Charles MacKay isn’t much of a sociologist or even a particularly good historian, but he has a fantastic eye for anecdotes. A story that’s always particularly stuck in my mind from his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is this one, from his chapter on alchemy, totally orthogonal to that topic but irresistable. A young Raimond Llull, Catalan philosopher and original Wheel of Fortune fan, keeps hassling this lady who’s absolutely not interested. She tells him as much, over and over again, but it doesn’t matter. So her radical solution is that she just tears open her blouse in front of him, showing him her breasts but also that she’s got a nasty-looking cancer on one of them. “This is what you love,” she says, and suddenly it turns out that Llull doesn’t actually love that – he’s totally cured.
I thought at the time that this was a tactically pretty remarkable gambit. To destroy an unwanted affection, you sacrifice your own image in the eyes of another, not by being self-deprecating – which the other can always regard as a lie or, probably rightly, as an invitation for affirmation that makes the other’s affection valuable to you no matter how unwanted – but by giving the other exactly what s/he wants. You expose the bare reality of yourself, exactly what the other wants to see, but in so doing you expose that reality as not desirable – as marked by a physical flaw or, as moralized in the account from which MacKay takes the story, by the curse of mortality. The other’s desire recoils in horror (and ideally, in this particular account, gets caught by Jesus on the rebound*).
I was rereading Stendhal’s On Love the other day and it changed my thinking on this. I hadn’t really grokked before that the process of “crystallization” he describes – the process by which our imaginations turn a regular person into the only object worthy of love – can operate on literally any trait, beautiful or ugly, transforming it into a virtue uniquely possessed by the beloved. Suppose, as Stendhal does, that the transvaluations produced by this process have a lasting effect on our sensorium, and you have an early theory (more complete than Rousseu’s practice) of perversion.
From this point of view, the gambit employed by Llull’s stalking victim looks especially risky. What prevents Llull from turning her cancer into a beauty mark, which is what the troubadour next door would have done? What prevents him from reconfiguring disease and mortality as desirable in themselves, rather than as disgusting? Again, Stendhal provides the answer: Llull isn’t in love, he’s just DTF. Amour-physique, not amour-passion or any of the other, more complex amour-flavors. In this case, crystallization may fail to take place simply because the lover doesn’t actually love this person in particular; s/he loves bodies in general. If a given love object turns out not to have the kind of body in which Llull’s interested, his desire recoils.** So, a good gambit for filtering out people who only love you because you have a body; but, if they’re actually in love with you, if they’re already (as inevitably in such cases) imagining what you are, then you’re only going to get yourself in deeper. Si tu es pris(e) dans le reve d’un(e) autre, tu es foutu(e).
* Note, this means that Jesus is Llull’s second choice: he would rather have had the girl, but she (and all flesh) turns out to be mortal and thus liable to abandon you (by dying). Jesus isn’t as pretty, but at least he’ll stick around. That’s an attitude shared by a lot of Medieval Christians, who have already lost faith in their god as the highest good.
** Llull’s physically normalizing rejection of the cancerous body is about what we would expect. Again to take the moral that MacKay’s source draws, though, what kind of culture trains someone to desire only bodies that are going to be around forever? Medieval Latin Christendom, I guess, but also one that presents (via film, TV, etc) the images of beautiful young people long after those people have ceased to be young, or alive.