Human beings are marked, both in terms of natural and cultural evolution and in terms of ontogeny, by an original lack of self-awareness: they are born without the ability to be self-sufficient and dependent, so that they do not fall into meaninglessness (the loss of the sense of existing among existing things) from their co-constitution with other subjectivities and with the natural world. In the course of their evolution, the primary relationship with the mother has become central to their ontogenesis. It is within this relationship, which becomes the reference point (both metaphorical and metonymic) for all direct or indirect relationships with their living environment, that they conceive themselves illusorily, thanks to the great constancy of maternal care, as one with the world and as a being in themselves. In this way, the original objective lack does not intrude into its subjective ontogenesis, deconstructing it. The loss of the constancy of maternal care, necessary for the emerging human subject to occupy a place in the world that is not only illusory, is the moment when one finds oneself ‘mutilated by the mother’, experiencing the loss of what was experienced as part of oneself and is emerging as other than oneself. This is the truly melancholic moment of our existence: the original lack can be contained and experienced as a livable loss of something that is in transition between the Self and the outside of the Self. If the mother remains present in the bond, together with the rest of the world, the distance between oneself and what is outside oneself becomes the melancholic space of the lack of the other that pushes the emerging subject out of its center of gravity. The lack of the other makes desire the force that extroverts the subject to life, inextricably linking Eros to melancholy. The original lack of being becomes the melancholic-erotic form that shapes our real existence: being in the lack of the other.
The video recording of the conference will be viewable on the official YouTube channel of the Eranos Foundation.
