Giada Biaggi: reflections of a stand-up comedian on the (obsolete?) concept of a soul mate

Before it became the macrobiotic Sunday brunch trend topic with radical-chic friends and LGBTQ+ friends, the concept of polyamory had entered my life when I was just a freshman at the philosophy faculty of the Catholic University of Milan and I was full of hopes painted with deconstructivist nuances on my emotional life. His pràxis had then been embodied by the faces, or perhaps it would be better to say by the genital organs, of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir: the father of existentialism and the mother of feminism. At a table in the Café Bec-De-Graz in Paris in front of a cocktail based on apricot juice on a spring day between the two wars, I imagined Jean-Paul having asked Simone to abdicate monogamy, as he understood it as a bourgeois-classist practice; in clear antithesis with the militant Marxism that animated his moral theory; she would have been his necessary love, but he needed others that were much more contingent. In short, they would have lived together and attended official events together, they would have exchanged knowing glances at conferences, they would have shared at a restaurant table the embarrassment of an escargot that one of the two was unable to get out of the shell with the appropriate fork, provided that he could have slept with the others. She must have pointed out to him immediately afterwards that it would be the same for her too, that she too would be free not to feel obliged to capitalize on his emotional investment in just one partner (and a cross-eyed one like the above); but the truth of the matter was that Simone slept with many fewer men than the women with whom Jean-Paul had sexual intercourse. Mon Castor: that’s what he called her in the Letters to the Beaver and other friends who are now sold off in stalls on the Seine – the beaver is in nature a monogamous animal that stops being monogamous only when the partner dies; this zoophilic nickname therefore denoted Simone’s amorous hegemony in Jean-Paul’s pyramid of relationships. I forced my then boyfriend to do the same, to call me Beaver; despite the fact that he was a construction engineering student, totally uninterested in both existentialism and its semantic surrealist derivatives.

Let’s take a leap in time: I’m thirty years old, I live in Milan, I have two degrees in philosophy, a doctorate on a covertly homosexual philosopher, I give monologues on micropenis and the invention of male fragility, I’ve been single for three and following the release of my second book (not without its sexual extravagances) I was contacted by the d editorial team asking me to write a story, a piece of fiction, about polyamory. After all, I have the perfect profile in their eyes: a progressive, fun and intellectual woman dressed in Prada, imagine if she is still attached to obsolete concepts such as a soul mate or a solitary marriage proposal in a starred restaurant. Well, they were wrong. Sometimes, to remind myself of my twenty-year-old self, I happen to go on sex tourism on the Left Bank and a couple of ménage à trois have happened to me in recent years, but currently I’m obsessed with having a permanent partner with whom to generate a son playing with wooden cubes and a rag doll in the shape of Margherita Hack. Due to the aforementioned obsession with relational univocity, I feel guilty towards myself: it’s all so terribly anti-literary, I know; but I use literature to live lives that are not mine. Anaïs Nin would have enjoyed it more in 2024, but unexpectedly at thirty I became the Christian Democrat version of myself. I think the real problem of my generation is the fact that meeting, from an event, has become a possibility that doesn’t happen – thanks to apps like Tinder it is easy to have access to a myriad of sexual partners, but it is precisely this infinite availability that erase in the bud, insinuating itself at an almost unconscious level, the idea that there could be authentic access to the other. Therefore “the most loves”, to me, who haven’t been able to get to the second date for a year, seem like something related to science fiction films, more than the latest rom-com streaming on Mubi. I think that another error of our time lies in the belief that a certain progressivism in the cultural and political sphere must necessarily coincide with the denial of monogamy; when often it is precisely the people who find themselves in a privileged monogamous situation (e.g. a marriage) who become the greatest supporters of polyamory.
In my humble opinion, in 2024 the rhetoric of polyamory therefore belongs to the most privileged classes, just as that of marriage belonged to the times of Jean-Paul and Simone. I prefer to suffer because a person with whom I am infatuated does not want to get engaged to me (drawing very fruitful novel material), rather than knowing that this will happen in a deterministic way because, from the first date, the man on duty made it clear that he is an adept of “solitary polyamory” and has decided that after the divorce he will only have superficial relationships with partners twenty years younger – specifying that he even has two consent apps on his iPhone.
And if we considered polyamory a sort of probable, but not necessary, second step in the dialectical progression of monogamy, a sort of possible consequence on the line of time and self-awareness in our adult life of what is or is not a couple, and not something that should drastically nip the existence of its exclusivity in the bud? And what is more intrinsically emasculating and disgustingly bourgeois than seeking a definition of love even before love itself? One of my favorite philosophers, Herbert Marcuse, writes in his 1977 essay The Aesthetic Dimension how things (works of art, sentimental and social ties) are political not because of their content but because of the putting into form of that content. And it goes without saying that every definition of the indefinite is a reactionary and inevitably fascist container. There is nothing more political and human than complexity and semantic abstentionism on the nomenclature of feelings.

The author is a stand-up comedian, screenwriter and writer, her latest novel has recently arrived in bookstores and is entitled Communism in Times Square (Feltrinelli)