Desublimating Desire: Courtly Love and Catherine Breillat

Abstract

In its sexually explicit contemplation of romance, desire and violence, Catherine Breillat’s cinema is provocatively suggestive of the tradition of courtly love. Working from Lacan and theorist Slavoj Žižek’s analyses of courtly love, this article asserts its continuing dominance as a romantic discourse as well as its articulation and subversion in the films of Breillat. According to Lacanian theory, this courtly tradition, most frequently associated with medieval European literature and poetry focusing on the conceptions of nobility, chivalry and adulterous desire, still structures sexual and romantic relationships today — an assertion that is not merely borne out by Breillat’s oeuvre, but analyzed, exposed and rendered explicit through her explorations of the inherent violence, cruelty and misogyny at the heart of heterosexual relations. In her frank explorations of the dialectics of distance and proximity, desire and disgust, and love and hate, Breillat confronts love in its multiple forms, violent as well as sexual, thus rendering explicit the fundamental fantasies that anchor and subtend discourses of romance.

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