I read a book: The Man Without Gravity by Charles Melman.
- Cyprien.L
- Apr 8
- 8 min read
“Sir, give me this water, so that I won’t be thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” (John 4:15)
More than fourteen years ago, I read a remarkable book — the kind that lifts an eyebrow while inviting you to see your everyday life differently. That book was The Man Without Gravity by Charles Melman. Though not a religious work per se, I’ve never stopped thinking about it, so deeply does it echo certain passages from the Bible: Ecclesiastes, with its disillusioned yet lucid view of our endless search for pleasure and meaning; the poignant encounters of Jesus with Nicodemus, in search of a truth deeper than appearances; and with the woman who had five husbands, always thirsting for a satisfaction the world can never truly offer.
Today, I want to share how these ancient, and yet strikingly contemporary, texts continue to help me make sense of Melman’s piercing and often unsettling analysis of modern society. A literary and spiritual walk between modern psychology and biblical wisdom — because yes, reading a book is also a way to feed the soul.
Brief Biography of the Author
Charles Melman is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, born in 1931 in Paris. A direct student and collaborator of Jacques Lacan, he played a major role in the transmission and evolution of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Founder of the Association lacanienne internationale, Melman is renowned for his incisive analyses of contemporary psychological and societal transformations, particularly through his work on jouissance and the erosion of symbolic structures in modern societies. Author of numerous influential works, he remains a key figure in the field of contemporary psychoanalysis.
Summary of the Book
In The Man Without Gravity, Charles Melman offers a sharp analysis of how our contemporary society has shifted from a logic dominated by desire to one centered on jouissance (unmediated enjoyment). This shift can be summed up in a few essential points:
From Desire to Jouissance
Melman describes how society, once structured by lack and the desire for a symbolically charged object, has transitioned to the pursuit of immediate, limitless pleasure. Desire once implied patience and idealization; today, jouissance demands instant gratification, eliminating the symbolic distance between subject and object.
The Loss of the Symbolic
Melman emphasizes the decline of symbolic landmarks — laws, prohibitions, figures of authority. These once helped channel our impulses into socially meaningful desires. Without them, our relentless quest for instant satisfaction leads to a crisis of meaning and authority.
An Addicted Society
By privileging immediate pleasure, we become addicted to constant stimulation, unable to bear emptiness, frustration, or boredom. This dependency, Melman warns, breeds psychic instability and a diffuse malaise.
Social and Individual Consequences
This paradigm shift gives rise to new forms of anxiety and psychological pathology. The modern individual struggles to accept the inherent dissatisfaction of life, seeking endlessly to fill the void with fleeting experiences and objects.
Spiritual Echoes
This problem resonates strongly within the biblical tradition. Ecclesiastes warns against the vanity of purely material pursuits. The Gospel stories of Jesus with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman urge us to seek not transient pleasures but deep, lasting fulfillment.
The Man Without Gravity diagnoses a society obsessed with jouissance while calling us to reclaim symbolic structures that can restore meaning and inner balance.
Ecclesiastes and Jouissance
Pleasure to forget the dust… but then what?
“This young man is in a relationship with a woman who has every quality, who loves him, and who has a son he is very attached to. There is a deep connection between them, and yet he cannot stay. He’s always thousands of miles away, even if his constant movement causes disruption, and without ever gaining anything from it. This reflects the new psychic economy in which there is no longer a place where a subject can dwell — no ‘home’ in the symbolic sense.”— Charles Melman, The Man Without Gravity
Reading Ecclesiastes recently, I was struck by how powerfully this ancient text echoes Charles Melman’s modern analysis. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” — this cry of Ecclesiastes captures precisely what Melman observes: we have moved from desire, which presupposes lack and patience, to jouissance, which demands immediacy and perpetuity. Melman writes:
“Jouissance removes all symbolic mediation; it confronts us with an insatiable immediacy.”
This immediacy resonates with Ecclesiastes’ reflection that even extreme indulgence leads to emptiness:
“I denied myself nothing my eyes desired… Yet everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” (Ecclesiastes 2:10-11)
This biblical insight feels disturbingly current when we consider phenomena like porn addiction — a modern emblem of what Melman describes: the pursuit of effortless, endless pleasure that paradoxically leads to deep dependence and dissatisfaction. Whether through pornography, compulsive video gaming, or social media binges, we seek instant highs — and reap only psychic exhaustion and existential void.
Melman helps us see Ecclesiastes not as a lament, but as a profound truth about the human condition: life centered on immediate gratification leads only to deeper frustration. Without symbolic distance or spiritual transcendence, we run endlessly toward fleeting pleasure — and away from true meaning.
Letting the Old Self Die
What if our emptiness stems from what we refuse to let die?
