Sguardi sul partner all’epoca dell’amore di sé. Il valutativo, il clinico e l’atopico

Abstract

In this article, I introduce a theory of gazes on partner from descriptions of current and past partners by people in their twenties to forties, during a pilot study on intimate relationships. The evaluative gaze - when the partner is described by socially relevant qualities (e.g. He is good-looking) -, the atopic gaze - when the evaluative parameter is deactivated and the partner is said not be exhausted by language (e.g. Paul is Paul) - and the clinical gaze - when the partner (and the relationship, usually a past relationship) is posited as pathological and told by means of a psychological or psychiatric lexicon, typically (a male) narcissistic or manipulative. The diffusion and normalization of the clinical gaze is a historical unprecedented, rooted in the new semantics of self-love, which I reconstruct analyzing the ten best-seller self-help books aimed at women to avoid toxic love relationships (millions of copies sold on Amazon.com between 2014 and 2024). From the semantic of self-love, I discuss the idea that relationships, the affective ones in particular, are an expenditure of energy that must be continually evaluated, or even an obstacle to emotional well-being and self-fulfillment, notably for women. With respect to the other two gazes, which have longer historical roots, I show their actualization by linking them to the performative demands of contemporary society, from which authenticity and failure emerge as crucial for future research. Finally, I show crasis and critiques from one gaze to all the others, following the method of French pragmatic sociology, and how the same person leaps from one gaze to another, on the same partner, even in the space of a few moments, a leap that is felt on a linguistic level just as, in a musical analogy, one feels the leap from one octave to another.