Between Nowhere and Goodbye: Love Clichés (and beyond) in Literature and Film

This essay will attempt to explicate some of Lacan's well-known maxims and aphorisms about the relationship between love and death – specifically, “Love is to give what one does not have” (Sem. V); “Love [is] a reality that manifests and reveals itself in the real” (Sem. VIII); and, “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you [hence] I mutilate you” (Sem. XI) – through critical discussions of O. Henry's short story “The Gift of the Magi” (1905) and Clint Eastwood's film Million Dollar Baby (2004).