Wherefore Art Thou Romeo?
Cecilia Sjöholm
previously published in Med kärlek: En festskrift till Claudia Lindén
for #vii. lovesick
spring 25
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”
Juliet says this in the so-called balcony scene in Shakespeare’s drama, a key scene where Juliet expresses her despair while Romeo stands below and listens, without making himself known. She expresses a resentful sadness because she and Romeo come from two rival families. Why must you be Romeo, from that other family, why can’t you be someone else? And she continues: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name”. That that is – leave the family feud, our love is more important. Or else I will do it she says, I will give up my family name to be with my beloved. And further into the drama she says: “What’s in a name?”
If Jacques Lacan had been in this balcony scene and, instead of Romeo, had been the one secretly observing Juliet, he would have answered the last question: “Everything, Juliet, everything is in a name.” The name simply means everything – the father’s name. The father’s name, Juliet, is more than a family name, where the one family’s name that happens to be borne by you, while the other family name happens to be borne by Romeo. The father’s name is the most fundamental element in what I call the symbolic order, Lacan would have said, the order into which you, Juliet, were introduced by your name.
Everything is in a name, Juliet, your whole desperate longing for Romeo is found precisely in a name. For the father’s name is the order that will determine your love, what it looks like, with its illusions, its lies, its betrayals, its madness, its tragedies.
Jacques Lacan has described the fundamental importance of the act of naming for love, and the relationship to something that we might call normative, determining, paternal, or at least symbolically determinating. He describes how this naming of the father can determine how desire is formed in his analysis of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was a novel that was burned in the US in the twenties, because it was considered obscene and perverse – a side of love that was not tolerated. Joyce’s novel describes bodies, body parts, intimate scenes without the reference to romance that we associate with love. Nora is not a woman. She is body, sound, flesh. For Lacan, too, Joyce comes too close. There are too many senses, too little desire.
For Lacan, Joyce’s obsession with naming reveals that he is close to psychosis. At this limit, a continuous exploration of pleasure is possible, a pleasure that is not bodily but linguistic. Ulysses, Lacan writes, testifies to the way in which Joyce is dependent on a father symbol that he simultaneously denies. The father’s name is moved around, displaced and hidden behind other names in various ways in Joyce’s text: Jacob, Abraham, Daedalus … In this circulation of displacements we find Joyce’s symptom: an enjoyment of the act of writing itself that both affirms and denies the importance of the so-called paternal signifier.
The paternal signifier marks what Lacan calls the desire of the Other – its Herrschaft, Bewältigung. Its compulsion – I should not believe that I am free to love. My love is a complex mess of desires governed by rigid societal norms and an inaccessible symbolic power whose meaning we can never quite grasp. The power of the Father is almost sacred in its inaccessibility. The Father can perhaps be named. But what the Father wants, what he demands, cannot be represented.
In his seminar X, Angoisse, Anxiety, Lacan shows that the Other is an “unconsciousness formed as such”. This means that the Other cannot give me the answer to what it is that I actually desire. The Other “involves my desire insofar as he lacks something that he himself does not know what it is”.
So my desire is based on the way in which the Other forces me to search – without ever giving me an answer myself. In Anxiety and the short seminar On the Name of the Father, Lacan makes it clear that the Other is a signifier that, above all, commands: it appears as “the sovereign good God, a delirious idea that arose in Plato” or as “the Jewish God”, a God who demands the jouissance of the subject. This is the essence of anxiety: “Faced with this order ‘Jouis’, ‘Enjoy’, I can only answer one thing which is: ‘J’ouis (I hear)’. Of course, but of course I do not enjoy it so easily.”
In one form or another, under one name or another, the Other, this strange Father figure who is also the embodiment of something higher, the God, is a silent command from which we establish ourselves. But its law, its command, is something we can never completely fulfill.
That is why psychoanalysis has chosen the other path. The law of the Father is not something that demands anything of us. It is quite the opposite. It is a prohibition, a castration, the limit at which our desire takes hold which we can never go beyond, unless we want to fall into a complete delirium.
We can apply this to the relationship between Romeo and Juliet. Everything is in a father’s name, Lacan would say: this is where your love takes place. This is where you also find the limit of your love, the impossibility that makes your fairy tale with Romeo so beautiful, so tragic, a tragedy that is somehow also so inevitable. For you live at a dangerous limit, a limit that you should fear.