“A young musician I see — very likable, 25 years old — tells me: ‘I just can’t accept it.’ He means he can’t accept that he won’t sleep with every woman he wants in his lifetime. He simply can’t. He cannot tolerate this limitation.”— Charles Melman, The Man Without Gravity
This brings us to Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus by night, intrigued by a truth he senses but cannot grasp. Jesus says:
“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (John 3:3)
Nicodemus replies in confusion:
“How can someone be born when they are old?” (John 3:4)
Like Nicodemus, we resist the radical transformation required of us — a spiritual death to the old self. Melman echoes this:
“Our time no longer wants to hear about symbolic castration. It wants jouissance without limits, without mediation, without debt.”
Neuroscience backs this up. A 2021 Nature Neuroscience study by Volkow and Koob shows how overstimulation of dopamine circuits (through porn, sugar, or social media) dulls natural pleasure and fuels chronic dissatisfaction. Another 2020 study (Biological Psychiatry) confirms that repeated exposure to pornography reduces connectivity in the brain’s reward system, impairing impulse control and emotional regulation.
This links to the Gospel story of the rich young man, who walks away from Jesus “very sad” (Mark 10:22) — unable to give up what binds him. The sadness of excessive jouissance is the sadness of one who receives everything and still feels nothing.
Saint Paul understood this. He speaks of the “old self” that must die so the new self may rise.
“Put off your old self, which is being corrupted by deceitful desires… and put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:22–24)“Our old self was crucified with him… so that we should no longer be slaves to sin.” (Romans 6:6)
This “old self” is not just a moral flaw. It is deeply existential. Neuroscience tells us our habits and environments rewire our brains. In this sense, sin is not merely disobedience, but a misalignment of our being — a deviation from the light we were meant to follow.
And so, like Nicodemus, we stand on the threshold. We sense the call to new birth, but hesitate. Will we accept the death of our illusions, or walk away “very sad,” clinging to what cannot save us?
An Unquenchable Thirst Gravity
The Woman with Five Husbands and the Man Without Gravity
“I’ve known patients who need two women at once, so that one can always be absent — one woman introduces the lack that allows them to desire the other. They rotate partners endlessly, restarting the cycle of lack and consumption.”— Charles Melman, The Man Without Gravity
Early in his book, Melman recounts a young man unable to mourn an imaginary life — a fantasy in which all pleasures remain possible, all partners attainable. He cannot “realize.” This word is crucial. He cannot accept that life has contours, that desire must eventually choose and inhabit.
This is exactly the condition of the Samaritan woman at the well. She arrives alone at noon — a sign of social isolation. Jesus speaks with her gently but truthfully:
“You have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.” (John 4:18)
She too cannot realize. She has tried to quench her thirst through relationships, through consumption. But none of these “waters” suffice. Then Jesus offers her a different water — one that quenches thirst forever. She leaves her jar behind and runs to tell others. She is changed not by moral instruction, but by a Presence.
Melman’s analysis finds a mirror here. Modern desire is not oriented toward communion, but toward objectification. The human becomes the object. The self becomes a product — posed, filtered, consumed.
Even feminist liberation has been co-opted. What once resisted objectification is now repackaged as self-objectification. The system swallows rebellion and sells it back to us — as freedom.
As Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis explains, capitalism today exploits not by force but by voluntary self-submission. We offer our identities on the altar of algorithms — believing it makes us free.
But the Samaritan woman discovers a freedom that cannot be sold. A water that gives life. A gaze that does not consume. That day, she ceases to be an object. She becomes a witness. And perhaps that is true conversion: not ceasing to live, but refusing to be sold — and realizing we are loved.
From Narcissus to the Desert
The Modern Man Facing the Source
“The online voice that excites us so deeply… is not addressed to another subject, but expresses a need belonging more to an organism. A subject only exists when its singularity is recognized. In today’s digital codes, what seems singular is merely the echo of a collective body. There is no true desire or true demand here — just dependency on a real-world object.”— Charles Melman, The Man Without Gravity
“For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things… becoming like him in his death.” (Philippians 3:8–14)
For Saint Paul, spiritual life begins not with self-improvement, but with letting go:
“For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things… that I may gain Christ.” (Philippians 3:8)
Christianity is not an upward climb toward perfection. It is a descent into death, a letting go, a new birth. A life no longer generated from within, but received from without.
John’s Apocalypse says it plainly:
“To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life.” (Revelation 21:6)
But the modern man doesn’t want to receive. He wants to produce. He wants to be the source — of his own joy, his own meaning, his own salvation.
Sometimes he looks for it in others — in empathy, in recognition. But the other becomes a mirror. Like Narcissus, he gazes into his reflection — through likes, views, and digital affirmation — and believes he’s found himself. But the mirror doesn’t quench his thirst. It imprisons him.
Jesus tells the Samaritan woman:
“Whoever drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:13–14)
She realizes, finally, that the cycle of thirst cannot be broken by another person, or by herself. It can only be broken by receiving — by letting go.
Saint Paul shows us a different path: not looking back at our reflection, but pressing forward:
“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20)“Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal…” (Philippians 3:13–14)
This is not about achieving success — but receiving life. Not building a self, but consenting to be loved. Not becoming godlike by effort, but by grace.
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