A study on love , regardless of the method or sources used to inquire into this core experience, is always personal. I began this study as an exploration of those elements of intimacy that lead to relational breakdown: the destructive potential of love and intimacy. I wanted to understand love not as a concept, but as an experience that, despite good will on both sides, can end in mutual destruction. As a method of inquiry, I chose textual analysis of tragic love stories that reflected, to some degree, my own personal experience, as well as theories of love from psychoanalysis, the language of which resonated with my personal experience. What I discoveredāand what I slowly came to articulate in this bookāhad less to do with the positive element in love and its links to wisdom, which many works of philosophy and literature have discussed, than what I came to understand as idiocy : the element of intimacy that always seems to evade mastering and continually undermines love relations. Beyond the noble aspirations of wisdom and the sublime in intimacy, I found, I lacked a conception of what I came to call idiot love.
Love has been studied and discussed from a seemingly endless array of perspectives, using an ever-growing body of sources which are continuously being revised. For this reason, no claim is made of covering the vast field of love studiesāneither in literature and psychoanalysis, the bookās main fields of inquiry, nor in philosophy, a field I also invoke throughout. Instead, I focus on a limited number of sources, developing an approach to intimacy that aims not for the heights of loveās wisdom, but the lows of its idiocy āa concept that extends less to intellectual ability than to emotional capacities. The underlying argument, approached from different angles and developed using a variety of concepts, suggests that intimacy involves not solely outsmarting love or achieving the wisdom it can offer, but also, at the same time, integrating the experience of idiocy into our understanding of human relations. The book articulates the moving parts of this integration processāachieved by conceptualizing the emotional dynamics of intimacy, and especially the negative element in love.
The bookās title and core conceptāidiot loveāis a conjunction of the two literary texts discussed: The Idiot (1869) by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Bad Love (2007) by Catherine Breillat. This concept, which builds to a description of what I call the idiot love cycle , is first developed through a conceptual framework based on theoretical sources from psychoanalysis and poetics, especially the ways that the work of Melanie Klein resonates with Platonic and Aristotelian ideas. I parse Kleinās theories on love, including the complex dynamic emotional system she describes in deceptively simple and intuitive terms, to articulate an approach to love which integrates its destructive potential into the experience of intimacy. In some ways, the book can be seen as a meditation on Kleinās theories, always reflecting back on the covert influence of Platonic thought on her work. Yet it also develops into a sustained consideration of Dostoevskyās literary art and its influence on the work of French filmmaker Catherine Breillat. Kleinās theories set the tone for the book and its intention: facing the complexities of love, as described in theory and portrayed in literature, while maintaining a link to how our conceptions of intimacy constantly and deeply affect our real-life relations.
The book begins by delineating the dynamics of Kleinās complex system of emotions, extending her discussion of love to the concept of intimacy, while tracing the historical and intellectual lineage of Kleinās theories back to both the overt and covert influence of Platonic thought on Sigmund Freud and the field of psychoanalysis. I develop these links, including their connection to Aristotelian poetics, to emphasize the significance of literary representation for conceptions of intimacy. I then embark on an account of loveās destructive potential as portrayed in novels of tragic love. Using these interlinked paradigms, I explore the role of irony in bringing tension to the fore, and develop the notion of idiocy as a mode for coping with tension. Drawing examples from Dostoevsky and Breillat, I describe what I call the stages of idiot love, a cycle that, as the novels develop, ends in relational breakdown and mutual destruction. The last chapter looks beyond idiocy to wisdom and discusses the possibility of countering the destructive forces of love through creative unionāwhich involves facing the links between wisdom and anxiety . I end in a reflection on the roles of Freud and Klein in psychoanalytical theory, suggesting that, as historical-mythical figures, they represent an oscillation between Narcissus and Cassandra āone focused intently on the self, one focused intently on the otherāembodying the perpetual motion and tension that both creates and destroys love and intimacy.
