The Madness of Lovers. The Illusion of Being Whole.
- Kabbalah -
The Madness of Lovers
The Illusion of Being Whole
אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי? וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי?
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?”
The previous essay circled around a sentence that seemed simple: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” We discovered that the difficulty lay not so much in the neighbour as in that “thyself” we take as known. And we discovered that between us and whoever wounded us there usually remains a debt. We expect it to be paid in due order: an apology, a reparation, an acknowledgement. When none of that arrives, forgiving is the only way out of the resentment that returns again and again: to stop collecting, in a single gesture, making the other a gift of what was taken from us.
But there is another debt, and it may be the hardest of all.
The debt one owes oneself.
And beneath it, something that is not a debt at all, but a plea.
✦I Should Have
We all know that voice. It comes at night, in the shower, on the way to work:
I should have seen it. I should have said it. I should have left sooner. I should have stayed.
In Spanish, the verb deber names at once an obligation and a debt. English keeps the trace too: ought was once nothing more than the past tense of owe. Other languages say it more plainly still: in German, Schuld is guilt and is debt; in Aramaic, ḥôbâ is debt and is sin, which is why Matthew’s Lord’s Prayer asks “forgive us our debts” where Luke’s says “our sins.” Guilt is lived as a debt that demands to be settled.
“I should have” speaks of something already past as if it could still be paid. And it assumes something strange: a self that, in that moment, already knew what I know only now.
That self never existed.
The one I was did not know what I know. He decided with what he had: his fears, his desire, his window the size of a fingernail. And I judge him from here, with the clarity of hindsight.
But the “I should have” almost never ends where it seems to. I should have been stronger, more attentive, braver. What for? So that they would love me. So that they would choose me. So that they would not leave. It sounds like reproach, but underneath there is a plea. And it does something more dangerous still: it puts me at the center. Under pressure, when something must be decided, answered or delivered, every task stops being a task and becomes a verdict on me. And the center is heavy: the more stress, the more I place myself at the center; the more at the center, the more stress.
✦What the Subject Truly Asks
Lacan put it precisely: every demand, whatever it asks for, is also a demand for love. One asks for something concrete, but hopes for something else: the sign that one exists for the Other (capitalized: not a person, but the place from which we are recognized). That from somewhere it might be said: “This is what you are, and it is good.” That is why recognition is never enough. Someone values the work, a friend says thank you, and something is still missing. What is asked for is what remains once they have already given what was asked.
That plea is born of something that does not close. Lacan called it the “lack-of-being”: we never quite coincide with what we say we are. It is not an error to be corrected; it is what makes us ask, desire, love. In Spanish, falta names both the lack and the transgression; and English fault once meant lack as well. Language already knew that we mistake the one for the other.
Here lies the trap. To know that what I ask for no one can give me is unbearable. To think “I failed” is easier to carry, because it preserves hope: if it was my mistake, it could be mended; someday they will give it to me, someday I will be someone again for those eyes that closed.
Guilt turns into debt what was impossible.
✦Trapped Light
An image has kept me company for a long time. I am a crystal through which the light of the world passes. I am not the light. I receive it, bend it according to my shape, and let it go. Each time it passes, something in me changes, ever so slightly.
But another light falls on the crystal too. It comes reflected, as in a mirror, from the gaze of others: what was expected of me, what I “ought” to be. I take that image for my own, and from within it begins to measure. A situation arrives, memory says what should come out, and something else comes out. They do not match, and I conclude: something must be wrong with me.
But they could never have matched. The expected was calculated for a crystal without shape, without fears or history: the same self that never existed. What comes out of me comes out bent because the crystal has a shape, a density, a history. No crystal refracts exactly like another. That deviation is not an error. It is my signature. Guilt reads as error what is one’s own form.
The mind, when it works, corrects its expectation in the face of what it did not expect: it learns. Guilt does the opposite. It leaves the image intact and condemns what came out.
It almost always begins outside. An email, a glance, a silence. The light enters and, instead of passing through, begins to rebound inside, faster and faster. This is how optical fiber works: when light meets the inner surface at an angle that forbids its exit, it is trapped in a succession of internal reflections. It rebounds again and again. So too the “I should have” that circles through the night.
What fails there? Not the light: it enters as it enters. Nor does the crystal break. It is the angle. The crystal is tilted toward the image, toward the gaze that measures it, and from that tilt no exit will serve.
Under stress, the crystal grows agitated. It turns, seeking the way out, but it turns upon itself, and each turn leaves it facing itself once more. Everything that enters seems to speak of me, and the more it speaks of me, the less it finds the way out. Seen from outside, a crystal that holds the light seems dark; within, it is saturated. This is the black light of guilt: it illuminates nothing; it only turns.
