Sissa - Jealousy: a Forbidden Passion

First published in French as La jalousie: une passion inavouable, Odile Jacob, 2015

This English edition Polity Press, 2018

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1184-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1185-3 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sissa, Giulia, 1954- author.

Title: Jealousy : a forbidden passion / Giulia Sissa.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017025320 (print) | LCCN 2017038667 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509511877 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509511884 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509511846 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509511853 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Jealousy. | Love. | Semiotics. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & & Theory.

Classification: LCC BF575.J4 (ebook) | LCC BF575.J4 S57 2017 (print) | DDC 152.4/8dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025320

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

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Love gives us pleasure. Love makes us suffer. What turns exaltation into distress, trust into anguish, serenity into despair, is very often jealousy.

A sullen and sorrowful fantasy; a cruel and petty passion; the confession of a secret indignity; a forced feeling of how little one is worth; the agony of an indigent and miserly creature who is afraid to lack; a symptom which betrays a distrust in one's own merit and reveals the superiority of a rival; an anxiety which usually hastens the very evil it dreads; an emotion so base that it has to be hidden; a foolish pride, a feeble love, a wicked heart and a ludicrous bourgeois absurdity; a prejudice created by education and enhanced through habit; a pathology of the imagination; the projection of an unconscious penchant for infidelity; repressed homosexual urges converted into paranoia; a failing phallus, problematic narcissism, deep self-hatred, poor self-esteem, insecurity, envy.

Blame is unleashed. Contempt roams free. Laughter resounds. No one would boast of being jealous. Pride, like other passions, claims Franois de La Rochefoucauld in one of his famous Maxims, has peculiarities of its own; while we are jealous, we feel ashamed to confess our jealousy, but when it is past we are proud of it and our capacity to feel it.

That says it all.

How many of us, during the course of our lives, could swear to never having experienced such shame? I, for one, must plead guilty. It is terrifying to call myself jealous. To the extreme numbness which comes upon you when a love eludes you and a life together disintegrates, jealousy adds the burden of humiliation. All the connections, familiar and unnoticed, which have bound together the habits and the hours suddenly dissolve. All the mundane small gestures of everyday intimacy remain, suddenly, in suspense. And even if this love was more of an ephemeral liaison than a common life, that does not prevent us from being thrown into disarray. Lies destroy confidence. The more we are surprised, the more we suffer. Our material, social or professional conditions may not change dramatically that much we know yet nothing will ever be the same as it once was. There will be nothing more. And, in addition to nothingness the shame.

I have known this shame. In the midst of the anguish, however, I also felt a strong sentiment of injustice. Why should the victim (for such one is) of an infidelity also have to bow down before this additional suffering? Whether he or she turns, in search of consolation, to philosophy or appeals to the various therapies of the soul, anyone who admits to being jealous will be very ill-received. The repertoire of available ideas is monotonous. The great pontiffs of the social sciences, of moral philosophy, of political theory and of psychology compete in speaking ill of amorous jealousy. It comes as no surprise that one hides, blushes, denies and proclaims with one voice: Jealous? What, me? Never!

I wanted to rebel against this nonsense. I wanted not only not to be silent, to attenuate or to embellish my jealousy but to recognize it for what it is without euphemisms, without denials, without any kind of kitsch Stoicism. And I wanted to think jealousy historically. What, I asked myself, has happened to our experience of love that we have come to be ashamed to admit to what is, above all, a form of suffering? Has it always been improper to assert one's erotic dignity?

Duelling is no more, and crimes of honour have been outlawed. Adultery is no longer the end of the world, seduction is practised openly and desire circulates widely. We enter freely into erotic contracts. All of this is marvellous. But, in this casual and plural euphoria, the jealous and, above all, jealous women are alone. The disapproval once attached to sex has now been transferred to love. Love is a desire for reciprocity, in the singular. Love is the desire for desire. Love is therefore jealousy but you must not say so.

Jealousy is a forbidden passion.

It has not always been so. It has become so. I have, therefore, dared to attempt what the great eighteenth-century philosopher Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, had intended to do had begun but never finished namely to write a history of jealousy. In doing so I discovered a curious fact. The ignominy which moralists of all stripes have attributed to the emotion itself is, on reflection, the predictable response to a massive cultural repression. We are ashamed only because we are made to feel so. We are afraid to look bad because we have been intimidated. We are afraid of ridicule because we have been ridiculed. We conceal our feelings because we lack the strength to suffer cruel comments, condescending advice or knowing smiles. Shame is a social passion.

Like all emotions, whose cultural subtleties we understand better and better, jealousy calls for careful thought. I'm not the first to become interested in it. Far from it. The philosophical and literary representations of jealousy are both immensely rich and very ancient. If we look at jealousy from the perspective of the seventeenth century we will discover that this emotion, for which La Rochefoucauld offers a brilliantly condensed description, is characterized by an altogether peculiar feature. On the one hand, unlike other states of mind such as courage or emulation, about which one is eager to brag, jealousy is a source of embarrassment, which demands discretion. We are ashamed to confess [