Subject and/of Love

 

I would like to start my article with a discussion about a film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. The film’s name is “A Short Film About Love”. The film is about obsession, with a storyline that explores the themes of love through an examination of the relationship between a young man Tomek and an older woman Marta that begins when he spies on her sex life through a telescope from his bedroom window across a courtyard to her apartment. Obsessed with her, and growing bolder, the young man invents reasons to make contact until finally he meets her and confesses his conduct and feelings.

After a certain point in the film it is in question that the roles of the woman and young man are changed. This means that the position of the spectator and the traced one are exchanged. The spectator is no longer avaliable for his function anymore and the traced one started to feel the spectators absence and began to question her position. I think that the woman character’s curiosity for the young man is not just for her conscience that the young man had experienced violence because of her, but something else. What words do we need to explain the feelings of the woman that made a young man, which is not even able to satisfy any of her needs, center of her life? Does everything here is about the love that confused with curiosity and unsatisfied emotions? Or in the opposite way are we doning a mistake with supposing sexual passions as love, if not is there a love emotion that is stronger and independent than sex? Or the main event here is the emptyness feeling of the woman which saw herself as a desired object, no longer has the subject to desire her? In this situation is it the need to become a desire object again that makes the object trying to be the subject after she lost hers and go after the one which desires her. If not is it the feeling that we call love? Or the object became desire itself for the woman that made herself the subject?

The love definition in the film described as a relation, a desire and a requirement which is unreachable. The role change at the breaking point in the film is olso confirms it. The whole thing is about a person that feels himself as loves subject or object. Men and women are the ‘things’ that can never experience a total sense in this game of love.

It is not possible to create a unity from men and women duality. There no such thing as third language as Irigaray said. Genders never can speak the same language, interaction and love continiues only by observation and discovery. At this point this reminds Baudrillard’s temptation game. An infinite chase between desire object and subject. This is the game that creates love.

The onlooker watches the film and includes himself to this game by his or her own gender. Perception and feelings about the film olso changes by this position. Maybe the language that Irigaray mentioned is not about the duality that comes together in the film but about us that we are the third subject while watching the film. This third language can be the key of the tie between us and the actors.

I will try to explain the effort of men and women for explaining what they are, with an example. Imagine that you are in a foreign country that you don’t even know its language, and you are in a bar. After leaving your table to go to the toilet i don’t think you will care too much about gender difference. But whatever gender you are when you face the situation that theres two doors for the toilet which looks like the same, you will think which one to get in.

You already know who you are instinctively. The first thing to do here is to look for signs to show you which door it is for you. But they don’t have any clue that might have help you to understand. After that you choose the door by that persons gender. I prefer to use more specific words for genders here. You are a man and it was olso a man came out of the door. And when you open that door you notice that theres a problem, theres a parfum smell inside that doesn’t belong to men’s toilet. And theres no pisuars like it should be. After you move forward inside you recognize that a couple of women are looking at you with an unconfused way. At that moment you say every excuse word you know and leave there with a shamefull feeling. After that the first thought that will come up to your mind will be the question that if the person came out while you were in the holeway was a real man or woman. All the differences you know is no longer important and you are confused. I wonder who has obligatories for being or feeling like man or woman like in this example. Who tells us that we have to be like a woman? Our satisfation ways and responsibilities? Or in simple way is that our body?

The change of the man and woman figures in the movie which i described first, to become desire objects and including their obssesif attitudes are not features of genders. As seen in the second example the women toilet does not just belong to women or a person that comes out of women toilet doesn’t have to look like a woman.
The creation place of gender difference is our brain not our body. Not all the differences we created is a result of our bodies.

It is a probable condition to shelter another gender in our subconscious mind and having a good relationship with it after, we learn not to reduce ourselfs to a gender and understand our genders with Freudian way. But there is many discourses that can oppose to this multiple identities in society. It is a totality of discourses that tell us ‘who we are’. This is a structure that despies our own rational mind and puts us into duality. It has too many incorrections that needed to be repositioned.