Love is not reduced to conjugality or passion: by approaching it as a set of gestures and practices, Michel Bozon shows that it is about giving and sometimes abandoning oneself. It is then exhaustion more than hatred that threatens in this peaceful vision of romantic relationships.
“There is no love, there are only proofs of love” Jean Cocteau said to one of the characters in Robert Bresson’s film, The ladies of the Bois de Boulognesuperb story of amorous revenge. These are the multiple and successive ways in which love is discovered, experienced, proven and sometimes withers until it dies, which Michel Bozon describes, in a lovely essay where he abandons scientific jargon for an alert style. and attractive. Passion, here, arouses curiosity less than a series of experiences, which ultimately relate to ordinary practices, and yet introduces “so much intensity into our lives” (p. 16). Love is then what enchants married life, and which is signified by a thousand small gestures. They are the ones described in literary texts, films, but also in the sociological surveys on which this book draws.
Donations and abandonments
The social science researcher barely hides behind the essayist, because it is indeed the banality of everyday life that is at issue here, but a banality transformed into an adventure when “life outside” has become “pale and petty”, as Musset once wrote in Confessions of a child of the century. This is not the place of the violence of amorous passion which bursts out in a flash of love, as when Werther sees Charlotte for the first time, surrounded by the six children to whom she gives their snack. “My whole soul was attached to his face, to his voice, to his bearing,” says Goethe’s hero.
Few people living as a couple (only 13%) say they have experienced love at first sight when meeting their future spouse. Contemporary society returns it to the realm of romantic myth, yet regularly reactivated in literature or cinema. We want to evoke here the moving meeting between the two heroines of Carolthe film by Todd Haynes. But this meeting takes place under the sign of the prohibition of a relationship that is both adulterous and homosexual. However, Michel Bozon’s ultimately phenomenological study concerns a world where the forbidden has almost disappeared, and where love functions as a norm and regulator, in a temporality which could be that of a classical symphony: the allegro appassionato of the beginnings, the sweet andante of the established relationship, the scherzo of the crises, and a finale in the form of an apotheosis or fall.
During the beginnings of love, the two protagonists enter into a series of intense exchanges which culminate in a “surrender of self”. This marks a real break with the representations of love in force until recently, when the vocabulary of war, hunting, or at best sacrifice still dominated. Women “gave” themselves at the risk of losing themselves since this gift was not followed by any counter-gift. The men, for their part, took. This fundamentally unequal relationship was not the only mark of relations between women and men in force in the Christian West. In the novel of Baïbars, this great Arab epic cycle of the Ottoman period and which takes place in the 13e century in Cairo and Damascus, the hero, in his young years, often protects his posterior against the amorous attempts of men who are excited by his beauty.
Nothing of the sort in the reports highlighted by Michel Bozon. The lovers build a relationship of interdependence, confide in each other, hand over their bodies, their time, their space, their friendly network, their past and even their dreams. Instead of being kidnapped or dreaming of an impossible beloved, according to the diagram illustrated by The Princess of Cleves or by The Duchess of LangeaisBalzac’s moving novel, love as it is practiced today, according to the standards of a liberalism considered in the broad sense, only exists in its fullness when the abandonments are reciprocal. We are, the author tells us, in a relationship of exchange which respects a certain logic of movement of goods (p. 49). These goods are no longer women, as in the theorization of Claude Lévi-Strauss, but everything that lovers can give of themselves to the other. However, as with Marcel Mauss, we give in order to receive, the exchange is as material as it is symbolic, and the surrender of oneself, like the gift of the potlatch, thus makes control over the other possible.
Love and violence
In this practice of love, the asymmetry of the sexes is no longer structural, but circumstantial, since in today’s world “gender inequalities are very present” (p. 76). The resulting imbalances often require “emotional labor” (p. 78) on the part of women. Michel Bozon tells us nothing about this emotional work. But he knows what it means to make his time, his availability, his attention available, and to abandon or put into the background his own ambitions and his deep desires. Women have substituted another for the sacrifice of their virtue: that of achieving true equality. And when the couple formed by Roger and Élisabeth Vaillant, the first reader of her husband’s texts and complacent listener to the stories of his antics with, undoubtedly, prostitutes, is cited as an example of marital relations that are certainly unequal, but full of complicity, we wonders. Could we imagine a man who would tell how, alone in a hotel room, he waits for his partner, rejoicing that on his return and to show him her love, she tells him about her escapades with beautiful young people, priced or not? Certainly, what Eric Fromm would have placed on the side of sadomasochism can be included among the manifestations of love. But what love is it then? In this apparently liberated form, are it not rather the old structures of bourgeois marriage which persist? The cuckolding there is ridiculous. The fate of the deceived or abandoned woman is melodrama, if not tragedy: she is “broken”.
Émile Durkheim had shown, in this classic of classics which is his study on suicide, that monogamy limits the horizon of women, “closes all avenues, prohibits all hopes, even legitimate ones”, while morals grant men “certain privileges which allow (them) to attenuate, to a certain extent, the rigor of the regime”. Men, according to Durkheim, unlike women, sought something other than sexual satisfaction in marriage. For Georg Simmel also love goes beyond its simple sexual manifestation; it involves the whole of life. Like Simmel, Michel Bozon partially dissociates love from sexuality. When the couple stabilizes, affectivity seems decisive. This does not mean that sexuality is absent. It is domesticated, predictable, probably provides less excitement but, it seems, more pleasure, because everyone knows the sensitivity of the other. Sexuality is therefore an element of this common domain which is constructed in married life and where the tasks to be accomplished are distributed in an increasingly unequal manner, fueling frustrations and bitterness.
Moments of reunion, gifts, little touches, are all ways of practicing love, when the common space risks withering and falling apart. Because even if time is not necessarily the barbarian that Brassens sang about, disenchantment threatens, transforming the familiar and the known into the foreign. It is this profoundly melancholy moment of unbinding, of modification, that Michel Bozon describes mainly using literary references, but a moment which prefigures a new encounter and a renewal. Nothing, or almost nothing, appears, in this almost sweet ending, of the ambivalences, of the conflict where love is intertwined with hatred. If the eruptive force of Eros is largely absent from Michel Bozon’s book, the physical but also symbolic violence which too often reigns in couples is only mentioned marginally.
What is given to us here is a blueprint, stripped of its dross, of everyday tensions: a sort of ideal type of love as it is mostly represented (and internalized) in heteronormative contemporary society. We can possibly regret that the marginal, minority or unorthodox figures of love are too little present. We think of these gray areas revealed, for example, by the recent publication of François Mitterrand’s letters to Anne Pingeot, of loves which take place almost in parallel on different scenes, and where relationships are negotiated over the long term. multiple modes of self-discovery. But all the culture, sensitivity and intelligence that Michel Bozon deploys in this essay must help us to recognize love as we sometimes have the chance to experience it, or to observe, with a touch of jealousy, the manifestations in others.