Why won’t it let the light out? Out of fear, yes. But also for another reason: while the light turns within, the crystal is the center of everything.
To hold the light is a way of remaining the center.
Before that center there are three possible places. The first two remain within it.
✦The Accused
Every debt needs a creditor. Freud gave it a name: the superego. And he observed something disconcerting: conscience grows more severe the more we renounce. The force of what we deny ourselves does not vanish; the superego gathers it up and turns it against us. Each payment gives the collector more strength to come collecting again. Before it, to desire is already to owe. That is why those who strive hardest to be good are those who accuse themselves most.
That collector almost always has a face: the one whose love we lost, whose silence wounded us. In melancholia, Freud said, the reproaches a person aims at himself are often reproaches against someone loved, turned back upon one’s own ego: “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego.” Ronald Fairbairn saw why: the child failed by a parent prefers to believe the fault is his own. That way the parent stays good and the world keeps its order. It is as if the child told himself, in Fairbairn’s words: “It is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to be a saint in a world ruled by the Devil.” There is a secret fidelity in guilt.
But guilt gives me something more: a place. When I am guilty, the whole world points at me. I am the one spoken of, the one who owes. At last I exist. That is why there is jouissance in guilt, disguised as pain. In the clinic Freud found those who need punishment more than forgiveness, and even those who commit a crime to give a motive to a guilt they already had.
And the other, perhaps, does not even accuse me. Perhaps they have already moved on with their life. It is I who stand behind their gaze, who keep the court in session, write the sentence and sign it. Lacan called fantasy that scene one stages in order to know what place one occupies before the Other.
If what I ask is to be someone for the Other, guilt offers me a cheap version: to be someone before its court.
✦The Idol
The second place looks like a way out: forgiving oneself. “Forgive yourself,” the self-help books repeat. But when Jesus forgave a paralytic, the scribes asked in outrage: “Who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7). Their question was theological; here it illuminates something else. Whoever says “I forgive myself” takes the place from which forgiveness is given. The court still stands; only the verdict has changed. The self that condemned itself now absolves itself, and in both cases it is the one who judges.
The Bible has a law for this, though it was written for another purpose: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Exodus 20:4). The Hebrew word is pesel, from a root meaning to carve: the sculpted, fixed image. What lives, changes, and the error is to carve the image in stone and then kneel before it. The accused kneels before his ideal image, or before its reverse, “I am not worthy of love,” which is carved as well. The one who absolves himself kneels before another: the image of himself as a merciful judge. This is the idolatry of the self: the self in the place of God.
Why does it not work? Lacan distinguished between the other, one’s fellow, and the Other with a capital letter: the place from which one speaks and judges. A person may occupy that place for a time, but is not that place. And he added: there is no Other of the Other. Behind the place from which we are judged there is no one to guarantee the verdict. Whoever occupies it is also marked by their own lack.
No one has the last word on what I am. Not the other, and not I.
That is why what I ask for cannot arrive, and why I cannot give it to myself either. Acts can be judged: I did harm, or I did not. What cannot be judged is the whole of one’s being, neither to condemn it nor to absolve it.
✦Out of the Center
The Kabbalah of Isaac Luria imagined the beginning of the universe as a withdrawal. Before creation, the infinite (the Ein Sof, the “without end,” as the kabbalists call God beyond every name) filled everything. So that something other than itself might exist, it contracted and left an empty space. Luria called that contraction tzimtzum. If even the infinite had to leave the center for there to be a world, the self has no need to stay there.
In another essay I wrote about bitul, the nullification of the self in the mystical tradition. The crystal does not produce the light, nor can it claim the light as its own, but neither is it nothing: it has structure, marks, angles. To leave the center is to turn the crystal ever so slightly. The light does not change, nor does the crystal break; what changes is where it faces. And the light that was circling finds its way out.
But bitul is not an idea for later. To tell oneself at the end of the day “that does not define me” comes too late: by then the light has already circled a thousand times. Bitul is practiced in the moment the light enters. There is a verse from Psalm 16 that tradition turned into a daily practice: “I have set the Lord always before me.” Some hang it in front of them, to keep it in sight. Read from here, it is a concrete practice: to set before me something that is not me. The center stays outside.
What does it look like on an ordinary day? An urgent email arrives, a deadline, a difficult meeting. The question of the center is: what will they think of me? The question of one who stands to the side is: what does this need? The first sets the crystal spinning upon itself; the second turns it toward the task. It is not indifference. One works just as well, sometimes better, because the strength that was spent defending the image is freed for the work.
