Thinking About Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy 9780271076188

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THINKING ABOUT LOVE

THINKING ABOUT LOVE Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy edited by diane enns and antonio calcagno

The Pennsylvania State University Press  •  University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Thinking about love : essays in contemporary continental philosophy / edited by Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno. pages cm Summary: “A collection of essays exploring the nature and experience of love, its contradictions and limits, and its material and ideal forms. Drawing from leading contemporary Continental philosophers, contributors focus on love as it relates to such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, hatred, politics, and desire”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-271-07096-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Love. 2. Continental philosophy. I. Enns, Diane, editor. II. Calcagno, Antonio, 1969– , editor. BD436.T45 2015 128’.46—dc23 2015022697

Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. This book is printed on paper that Contains 30% post-consumer waste.

Contents Acknowledgments vii Thinking About Love: An Introduction Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno 1 part i Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love 1 Love and Death Todd May 17 2 Love’s Limit Diane Enns 31 3 The Subject in Crisis: Kristeva on Love, Faith, and Nihilism John Caruana 46

part ii Love, Desire, and the Divine 4 The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love in Continental Philosophy of Religion Christina M. Gschwandtner 63 5 Love’s Conditions: Passion and the Practice of Philosophy Felix Ó Murchadha 81 6 What Can Love Say? Lyotard on Caritas and Eros Mélanie Walton 98 7 Finding a Place for Desire in the Life of the Mind: Arendt and Augustine Antonio Calcagno 114

part iii Love and Politics 8 Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love: Toward a Social-Material Theory Christian Lotz 131 9 Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil on the Significance of Love for Politics Sophie Bourgault 149 part iv The Phenomenological Experience of Love 10 Trust and the Experience of Love Fiona Utley 169 11 The Time of Possible and Impossible Reciprocity: Love and Hate in Simone de Beauvoir Marguerite La Caze 186

12 Intentionality and the Neuroscience of Love Dorothea Olkowski 201 part v Love Stories 13 Love Is Blind: Jacques Derrida Dawne McCance 221 14 The Babies in Trees Alphonso Lingis 235 List of Contributors 247 Index 251

Acknowledgments The idea for this volume was born in a conversation between two friends at a café talking about love. The rewards of a philosophical friendship are many, but one of its greatest pleasures is working together on a project of mutual interest, inviting others into the activity of thinking together. We express our deepest appreciation to all the contributors who joined us in this labor of love and friendship, and to Daniel Fast for the elegant cover image. It was a joy to work with the staff members at Penn State University Press. We are especially grateful to Kathryn B. Yahner for her enthusiastic support of the project from the start, to the ever-efficient Charlee Redman, and to Steve Kress for the cover design. A special note of thanks to Nicholas Taylor for his impeccable copyediting.

Thinking About Love An Introduction diane enns and antonio calcagno

Philosophers have been accused, and rightly so, of not giving love enough consideration. Treatments of love by philosophers throughout history pale in number when considered against all the works of literature, poetry, painting, or film devoted to love in its plethora of forms. How does one write of love philosophically, given the age-old prejudices of Western philosophers against the body, emotions, and the mutability that is their only constant? Reason falters in matters of the heart; for reflections on love we flock to the poets and musicians. Their melodies, the lyricism of their self-contained lines, act like watery conduits, easing the awkwardness of expressing what is deeply felt in words that never seem adequate. But beyond descriptions of the beauty and joy or pain of human attachment, we need understanding. Love is not beyond thinking. We approach the thinking of love through analyses of our own and others’ experiences; in this way reflection on love can transform us. But there is another reason why philosophers should care about love. Plato rightly saw eros as a motivator: it pushes us, inciting our desire for pleasure, wisdom, knowledge, and virtue, and even for the good. If we accept this insight, thinking about love in all its manifestations—desire, appetite, sexual longing, intimacy, care, and friendship, as well as love’s failure and death—can enrich our understanding of human existence. Love is a