Lacan has not really done any reading of Romeo and Juliet. But he has done a reading of Hamlet. Hamlet is not only about melancholy and depression, it is about love, and perhaps the inability to love. In many ways, one could even argue that if Oedipus teaches Freud something about desire it is Hamlet that teaches Lacan something about love. Or rather: Hamlet teaches Lacan something about how difficult it is to love, he teaches him what the dangerous line that Romeo and Juliet cross is about. As you remember, Hamlet is loved by Ophelia who drowns herself as a result of a bewildering madness. Where does this madness come from? From the father being killed by Hamlet? Or is it triggered by Hamlet’s own madness, which we do not even know is real?
Perhaps it is triggered by Hamlet’s inability to return Ophelia’s love. In Hamlet’s mind, she is a fantasy, idealized, and fetishized. Just as Romeo and Juliet are to each other. But Hamlet sees through the dangerous passion that drives them to their deaths.
At the beginning of the play, Ophelia describes to her father the many signs of love that Hamlet shows her. But suddenly something changes. She tells her father Polonius about her encounter with Hamlet:
OPHELIA: My lord, as I was sewing in my chamber, Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced, No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, Ungartered, and down-gyvèd to his ankle, Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, And with a look so piteous in purport As if he had been loosèd out of hell To speak of horrors, he comes before me.
POLONIUS: Mad for thy love?
OPHELIA: My lord, I do not know, But truly I do fear it.
POLONIUS: What said he?
OPHELIA: He took me by the wrist, and held me hard. Then goes he to the length of all his arm, And with his other hand thus o’er his brow He falls to such perusal of my face As ‘a would draw it. Long stayed he so. At last, a little shaking of mine arm, And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He raised a sigh so piteous and profound That it did seem to shatter all his bulk And end his being. That done, he lets me go, And with his head over his shoulder turned He seemed to find his way without his eyes, For out o’ doors he went without their help, And to the last bended their light on me.
POLONIUS: Come, go with me. I will go seek the King. This is the very ecstasy of love, Whose violent property fordoes itself And leads the will to desperate undertakings As oft as any passion under heaven That does afflict our natures. […]
It is a faltering that Hamlet shows, not an inability to to approach love. But instead of idealizing and fantasizing, Hamlet is a modern subject, a subject that in many ways seems to be stuck in his inability to love. But the problem is not about that. The problem is that he realizes that he, Hamlet, held up Ophelia as an ideal object, a fantasy object – and he sees through the illusion!
So he caresses Ophelia and shakes his head …
After the scene described above, his love for Ophelia takes on a cruel form, where Hamlet starts reminding Ophelia that she is really a fantasy, in himself – he avoids her, ghosts her. Once upon a time I loved you, he says … but explains nothing. Those around him blame melancholy. But in reality it’s because he’s seen through his own imagination. He is left with a tremendous emptiness. But at the same time the scene of love is reversed. It is no longer Hamlet who has loved, it’s Ophelia.
A fetish is something intangible that we cling to, whose unattainability we also submit to. In Hamlet’s love, which is a kind of extension of courtly culture, Ophelia fulfills the function of a fetish. And when Hamlet becomes unable to meet her, when he sees instead that he is trapped in himself, unable to love, he reverses in many ways the terms of how courtly love should be perceived. In the end, it is not Hamlet who worships Ophelia, it is Ophelia who worships Hamlet, it it is not Ophelia who is exalted and untouchable, it is Hamlet who is the real enigma of courtly love – untouchable by others and by himself. He is caught up in his fantasies, in an idealization whose origin he does not understand.
Perhaps the modern are paralyzed in and by the way subjectivity has been constructed. The oedipal drama of the birth of desire in Freud is transformed into a Hamletian drama of the end of desire, of the eclipse of desire when the unconscious desire is transformed into a paralyzing and guilty form of knowledge.
Why, Lacan asks, are the moderns more neurotic than the ancients? The answer has to do with knowledge. The moderns reflect love as if it were an illusion, a pathology, something that has to do with idealization. Hamlet knows all that Oedipus did not knew. Therefore, he also becomes paralyzed and unable to love.
Can there be true love at all? Yes, but we may have to understand and face its incompleteness, that it does not always follow the ideals.
