In this series on the body, it is impossible not to evoke the immense question of eros, especially on this Valentine’s Day.
Subject to the same reductive logic as Grimm’s tales under the “Disney cut”, Eros, this god who is nevertheless entirely amoral, has become in recent days a cute and harmless cherub, stuck on the windows of the CPE, distributing red glitter and cinnamon candies. It is also celebrated in its consumerist dimension, offering mostly heteronormative and monogamous couples the opportunity to “rekindle” the flame, for a dinner at the restaurant or a weekend at the hotel.
Eros and its increasingly — fortunately — diversified and inclusive variations nevertheless spread out in our lives in a wide spectrum of experiences, having both this propensity to project us into a sudden impression of accessing the divine, then to throw us into the abyss of our personal hells, sometimes in an infinitely short space of time.
If Eros summons an immense part of shadow, in its tipping point offered to power relations, to the objectification of the other and to the most disembodied gratifications of humanity, it is also the place of the highest expression refinement of which humans are capable.
On this interface of eros between the intimate and the social, listen to this podcast (https://www.binge.audio/podcast/le-coeur-sur-la-table) which brilliantly addresses this necessary social conversation on the deconstruction of internalized models of domination, the recasting of the ethics of consent and the breakdown of the institution of the monogamous couple. There is even talk of a “romantic revolution” which, if it does not spare us the pains of love, may well spare us a dilution of our personal path in that of the dominant myth of our time.
Because it uplifts us, crushes us, kills us and makes us alive all at the same time, Eros is, from a psychological point of view, first and foremost an energy involved in transformation, and, therefore, , it is in the singular stories that we can apprehend the most of its power and its paradoxes.
“Like a wave too big, I’m coming to break”
Installed in one of the rooms of my imaginary museum, these words of Desjardins and something of eros are amalgamated in a kind of inevitable stopover in the amnesic journey of my personal genealogy of love. Like you, I have more or less consciously archived a series of residual artefacts of these rises-followed-falls characteristic of the feeling of love which, literally, “passes through our bodies”.
Depending on the era, the framing and the evocations, I remember a series of Terrence Malik close-ups: hair that hugs the back of the neck in the most beautiful way possible, imprints left on my own skin by a collarbone, a taste of cherry “lipsyl”, the sound of laughter enclosed in a tiny case placed on a bedside table, or even the exact reminder of this precise way in which light embraces a silhouette, to detach it from the rest. There are also, in my museum, currents of air listed by date, in homage to this ability they had, in tune with a slowing down of time, to transform the wind and the space between me and the another into a great declaration of war on the stability of my life.
The interior constructions of eros, if they are the seat of many wounds, also conceal their share of splendor and poetry for any archaeologist of the human psyche who is busy revealing them. Central theme of many psychotherapeutic approaches, the famous Freudian “repetition compulsion”, if it is sometimes desperate, can also be understood as this tireless attempt to return to the original scene of our love theaters, in the hope of finally change the last act. In this perspective, the feeling of love, whether it is illusory, projected or consumed in “real life”, has this undeniable transformative potential, as long as we invite the consciousness to do so. Only remains compulsive what is repeated without being aware of it, digests it, suffers it and integrates it.
Let us think of what the great post-separation torrents trigger in us, the tender embraces placed on physical and psychic scars, the revelations of power found in previously forbidden or unknown pleasures!
But think also of all those floors that welcomed us, curled up against the void that sucked us in through our stomachs, of those trains of tears that made us thin for days on end, of how the torture of breaking up is too often trivialized in stories of love modernity. We would have to “move quickly to something else”, regulate the conditions of custody, material goods and hang our illusions on other bodies and other figures. We often overlook the stage of self-disintegration that any great authentic transformation implies when it “passes through the body”.
In the stories of many people, eros, in its full experiential density, certainly participates in the fundamental adventure of becoming oneself.