A sage of the Talmud said it in the Ethics of the Fathers (2:16): “It is not upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” The first half removes the self from the center: the work is not mine, and the outcome does not depend on me alone. The second keeps that from being mistaken for washing one’s hands of it. And in Hebrew there is a detail: “to desist” is libatel (לִבָּטֵל), from the same root as bitul (בִּטּוּל). Read from here, the sentence draws a line: bitul nullifies the self, not the task. I withdraw from the center, not from the work.
And I? Am I not even master of myself?
Perhaps not. Guilt treats one’s own life as a badly managed estate. But life, talents, mistakes pass through us. The “I should have” needs an owner who failed; if no one is the absolute owner of what they are, no one can demand of themselves to have controlled all that they were. One answers for one’s acts, but not for the lack that constitutes one.
But beware: bitul is not contempt. “I am nothing,” said with contempt, keeps the judge intact; only now he condemns in a low voice. The crystal does not say “I am worthless.” It says “I am not the light.” The one is humiliation. The other is freedom.
Leaving the center does not erase the past. An ancient teaching says that return (teshuvah), when it is done out of love, turns faults into merits. It does not erase them, because it includes repairing what can be repaired. But return is not going back: it is turning toward the light, turning the crystal ever so slightly. Then the past changes its place: it is not paid off, it is reread. The “I should have” reads the past in order to accuse; return reads it in order to take it in. The mystical tradition goes further still: no fall is final, and every descent is for the sake of an ascent. The one I was will have been the one who brought me here. Every detour and every fall (and this is said by one who has had them all) became necessary in the rereading. “Stones in my path? I keep them all; one day I will build a castle,” wrote the Brazilian Nemo Nox. And if I remove a single one, the castle falls. And why did I not learn sooner? That question is the last “I should have”: it assumes, once again, a self that already knew. I learned when I was able to understand. The marks on the crystal do not fade; they become form.
✦Loving Oneself
Lacan said that to love is to give what one does not have. Forgiveness shows it almost literally: whoever forgives gives what they no longer have, because it was taken from them. But even when there is nothing to forgive, that is what love is. We do not give what we possess: we give our lack. We show where we are vulnerable, hoping the other will not wound us there.
And here is the paradox: once again we ask for the impossible. What the other can give me, even when they truly love me, is also their lack, not their fullness. I was asking for fullness; the other gives me their lack. Two mad lovers sitting in the moonlight, promising each other everything.
Before the other, the lack leaves me as a gift: it has someone to receive it. Before myself, there is no one to hand it to: it stays. What can change is what I do with it. If loving the other is giving what one does not have, secretly hoping the other will complete me, loving oneself is ceasing to demand of oneself what one does not have. And ceasing to expect to be whole.
That is why forgiving oneself is not absolving oneself. The idol sits in the judge’s seat and pronounces another sentence. The one who leaves the center rises and leaves that seat empty. When the seat stays empty, the lack ceases to be a case file and becomes again what it always was: that which makes us desire.
Kepler discovered that the planets do not move in circles, but in ellipses. An ellipse has two foci: the Sun occupies one; the other is empty. And the shape of the orbit is defined by both. Perhaps a life out of the center is something like that: it turns around something that illuminates it and around an empty point that no one occupies. That emptiness is not a flaw in the orbit. It is half of its form.
To stop asking is not to stop desiring. I seek, I love, I choose, I err, I repair what can be repaired. What falls away is the plea for a guarantee. And what I was asking for, to be part of something greater than myself, does not arrive as a gift someone hands me. But it passes through. The crystal is not the owner of the light; and yet, while it lets the light pass, it is not separate from it.
The gap does not close.
But it ceases to accuse.
✦ ✦ ✦
To forgive the other is to stop holding them as a debtor. To forgive myself is not to sit in the judge’s seat and absolve myself, but to leave that seat empty. Then the other stops playing a part in my fantasy and becomes again what they always were: someone I never finish coming to know. Just like me.
Hillel said it in two questions. “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”: no one can answer for my acts in my place. “And if I am only for myself, what am I?”: I am neither the center nor the owner of what passes through me. There is no need to erase the self in order to stop worshipping it. It is enough to remove it from the center.
What I was asking for was never a need. It was a demand for love, and every demand for love asks for the same thing: that the Other complete me. That is what no one can give, because no one has it. And so I can say it without denying the lack:
I do not need what no one can give.
Will I sit beneath the moon again? Most likely. But this time lucid: without promising everything, without asking for it.
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