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fundamental aspect of our being, and its presence or absence in our lives has profound effects. That philosophers on the whole have greater confidence in the power of reason than in the power of love means they have neglected a fertile terrain for exploring and understanding the human condition. In order to address a number of our most vexing philosophical problems, including the relationships between emotion and reason, the self and the other, love and hate, ethics and politics, and our preoccupations with death, trust, intimacy, and sex, we need to think about love. This book considers these problems from perspectives arising out of the Continental tradition. While there exists a growing philosophical interest in the question of love, mostly on the part of Anglo-American Analytic scholars, Continental approaches to the question of love have not been fully explored. Philosophers in the Analytic tradition, foremost among them Irving Singer,1 Harry Frankfurt,2 and Alan Soble,3 have written extensively on the nature of love and its history, but they do not write in the context of the persistent themes we find in recent Continental philosophy, including critical accounts of subjectivity and selfhood, social relations of production and reproduction, alterity, desire, abjection, ineffability, reversibility, and ambiguity. While several works have recently appeared that are rooted in this latter tradition, notably Jonna Bornemark and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s edited collection Phenomenology of Eros4 and M.  C. Dillon’s Beyond Romance,5 these texts are exclusively phenomenological treatments of erotic love and therefore more limited in scope. Jean-Luc Marion6 and Michel Henry,7 also phenomenologists, and a cohort of contemporary French thinkers have done much to rectify the lack of philosophical interest in love, but their perspectives are informed and constrained by the Catholic tradition. New or relatively recent works by Alain Badiou8 and Jean-Luc Nancy9 can be added to the roster, but these are either too prescriptive, as in the former, or obscure, as in the latter. We seek a wider approach to considering love, one that is informed by recent philosophical work but also moves beyond it. With this in mind, we have brought together scholars and philosophers from a variety of critical perspectives to reflect on a number of contemporary European Continental thinkers, all of whom have much to say on the nature of love. Our contributors consider the writings of Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Henry, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone Weil, among others, and several draw on fiction and film for their analyses. Each of the fourteen essays focuses on a specific question or theme and draws on leading Thinking About Love

philosophers to help develop the problem or provide a critical response to the questions raised. Our contributors explore various aspects of love, from its paradoxical nature and its connection to hate or the event of death, to the role it plays in ethical comportment and the limit it demands when it encounters violence. With few exceptions we have restricted our texts to principal figures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Continental philosophy, as it is this body of work that needs more scholarly attention. The purpose of this collection is to widen the scope of philosophical reflection on love in terms of method and to raise new questions on the nature of love that challenge established views. Literature, film, memoir, social analysis, and personal meditations on love can lead to valuable philosophical insights that provoke further thinking and help us to understand the complexity of human relationships. This complexity is constantly evolving. We believe it is time for fresh perspectives on the nature of love, given new forms of social organization, changes in political and social conventions, and the development of a more robust psychology and new types of love relationships—all of which have been shaped by technology and the collapse of old social norms. Not merely exegetical, the following essays grapple with the realities of human experience; the materiality and vicissitudes of contemporary love figure prominently. Central to such an endeavor is the self-reflexive question of how to think about love philosophically: is there an ineffability, or conversely, a materiality to love that remains inaccessible to the philosopher? Our contributors are not making prescriptive claims about authentic love, as many philosophers have done; they are thinking about how to think philosophically about love without attempting to resolve or alleviate love’s ambiguities, paradoxes, or limits. This highlighting of some of our best European thinkers and attentiveness to both the thought and the experience of love fills a lacuna in the philosophy of love. We trust that the essays gathered here will appeal to a broad audience of readers searching for new insights on timeless questions regarding love. We have organized the chapters into five parts, grouping essays according to the themes rather than the authors they address. Some are expository while others are more reflective, even personal. We could never pretend to be systematic or comprehensive in our discussions of love; this collection reflects the disparate, perhaps even haphazard, ways in which we move between experience and analysis in our consideration of love, between the body and mind, and between another’s experience of love and our own. Such thinking demands versatility not only in the writer, but in the reader as Introduction

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well. When it comes to thinking about love, philosophy must open its doors to creativity. I. Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

