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“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” (Freud, 1905, p. 222, my emphasis). This “fact” is, of course, a fiction. The object is neither found, nor re-found, perhaps not even lost. Rather, there is a continuous sliding from this one to that, from outside to inside. (“The character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object cathexes and … contains the history of those object choices” Freud, 1923, p. 29). There is no direct access to an original, only to its fictive (mediated) representatives. This mediator is language.1 That is, the subject slides from object to object precisely as his/her speech slides: signifiers linked, one to the next via metaphor and metonomy; no signifier pinned to a signified (see Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1959); objects transformed, this one into that, endlessly, by way of condensation and displacement. (The two processes are more than parallel; they are identical.)
Love simply puts a limit on the series of transformations. The object to be loved appears, is “chosen” and is thus fixed in its place: fixed there as a semblant of an unremembered other, a compensation. The loved one is a souvenir of a lost souvenir—the original event necessarily mythic, the question of its “reality” an incoherence. It can be believed in, nothing more.
Thus, re-writing Freud: The fictive finding of a fictive object is the doubly fictive re-finding of what one never quite had. This “lost object,” (mis)-construed as gone, inspires a driven search for (an)-other. The object which quiets that drive is, in the quieting, loved. Love, then, necessarily rests on this fiction of symmetry—Lost and Found— classically articulated in Aristophanes' playful myth of