The Rejection of the Other and the Catastrophe of Trinitarian Love as the Basic Structure of Modernity

Abstract

This article takes a new look at the problems of love, family and sexual relations in the modern world, as well as related shifts in values and attitudes. We introduce concepts that allow us to see non-trivial causal links between the micro- and macro-level: between individuals’ personal lives and relationships – and nationwide demographic processes. We question the idea that the primary focus of sexual orientation, attraction, and identity is the sexual object (and hence the primary distinction – between those attracted to persons of one’s own sex or the opposite sex). We believe that what matters (primary, fundamental) is not the object of attraction, but whether the bodily and related soul relations are binary or trinitarian. A trinitarian relationship in love is not necessarily a relationship of three, but a relationship where there is room for a Third, whether it be a child, another loved one, or the word. If the child accepts the parents’ love for each other, then the child accepts the parent as an Other, as an independent person – i. e., not as his/her property: sees the parent as a person who can have their own independent relationship with the Third. Divorce, realizing the rejection or the substitution of the beloved, provokes in the child the fear of the finitude of love, the fear of trinity love as such – because love ends in too painful a catastrophe. The defense in those who have experienced the catastrophe of trinary love becomes a lapse into the duity – the ability to love only one person, rejecting the Third, and not perceiving the beloved (beloved) as the Other. Having described the duity and the trinity, and their relation to the concept of the Other, we will move from philosophy and psychoanalysis to sociology and politics. We will show how, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the duity is established as the basic structure of relationships and the perception of the world in various spheres, from literature and art to ethics and politics – and this is due above all to the normalization of divorce and contraception in contemporary societies.