On love and jealousy

Continuing on my reading of Proust I was struck by this passage:

on one occasion, catching sight of myself in the mirror at the moment when I was kissing Albertine and calling her "my little girl," the sorrowful, passionate expression on my own face, similar to the expression it would have worn long ago with Gilberte whom I no longer remembered, and perhaps assume one day with another if I were ever to forget Albertine, made me think that, over and above any personal considerations ..., I was performing the duties of an ardent and painful devotion dedicated as an oblation to the youth and beauty of Woman. And yet with this desire by which I was honouring youth...

I suppose the most obvious thing to note is the sorrow and pain he finds even in the midst of his physical passion - very much in the spirit of Lacan's Kant Avec Sade this painful duty to pleasure. The other Lacanian theme I which to draw attention to is "Woman doesn't exist". That is abstract Woman - woman is always assigned a role, the abstract noun for humanity being Man (the Lacanian definition of man I most like being "man is a woman who thinks she exists". In this passage we see Proust positing that Woman does exist, putting Albertine, Gilberte and the unknown future woman into an interchangeable place of Woman, and "over and above any personal considerations", further emphasising this abstract nature of Woman. One doesn't have to resort to Proust's biography (he was gay) to see how this fails, one only has to look at the next sentence where the object of his worship changes from "Woman" to "youth" - it is not so much as Woman that Albertine, Gilberte and future women are interchangeable, but as Youth.
Another Lacanian proposition that I was reminded of in these pages (the opening section of The Captive) is "The sexual relationship is impossible" - it is impossible to fully possess another person. The unconscious means that we can never fully possess ourselves never mind someone else. Proust's jealousy is therefore just a way for him to continue believing in the possibilty of the sexual relationship, take this passage for example:

O mighty attitudes of Man and Woman, in which there seeks to be united, in the innocence of the worl's first days and with the humilty of clay, what the Creation made seperate...

Love as finding a soulmate, finding our missing half, complete possession (possession being made explicit in the rest of this sentence - "woman submissive before man", rather than love as between 2 independent and autonomous souls. It is this complete possession of the other which is the spur to Proust's jealousy, he spends a lot of time on the desire for knowledge of the other, as if he can possess her through this knowledge. The link between his jealousy and the impossibility of the sexual relationship is made very clear in a passage in which he compares his condition to that of a man who is to fight a duel and may well die suddenly having the revelation that he has wasted his life and if he survives the duel he will no longer put it to waste:

It [life] has, at that moment, become filled with ... all the splendid things which, he tells himself, the fatal outcome of the duel may render impossible, without thinking that they were already impossible before there was any question of a duel, owing to the bad habits which, even had there been no duel, would have persisted.

Even if Albertine was to tell him everything, the sexual relationship would still be impossible. For Proust, it is, and he often says this, his jealousy which is a spur to love, without the jealousy he would not love Albertine. Even if she gave him full knowledge the jealousy would not go away, he would simply find new reasons to doubt - for if he believed her he would have to admit the impossibilty of attaining full possession of her (Love, by his defination). Thus jealousy is not only his reason for loving Albertine, but the only way to keep his belief in Love at all.