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We begin with mortality. In “Love and Death,” Todd May rejects the traditional depiction of love as enduring and even eternal. This view of love stems from Plato and is refined by the Neoplatonists and other religiously oriented thinkers. May risks a wager: what if our mortality, although it makes love temporally finite, lends to love an intensity, a power and affective valence that distinguishes it from other emotions? Through an exploration of diverse phenomena, including aging, friendship, and romantic love, May argues that a reflection on the significance of death to love does not tell us how to conduct a successful long-term romantic relationship but makes us aware of the impact of the limits of our time together. In this way death lends to love an intensity that varies in different kinds of relationships, and it is this intensity that constitutes the nature of love. Our mortality, in fact, is “a cosmic gift to love” even if it is an ambivalent one, since “it takes our loved ones from us but gives them to us all the more while we and they are here.” Our mortality provides the ultimate limit to love, gifting us with meaning and fulfillment, but in loving, our own limits are revealed. In “Love’s Limit,” Diane Enns reflects on the limits of love with reference to twentieth-century philosophers like Arendt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre and to writers such as Lorna Crozier and David Grossman. Enns begins by taking a position against the liberal and Christian paradigms that continue to inform our assumptions about romantic love. In the former, the self is presumed autonomous and sovereign, requiring equality and reciprocity to love properly; in the latter, the self is a mere vessel for God’s perfect love, requiring self-sacrifice and denial. Enns argues that there is a limit not to love itself—for love can be experienced as an expansive swell of emotion without limit—but to an individual’s capacity for love. The limit arises when the self permits another to erode or destroy this capacity. This is not a sovereign self with fortified borders that is threatened by the love and need of another, but a self always already in relation to another, affirmed in her existence by the act of loving rather than by being lovable. Loving, Enns suggests, is a gift to both lover and beloved, an unsurpassed affirmation expressed in Augustine’s phrase volo ut sis—I will you to be. Enns interprets this as a passive acceptance of the other’s freedom to be, to act, and to take Thinking About Love

responsibility for one’s life. But to be capable of love we need to be vulnerable to the other, Enns argues, and this means being open to the risk of suffering and loss, to the vicissitudes of love. Thus the capacity for love is destroyed when vulnerability is crippled. John Caruana reflects similarly on love’s wounds and limits in chapter 3, “The Subject in Crisis: Kristeva on Love, Faith, and Nihilism.” He writes of a current crisis in subjectivity: an inability to love. To assess this crisis he turns to Julia Kristeva, for whom the subject is given in love. When love is not present or deficient, the incipient psyche falls back on itself, into an autism that inhibits, even forecloses, relations with others. Kristeva is unequivocal in her criticisms of the vacuous and exploitative discourses of love and romance proffered by our present age, which fail to address what she calls “the incredible need to believe,” to have faith in the world and in others. Given this failure, Caruana argues, it should not surprise us that young people are increasingly attempting to heal their tormented psyches through self-harm, in particular self-cutting, a paradigmatic symptom of our age. In the absence of effective and meaningful images and representations, these youth are abandoned to themselves, enacting a desperate ritual in response to abject feelings. Through self-inflicted incisions they struggle to revive their stillborn psyches without recourse to metaphor and idealization. But it is an act as futile as it is tragic, for if they cannot love themselves they are unlikely to establish loving relations with others. Kristeva challenges our contemporary secular age to conceive of alternative narratives and images of love that can foster ongoing psychic renewal and belief in the world again. II. Love, Desire, and the Divine

In part II we shift our focus to discussions of love and transcendence, whether we speak of a love beyond human capacities, that gestures toward the unsayable, or of the desire that propels us beyond ourselves. We commence with Christina M. Gschwandtner’s discussion of what she calls an unprecedented and surprising emphasis on love in a particular current of French thought. In “The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love in Continental Philosophy of Religion,” she argues that in this body of work we find a fairly monolithic and extreme picture of love as kenotic abandon, entailing intense self-sacrifice, total abnegation, and complete devotion to the other. This approach is particularly evident in Jean-Luc Marion, who has written most extensively on the question of love, and whose assumptions and Introduction