The intense focus on the dynamics of intimacy, and especially relational breakdown, leaves many thinkers, philosophers, and critics who have written on the topic of love outside the bookās scope. These include Erich Fromm, J. David Velleman, Harry Frankfurt, Pascal Bruckner, Eva Illouz, John Armstrong, Carrie Jenkins, and Simon May. Perhaps more noticeably, the book refrains from extensively engaging with the work of Wilfred Bion or Donald Winnicott in the field of psychoanalysis, or Julia Kristeva or Martha Nussbaum in the field of literature and philosophy influenced by psychoanalysis. These great clinicians and scholars have all engaged deeply with the work of Melanie Klein, and their seeming omission lies exclusively in a desire to focus on weaving a thick intertextual fabric from the bookās main sourcesāa task sufficiently complex in its own right. In this sense, the book is not only a study but also an essay, putting a distinctive mark on a traditional task, and driving my narrow use of these sources. Many of these and other scholars who have written on Plato, Aristotle, Freud, and Klein, as well as Dostoevsky and Breillat, were consulted in the research for this book, and some of those not cited in the text appear as references. Similarly, certain matters of depth and breadth have been given up in order to stay focused on this more modest goal.
In mentioning method, it may also be useful to include a small note on terminology. One of the bookās main endeavors is to fuse language from literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis into a singular discourse for the complex dynamics of intimacy. This results in certain clusters of interrelated terms that should be considered together even when their links are not openly spelled out. An obvious example is the word psyche, a term used repeatedly in psychoanalysis to refer to the inner self, but which shares its roots with ancient Greek philosophical texts cited in the book, where it is usually translated as soul. In this book, psyche and soul are nearly interchangeableāespecially in light of parallels between Platoās tripartite theory of the soul and Freudās tripartite theory of the psyche, and my focus on the selfās inner elements in relation with others. With this in mind, I may write in parallel terms about drives, emotions, and fantasies; desires, feelings, and thoughts; or instincts, affects, and ideas. These clusters of terms, which reflect various discourses for describing the inner self in relation to the outside world, also represent different approaches to speaking about appetitive, sentimental, and mental elements of the self. The specific terms are less critical than the tripartite paradigm of elements of the psyche that occur simultaneously in the selfāand which may also be experienced by the other. This distinction also extends to my use of the words emotion and feeling, which are central to many discussions in the book and will often be used to designate specific elements of affect: emotion will almost always refer to any given affective phenomenon, while feeling will almost always refer to the experience of that affective phenomenon. So I might discuss the emotion of anger in one place in the text, and in another a literary character represented as feeling anger. The language in the book acquires a modular quality, as do its concepts, congealing into a discourse for the experience of idiot love.
This book is not the first to be written about love and its dark side. Yet, while many books provide compelling accounts of the nature of love, its reasons and values, how it works, why it hurts, or how it drives us crazy, most engage only cursorily with the mechanics of relational breakdown or the dynamics of mutual destruction in intimacy. This book is squarely focused on the negative element of love, on incorporating the notion of idiocy into conceptions of intimacyānot as a paradigmatic idea in its own right, but as part of broader understandings of love and intimacy found in other books. My focus on how love breaks down aims to make a case for our integrating and navigatingārather than outsmarting or defeatingāthe destructive potential in love and intimacy. The moral element of love is presumed, not argued, in an approach that is less speculative or prescriptive than reflective and descriptive. The issue I pursue has to do less with the good or bad parts of love in their own right than with how good intentions in love can still result in mutual destruction. I make no attempt to defend love against claims of immorality or unreason. I merely describe elements in love that, despite ourselves, keep undermining intimacy. Put another way, whereas many books focus on loveās good or bad parts separately, I aim to describe how they interact within a dynamic system, convinced that such an understanding can improve our ability to tolerateāthough never eradicateāthe destructive potential of intimacy.
The need to keep thinking about love, and exploring ways of processing its appearance in our lives, remains no matter how many times it has been represented in various forms and genresāas myth and epic, verse and epistle, poems and novels, or film noir and romantic comedies. We keep thinking about love no matter how many essays, manifestos, or treatises are written on the topic. We seek loveās wisdom, yet no matter how much we learn or study, we find still ourselves ignorant, acting like idiots. This perennial tension between wisdom and idiocy guides me in my inquiry into additional tensionsābetween concepts, between texts, between characters, between emotionsāthat appear in love. It provides this book its individual scope and breadth, shaping its discourse, molding its discussion, and tracing how our conceptions of intimacyāinfluenced as they are by literature and philosophyācan help us develop our capacity for love. The aim of this book...