Love and Occident

Major work of the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont.

Published into 1939 for the first time, the Love and the Occident was translated in several languages and was republished many times (the famous edition " définitive" go back to 1972).

the Love and the Occident was an undeniable success just as the theses as the author exposes to it. On the basis of Tristan and Iseult, of Rougemont déconstruit the Myth of passion in love, as an exaltation not without effects on the political world. The finality of the courtly love, it is the passion, which is more present than ever at the 20th century.

By the rise of the Totalitarianism S (its supreme completion is represented by Hiroshima), passion found a ground of fastener where all the exaggerations are possible, in the decline of the human destruction. Blazing exposed facts (Denis de Rougemont recalls the evolution of the disproportion of passion through the centuries) is followed by an act of faith in favor of fidelity, bet of the love-action, which preaches Agapé (Christian love) against Eros (the desire without end, ultimate refusal of the life). " To one psyché Western torn between the individual adventure of passion (or the mystic) and the collective morals of the City, between the romanticism eternal and the needs for the social order, the author opposes an ethics of the marriage based on the concepts of decision, engagement, and anybody free and responsable" (François Saint-Ouen).

Analyzes and comment of work; a Platonic prospect:

“ the love and the occident must above all be included/understood like the narration of the combat between two types of loves, and more precisely two manners of vivres, symbolized by Eros and Agapè. The author engages at the same time a historical review and a party taken in favor of the Reunion Christian. Let us start by briefly defining the heart of the problem. The Eros is the Greek love, “the love passion”: it is the love inassouvissable, infinite, it is tension, movement, dash. We point out that Platonic philosophy is primarily erotic. And the Eros of which it is question here - first of all through the analysis of the myth of Tristan by Rougemont- is well a love which is expressed in the form of “mystic”. More than the love of an object, it is love of the love. We remember this famous Nietzschéenne turning: “we do not like the life by practice to live, but by practice to like”, and of the comment of Safranski: “Nietzsche suggests falling in love with the love”. Because Platonic philosophy - and we will accept here that philosophy nietzschéenne forms part completely of it is primarily erotic: it is a glorification of the tension, movement towards the unit, of the war, the friction. Tristan incarnates this erotism (in the original purity of the myth, it is above all the narration of mystical experiments in question will find we later in Tristan of Wagner and Iseult has the appearance of a symbol here.) Tristan can live this love only because it is impossible, and if this love threatens to become possible, Tristan invents subterfuges to prevent its realization. The satisfaction of the tension, it is the death of Eros. Denis de Rougemont pushes the analysis further from the myth: he puts forward the action of the “will of nothing” in erotic heroism. The Eros being by definition impossible to appease, its only end lies in death, it is the only moment when the tension is slackened. Thus Eros leads Tristan to death, and the erotic myth becomes radically tragic. Us include/understand thus easily party taken of author in favor of Reunion Christian, that one could to name “love-possession”, and which resides not in the love of the love but in the love of the object, whose possession means relaxation of tension, satisfaction of the desire. But to stop there would be to avoid the principal question subjacent with any philosophical problem: the question of the values. Let us take again the opening of the dialog of Plato who treats primarily erotic question, Phèdre: “Phèdre, my friend, where do you thus go and from which you come? ”, and we put this same question, in this precise order, with regard to the erotic love. Where the erotic love carries out Tristan? With death, certainly, but how? And we are still tempted to borrow from Nietzsche part of its term to answer it. The danger of Tristan is that of a strong man “who seeks his decline”, of a man capable of glorifier the tension, which perceives the man as “something which must be surmounted”: thus T it seeks the test, resistance, like as many means of affirming its to become. Isn't this “will of death” hidden by Eros precisely what constrained life to reappear in beyond quite different, across good and badly? Isn't this what pushes the philosopher to imagine new manners of living, to create new values, with becoming artist and legislator? Isn't this the destiny of the great men only “of living dangerously”, that of living “érotiquement”? While answering the first question we thus answered the second: it is precisely of the increase in the life and too full with force that is born the erotic passion, suitable for the expansion of the life which is before any tension, movement, going beyond. We see also what the glorification of the Reunion supposes, and the judgment of the Eros: the equation happiness = relaxation, rest, Sabbath, bliss, nirvana… And contrary: misfortune = tension. Behind this “horrible equation” hides what Nietzsche denounces like nihilism, namely a hidden love of the rest, a lassitude of the love, a death before the hour. We thus include/understand the ambivalence of the will of dead: in a case it emerges from a surplus of vitality and constrained the life to intensify - and to even perhaps become exhausted more quickly, with becoming dangerous, but isn't a choice there? - while in the other death gains the life, under cover of a “will of conservation”; then the life becomes rest, it becomes dead before the hour. ” Rougemont and the Love , extracted the conference on the Christian judgment of the Eros, given by Mathieu de Ménonville in Paris, January 2007.

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