A documentary film that came out a few years ago, and which became a topic of debate, puts Lacan’s ideas about modern love in an explanatory light. It was made by a Swedish filmmaker, Nahid Persson, and her story with Anders. Anders, like herself, is middle-aged, lonely, lovesick, full of life and interests. He is a former elite tennis player and now a respected coach, handsome with long hair – a close friend of Björn Borg and quite similar in appearance. He is lovable, full of attention, patient, and of course also has a healthy sexuality. As Nahid, the narrator of her own movie, describes it: he is too good to be true.
Nahid thinks life with Anders is perfect. Until one day she is struck by a suspicion. Something comes to light when she looks at Anders’ Facebook page. Several women are writing loving comments, with hearts as emojis. Nahid begins to suspect that everything is not right. She checks his account and connects with other women through it. It could have been a movie about a midlife crisis. But what Nahid begins to realize is that Anders is not dating another woman, or two or three. He’s dating 23 other women, at the same time as her. And that’s the beginning of the movie – it’s called Anders, Me and His 23 other women – and in many ways it’s about how true love doesn’t look like we think it does.
Do you love me? Nahid asks. Anders of course says yes I love you, I really want to be with you. I can only be with you if you tell me the truth, says Nahid. I tell you the truth, says Anders.
Nahid gets Anders to start couples therapy with her. In the movie it seems like a trial – he is forced to tell the truth. When she asks Anders something, Anders always says yes. Yes, I love you. Yes, I want to live with you. Yes, I will give up all my other women. He is telling the truth, of course. It’s just that he’s telling the same truth – maybe – to the 23 other women too.
To Nahid, and the other women, Anders is a pathological liar, a psychopath. But for those of us watching the movie, we see something different. This is a man who has completely submitted to the desires of the Other, the Other which in this context is the combined desires of all 23 women. When Anders says the truth, it is an attempt to satisfy the Other who wants something from him.
In Les Noms du Père, Lacan shows that it can be an expression of anxiety. In anxiety, freedom does not appear as an attractive possibility. Anxiety is the fear of a lack of desire – and that desire is aroused and perpetuated in a submission to the Other who tells me what I want. The anxiety-ridden subject needs to imagine how it can satisfy the Other, to avoid the void. In the state of anxiety, it is only submission to the Other that unties the knots of anxiety – submission to the fantasy of what the Other wants – it is not I who desire, I give the Other what he wants. What emerges is a subject who always says yes. A subject who always wants to satisfy. It is a subject who is most of all afraid that the Other’s desire – what he desires from me – will fail. So I say yes.
And here is the problem of the sex addict. He says yes. Not to disappoint. Not to cheat. But because they have to. The sex addict’s compulsion is just that – a compulsion to love, again and again. To the outside world, of course, Anders appears to be a liar. But to Anders himself he’s just following the will of the women – a call to love that ultimately comes from a power far stronger than himself
When he says he loves, Anders is telling the truth. He dares nothing else, in this compelling trial that love is – for him.
What is in a name, Julia asked? Everything, Lacan would have answered her: it is in the name of the father that we find the key to the symptoms that mark the crooked relationship of the moderns to love, their fetishizations, their idealizations, their systematizations. Even in the case of Romeo and Juliet, who in their purity and innocence still choose to balance on the precipice, they are driven to choose each other. According to the logic of the paternal law, they choose each other not in spite of the family feud, but because of it, unaware that their love story began long before they were born.
Shakespeare’s lovers are modern, that is, neurotic in the face of paternal laws. But what remains today, are there any symptoms left to explore? The diversity of forms of love that stands before us today testifies that the illusions of love have long since been seen through. What remains? How can we idealize, fetishize, create new acts of love madness?
Maybe we don’t have to. Maybe it’s time that we, like Anders, no longer ask what symptoms drive our love. Maybe it’s time instead that we, like Anders, simply just say yes.
References
Lacan, Jacques, Le Désir et son Interpretation (Paris: La Martinière, 2013).
Lacan, Jacques, The Sinthome, translation A.R. Price (London: Polity, 2016).
Lacan, Jacques, Anxiety, translation A.R. Price (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).
Shakespeare, William, Romeo and Juliet, prepared by Jill Levenson and Barry Gaines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, prepared by Cedric Watts (Stansed: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2023).
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