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analyses are reiterated by other writers even on the rare occasions when they criticize him or diverge from his account. Kenotic love is grounded in claims about the relation between God and the human soul (as agape), limiting love to the traditional image of a male initiator of love and a female respondent coming together in a heterosexual coupling. Gschwandtner argues that this kenotic version of love is too extreme and does not ultimately depict how love is actually experienced in concrete situations. For example, while heterosexual eros is the most common pattern for love in the Western Christian tradition, it is not clear that this is an adequate pattern for all loves, like parental love, homosexual love, friendship, or love for an animal, a home, or a garden. Love is not only sexual and it is not always kenotic in this intense degree. This does not mean we should entirely reject accounts of kenotic love, Gschwandtner concludes. If it is described more narrowly as a particular religious phenomenon of agape, kenotic love provides a meaningful account of religious experience and of religious identity in phenomenological terms, and in that sense provides important insights into the meaning and patterns of religious experiences of love. To be in love is to be a self and to be a self is to be overtaken with passion, that is, ruled by an alterity that is both within and transcends the self. In chapter 5 of this volume, “Love’s Conditions: Passion and the Practice of Philosophy,” Felix Ó Murchadha understands love as the self giving itself to this alterity, trusting in a passionate feeling that always remains partly opaque but also conscious of possible destruction. The will to love and to be loved does not then begin with itself, but is a response to that which entices and allures it. There is a tension, however, between this alterity and the philosophical project of self-understanding. Self-knowledge, responsible selfhood, and self-legislating reason—informed by Stoic reflections on the self—all cluster around the formation of a self capable of philosophical reflection and are rooted in an ascetic discipline of control, perhaps even elimination, of the passions. The philosophical impulse to sovereignty and autonomy forgets the source of self-responsibility, which is not in the self but in the place from which the self emerges, the between space of being in love. But such an autonomous, sovereign, and apathetic being cannot love, Ó Murchadha points out. And while Christianity’s account of love as agape critiques this philosophical position, it ultimately fares no better. To think love philosophically, Ó Murchadha concludes, is to begin in and with passion, to begin as already in love. It is to practice philosophy otherwise, beyond the Stoic-Skeptic inheritance that continues to inform the ascetics of philosophical reflection. Thinking About Love

In chapter 6, “What Can Love Say? Lyotard on Caritas and Eros,” Mélanie Walton’s point of departure is Jean-Luc Marion’s claim that philosophers no longer have the words to speak of love. Referring to JeanFrançois Lyotard’s concept of the differend, she argues that it is in the face of the impossibility of full and complete capture of knowledge that we are called most urgently to try anyway. When it comes to the experience of human love, we must keep in mind that while narratives are the clearest indicators of the truths we live by, these narratives do not capture the meaning of the event itself; their identification as narratives does not then give us the power to break the veils of construction and access some true wisdom beneath them. With the help of Lyotard’s The Confession of Augustine, Walton elaborates two notions of love, eros and caritas, and argues that the former succeeds better than the latter in speaking of that which we cannot, of that surplus of meaning that is just out of our grasp of the event. The failure of caritas rests in its becoming an overly constrictive, circular, and universalizing narrative that prohibits the indeterminacy of the occurrence. Caritas possesses its object; it avoids any exception by its creation of the narrative whose form authorizes every past, present, and future possibility as already denominated as an instance of God’s love. Eros is markedly different, Walton suggests. In eros, the having is only as a not-having; eros has only longing, it is a lack but paradoxically not a lack, because it is pure materiality. Walton concludes that it is eros that succeeds best to speak of that inaccessible excess because it fails to do so, yet it tries, again and again. In “Finding a Place for Desire in the Life of the Mind: Arendt and Augustine,” Antonio Calcagno argues that a more robust understanding of desire must play a role in the life of the mind as Hannah Arendt describes it, and it must do so primarily as a motivator, an experience that is not of our own generation, but which moves us to desire to think, judge, and will. Arendt’s most sustained treatment of desire or appetite (appetitus), what is often translated as “craving,” can be found in her doctoral dissertation, now published as Love and Saint Augustine. Like Augustine, Arendt associates desire with the appetites of the body; it is understood as an inferior kind of love that largely confines oneself to one’s own ego interests. Ultimately, desire, craving, or appetite is redeemed, indeed transformed, through social interactions or an encounter with God, or so, at least, this is the way Arendt reads Augustine: appetite yields to agape. If we read Augustine closely, with some distance from Arendt’s fruitful reading, he never fully makes the Neoplatonic distinction between Introduction

