The Suffocating Door: Narratives, Relationships, Desire, and Identity

Jouissance and Sublimation with ‘A’

I’ve got a personal story for this essay. I was still in university. There was this woman (I’ll call her A). We became good friends. She was kind-hearted, yet outspoken and assertive in her expression. She had an infectious laugh. She had an uncanny ability to see through the veil of people and sense their emotional state. She would listen with her entire being, and as the years have passed I’ve realized this is something rare. It’s rare to find people who leave you feeling understood and validated, ‘A’ did that for me, and I hope I managed to offer her something similar in return.

“The specificity of the subject’s desire is hence confounding, making it impossible for it to understand why it falls in love with a particular person rather than some other, or why, once in love, it finds it difficult to transfer its affections elsewhere….”

“Conversely, it may well be that the subject is intrigued by objects it experiences as somehow opaque or impenetrable because such objects provide a perfect screen for its narcissistic projections; they, in a sense, explicitly “invite” the subject to idealize (or even idolize) them by raising them to the dignity of the Thing.” — Mari Ruti, The Singularity of Being