The Beauty of Unfulfillment

The dialectic between transitory pleasure and permanent values, between the nature of life and the ideal, finds one of its representations in the experience of unfulfilled loves. Cyrano de Bergerac and Baudelaire’s poem A une passante have already received extensive scholarly attention but never as a theory of desire. Can a love still be real if it cannot be undertaken and experienced? The texts in analysis re-think the role of the object of love, and therefore the metaphysics of love, through the dynamic of lack and desire. Desire needs to replicate itself in order to exist, thus the object of love must remain unattainable.