On Duty

By combining construction of thoughts which are always global or universal, and political experimentation which are local or singular but universally transmissible we must assure the existence of the communist hypothesis in consciences and situations.

That is what we can do and it is also what we must do.

Alain Badiou

The problem we are faced with it is not minor: we must reinvent subjectivity. This means rewrite the coordinates from where the subject moves, lives. That is why I stress so much the role of love, of love in a new way. Falling in love is the ultimate act of freedom; none can oblige you to love or not to love, not even yourself. It is there where one must put the accent. Ideology took over all the realms where we used to be able to fight. Love in the first place. The family, the house, the blue or pink prince or princess, the dreams that someone else put in our beds and in our lives. Living as if love is a part of our self development, in the form that ideology tells us to, that is, as a free choice of a lifestyle with one or more partners, be they of the same or different sex, color or race. Living our lives following the stupid dream of loving someone as if that would be the most important part of my life but at the same time keeping it under control, with contracts and psychological hygiene. A love that doesn’t hurts, that doesn’t fall in love.

What we have to do is to love as it it really matters, as if poetry and philosophy really exist so we can study them. We must to put our lives in bet, and capsize for someone else; we need to read again, even if the books are already read and the flesh is sad; we must learn, learn and learn. Otherwise, life becomes the gray alley which, with more or less money depending on which part of the globe you were born, but nevertheless empty, meaningless and shallowly, leads you to death. We are not in search of happiness; it is in the most literal sense of the word something that we must do in order to survive.

It is in love, and in love only, in the wetness that language carries between the two that love each other in the bed, in the sharp darkness of the bedroom, the two that produce themselves as they look in each other’s eyes their own reflection, where the construction of universal thoughts and the singular political experimentation meet. It is in the bed where words carry, at the same time, the universality of the idea and the locality of the bodies. The place so insanely enchanting where the capitalism system is literally reproduced, the place that philosophy disregarded for two thousands years and that poetry tried in vain to name and localize.

It is not the real of the sexual relation, of the bodies moving up and down, the one that we need to scape from when we fuck. It is on the contrary the real of love that has to be veiled and negated. As in the final scene of Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange where the dream of fucking appears in order to make music bearable. It is in the fucking between clapping people dressed like in the 19th century that the reality of love can be concealed. “I was cured, all right...” we hear Alex say.

Love is the ultimate act of freedom. Love is subject’s truth. Love confronts us with the fact that freedom is duty: I cannot do otherwise but love you. Even more, if love is to be true love, the other has to come with me without waiting for him, for her. She appears in a world emptied of meaning and purpose, a world where the only ethical act available to me is suicide. But I keep living because there is love.

The unconscious is structured as a language. The truth has the structure of fiction. Love is a poem written with our lives, a poem that never stops of not been written. Love does not only have the structure of language, but only appears in the empty spaces left by it. In the internal bubbles of unspeakable worlds that inhabit the world of language, is where love dwells. When loving, the subject walks in the boundaries of this borderlessness. If we think of language (of the unconscious) as an infinite fluid, this fluid is full of bubbles that show the exterior of it from its interior; the unspeakable as such. Without language there is no love and without poetry there is no real beauty. A consequence of this is that there is a beauty that is only given to those who love, bubbles that can only be seen in the sharp darkness of the bedroom.

To create a new subjectivity means, in the first place, to understand the structure of language, of love, of the unconscious. In order to enact my freedom completely, I must recognize where and how my acts will determine my future duty. And my duty can be take the rifles and make the revolution or take my life and capsize for someone else. Since by definition l‘avenir comes without me been able to foreseen it, I cannot know what to do in a particular situation. That is to say that in order to have an event, one must jump into the particular situation in an absolute meaning and senseless way; it is only a posteriori that the meaning of my acts can be reconstructed. This jump into the abyss, without a parachute or life insurance, is the only way to find the truth of love, or in general, of a particular situation. We risk a jump into nothingness. We risk a complete failure. We risk our life in doing so. But we risk it joyfully because we cannot do otherwise. Because doing otherwise now means precisely fulfill our duty.

Photo by Piet Musterd