As promised a few days ago, I am bringing out here Philippe André's short film, entitled "The Rope" and an excerpt from "Being and Nothingness" by Jean Paul Sartre. In either case, it is a matter of spotting all the ambiguity of the romantic process, which must be a walk without being a personal intention. Here we are in this territory where the categories of freedom, of intention are found to be "bypassed". We can see there an instability of one's own person which puts her in danger because it deregulates everything that, usually, allows one to navigate in life. We can also see in it a power of self-projection which is probably unparalleled. For amateurs, the last sentence of this excerpt can be put in relation with what Emmanuel Levinas says of "respect", which is also conceived as an asymmetrical relation, which one can only hope that it is reciprocal, without that we may want it, and all the more so, demand it. "The Rope" manages, curiously, to stage this intensity, this distance which sets in motion towards the other without ever ceasing to be, however, a distance.
"In itself the Other-Object never has enough strength to cause love. If love has as its ideal the appropriation of the other as another, that is to say as a gazing subjectivity, this ideal can only be projected from my encounter with the other-subject, not with the other-object. Seduction can only adorn the other-object that tries to seduce me with the character of a precious object "to possess"; it will perhaps determine me to risk big to conquer it; but this desire for the appropriation of an object in the midst of the world cannot be confused with love.Love can therefore only be born in the loved one from the test he makes of his alienation and of his flight to others. But, once again, the beloved, if this is so, will only transform into a lover if he plans to be loved, that is to say if what he wants to conquer is not a body but the subjectivity of the other as such. The only way he can conceive of to achieve this appropriation is to make himself loved. So it appears to us that loving is, in its essence, the project of making oneself loved. Hence this new contradiction and this new conflict:each of the lovers is entirely captive of the other inasmuch as he wants to be loved by him to the exclusion of all others; but at the same time, each requires from the other a love which in no way reduces to the "project of being loved". What he demands, in fact, is that the other, without originally seeking to make himself loved, have an intuition that is both contemplative and affective of his beloved as the objective limit of his freedom, as the ineluctable foundation and chosen from its transcendence, as the totality of being and the supreme value. The love thus demanded of the other cannot ask for anything: it is pure commitment without reciprocity. "
Sartre - Being and Nothingness, Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p. 424.