Today we talk a lot about “deleting ourselves”: freeing ourselves from an addiction, from authority, from violence, regaining our autonomy, ceasing to depend on others or reducing the vulnerability that we maintain with this or that attachment. The word circulates in medical, educational and political discourse. But what exactly does it cover?
As Clotilde Leguil, philosopher, psychoanalyst and member of the School of the Freudian Cause, explains in her new eponymous essay (published September 12), letting go is the experience by which we reduce within ourselves the intensity of constant pressure. More profoundly, the term designates a complex process: it first supposes a capture, therefore a gesture of capture, often violent; then a hold, which reflects the impossibility of disobeying what happens; finally, the conquest of a disobedience, which opens the way to possible disobedience.
The author recalls that the word has found a new resonance since the 1980s, particularly when talking about aging or psychological phenomena. But it was first thought of in sociology and political philosophy. The debates on the power of the media and in particular of television offer a classic example: capture, when it captures the eye, transforms its presenters into stars and distracts from everything else; disconcerted, when psychologists and educators call for the establishment of rules of use – as we still do today with mobile phones.
To speak of withdrawal is therefore to evoke a tearing away: to escape from a fascination, to break with a narcissism stuck to images or models. Movements like #MeToo, by denouncing male violence and the domination of women, provide a strong illustration of this: they force us to rethink these mechanisms of grip and release.
Love as ground
To address this notion of letting go, Clotilde Leguil chooses to question romantic practices, where taking away plays out both in the feelings aroused by the encounter and in the potential dependence on a toxic relationship. In this sense, love is a privileged terrain for understanding how a grip occurs and how a release becomes necessary.
Starting from the romantic event allows us to place the question of consent in the temporality of the subject: the romantic encounter is a gradual process, while the separation embodies a letting go which requires a long time. In both cases, temporalities collide, accelerate or slow down.
The relationships of domination which still mark romantic relationships today remind us that the history of love is far from being that of a simple idealized passion.
The romantic encounter in fact disrupts the course of one’s existence: it involves welcoming an unexpected element into one’s life. But separation requires a long process of disengagement. In both cases, time does not unfold in a linear manner: it accelerates, pauses, slows down.
Loving supposes accepting a hold, but also freeing oneself from a previous organization of oneself. And when we free ourselves from a romantic hold, a new hold is established, this time on our own desires. Why do we sometimes get lost in the desire of others? Why do we also drown in ours? The illusion of always free and informed consent often masks a reality of dependence or submission.
Violence of love
The relationships of domination which still mark romantic relationships today remind us that the history of love is far from being that of a simple idealized passion. Behind the rhetoric of feelings there is often a logic of power, where women’s bodies are reduced to an object of exchange or possession, as if the fiction of love served to mask the reality of dependence.
The originality of Clotilde Leguil’s book is to seek examples, to support her point, both in literature (Ernaux, Orwell, Molière, Laclos, Zweig) and in philosophy and psychoanalysis (La Boétie, Freud, Lacan). These different references reveal that love is not only a matter of consent to the other, but also of consent to oneself.
Can we, in fact, fall in love without questioning our own being? To love is ultimately to agree to recognize oneself as a subject transformed by the relationship. Clotilde Leguil frequently relies on the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who associated love with speech. In this sense, the romantic event is also a consent to another use of language. But what do we do when the other’s desire overwhelms our own?
Through extensive analyses, the work explores this tension between holding and letting go in intimate relationships. The works of Vanessa Springora and Lola Lafon, centered in particular on family ties, are the subject of a sometimes long but precise commentary.
Political influence
These reflections extend to the political field. It is not only a question of thinking about the exercise of power, but also the effectiveness of the cultural systems that shape our lives. And there is no need to turn to China or other distant regimes: our Western world is also subject to “the icy grip of predators” which determine our daily lives.
Already, in the 20th century, analyzes mixed influence, desire and enjoyment, observing the relationship between media, crowds and power, with the idea that another policy could help everyone to free themselves. Today, as Clotilde Leguil shows, these questions resurface, but applied to family or romantic authority, that is to say an authority which does not come under the law, but which is nevertheless exercised with force. The work presents this authority as a force of attraction to which one gives in and which is all the more difficult to disobey.
One question remains: if psychoanalysis can help an individual to free themselves from control, can it also act on a collective scale? This is the question implicitly raised in this work.