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matter and spirit (nous). The human person is a unity of body and soul. Whereas Arendt separates bodily desire from the traditional faculties of the soul, Augustine, through an encounter with God, allows desire itself to be transformed: it can move us to the good, which is God, away from our own self-interest. This does not mean, however, that one ceases to struggle with bodily and spiritual desires, the struggle between the earthly and heavenly cities; rather, the encounter with God and the gift of grace need not reduce desire simply to one’s own needs, one’s own bodily needs. The encounter opens up desire to a larger possibility of objects. Love, then, is a desire for not only our own selves, but also others, the world, and God. If Augustine is right, and we extend the dialogue between Arendt and Augustine, one that continued throughout all of Arendt’s own life, then perhaps we can find a place for desire as a love that can motivate the faculties of the mind, which Arendt found crucial for the promise of a new politics founded on exceptional words and deeds. III. Love and Politics

From discussions of kenosis, differends, and the motivating push of desire, we turn in part III to the social and political context of human love, its profound materiality. In chapter 8, “Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love: Toward a Social-Material Theory,” Christian Lotz provides a critique of the religious, romantic, anthropological, or legal conceptions of love that reduce love to an ontological or ethical base from which all other elements of society emerge. He develops instead an understanding of love as the sensual form of being social; that is, love is tied to a social form, dependent on the categorial system of reproduction within which love concretely exists under existing relations of production. From this vantage point, sensual life is as complex as the social world and cannot be abstracted from it. Love must remain tied to real individuals and grasped in its specific, categorial form. As Marx states in The Holy Family, love “cannot be construed a priori, because its development is a real one which takes place in the world of the senses and between real individuals.” To outline this conception of love, Lotz first reflects on love in pre-Marxian terms, as Marx’s break with essentialist conceptions of love depends on his critique of Feuerbach. He then reconstructs Marx’s early philosophy of love as a philosophy of sensuality, expanding this position by taking the “standpoint of reproduction” (Althusser) into account. Lotz concludes with a discussion of Antonio Negri’s and Alain Badiou’s philosophies of love, which he argues provide a regressive position Thinking About Love

in recent political philosophy and a relevant contrast with the social-material theory of love Lotz provides in this chapter. Considering further the practical implications of theories of love is Sophie Bourgault’s chapter, “Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil on the Significance of Love for Politics.” In recent decades much scholarly attention has been paid to the role of love in politics. Martha Nussbaum, among others, has made a powerful case for the importance of empathy and compassion in politics. But compassion is certainly not without its critics. Many feminists have objected to a celebration of political compassion and of “caring,” and numerous political theorists have raised red flags about compassion’s excessive sentimentality and its possible perversion into a politics of pity. Bourgault sheds new light on this debate by turning to two twentiethcentury political philosophers whose work appears to capture the two most extreme positions that could be taken in this debate, Arendt and Weil. In The Human Condition Arendt suggests that love was a great antipolitical force, and in On Revolution she blames compassion for the failure of almost all revolutionary projects. The contrast with Weil could not be starker. Weil wrote several essays that argue that social justice and good citizenship are impossible without love. Bourgault considers these dissimilar positions, paying particular attention to the ties between political compassion, speechlessness, and bodily needs. She suggests that Weil’s and Arendt’s distinct positions on compassion are highly dependent on the former’s Platonist and the latter’s phenomenological standpoints on things political. Despite their divergent views, Bourgault concludes that both philosophers agree that solutions to modern ills should include “sober” kinds of love (e.g., philia). Nevertheless, a positive outlook on love need not entail a progressive politics. In fact, Bourgault argues, Arendt and Weil were both wary of efforts aimed at translating love into generous welfare state measures and both worried about the large bureaucratic apparatus that accompanies such measures. IV. The Phenomenological Experience of Love

Part IV brings us to the rich terrain of phenomenology and back to the body’s individual experience of love. We begin this section with Fiona Utley’s essay “Trust and the Experience of Love,” which mines the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to show that love must not be understood as a purely spiritual phenomenon; rather, essential to love is a fundamental comportment that is grounded in trust. She explores how trust unfolds as Introduction

