On (the) Love (encounter)

Badiou says it somewhere in his Siècle, I think: Love is the most revolutionary thing to do today.

The problem I want to treat here was posed by Derrida in a beautiful scene of his documentary, where he is talking about Echo and Narcissus. The story goes like this: a jealous god is pissed off with Echo, a beautiful and young nymph who used to talk a lot, and condemns her to talk just repeating the words of the others. She falls in love with the young and vain Narcissus, and manage to, "in her loving and infinitely cleverness", tell him she is in love with him: "In repeating the language of another, she signs her own love." The end of the story is know to everyone, he dies and she goes to live into the empty spaces.

In this point of the documentary, Derrida realize something: "And always, with every word, talk is not to see. And in fact, Echo blindly but quite lucidly, corresponds to Narcissus who is also blind. [...] Not to see more than one self, is a kind of blindness, and he cries, he dies, in a certain way, for not being able to see anyone else. Echo and Narcissus are two blind people, who love each other, and..." he stops moving his hands, looks inside, mumbles an answer, dilates the three seconds of silence, and finally, he asks himself: "How come two blind people can love each other? That is the question then."

The answer, or better, one possible answer, is given by Zizek on his "Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture: Wagner". This is one of the best talks I heard of Zizek so I will quote in extenso from the last 20 minutes: "My solution is: love highest need is to renounce his own power. This is what Lacan calls symbolic castration. If one is to remain faithful to one's love, one should not elevate it to the direct focus of one's life, one should renounce its centrality. Love should not be posited as direct goal. Love is a by-product, something of undeserved grace. The point is not that there are more important things than Love, an authentic love encounter remains a kind of absolute point of reference of one's life. To put it on traditional terms, what makes one's life meaningful. The hard lesson learnt by Brunhilde is that precisely as such, Love should not be a direct goal of one's life. True Love is modest, like my old of example, the love of a couple in Marguerite Duras' novels: while the two lovers hold hands, they don't look into each other's eyes, they look together outwards, into some third point, their common cause. Perhaps, I claim, there is not greater love than that of the revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other, at any moment, if the revolution demands it. They do not love each other less than the amorous couple bend and suspending all their terrestrial link in order to burn out in unconditional passion. If anything, they love each other more."

And so she goes to Africa, or Australia for that matter, to do what she has to do, and you stay in Europe and work, try to write. How to know if the encounter was a real love encounter? "So much of love is on your own head" she would say, write, the last day. Today is the next morning. Zizek continues on the narcissistic side of Wagnerian love: "If you look at all Wagner's great love dialogues they are basically, and Wagner was aware of it, a narcissistic fake, in the sense of you don't really care about your partner, you just want to get immersed into your dream. Which is why in wagnerian love affairs you never even look at your partner, just somebody comes and you say: for thousands of years I been waiting for you, and so on and so on. The partner is just someone who triggers you. [...] It's not at all an encounter with otherness."

On the one hand, the other should remain an other, a mystery, a riddle never to find out its answer. While on the other hand, for both subjects the event should remain (and become more) real, and, more importantly, productive. The evental nature of the encounter can only be asserted a posteriori. The event will be (retro)produced by the products harvested from the encounter. The love event follows the same logic of life, whose circular definition implies a precedence of the logical versus historical causes. Heidegger knew this pretty well as we can read on his dialogue on love: "The passing of the pass is something else than what has been." We can paraphrase now, and say: The passing of the love encounter is something more than what it was.

Photo by Shanon Wise