The Tragedy of Love: A Study of Love And Death in Jacques Lacan’s Thought, With Special Reference to Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet

Abstract Love is a significant concept in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory that, compared to other concepts, has received little attention from Lacan scholars and Lacanian literary critics. Through offering an analysis of the concept of love in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and its connection with the Lacanian notions of desire, subjectivity, fantasy, the Real, and death (drive), this article seeks to delineate Lacan’s contribution to the philosophy of love. Following a general exploration of the love between Romeo and Juliet, several passages of Shakespeare’s play are studied with regard to basic questions in Lacanian philosophy of love: the nature of love, the reason why one loves another, the effects of love upon the individual’s subjectivity, the difference between love and desire, and the relation between love and death. The authors argue that Lacanian concepts, such as object petit a, and the Symbolic, illuminate aspects of Romeo and Juliet’s love, leading them to know that their desire cannot be fulfilled and that there is always something more to be desired. In this tragedy, neither Romeo nor Juliet can understand what the other desires, and what they believe they themselves desire is merely an illusive construct of their own fantasies.