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a lived experience, from the body and habituation, to the psyche and ultimately extending through to the spirit, where one encounters acts of willing and motivation, which are fundamental for love. The unique observation of this chapter is Utley’s cogent point that although Merleau-Ponty does not have a sustained view of love, his disparate writings on the subject demonstrate some consistency. She concludes that we do not remain in the heightened phase of falling in love; rather, our lives settle as new sedimentations occur, building new worlds of shared intimacy from our affective opening onto depth. A metamorphosis occurs out of depth and its reversibility of dimensions through entanglement, and I am altered, you are altered. We become, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, “two in one Being,” and this one being creates a new world. The human experience of love in its most concrete manifestations is further highlighted in Marguerite La Caze’s essay “The Time of Possible and Impossible Reciprocity: Love and Hate in Simone de Beauvoir.” This chapter explores how interpreters of Simone de Beauvoir look at her intriguing readings of love and desire in The Second Sex. La Caze brings Beauvoir’s view of love from that text into relation with her descriptions of hate and vengefulness in her early essay “An Eye for an Eye.” She demonstrates how Beauvoir’s position differs in The Second Sex and in other texts from that of the essay and argues that we must distinguish these emotional reactions of outrage from reciprocal loving relations. La Caze writes that “An Eye for an Eye,” written amid the postwar purge, clarifies for us why vengefulness is “almost bound to be disappointed.” For Beauvoir the extremes of the crimes of the Nazis and the collaborators taught anger and hate to people in a way they had not before experienced. Although this experience was thought to promise a corresponding joy when the worst criminals were punished, disappointment resulted instead. Ultimately, while these particular negative affects are both ethical and understandable, according to Beauvoir they cannot be satisfied or resolved. She sets out to comprehend why this need for a restored reciprocity in the light of such crimes usually cannot be fulfilled. Both private revenge and state punishment fail to bring about the perpetrator’s recognition of what they have done, of their own ambiguous existence or an acknowledgment of the victim’s perspective. Here, writes La Caze, Beauvoir parallels this impossible reciprocity with that of love. In other texts, however, Beauvoir suggests that reciprocity in love may be possible. Indeed, it would be if women were not oppressed, she argues in The Second Sex. In exploring the two accounts of love and hate, La Caze not only offers readers a challenging view Thinking About Love

of reciprocity and its connection to time, but also a reading of the relationship between love and hate. Dorothea Olkowski’s point of departure in “Intentionality and the Neuroscience of Love” is the failure of Irving Singer to provide a workable ontology to serve as the framework for the modern ideas of love that he puts forth. She takes on the leading philosophical view of love espoused by Singer but also frames the question of love in terms of neuroscience. Olkowski’s task is to address this failure and take up the challenge of developing an ontological framework for love, one that correlates the ontology with scientific accounts of the physiology and neurophysiology of love. To this end she asks whether love is an emotion, and if it is, how shall we define emotion? Is an emotion a product of sensation or something correlated with intentions? For if emotions are sensations and not intentional, then any notion of lasting love is an illusion. Love may be romantic or familial, passionate or convivial, sexual or Platonic, sadistic or generous; whatever form it takes, we will have to go back to the same questions Singer asked: Is love something learned, is it an instinct, is it a creative act, or is it something else altogether that we have not yet examined and may not even understand? To respond to this line of questioning Olkowski walks us through the ideas of David Hume on the passions, then turns to the accounts of intentionality found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception and in Walter J. Freeman’s on neuroscience. Finally, Olkowski takes up the fictional account of love between the protagonists of Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84 to show us how such intentionality might function. V. Love Stories

Continental philosophy often appeals to literature and stories to make certain points about an experience or an event. We close our collection with two meditative essays that discuss the nature of love within the framework of stories. Both draw from the work of philosophers, but they also show how philosophical reflection and analysis can be carried out in different forms of expression. In chapter 13, “Love Is Blind: Jacques Derrida,” Dawne McCance provides a Derridean-inspired meditation on her own views of love. She invokes memory to show how her experience of love, in particular the love of her father, is transformed in time and by looking back at it through the lens of the present. This chapter, however, is not only a timely meditation Introduction

