ABSTRACT
In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960) Lacan uses the example of courtly love to illustrate the centrality of desire to the psychoanalytic project. It is paradoxical that Lacan would choose a model of love based on unrequited love to illustrate the operation of desire. But desire, for Lacan, circles an enigmatic Thing (das Ding) that later, in his seminar Encore (1972–1973), he will equate with the idea of la Femme n’existe pas (The Woman does not exist). The immaterial Thing (or object a) of Lacan’s teachings is set in motion by the primary jouissance of the mother and is not a lost object, but a cause of desire. For Lacan courtly love is a novel way to negotiate the sexual impasse from the masculine side. The cast of characters in the love courts, the medieval castles, and in the courtships doomed to failure produced a culture of romantic love in France, and elsewhere, based on the pursuit of the idealised object in the form of the Lady. While much work has been done on the status of the Thing in Lacanian ethics, less work has been done on the status of the Thing in relation to the exalted Lady of courtly love and the mother (as primordial Other). This chapter considers how Lacan narrates the Thing of relevance to courtly love through various incantations of the feminine and the mother. It is argued that masculine desire for the unattainable Lady is not only hommosexuelle, as Lacan explains, but an expression of the hysteric’s discourse. Like the female hysterics of the Victorian era whose bodily symptoms defy medical explanation, the male courtier claims to be lovesick. Both respond to the asexuality foundational to phallic jouissance and the non-existence of the Woman in masculine love.
