It is not the least of the paradoxes of science fiction literature to have anticipated the advent of artificial intelligence, fantasized about its potential and identified its limits, but also to be now a pioneer in trying to identify the means of reasoning the use that the human being already makes, particularly in the manipulation of our states of heart.
In the era of lives under algorithms, countless are the essays that highlight the new psychic pathologies engendered by what the sociologist Eva Illouz does not hesitate to qualify as the phenomenon of End of love (Le Seuil, 2020). Among the most successful, we could cite, among others, the recent Dating Fatigue (ed. L’Observatoire, 2021), journalist Judith Duportail, or Our Wild Hearts (Arkhê, 2021), by screenwriter, documentarist and essayist France Ortelli. In classic romantic fiction, The one you believe (Gallimard, 2017) by writer Camille Laurens, or Synthetic Heart (Seuil, 2020), by Chloé Delaume, one in a melancholy mode, the other in a much more explosive mode, also draw up the overwhelming observation of the dehumanization of love relationships, of the ever-greater reification of the female body. and the cult of youth which always pushes back the date of sexual expiration of women.
Rediscover the human side of sex
For Eva Illouz, the heiress of the Frankfurt School – a movement itself nourished by Marxist thought – technology has thus become the best ally of a new form of capitalism. “Scopique» which pushes us to compulsively consume more and more bodies, leading us into a logic of irreversible psychic alienation. Once the observation has been made, there are few literary or intellectual voices capable, today, of finding ways out to rebuild the human part of our sexuality. This is why the first novel by American poet Melissa Broder, Under the sign of fish, just translated in France by Christian Bourgeois editions, was the subject of an explosion across the Atlantic. It should also be adapted soon in series with Claire Foy (The Crown) in the title role.
The first part of the book, however, starts from the same disillusioned observation as the aforementioned essayists or novelists: Lucy, 38, locked in a thesis on the ancient poet of love Sappho who never ends, has just separated from her companion and goes through a phase of intense depression. Her sister then offered her to stay in her splendid house in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, on condition that she kept her dog obese and diabetic and joined a group of emotional and sexual addicts. The tone is set. Convinced by a member of her group to register on the apps, Lucy connects dates fucked up with guys shot at porn scenarios. It could all be incredibly dirty and utterly hopeless – especially since Melissa Broder spares us every detail of these disembodied and interchangeable coitus – if the writer were not endowed with a sense of satire and self-mockery that she does not. would not have denied the great Philip Roth. Above all, Lucy only has to cross the road to find the sea.
The sea, a space conducive to the deployment of sci-fi
Just as Aldous Huxley invited us to cross the doors of perception, this road between the world of men governed by the rules of scopic capitalism and the world of the sea, loaded with symbolic and mythical references conducive to all metamorphosis, becomes for the ‘heroine the occasion of a potential resurrection by means of a night encounter with a sublime swimmer whose particularity is to be half-man… half-fish. Under the aegis of Saphho, of whom we do not know “Nor if she was a lesbian, preferred younger men, was hypersexual, bisexual or had a lot of lovers”, Lucy begins a torrid love affair with this lover smelling good iodine who explodes almost all the patterns of a so-called normalized sexuality. But, again, what is the norm when she looks like what Lucy leaves behind, rubbing with relish with the scales of her new lover?
The more so as behind the description as erotic as perfectly disturbing of their antics (another feat of writing), it is also the tenderness, the listening and the benevolence rediscovered for Lucy, herself considered as “Abnormal” in a world that still has a hard time tolerating psychic vulnerability. Finally, it is the possibility of renewing the broken links of interpersonal recognition mechanisms. In Minima Moralia, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, sensing the effects of capitalism on the reification of romantic relationships, wrote: “If human beings were no longer objects of possessive appropriation, they would no longer be interchangeable either. True attachment would be that which addresses itself to the other in its specificity, attaches itself to some of the traits that one likes in him, and not to the “idol” of a “personality”, which does not exist. is that the property of what one owns. ” Will Lucy’s Fishman keep that promise to the end? I let you discover it…
–
