OBJET A: IN YOU MORE THAN YOU

One could be forgiven for wondering, though, whether Cynthia's physical violence to her lover does not strain even the wide tolerance of courtly love, and push us closer to something like sadism. When Cynthia returns to Propertius' house after routing her rivals, she assumes the hauteur appropriate to a triumphant general and dictates terms of “surrender” to her lover (“accipe, quae nostrae formula legis erit”—“hear what my terms are,” 74)—but she also bites him until she draws blood, scratches his eyes, and beats him cruelly (65–67). The corpus as a whole has not prepared us for this—though elegy 3.8 had elaborated, at a purely theoretical level, the idea that violent behavior signals true love. In that elegy, Propertius had invited Cynthia to “prove” the depth of her affection by wounding his face, threatening his eyes, marking his neck (3.8.6–7, 21–22). Yet his invitation can only be sarcastic hyperbole in Book III: Cynthia may have raged at him verbally, but her worst physical gesture in the whole of the corpus thus far has been to push (dramatically, but

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harmlessly) a small, light food table at him as he reclined on a dining couch (3.8.3–4).^[43] In 4.8, by contrast, Cynthia does in fact wound her lover's face, eyes and neck, waxing physically violent for the first and only time in the corpus (64–66). She even exceeds his ironic invitation to violence extended in 3.8: there he had asked merely for a bruise on his neck to display to his envious peers as a sign of her love (“livor,” 3.8.22), but in 4.8 her “lovebite” draws blood (“imponitque notam collo morsuque cruentat ”—“she made her mark upon my neck and her bite drew blood,” 65).^[44] What has this savagery to do with love?

Everything: Cynthia bites and wounds the surface of her lover's body as yet another effect of the necessary asymmetry that founds the sexual (non)relation. Lacan's formulae of sexuation, with their emphasis on non-complementarity, essentially say that no relationship exists between what the loved one possesses and the lover lacks. Yet love and desire flourish somehow: what fills in the gap between what the lover wants from the beloved and what the latter has to give? Lacan answers “objet a ”—the mysterious object that is “in the beloved more than the beloved.” The lover loves something in the beloved of which the latter is unaware and cannot name (I can never articulate the exact cause of someone else's love for me).

Žižek draws our attention to the lover's experience of the beloved's body in order to dramatize the disjunction between the two positions. I can regard my lover's body as an object of aesthetic pleasure, or of sexual desire, or of biological study (the effect of flesh, blood, glands, and the like); yet I cannot translate one domain into the other (cannot, for example, see sexual attraction as entirely a matter of blood or muscles or pheromones, of biological determinism) because they belong to heterogeneous orders. Even if biochemistry successfully isolated the hormones that governed the rise, intensity, and duration of love, the actual experience of love qua event would still maintain its autonomy, its radical heterogeneity to its bodily cause. The body's depth can be read as extra-symbolic “cause” of the surface “effect”—but an effect already incommensurate with its cause, because surface and depth belong to heterogeneous orders.^[45] In this context, it makes sense to call Cynthia's laceration a “lovebite” (nota), even though the term is usually reserved for mere bruises. Her gesture sketches a desire to break the barrier between symbolized surface and depth; she breaks into her lover's body as if to draw out from it the fantasized objet a, the presumed object-cause of desire.^[46] She acts out Lacan's cryptic summary of love: “I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a —I mutilate you.”^[47]