Envy and Love in the Experience of Female Excess

Envy is a passion of both women and men; however, in women it has something more evident of being limitless or bo¿omless. In Specchio specchio delle mie brame, Donatella Borghesi makes this into a ma¿er of the end of the patriarchy. She holds that in the patriarchy the female measure was above all of the man and, therefore, jealousy the tone of the relationship between women in competing for the male gaze; but in the post-patriarchy it is a very different thing. As male authority weakens, the measure frequently ends up being another woman and the envy of what is most loved in another woman turned into the deepest passion. To me it seems that, prior even to the social, the position of women amongst themselves is symbolic, and that the deepest passion of envy in women has to do with their being of the same sex as the mother. From there comes the greater destructivity of this feeling in them. The one who is jealous competes to appropriate herself of the love that the other has. The one who envies destroys the treasure that she loves in the other. Melanie Klein speaks of gratitude as a feeling that repairs the envy. This is true but I consider, however, that gratitude is a feeling that has the same root as envy: the love of something valuable that we assault when we envy and which we give thanks for with gratitude. In envy there is also the fear of something inconceivable that we capture in envy, namely, an excess. There is an enormity that fascinates, that at bo¿om astonishes and captivates us. It takes us outside ourselves through a resonance that we notice within. At the end of the day, envy is a failed admiration that has not known how to continue evolving. And there can be seen all the ambivalence of envy. We envy the other because there is something in her that leads us to allow ourselves to be seduced. On leaving ourselves for something that transcends us and at the same time is ours, because if it a¿racts us it means that something of us assents to it.