TEARS.
Particular propensity of the lover to cry:
modes of appearance and function of tears
in this subject.
1. The slightest amorous emotion, of happiness or of ennui, brings Werther to tears. Werther often, very often, cries, and cries abundantly. Is it the lover who cries in Werther, or the romantic?
Could this be a disposition of the amorous type, to abandon himself himself to tears? In submission to the Imaginary, he thumbs his nose at the present-day censure that keeps the adult in exile from tears, and by which a man must protest his virility (Piaf's maternal compassion and satisfaction: "Mais, vous pleurez, Milford!") By liberating his tears from constraint, he follows the orders of the amorous body, which is a bathed body, a fluid expansiveness: crying together, flowing together: delectable tears consummate the reading of Klopstock that Charlotte and Werther perform together. Where does the lover claim the right to tears, if not in a reversal of values whose first target is the body? He accepts the rediscovery of the infant
What's more, here, the amorous body is the double of a historical body. Who will write the history of tears? In which societies, in which eras have we cried? At which point did men (and not women) stop crying? Why, at a certain point in time, did "sensitivity" become "sentimentality"? The images we have of virility are unstable: the Greeks, men of the 17th century often cried at the theatre. Saint-Louis, according to Michelet, suffered from not having received the gift of tears. Once he finally felt tears softly rolling down his cheeks, "they felt so delightful and so soft, not only to the heart but to the lips". (Similarly: in 1199, a young monk set off for a Cisternian abbey in Brabant to receive, by their prayers, the gift of tears.)
(Nietzchean problem: how do History and Type combine? Is it not the work of the type to formulate - to form - what in History is timeless, out-of-time? In the lover's tears, our society represses its own timelessness, making of the lover who cries a lost soul whose repression is necessary for his "health." In the film, The Marquise of O, the lovers cry, and the audience laughs.)
2. Perhaps "crying" is too general: perhaps we shouldn't attribute the same signification to every kind of tears; perhaps in the same lover there exist numerous subjects that engage in neighboring, but different modes, of "crying." Who is this "me" who has tears in his eyes? Who is this other that, one day, brings me "to the brink of tears"? Who am I who cries "all the tears in my body"? or who sheds, upon waking, "a torrent of tears"? If I have all of these modes of crying, it is perhaps because, when I cry, I am always addressing another, and that the address of my tears is not always the same: I adapt my modes of crying to a kind of blackmail that, by my tears, I intend to enact around me.
3. By crying, I want to make an impression on someone, pressure him ("Look what you've done to me!") This could be - and commonly is - a way to force the other to openly admit his commiseration or insensitivity: but it could also be myself: I make myself cry, to prove to myself that my grief is not an illusion: tears are signs, not expressions. With my tears, I tell a story, I create a myth of grief, and as soon as I have, I can live with it, because by crying, I give myself an emphatic interlocutor who receives the "realest" of messages, that of my body, not of my language: "Words, what are words? One tear could say more."
{A Lover's Discourse}