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on “filial love”; McCance also acts as a sage who guides us through Derrida’s own writings on love. She exposes and ponders different Derridean claims about the nature of love, including its power to individuate but also obscure and hide, mindful of the fact that Derrida himself was always reluctant to speak about the nature of love, or his own experience of love. A dynamic parallel is established between the author’s own reflections on love and how it is treated and discussed by Derrida. In our final chapter we return to the themes of death, life, and love. Alphonso Lingis meditates on the experience of love in nature and the love of nature. “The Babies in Trees” begins with a description of these experiences while traveling. He finds in nature a powerful experience of life, a life that is not uniquely his own but to which he feels intimately linked. He expresses the feelings of awe and amazement at belonging to the greater experience of life that he uncovers in nature. But nature not only displays the magnitude and power of life, it also bespeaks a kind of unique intimacy and love, which Lingis says lies within the very structure of nature itself. Our bodies, fundamental expressions and parts of nature, experience the intimacy between love and life as it is witnessed in nature as a whole, but also love and death. “Love comes over us,” Lingis writes; “it is a force of nature in us” that elicits a demand to care and nurture. He uses the example of the relations between mothers and children, turning at the end of his essay to the Toraja people’s custom of burying in the trunks of trees their stillborn or infants who die before cutting their first tooth. In this way, the trees continue the love and nourishment of the parents. “In love we are attached to a singular life,” Lingis states, but also “to a vast beyond and future that opens before that life.” Our wish for readers is that this volume of essays will not only illuminate provocative insights on love generated by a number of major figures in Continental philosophy but also stimulate further thinking about the nature of love and its implications for the human condition. notes 1. Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and The Pursuit of Love (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 2. Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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3. Alan Soble, The Structure of Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 4. Jonna Bornemark and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, eds., Phenomenology of Eros (Huddinge, Sweden: Södertörn Högskola, 2012).

5. M. C. Dillon, Beyond Romance (Albany: Incarnation: Pour une philosophie de la State University of New York Press, chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000); and Words of 2001). Christ, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner 6. Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012). trans. S. E. Lewis (Chicago: University of 8. Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In Chicago Press, 2008) and Prolegomena Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (New to Charity, trans. S. E. Lewis (New York: York: New Press, 2012). Fordham University Press, 2002). 9. Jean-Luc Nancy, God, Justice, Love, 7. Michel Henry, The Essence of Beauty: Four Little Dialogues, trans. Sarah Manifestation, trans. G. J. Etzkorn Clift (New York: Fordham University (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 1973); Press, 2011).

Introduction

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1 Love and Death todd may

How long is tomorrow? —Eternity and a Day, a film by Theo Angelopoulos

We like to imagine that love, true love, is forever. Maybe it is. We never really have to put it to the test, do we? We are mortal creatures, and so forever always ends. Death is the only test of a love that one hopes would otherwise last forever. But, of course, death is not forever; it is the wall between us and forever. What if death, rather than barring us from an eternal love, actually saves our love for us? What if it were death that ensured, if not our love itself, at least its intensity? That is the wager of this essay. Love might or might not last eternally, but its intensity—which is one of the key elements that makes it love—is enhanced rather than undermined by our mortality. The tragic fact of our death is a guarantor, not of love itself, but of its intensity. Without death, the light of love would not be extinguished, but it would burn less brightly. To place this philosophical wager requires several tasks. First, of course, is to say something about love. In this case, the focus is on what is often called romantic love, rather than friendship or parental love. We do

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not attempt to define love here. The task is too large, the literature too vast, to account for adequately when our target lies elsewhere. Instead, we look at several current accounts of love, to see what they tell us and what they don’t, especially about the intensity of love. Then we look at that intensity itself, to see what relationship it has to time and to our mortality. What is it about the limited trajectory of our lives that gives romantic love the intensity it has? In order to do so, we look at it first from the other side, although only speculatively so. What might love among immortal creatures be, creatures who were otherwise like us except that they didn’t die? This is tricky business and lends itself to very different intuitions. I once wrote a book on death that argued that while death is bad for us, so is immortality.1 Perhaps this essay will stand as an example of why immortality would be bad. In any event, to assist our intuitions in this I will discuss a film that approaches immortality from a sideways direction: Groundhog Day. I will read this film against its normal grain; I believe it has something to teach us that we have not yet learned from it. Finally, we must ask whether what we learn from the relation of love and mortality has anything to tell us about our mortal loves. If the intensity of romantic love requires mortality, do the reasons this is so enlighten us about the nature of that love as it often plays out in our lives? There is often a mortality to the intensity of love even among creatures that die. Does our investigation tell us anything about why that might be so? Love

