Translator: Naíma Perrella Milani
Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
What is love?
It's a hard term to define
in so far as it has a very wide application.
I can love jogging.
I can love a book, a movie.
I can love escalopes.
I can love my wife.
(Laughter)
But there's a great difference
between an escalope and my wife, for instance.
That is, if I value the escalope,
the escalope, on the other hand,
it doesn't value me back.
Whereas my wife, she calls me
the star of her life.
(Laughter)
Therefore, only another desiring conscience
can conceive me as a desirable being.
I know this, that's why
love can be defined in a more accurate way
as the desire of being desired.
Hence the eternal problem of love:
how to become and remain desirable?
The individual used to find
an answer to this problem
by submitting his life to community rules.
You had a specific part to play
according to your sex, your age,
your social status,
and you only had to play your part
to be valued and loved by the whole community.
Think about the young woman
who must remain chaste before marriage.
Think about the youngest son
who must obey the eldest son,
who in turn must obey the patriarch.
But a phenomenon
started in the 13th century,
mainly in the Renaissance, in the West,
that caused the biggest identity crisis
in the history of humankind.
This phenomenon is modernity.
We can basically summarize it
through a triple process.
First, a process of rationalization
of scientific research,
which has accelerated technical progress.
Next, a process of political democratization,
which has fostered individual rights.
And finally, a process of rationalization
of economic production
and of trade liberalization.
These three intertwined processes
have completely annihilated
all the traditional bearings of Western societies,
with radical consequences for the individual.
Now individuals are free
to value or disvalue
any attitude, any choice, any object.
But as a result, they are themselves confronted
with this same freedom that others have
to value or disvalue them.
In other words, my value was once ensured
by submitting myself
to the traditional authorities.
Now it is quoted in the stock exchange.
On the free market of individual desires,
I negotiate my value every day.
Hence the anxiety of contemporary man.
He is obsessed: "Am I desirable? How desirable?
How many people are going to love me?"
And how does he respond to this anxiety?
Well, by hysterically collecting
symbols of desirability.
(Laughter)
I call this act of collecting,
along with others, seduction capital.
Indeed, our consumer society
is largely based on seduction capital.
It is said about this consumption
that our age is materialistic.
But it's not true! We only accumulate objects
in order to communicate with other minds.
We do it to make them love us, to seduce them.
Nothing could be less materialistic,
or more sentimental,
than a teenager buying brand new jeans
and tearing them at the knees,
because he wants to please Jennifer.
(Laughter)
Consumerism is not materialism.
It is rather what is swallowed up
and sacrificed in the name of the god of love,
or rather in the name of seduction capital.
In light of this observation on contemporary love,
how can we think of love in the years to come?
We can envision two hypotheses:
The first one consists of betting
that this process of narcissistic
capitalization will intensify.
It is hard to say what shape
this intensification will take,
because it largely depends
on social and technical innovations,
which are by definition difficult to predict.
But we can, for instance,
imagine a dating website
which, a bit like those loyalty points programs,
uses seduction capital points
that vary according to my age,
my height/weight ratio,
my degree, my salary,
or the number of clicks on my profile.
We can also imagine
a chemical treatment for breakups
that weakens the feelings of attachment.
By the way, there's a program on MTV already
in which seduction teachers
treat heartache as a disease.
These teachers call themselves "pick-up artists."
"Artist" in French is easy, it means "artiste."
"Pick-up" is to pick someone up,
but not just any picking up -- it's picking up chicks.
So they are artists of picking up chicks.
(Laughter)
And they call heartache "one-itis."
In English, "itis" is a suffix that signifies infection.
One-itis can be translated as "an infection from one."
It's a bit disgusting. Indeed, for the pick-up artists,
falling in love with someone
is a waste of time,
it's squandering your seduction capital,
so it must be eliminated
like a disease, like an infection.
We can also envision
a romantic use of the genome.
Everyone would carry it around
and present it like a business card
to verify if seduction can progress to reproduction.
(Laughter)
Of course, this race for seduction,
like every fierce competition,
will create huge disparities
in narcissistic satisfaction,
and therefore a lot of loneliness and frustration too.
So we can expect that modernity itself,
which is the origin of seduction capital,
would be called into question.
I'm thinking particularly of the reaction
of neo-fascist or religious communes.
But such a future doesn't have to be.
Another path to thinking about love may be possible.
But how?
How to renounce the hysterical need to be valued?
Well, by becoming aware
of my uselessness.
(Laughter)
Yes,
I'm useless.
But rest assured:
so are you.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
We are all useless.
This uselessness is easily demonstrated,
because in order to be valued
I need another to desire me,
which shows that I do not have any value of my own.
I don't have any inherent value.
We all pretend to have an idol;
we all pretend to be an idol for
someone else, but actually
we are all impostors, a bit like a man on the street
who appears totally cool and indifferent,
while he has actually anticipated and calculated
so that all eyes are on him.
I think that becoming aware
of this general imposture
that concerns all of us
would ease our love relationships.
It is because I want to be loved
from head to toe,
justified in my every choice,
that the seduction hysteria exists.
And therefore I want to seem perfect
so that another can love me.
I want them to be perfect
so that I can be reassured of my value.
It leads to couples
obsessed with performance
who will break up, just like that,
at the slightest underachievement.
In contrast to this attitude,
I call upon tenderness -- love as tenderness.
What is tenderness?
To be tender is to accept
the loved one's weaknesses.
It's not about becoming a sad couple of orderlies.
(Laughter)
That's pretty bad.
On the contrary,
there's plenty of charm and happiness in tenderness.
I refer specifically to a kind of humor
that is unfortunately underused.
It is a sort of poetry of deliberate awkwardness.
I refer to self-mockery.
For a couple who is no longer sustained, supported
by the constraints of tradition,
I believe that self-mockery
is one of the best means for
the relationship to endure.