Courtly Love

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (19)

1. #01

   Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96

   Dr Lacan

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's poetic structure—particularly the Narcissus/mirror motif and the figure of Beatrice in courtly love—to argue that the objet petit a (o-object) is non-specular: it appears as an image of nothing, and this structure of sublimation (where jouissance is withdrawn) establishes a privileged equilibrium between truth and knowledge that poetic construction can illuminate more directly than psychoanalytic theory alone.

   it is that of courtly love in so far as we can locate in it in an outstanding fashion the terms (I) the ego ideal, (o) the o-object, i(o) the image of o, foundation of the ego, and $.

2. #02

   Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.238

   Seminar 15: Wednesday 19 March 1969

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses a semi-autobiographical digression on surrealism, Sartre, and student militancy to frame a critique of ideology-critique as self-defeating repetition, then pivots to position sublimation—especially courtly love—as the more productive terrain before gesturing toward the drive-level account of sublimation (the bell/grelot figure) and the broader subversion of the function of knowledge that psychoanalysis enables.

   I did not underline that in this institution of courtly love, in principle, the woman does not love. Or at least one does not know anything about it.

3. #03

   Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.95

   **VII** > A love letter *(une lettre d'amour)*

   Theoretical move: Lacan advances that analytic discourse emerges from scientific discourse precisely to reveal that speaking of love is itself a jouissance, and that the soul—far from being a psychological presupposition—is an effect of love ('hommosexual' elaboration), while feminine jouissance points toward the question of the Other's knowledge, which scientific discourse forces us to think without recourse to any Supreme Being's supposed knowledge of the Good.

   Next I made an allusion to courtly love, which appeared at the time at which hommosexual amusement had fallen into supreme decadence... Courtly love shone as brightly as a meteor in history and afterward we witnessed the return of all the bric-a-brac of a supposed renaissance of stale antiquities.

4. #04

   Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.166

   Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973** > **Seminar 7: Wednesday 20 February 1973**

   Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual non-relationship is irreducible: love operates in a 'hommosexual' (soul-to-soul) register that bypasses sex, courtly love was a historically singular meteor rather than a dialectical synthesis, and the question of woman's enjoyment opens onto whether the barred Other itself knows — with the conclusion that attributing omniscience to the Other (or to God/woman) actually diminishes rather than enriches love.

   the invention of courtly love, is not at all the fruit of what people are used, like that, in history, to symbolise by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. There is of course not the slightest synthesis... Everything that was seen after courtly love, is something that shone, like that, in history, like a meteor.

5. #05

   Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.85

   Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

   Theoretical move: By analysing a clinical case (Lebovici) where misidentification of the phobic object as "phallic mother" and countertransferential interventions drive the subject from phobia into perversion and ultimately passage à l'acte, Lacan argues that conceiving the analyst as a real object (the "bundling" model) distorts the analytic relation and produces pathological rather than therapeutic effects.

   Everything we know about the practice of courtly love and the whole sphere in which it was localised in the Middle Ages implies a very rigorous technical elaboration of the approach to love that entailed a long practice of restraint in the presence of the loved object, aiming to make a reality of what lies beyond

6. #06

   Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.106

   Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > THE PRIMACY OF THE PHALLUS AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

   Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's case of the young homosexual woman to argue that the structure of desire is organized around lack: what is loved in the beloved is precisely what she lacks (the phallus/child as imaginary substitute), and that Freud's countertransference error lay in making a mere desire real by premature interpretation, collapsing the symbolic plane onto the imaginary.

   It's truly a sacred love, so to speak, or courtly love in its most devotional form... It instates lack in the relationship with the object as the very realm in which an ideal love can blossom.

7. #07

   Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.223

   **XIV** > **XVI**

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's cosmological argument for crime and a reading of Freud's death drive to establish that the drive is not a natural instinct toward equilibrium (entropy) but a historically articulated, signifier-dependent will to destruction and creation ex nihilo — a "creationist sublimation" that points to Das Ding as the foundational beyond of the signifying chain, and that sublimation (exemplified by courtly love) locates its object in this same place of being-as-signifier.

   You have to admit that to place in this beyond a creature such as woman is a truly incredible idea... If the incredible idea of situating woman in the place of being managed to surface, that has nothing to do with her as a woman, but as an object of desire.

8. #08

   Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.117

   **VIII**

   Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kant's moral fable to expose the limits of the reality/pleasure principle as a criterion for ethics, arguing that sublimation and perversion both open onto a different register of morality oriented by das Ding (the place of desire), and re-grounds sublimation theoretically by distinguishing it from symptomatic repression through the drive's capacity to find its aim elsewhere without signifying substitution.

   namely, the Minne, or, in other words, a certain theory and practice of courtly love... it concerns certain traces within us of the object relation that are unthinkable without these historical antecedents

9. #09

   Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170

   **XI** > **XII** > **A critique of Bernfeld** > **A CURIOUS CASE OF SUBLIMATION**

   Theoretical move: By reading Arnaud Daniel's scatological poem within courtly love, Lacan demonstrates that sublimation does not require the disappearance of the sexual object but instead involves the construction of a refined symbolic apparatus around a cruel, empty Thing — the Lady's very crudity is what unveils Das Ding at the heart of sublimation.

   I don't think it a waste of time for me to read you a piece of evidence from the file of courtly love that even the specialists themselves literally don't know what to do with.

