Dissymmetry of Love

The "dissymmetry of love" is McGowan's term for the structural principle that genuine love — as opposed to romance — is not organized around complementarity, reciprocity, or the mutual satisfaction of lack, but is constituted by an irreducible asymmetry and by disruption. Love, on this account, does not emerge from the smooth fitting-together of two subjects; it erupts precisely where that fitting fails. The disruption is not an accidental obstacle to love but its very generative condition: love lives on through dissymmetry because it is rooted in the encounter with the Other as genuinely Other — an encounter that cannot be absorbed into the subject's fantasy frame or reduced to a predictable object of desire.

This structure implies that love is not the satisfaction of lack but its intensification and productive re-routing. Where romance (capitalism's preferred form) converts the Other into an object of desire — a stand-in for the lost object, a vehicle for the subject's jouissance — love preserves the alterity of the Other, holding open the gap that fantasy would normally close. McGowan reads Aristophanes' speech in Plato's Symposium, ostensibly the paradigm of harmonic union, as itself secretly illustrating this dissymmetry: even the myth of two halves seeking wholeness encodes an asymmetry that undermines the fantasy of perfect complementarity. Love is therefore aligned, structurally, with the productive function of lack and the gap rather than with their imaginary resolution.

Within capitalism-and-desire-the-psyc-todd-mcgowan, the dissymmetry of love is a pivotal concept in McGowan's critique of capitalist ideology. It is positioned as what capitalism must neutralize: by transforming love into romance, capitalist ideology converts the Other — who should remain irreducibly other — into a mere objet petit a, an object that promises to fill the subject's lack rather than to sustain the productive encounter with it. The concept therefore sits at the intersection of McGowan's accounts of ideology (which operates by papering over constitutive antagonism and offering surplus-jouissance as a substitute for genuine relation) and desire (which, as the canonical definitions confirm, is structurally organized around lack and the gap rather than satisfaction).

The dissymmetry of love extends and specifies several of the cross-referenced canonical concepts. It is an application of the structural logic of the gap — the irreducible opening that prevents any system from closing — to the domain of intersubjective relation. It reframes lack not as something love would remedy but as what love sustains and even amplifies. It stands in contrast to the ideology of romance, which, like capitalist ideology more broadly, promises that lack can be made good. And it distinguishes love from both desire (which circles the lost object without reaching it) and jouissance (which the body compulsively repeats), positioning love as the operator — consistent with Lacan's formulation in Seminar X that love makes jouissance "condescend to desire" — that holds the gap open rather than filling it with fantasy or surplus-enjoyment.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free MarketsTodd McGowan · 2016 (p.197)

Love emerges out of a disruption, and it lives on through dissymmetry. Even the speech of Aristophanes, which seems like a monument to harmony, actually illustrates the necessary dissymmetry in love.

The phrase "lives on through dissymmetry" is theoretically loaded because it reverses the common assumption that love aims at equilibrium: "lives on" indicates that dissymmetry is not love's problem but its sustaining condition, while "even the speech of Aristophanes" performs a symptomatic reading — finding the structural truth of love (asymmetry, disruption) encoded in the very myth most committed to denying it (the myth of two halves finding wholeness).