Why is not possible to talk about love?

Pues todas las muchachas hermosas deberían estar desnudas, de espaldas,

atadas con gruesas cadenas, y con los muslos abiertos, totalmente

abiertos. Entonces se las podría azotar sin piedad.

Juan Emar

Derrida says it pretty clearly: I don't have nothing to say about it. Neither Lacan, he just talks about a love letter. What can I say about love then? Nothing, of course, but I am not able to bear the silence.

At he beginning of his documentary, Derrida distinguish between le future et l’avenir. The later is a future to come, which is someone who comes and whose arrival is totally unexpected. Love, one could say. For him, that is the real future: the Other who comes without me being able to anticipate her arrival. The happening of the love event, in Badiou’s terms. Later, Derrida will be asked about l’amour, “la mort?” ask him. “No, no, l’amour, we already hear too much about death,” replies the interviewer, Amy. “I don’t have anything to say about it. At least pose a question, I can’t examine love just like that.” A bit later Amy ask why love has been the subject of philosophy since Plato. He continues: “You can’t ask this from me Amy. Why have philosophers always spoken of love? That’s how philosophy has started... No, no. It’s not possible. I have the head empty about love in general.” He will go then into the difference that exists between qui et quoi, between the who I love, and the what I love. This difference is the one that divides the heart. The same question, regarding the being this time, is the one that divides philosophy from the beginning. Who is the being? What is the being? Fidelity [to the love event] is threatened by the difference between who and what.

Is there a difference? Between love and being, between who and what? He doesn’t go into this. At least we know that there is not sexual difference, he told us.

It is not possible now, but Hegel used to talk about it, about love, without any pudency:

Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness only as the renunciation of my independence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me. Love, however, is feeling, i.e. ethical life in the form of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational and known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent person and that, if I were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it since there is nothing more stubborn than this point (Punktualität) of self-consciousness which is negated and which nevertheless I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the propounding and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving of it, love is unity of an ethical type.

We could rewrite Hegel with Lacan’s words and recuperate from there the nonexistence of sexual relation: Love means the awareness of my making (out) of One with an Other, in this way, I get the idea of me being One just under the condition of losing myself in the fantasy of the unity of the Two into One, this is the object a. Love however, belongs to the realm of sex, is determined by the sexuated nature of the beings. There is no common measure between the event of love and the ordinary rules of life, the state, the power. When we are conscious of our relation the feeling disappears, it only can inhabit the unconscious. The first moment of love is the desire of being not-all, of being-with-a-hole, and that the completeness of myself is dreadful. Second, I see myself in the Other’s eyes, while the Other is seeing herself on my eyes, and we establish a relation, a relation that cannot be sexual. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous contradiction; language cannot say it because there is nothing more stupid than this pointlessness of self-consciousness which I must negate in the very act of its enunciation. Love is the cause and resolution of this contradiction, is the hole around which the subject turns for ever, and is always apart. When we look at it as the resolution of the contradiction, love makes the ethical One.

If the unconscious is structured as a language, and I am quite certain that to fall in love is not a conscious process, then to talk of love is to talk of language. Heidegger on language, who else. Heidegger on silence, on the way to talk about language, on they ways to shut the fuck up. If there is any way to understand Heidegger is as a consequence of the lack of a sexual relation, I lay that here without any warrant.

Photo by Sandra González