Summary of romantic decomposition. THE you arethe “what is it”, of the Greeks was applied very early to love, embodied by Eros and of which the guests of the Banquet of Plato questioned nature. Thus we distinguished the faithful Eros, attached to the soul, from the vulgar Eros, aspiring only to the enjoyment of the body. Aristophanes evokes in the same Socratic dialogue these spherical primordial beings composed of male/female, male/male or even female/female halves, which Zeus had split in two to prevent them from conquering Olympus. Since then, we have been searching for our missing part… Love, when it ends, is also of interest to philosophy. Claire Marin devoted a notable essay to breakups, including the end of a romantic relationship (Breakup(s), Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2019). In Dislike by Fabienne Brugère, it is not so much the end of a story as the process of disintegration of the feeling of love that the author ofWe are not born a woman, we become one (Stock, 2019) analysis. Disenchantment, the object of his reflection, is dissected through the various stages of decomposition of the bond which united two people, or a being to an ideal, to a country… In the solitude of abandonment or the coldness of indifference, we wonder how we could have been loved and no longer be loved, how we could have burned with such flame yesterday and today experienced nothing but nothing emotion. From overflow to nothing… It’s incomprehensible! This kind of mystery is as astonishing as that of the passage from life to death. No matter how much we reason with ourselves, how much we stop ourselves from loving so as not to suffer from emotional amputation, so as not to let ourselves be caught up in the gap of absence, intelligence is powerless to console a bereaved heart. Hume does not say it any other way: “Reason is and must only be the slave of the passions; she can never fulfill any other office than that of serving and obeying them. »
Fabienne Brugère details the “three Ds: disappointment, distance, and detachment”. A specialist in aesthetics and philosophy of art that she is, the author of Dislike However, do not forget the lessons of the Ancients on the good life, particularly those of the Stoics. We cannot act against disenchantment, but on our own behavior, yes! Failing to uproot the roots of a sorrow that we can do nothing about, we must behave “as if” – maintain an upright and open attitude towards the world and others. So this way of being, more than a social action or an aesthetic pose, invites us to be in another way and will constitute the beginnings of an existential change. And hence, the first steps towards healing. The subtitle of this essay is, let us remember, “manual for a return to life.” »
Fabienne Brugère
Dislove. A Return to Life Manual
Flammarion
Edition: 5,000 copies.
Price: €21; 231 pp.
ISBN: 9782080441959
){kind=link}