Paris Was Ours by Penelope Rowlands Read Free Book Online

cooperation; and transforms the ‘I’ into a sort of armature that is threatened by every ‘blow’ from an instinct, even though [such encounters between the ‘I’ and the instincts] should amount to a natural maturation—the very normalization of this maturation henceforth depending, in the human subject, on a process of cultural mediation that (in the case of the love-object) the Oedipus complex best exemplifies.
    Um,
comment
?
    Now I don’t know how you—or my waiter at the Flore, for that matter—would have chosen to explain this line to a flustered twenty-one-year-old hopped up on
chocolat chaud
. Lacking any such guidance, I had had to content myself with underlining “the desire of the other” repeatedly in bright green ink and musing aloud that here, surely, Lacan was evoking Sartre’s celebrated maxim, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” (Proud to be engaged in Deep Thought at Sartre’s own favorite café, I tried to talk about existentialism there as often as possible; for lack of other company, though, I had to aim most of myremarks at the waiter, who of course refused to dignify them with a response.) This only partly accurate assumption, unchallenged by any further study of the
Écrits
, led me in turn to the (also only partly accurate) conclusion that for Lacan, a person’s identity—her
I
—depends on her ability to elicit desire from someone else.
    Perhaps, I mused, this was an
enfer
for some; but for me, whom an American expat friend had laughingly dubbed “the Left Bank kissing bandit,” it sounded like great news. Cut loose though I was from all the moorings—linguistic, cultural, social—that had secured my identity at home, and nervous though I was to brave the daunting terrain of adult love affairs, I had found, in this faux-Lacanian insight, a source of reassurance. As long as I could elicit and maintain the
désir de l’autre
—the Parisian male still being, in my eyes, the ultimate
autre
—I would know who I was. Following Lacan’s stated project of reworking, and revolutionizing, René Descartes, I coined the following motto: “I am loved, therefore I am.”
    With this in mind, I transformed myself into what another friend liked to call “a one-woman band of seduction,” rapidly changing instruments and varying my performances depending on what my audience, at any given moment, seemed to most want to hear. To impress Pierre-Yves, a professor of international relations, I read five newspapers a day, keeping careful notes on all the obscure geopolitical conflicts that as an undergraduate I had—wholly absorbed in my thesis on French surrealist fiction—blithely ignored. With Étienne, who had poured his inherited wealth into a vanity publishing house for sleek, glossy philosophy tomes, I struck a more intellectual note. Perched on an uncomfortable minimalist sofa inhis sprawling Marais apartment, I would “casually” interrogate him on subjects that I had determined in advance would get the conversational juices flowing. A sample question: “Do you think that radical evil, in Laclos’
Liaisons dangereuses
or in the novels of the Marquis de Sade, serves as a deliberate subversion of the Kantian categorical imperative?” Imagine my (artfully feigned) surprise when he answered with a broad grin that he had written an essay on
this very topic
and would be delighted to tell me
all about it
!
    In my dealings with François, a haughty young count who saw ill breeding as the greatest sin, more superficial things became paramount. After a traumatic first visit to his mother’s imposing
hôtel particulier
—“Ah bon,” she said in mock innocence after scrutinizing me from head to toe, “Americans don’t believe in having their clothes pressed?” — I worked assiduously to resemble a chic young woman of the
grand genre
. Naturally, my dry-cleaning expenses skyrocketed; so, too, did my expenditures at the secondhand designer-clothing shops of the eighth and the sixteenth,