I wrote this essay in 2014 on the request of an amazing artist friend of mine, Te Neille. I totally forgot about it until today. Posted on Medium.
“there is always something traumatic about love; with love there is a permanent emergency state” – Alain Badiou
Love, like aesthetics, due to its nature cannot ever be fully conceptualised, this only allures us even more into endless wild speculations about it. It is difficult to speak of love without falling into the two extremes, on one hand emotional outbursts based on personal experience and memory-driven (and thus reactive) convictions on the topic.
However imprecise and subjective these arguments may be it is a perfectly reasonable response, as nothing else we will experience will evoke such strong personal feelings as love. On the other extreme, impersonal philosophical meanderings, which are so divorced from the subjective nature of the topic often, succeed in emptying out love of any weight with the clinically disinfected hands of a medical professional. Love is not just a philosophical category, it is lived (painfully) through the subject.
As such, I will dispense with a genealogical account of love through the ages, while only making an explicit point that with the term love in this essay I am referring to romantic, passionate love (yes the one that interests us the most, as touching as your not-so-innocent love for your mother is), Eros. Also besides clear and complex links to sex and jealousy, I consider the term love completely unhinged for marriage, reproduction and material connotations. To put this succinctly, the feeling that made you understand all those love songs and behave like an idiot that last time with someone you were involved with, and that hopeless, boundless pain when it ended..That’s it! Sounds like fun right? I also want to untangle sexual desire, usually in a fetishistic way towards an other (objectification) from love, which focuses on ‘the very being of another’. Love and sexuality are so not easily untangled, but that’s an essay for another day.
Kundera speaks of the ridiculousness of explain why you love someone. Because you love the being of a person, stating the reasons make no sense. What remains is that inexplicable kernel, that contingent encounter with the other which makes grown adults completely loose their shit and then look back in surprise an shock at their behaviour, their strong, almost uncontrollable emotions.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Conscious uncoupling’ my ass, if there was no conflict in that celebrity break-up there was certainly very little passion and possibly even less love. It was more of an arranged marriage between two photogenic public figures. That is exactly what happens when we attempt to make the strange attractor safe, to remove the danger from love. This untamable love has always existed in opposition to the ‘proper’ arrangements of marriage, the propagation of property ownership and the established social order. Given this we must examine the revolutionary potential of love today, and its need to be defended from attempts to tame it.
These attacks come from two sides. On the one hand the traditional, hetero-normative attack on Eros is the one we are used to. With calls towards morality, for monogamy and against promiscuity, always attempting to reposition love towards utilitarian ends. Lee Edelman calls this reproductive futurism, this ‘won’t someone think of the children’ argument-killer since who can be against the future or children any more than one can be against kittens or oxygen. Love is feared, rightfully so, because it refuses to be herded into ‘proper’, accepted categories of desire. It is feared just as true queerness is, queerness as that refusal to accept reproductive futurism, to be the horror at the centre of normality.
On the other hand is the newer, post-modern attack on love. Love is essentially an embarrassing affair for all involved. In this age of appearance and spectacle, of self-conscious ironic disavowal of affective investment in anything, there is an attempt to ‘denature’ love. As Zizek calls it, diet love, alcohol-free beer, love without the pain, without the unexpected, without the madness. Paltrow’s handling of her break-up epitomizes this approach. This is a far more insidious attack on love than the traditional one, whose direct opposition served only to validate true love as an antagonist.
This attack follows today’s neo-Buddhist personal philosophy of late capital, the imperative to enjoy, to ‘just be happy’, the mantra ‘follow your dreams, do what you love, follow your heart’ etc, but do so ‘consciously’ or ‘mindfully’ to use some abused buzz words, do so within the confines of accepted behaviour and always with a certain self-conscious ‘I am I aware I look silly doing this but..’. I think this approach is even more conformist today, where we reduce everything to a logic of means and ends, with the pursuit of pleasure as the only goal. Denatured love becomes just another packaged experience we consume while obeying the conformist imperative to enjoy.
Love, which is a special mode of desire, a true encounter with the other, where you reach for an object and it reaches back to you. Where the object of desire becomes another subject and as a consequence produces an explosive reaction which threatens/promises a revolution of our internal landscape. Eros love is much too unstable a chemical to be used for political struggle, although it tends to be an unreliable catalyst of revolution. And you wanted to tame it?
While I understand and accept the reasons for wanting to break out of the traditional, monogamous love > marriage > reproduction cycle, I see love as a far more eternal, dangerous category, one which acts as a short- circuit between the personal and the impersonal. Which is the reason why every attempt was made to channel it into reproductive logic. Breaking these links to love, re-discovering it, experimenting with new ways of living this unalienable human experience, living it not just as an explosive affect but as a daily practice while also accepting the pain and danger love presents us with, is in my view the very foundation of any path to a revolutionary life. We must fight any puritanical attempts to either conventionalise or denature love, it is one of the few freedoms we have left.