In Jealousy: A Forbidden Passion, Giulia Sissa aims to re-evaluate jealousy's composition and value. She argues that jealousy is an ordinary and valuable form of anger which arises when one's desire for another's love is undermined. To think otherwise – to laud Stoic denial or to smother such anger in shame – is to be seduced by modern ideology that views jealousy as a rival-focused triadic emotion, one that reflects romantic entitlements within a competitive lovers' marketplace. For Sissa, however, to be jealous is simply to suffer because one loves. There is no shame in that.
Sissa's writing is elegant and suffused with personal feeling. Her wide historical horizon, classical expertise, and creative juxtaposition of texts show that one can write richly about a messy subject. Whilst there is much to squabble over, this is the most interesting meditation on jealousy I have read, and will benefit anyone who researches, or has, emotions. I will first summarise the book's complex tapestry of arguments, before raising a few questions.
Chapter one takes us to the erotic anger (orgê) pervading much Ancient Greek tragedy. There, jealousy is connected nobly to action. People suffer because they are hurt by their lovers; their responses, vengeful or not, metabolize pain. Sissa focuses on Euripides's Medea, and argues that the play's structure mirrors the form of erotic anger: Medea is wronged by Jason's infidelity, clearly articulates her fury, and seeks revenge. Medea's erotic bond with Jason, a bond that defines her, underpins her anger. These tragedies are notable because jealousy is not portrayed as shameful, and because it targets a beloved. Rivals play a minor role.
This portrayal of jealousy is overturned by subsequent philosophical reflections on the emotions. The trouble starts with the Stoics, who denigrate the emotions, particularly anger, but it continues in the early modern era, as Sissa shows in chapter two where she describes the evolving historical view of jealousy through the eyes of four male philosophers.
In his early writings, Hobbes develops a mechanistic view of the emotional person as a moving body, beset by forces. Anger is caused by impediments to movement in the race of life. For Rousseau, jealousy is an explicit consequence of the ‘invented and artificial’ phenomenon of romantic love, which, in turn, rests on the rise of private property. Viewed thus, jealousy is essentially competitive. It rests on three features: comparison with others, amour-propre, and a Hobbesian obstacle to the free running of one's love. The connection between the self, and jealousy, animates strong feelings but hinders their unambivalent expression, for no one wants to be seen to be vain. Diderot and Stendhal, in different ways, chart the ironical complexities of jealousy's social origins and context. Stendhal, in particular, retains the idea that jealousy manifests love but he emphasizes the vitalizing role of the imagination within the ‘crystallizations’ that drive romantic captivation.
In the powerful third chapter, Sissa decries those who downplay the reciprocity inherent in romantic love, a move caused, she thinks, by confusion about love objects and objectification. She contests the tradition, with Kant as its most infamous exponent, that conceives of relationships as quasi-contracts that are necessary to avoid the risk of objectifying or using another person due to sexual desire. In turn, sexual desire is regarded, explicitly or otherwise, as potentially dehumanizing or degrading. Viewed thus, for Kant and others, ‘jealousy is a claim to a right’: a form of possessiveness that one has in virtue of loving in the correct manner.
Jealousy springs from possessiveness; that is the premise. For some, this is appropriate. For others, especially those versed in the Hegelian and Marxist engagement with the premise, it is to be resisted. Sissa holds Simone de Beauvoir as an example of someone who attempts to ‘abhor the quagmire of jealousy, and ban jealousy altogether’ through ‘endur[ing] Sartre's other women’ (146), i.e. through an open relationship.
More interesting, however, is Sissa's rejection of the possessiveness premise. She adroitly illustrates that to be the object of someone's attention is not thereby to be a thing, and describes desire with vivid intensity. Far from being dangerous or degrading, erotic attention is a form of ‘hyperpersonification’:
A body is never a thing. In an erotic situation, a body reaches out to another body. Desire clings to parts and places, bits and pieces, indeed, but above all it responds to movements and postures, attitudes and gestures – which have nothing to do with ‘things’… When I desire, I do exactly the opposite of what is meant by ‘objectification’: I accentuate the privilege, the unique point, the anchorage and the centre of gravity of my desire, which sets that person – the object of my love – apart… It is not sex that instrumentalizes persons; it is Kant and his followers who instrumentalize sex. (128)
In chapter four, Sissa offers an unflinching portrayal of what it is like to suffer from jealousy. She frees the emotion from the common veils of mockery or sarcasm, ‘because being jealous means not conceding one's singularity, not giving up on the irreplaceable, and clinging to privilege, it is absolute despair’ (154).
The chapter argues for the idea that jealousy is the direct continuation of love. But unlike others who adopt this view, from Stendhal to Jean-Luc Marion, Sissa's approach is not sanitising. For her, jealousy arises when the other ‘breaks the agreement of desires’ in love; that is, it flows from the inescapable vulnerability engendered by romantic love (here she echoes Jerome Neu's approach). The resulting pain does not edify, it cannot be woven into a narrative of emotional enrichment. Instead, she aims to be ‘furious, candid, and realistic’ because ‘suffering serves no purpose’ (157).
