The Other as an Object of Conquest Versus the Other as Horizon: A Reading in Stephen Mitchell and Clarice Lispector

This paper presents a dialogue between Clarice Lispector’s story “Love” and Stephen Mitchell’s ideas in his book Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time. Using Freud’s, Meltzer’s, Bion’s, and Lacan’s ideas as a starting point, the close reading of both texts offers an understanding of love as a unique interaction between the heimliche and the Unheimliche as well as between the capacity to relate to the other as a destination to be conquered and the capacity to relate to the other as a horizon that generates a perpetual motion within. The final sections of this paper offer that what makes movement possible is the commitment to the movement itself rather than to its target. Wherever the other is constituted within us as a horizon rather than as an object of conquest, movement toward that other, no matter its vicissitudes, will always be maintained.