love can be looked at as either a never-satiated want for erotic gratification or as a wish to redeem humans from the hybris of taking themselves as self-sufficient creatures endowed with godlike powers. Love would thus meetthe physical or meta-physicalneed to fiU an original lack in human nature. The paradox oflove stages then the drama, begun in illo tempore and continued throughout the historical ages, of the human body aUenated from the self (or soul?) and torn apart by instincts as punishment for its terrible offense against the gods. If there seems to be an irreconcilable tension between the terms ofthis paradox, or between what I shaU caU minor love and major Love, the contradiction is imperceptible rather than drastic. Passion and reason both speak, and—as in the Derridean pair difference/differance—their relation inside the structure oflanguage is one ofcoincidentia oppositorum. It is from this site that humans ground their love in the other and accompUsh the fundamental goal of their existence: to be given back the object—corporeal or ethereal—ofwhich they were deprived in a mythical time, be it childhood or the fabulous dawn of history, an object which would make them complete again. On these two registers conveying apparently contradictory messages and flowing continuously into each other, a dramatic opposition inside human reaUty is deployed as a matter of(mis)understanding: the pleasure taken from the body ofthe other is first contrasted to, then assimilated with, the painful quest for the beauty ofan unattainable beloved. These are in short the premises for my discussion on minor and major love. Along with references to several crucial contributions to the topic (Plato's Symposium, Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Lacan's Séminaire. Livre III: Les Psychoses; Livre XI: Les Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse; and The Seminar. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), my own preliminary conclusions wiU offer the theoretical background for the second part of this study, consisting of a reading of Uterary texts by Ovid (The Art of Love) and Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). I In the weU-known Platonic myth of the Symposium, men attempt to attack the divinities and therefore have their soul cut in two: "This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other. Love is born into every human being; it caUs back the halves of our original nature Vol. 19 (1995): 28 THE COMPAKATIST together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature" (27). Freud beUeved that beyond—and more original than—the life instincts, the reality principle, and the pleasure principle, a death drive is active in man. If, foUowing the pleasure principle, "the aim ofaU Ufe is death" (38), according to the death drive "the organism wishes to die only in its own way" (39); the latter drive would thus have the effect of a mechanism that defers, as wish fulfillments, the propensity of our being for a quick extinction. FinaUy, early in his Séminaire (1955-56, Livre III), Lacan points out that human desire is structured as "désir de l'autre" (50), which means both "desire for the other" and "desire of the other"1: as object of pleasure the beloved is a "small" other or "a smaU object o" (Ie petit objet a); in its turn, Love for the big Other takes place inside an inter-subjective relation, where pleasure transfigures its instinctual roots and becomes a falling not on the body but on the signifier of the other.2 Looking for a body in desire and looking for the end(s) ofcapricious pleasure characterize respectively minor and major love. As I see it here, their paradox describes, once again, how in both cases the lover is deluded by the identity of his (by which I constantly imply...

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