Sissa also thinks jealousy has little to do with vanity, self-concern, or self-esteem. Such a view, she argues, does little justice to the pain of jealousy. Instead, ‘we become vain in the process of attempting to hide a pain from which we are already suffering’ (159). Note that as with her interpretation of Medea, rivals play a marginal role in jealousy. She writes:
Above all, jealousy is a feeling of moral and physical grief, of sorrow and affliction, brought on by the eclipse of the other person's desire, the loss of his or her irreplaceable presence… The jealous are in mourning. (159)
The book ends with an extended discussion of the Ovidian ars amatoria. Sissa embraces his core insight; namely, that while jealousy is pain, one can sidle up to it playfully. To love well one must manage the ensuing dialectic of pleasures and pains through the adoption of a proper ‘erotic epistemology’ which praises ambivalence, allusion, opacity, discretion, and hardy realism in love, and rejects what Sissa regards, negatively, as the cult of transparency. The book's conclusion houses Sissa's clearest statement of jealousy's normative status: jealousy is normal, realistic, healthy, useful, honest, worthy, but painful.
Whilst Sissa's argument highlights the character of some kinds of jealousy, her characterization of the focus, intensity, and composition of jealousy can seem overly narrow. The focus on romantic love, for instance, will not appease those who think jealousy between siblings, friends, and colleagues is endemic, not romantic, and the paradigmatic form of jealousy. Moreover, asexuals, or people with little interest in sex, might baulk at the overly intimate association between romantic affection and sexual attraction and activity. Finally, even if one thinks jealousy is best understood in romantic terms, one can ask whether infidelity, flagrant instances of betrayal, as in the Medea, are as common or as paradigmatic a cause of jealousy as opposed to, say, the anticipation of alienated affection. If the latter, jealousy is akin to fear, not anger.
The focus on angry jealousy also sidelines the ways this emotion can be subtle, diffuse, and sad. Jealousy need not be veiled in shame to be experienced in a muted way, or a self-critical way. Peter Toohey speaks of the ‘quieter’ life of jealousy (P. Toohey, Jealousy (Yale University Press, 2014), x), whereas for Sissa the volume is always turned up. This, I think, is a mistake.
Perhaps the mistake arises from Sissa's point of departure: the idea that jealousy is erotic anger. This view could be more clearly specified, however. Jealousy is portrayed in terms of both anger and grief, and Sissa is clear it is closely related to the fact that one loves another person. But is jealousy a distinct emotion, a species of another emotion such as anger, part of a broader trait or disposition like love, or some combination of these views?
These uncertainties inflect Sissa's defence of jealousy. Even if jealousy is a form of anger, anger is often unjustified and many of the purported instrumental benefits of jealousy presuppose that someone is well-placed to engage productively with their feelings rather than becoming aggressive. (Medea fails spectacularly, in this regard.) Perhaps a clearer distinction between episodes of jealousy, and jealous traits, would help here. The former might have occasional value, and certainly not warrant shame, but few would suggest we should cultivate the trait of jealousy.
Many non-monogamous people, for example, strive to cultivate a range of opposing traits like honesty, openness, and diminished possessiveness. Sissa's fleeting engagement with non-monogamy was one of the book's weakest areas. She is clear that Althusser's sexually open relationship with his wife Hélène, whom he strangled, was marred by cruelty. Yet her other only example of such a relationship, that between Sartre and de Beauvoir (termed a ‘polygamous contract’), is not a good example of a flourishing open relationship premised on honesty, respect, and kindness.
Lots of non-monogamous people acknowledge that jealousy is challenging and one cannot eschew possessiveness by fiat. Instead, they strive to sustain nuanced and kind ways of attending to the emotional lives of their lovers. Sissa offers a false trichotomy: Kantian contractualism, the Ovidian art of love, or the de Beauvoirian rejection of possessiveness. There are many different ways to reject utopianism and contractualism in romance.
Finally, while some people might think Sissa's Ovidian solution to jealousy, the delicate dance in the liminal space between pleasure and pain, is attractive, other readers will be more sanguine. I worry that any ‘erotic epistemology’ that is founded on opacity and dissimulation accentuates heteronormative patriarchal power, and favours confident people with well-articulated desires. In reality, however, there is little distance between playful denial, and outright gaslighting. Obsessing over transparency may be unsexy, but honesty and clarity can be fostered in ways that avoid this pitfall while empowering vulnerable people.
These points aside, the book is excellent. Sissa situates her normative appraisal of jealousy in a broader historical context, illustrating how the emotion has been analysed over time in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalytic writing. This wider focus exposes the complexity of both jealousy as an emotion, and the many factors that shaped social judgments of jealousy's value. Sissa's descriptions of the depths of jealous pain, and the complex grip of romantic attraction, are truly captivating, and a welcome corrective to more sterile writing on emotions.
Jealousy is frustratingly intricate. Sissa shows us, with great precision, what the angry manifestations of jealousy are like, how it can spring from love, and how lovers might fight back with muscular irony, playfulness, and self-respect. One can infer what this book is like from the fact that Sissa feels the need to clarify, multiple times, that she does not condone violence. Not all jealousy is like this, however. At times to be jealous is to be unashamedly sad and fearful as one's vulnerability is exposed and one's fears heightened. Infidelity, betrayal, or a heroic erotic bond are not required for this; just the apprehension of slowly waning affections from someone one cares about. In those situations, clear, kind, and tender reassurance speak louder than fury.
