In Praise of Forgiveness

Massimo Recalcati (Author), Alice Kilgarriff (Translated by)

9781509534890, Polity Press

Hardback, published 3 July 2020

200 pages
20.1 x 13.5 x 1.5 cm, 0.295 kg

�Fascinating and provocative, this book sizzles with critical passion. It is fed by a deep knowledge of the vagaries of love in our nihilistic, �hyper-hedonist� times and by psychoanalytic insight. The addition of riveting cases makes this a pithy and important work.�
Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness

Relationships fall apart, marriages fail, couples break up – it happens to us all. Time corrodes passion and the routines of daily life kill the excitement that surrounds the emotion of the first encounter. The difficulty of uniting sexual pleasure with love, which Freud considered to be the most common neurosis in any love life, has become emblematic of a truth that seems undeniable: desire is destined to die if its object is not constantly renewed, if we do not change partner, if it is closed for too long in the restrictive chamber of the same bond.  

And yet what happens to these bonds when one of the two partners betrays the other, when the promise fails, when there is another emotional experience cloaked in secrecy and deceit? What happens if the traitor then begs forgiveness? Are they asking to be loved again and, having declared that it is not like it used to be, now want everything to go back to how it was? Should we make fun of lovers in their attempts to make love last? Or should we try to face up to the experience of betrayal, with the offence caused by the person we love most? Should we not perhaps attempt to praise forgiveness in love?

Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. The Ideology of the New
The Contemporary Degradation of Love Lives
Resignation or Dopamine?
Narcissistic Love
Two Lies in Our Time
The New Libertine Ideology
Love as Resistance to the Libertine Worship of the New


2. Encounter and Destiny
Love as Oedipal Repetition
Falling in Love with Ourselves
The Scream of Life
The Debate over Barolo
The Sexual Relationship Does Not Exist
We Are Loved Not Because of Something, But ‘Because of Everything’
The Loving Encounter is the Birth of a World
Disappointed Love

The Eros of the Encounter
Fidelity
The Face and the Eternal


3. Trauma and Abandonment
A Captive Freedom?
Albertine
Is the Promise of Love Always False?
Is the Promise of Love Always False?
“It’s Not Like It Used To Be”
What Is A Trauma?
The First Blow
Trauma is the Flipside of Repression
Trauma in Love
Falling into Non-Sense
The Fall This Side of the Mirror
A Wound With No Cure
Abandonment


4. The Work of Forgiveness      
Courageous Love
The Adulterous Woman
To Forgive the Unforgiveable?
Reflection by the Subject
The Impossibility of Forgiving Out Of Love
The Work of Forgiveness and The Work of Mourning
Forgiveness and Gratitude
Why Men Find It More Difficult to Forgive
Violence Without Law
Violence and Love
The Tender Assassin
Absolute Exposure to Love
Virgil’s Gloves
Narcissism and Depression
Woman’s Foreign Language
“They Are All Whores!”
Killing Them In Order To ‘Love’ Them
The Joy of Forgiveness?
Forgiving Oneself

Subject Areas: Psychology [JM]