In his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Petrarch demonstrates in a hitherto unseen manner how love is extremely ambiguous. Love is at one and the same time that which creates his identity, and that which dissolves it anew, it is simultaneously creation and destruction, recognition and alienation, pleasure and suffering – life and death. That is how (in the words of the brilliant Petrarch scholar Sara Sturm‐Maddox) his amorous subjectivity is profoundly ambiguous.1 The project of the poet is monological, and he strives toward a unity with himself, actualized in a circular and narcissistic auto‐communication in which he (so to speak) listens to his own speech – whereby he aims at being his own sender and recipient. But nevertheless he must concurrently affirm and negate the other, who mirrors the poet's self‐consciousness, but who contrarily alienates him as well. He has to express himself in the other in order to appear to himself which reluctantly makes the monological project dialogical. It is this fundamental, ambivalent conflict of poetry, which Petrarch eminently analyzes in his life's work. He has a strong inclination toward being solitary, unique, independent, and self‐enclosed, whereby he consequently objects the other to negation. However, he often emphasizes that self‐consciousness must make the detour by the other, if it is to achieve understanding and consciousness of itself. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that Petrarch's conception of love is ambivalent, and that it is due to the poet's special relation to the other, who is both conceived of as an opportunity and an obstacle to the manifestation of self‐consciousness, auto‐affection, and subjectivity.

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   |texte=   Crucified in the Mirror of Love: On Petrarch's Ambivalent Conception of Love in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta
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