10. #10

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.153

    **XI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's ego-psychological account of sublimation (which grounds it in pre-given *Ichziele*) in order to pose the real problem: how a social consensus can originate a structural function like the poetic, and then demonstrates that courtly love is the paradigm case — a historically emergent, signifier-driven construction of the Lady as sublimated object that reshapes the entire economy of desire and social exchange.

    it is precisely that kind of consensus we see born at a certain historical moment around the ideal of courtly love. For a certain highly restricted circle, that ideal is to be found at the origin of a moral code, including a whole series of modes of behavior, of loyalties, measures, services, and exemplary forms of conduct

11. #11

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.120

    **VIII**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the defining formula of sublimation — "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing" — as the key to understanding how the drive finds satisfaction beyond its aim, and he illustrates this via courtly love and a concrete fable of collecting, arguing that sublimation reveals the relationship of the drive to das Ding as distinct from any imaginary object.

    The whole theory of the Minne or of courtly love has, in effect, been decisive… This mode was created deliberately… a moral code instituted an object at the heart of a given society… The object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing as we define it in our Freudian topology.

12. #12

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.169

    **XI** > **XII** > **A critique of Bernfeld**

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bernfeld's account of sublimation as dependent on a synchrony with repression and the Ich/Libidoziele distinction, arguing instead that sublimation must be articulated around das Ding — a primordial, non-object — which precedes the ego's aims and anchors the properly Freudian ethics/aesthetics Lacan is developing throughout Seminar VII.

    you saw last time, in connection with the sublimation involved in the moral code of courtly love, the beginnings of the emergence of an ideal type.

13. #13

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.44

    **Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > <span id="page-31-0"></span>**SET A N D CHARACTERS**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the structure of Greek love (erastes/eromenos) as a purified pedagogical model for theorizing the lover as desiring subject and the beloved as possessing something the lover lacks, thereby grounding the psychoanalytic concepts of desire, transference, and love in a single dialectical framework; simultaneously, he insists that homosexuality remains a perversion regardless of its cultural sublimation, and introduces the axiom that "love is giving what you don't have."

    we must refer back to what I said last year about courtly love. It wasn't the same thing, but it served an analogous function in the society.

14. #14

    Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.121

    **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *AGATH ON*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Agathon's speech in the Symposium is a deliberately ironic, "macaronic" discourse in which the tragic poet reveals love as what is radically unclassifiable and always inopportune — always lagging behind — and that this comic-tragic ambivalence is structurally necessary: in the Christian context, love fills the void left by the inexorable fatal oracle and the commandment of the second death, which can no longer be sustained.

    to compare them with the headings of kind deeds and honesty in courtly love, as we discussed them last year. It would thus be easy for you to see that it is impossible to be satisfied when Léon Robin relates Agathon's list to the Carte du Tendre.

15. #15

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.100

    *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*

    Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the structural distinction between love and desire: love is a natural, hydraulic force grounded in narcissistic libido, whereas desire is constituted by lack—specifically the lack of the phallus in the other—and can never coincide with love without collapsing into narcissism. This distinction grounds the clinic of hysteria and obsession and is anchored retrospectively in Plato's Symposium as the founding articulation of the subject of desire.

    this *noli me amare*, which is the true secret, the true final word of the ideal passion of this courtly love whose term... I placed for very good reasons... at the horizon of what I articulated last year

16. #16

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.129

    *Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*

    Theoretical move: The neurotic's defining feature is the desire to know — specifically to reverse the effacing of the thing by the signifier and recover the real that preceded signification — and this structure, rather than social maladjustment, gives neurosis its theoretical authority; meanwhile, sublimation is reframed as a paradoxical detour through signification by which jouissance is obtained without repression.

    the outlines of it which may be given precisely in certain paradoxical points of the Christian tradition, courtly love for example, this was in order to underline for you the quite bizarre singularities... of certain sonnets by Arnaut Daniel for example which open up to us very curious perspectives on what the relationships between the lover and his lady effectively represented.

17. #17

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.182

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *The Love Object as Refound*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimatory love—paradigmatically courtly love—elevates the love object to the dignity of the Thing precisely by installing it as an interchangeable narcissistic image rather than a singular being; the objet a functions as the "remainder of the real" that condenses the Thing into a refound lost object, explaining why desire solidifies around a particular object with irresistible but unnameable intensity.

    Lacan's quintessential paradigm of sublimation is courtly love… the lover of courtly poetry does not venerate a flesh-and-blood woman, but rather an imaginary object that fulfills his fantasy (of recovered jouissance) from a distance.

18. #18

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.252

    8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *8. The Sublimity of Love*

    Theoretical move: This notes section develops a series of theoretical positions linking Das Ding, lost object, courtly love, and the enigma of the Other's desire to show how love operates as a vehicle for the subject's approach to the Thing—always fleetingly—and how love's interpellation can momentarily suspend ordinary socio-symbolic identification.

    The Lady is never characterized for any of her real, concrete virtues, for her wisdom, her prudence, or even her competence. Courtly love, in this sense, has nothing to do with the woman herself, but merely with her status as a 'signifier'

19. #19

    Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.213

    <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Thing or No-thing

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* is not merely Freud's technical term for the unknowable kernel of perception, but the Real core inhabiting the very heart of the Imaginary, thereby redefining the imaginary as the power of the veil (appearance over emptiness) and sublimation as the art of making das Ding simultaneously present and absent — with 'extimacy' as the structural name for this paradox.

    It is this very conjunction of a continually regenerated fascination with an essential inaccessibility that marks courtly love with the character of sublimation, indeed, that makes courtly love 'an exemplary form, a paradigm, of sublimation'.