The first act of Sygne, the heroine of Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie Claudel’s The Hostage, is that of what, following Freud, Lacan calls Versagung: the radical (self-relating) loss/renunciation of the very fantasmatic core of her being.
First, I sacrifice all I have for the Cause-Thing that is for me more than my life; what I then get in exchange for this sacrifice is the loss of this Cause-Thing itself
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We should therefore assume the risk of countering Levinas’s position with a more radical one: others are primordially an (ethically) indifferent multitude, and love is a violent gesture of cutting into this multitude and privileging a One as the neighbor, thus introducing a radical imbalance into the whole.
In contrast to love, justice begins when I remember the faceless many left in shadow in this privileging of the One. Justice and love are thus structurally incompatible: justice, not love, has to be blind; it must disregard the privileged One whom I “really understand.”
What this means is that the Third is not secondary: it is always-already here, and the primordial ethical obligation is toward this Third who is not here in the face-to-face relationship, the one in shadow, like the absent child of a love-couple.
This not simply the Derridean-Kierkegaardian point that I always betray the Other because toute autre est un autre, because I have to make a choice to select who my neighbor is from the mass of the Thirds, and this is the original sin-choice of love.
The structure is similar to the one described by Emile Benveniste regarding verbs: the primordial couple is not active-passive, to which the middle form is then added, but active and middle (along the axis of engaged-disengaged).
The primordial couple is Neutral and Evil (the choice which disturbs the neutral balance) or, grammatically, impersonal Other and I — “you” is a secondary addition.
To properly grasp the triangle of love, hatred and indifference, one must rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception which only introduces existence.
The truth of the universal proposition “Humans are mortal” does not imply the existence of even one human, while the “less strong” proposition “There is at least one human who exists (i.e., some humans exist)” implies their existence.
Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from universal proposition (which defines the content of a notion) to existence only through a proposition stating the existence of — not the at least one element of the universal genus which exists, but — at least one which is an exception to the universality in question.
What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition “I love you all” acquires the level of actual existence only if “there is at least one whom I hate”— a thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity always led to the brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity. 182
… true love … can emerge only against the background —not of universal hatred, but— of universal indifference: I am indifferent toward All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love you, the unique individual who stands/sticks out of this indifferent background.
Love and hatred are thus not symmetrical: love emerges out of universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love.