What is love? Recently, the task of answering this question has been taken up again by philosophers. We cannot here hope to sort out the differences among them, nor assess their adequacy. Let us just canvass four of the more interesting proposals. Before that, however, let us pause over a commonly rejected view, that love is love of a person’s qualities. It cannot be that one loves another solely for her qualities: her intelligence, her courage, her beauty, her perceptiveness. If it were only the qualities that mattered, then several odd consequences would follow. First, if we loved only those qualities, wouldn’t we love them wherever we found them? We would fall in love with everyone who had those qualities and love more those who had more of them, less those who had less. Or, if it were the combination that mattered—but only the combination—we would fall in love with everyone who had that combination. But we don’t. We fall in love with individuals. Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

Also, suppose we found someone who had those qualities but to a greater degree. Or had them to the same degree but also had another quality that drew us. Wouldn’t we trade in the beloved for this new person? The question is not whether we ought to, whether we owed loyalty to the beloved. It is whether, in fact, we would desire to “trade up.” If it were only the qualities that we loved, it seems unlikely that we wouldn’t. Or if we wouldn’t trade up, at least we would wish we could. But we don’t. Most of us aren’t even tempted. So it can’t be only the qualities that matter.2 Then what is it? In “Love’s Bond,” Robert Nozick argues that love forms a we from two separate individuals. This we consists in several characteristics. First, “Your well-being is tied up with that of someone you love romantically. Love, then, among other things, can place you at risk.”3 In addition to tying up one’s well-being with another, one also ties up one’s autonomy. One does not act solely with regard to one’s individual interests, or even out of one’s individual vision. From this, Nozick concludes that “each person in a romantic we wants to possess the other completely; yet each needs the other to be an independent and nonsubservient person. Only someone who continues to possess a nonsubservient autonomy can be an apt partner in a joint identity that enlarges and enhances your individual one.”4 Nozick contrasts love with friendship by using the term sharing to indicate the relationship among friends. Sharing brings friends together, but they do not form the we of love: “Nonromantic friends do not, in general, share an identity.”5 In love, then, an entity arises that did not previously exist. This is not some mysterious entity, any more than a society or a group arising among individuals is a mysterious identity. It is, as the title of Nozick’s article suggests, a bond that brings two people together, not only in a common set of projects (friendships can do that) but in a common life that weaves the identity of each into that of the other. One might ask about the difference between the sharing of friends and the identity of lovers. What exactly constitutes this difference? Is it a difference in kind or simply one of degree? Nozick is allusive rather than precise about this. He seems to suggest that love differs from friendship in the arising of a new entity, a we. But what is this we? The qualitative (or ontological) difference seems to arise from a quantitative one. The more deeply we share, the more we tie together our well-being and our autonomy. And the more we do that, the more we move toward the formation of a bond that merits the name of love. It is, then, the intensity of the engagement that leads toward and eventually sustains the formation of love’s bond. Love and Death

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More recently, Bennett Helm has utilized the concept of identification in discussing love but has divorced it from Nozick’s use. He worries that an account like Nozick’s “blurs the boundaries between lover and beloved. Although intimacy requires closeness, such closeness should not be construed in a way that undermines the separateness of the two persons.”6 The challenge Helm believes we face is to be able to think of love’s bond without losing the distinction between lovers. He does this by rethinking particular emotions, like pride and shame. We often think of pride and shame as referring solely to ourselves. They are taken to be “reflexive,” in Helm’s term. But we need not do so. We can feel pride in another’s accomplishments. Pride and shame are “person-focused emotions,”7 to be sure. But the person they are focused on does not need to be oneself. They can be focused on someone else. Pride can be pride not only for another but also in another: “My pride in my wife for winning a bagpipe competition is non-reflexive. For I do not merely see her as a representative of something I value, I do not value merely my association with her, nor do I simply appropriate her interests for my own; rather in feeling this pride I thereby commit myself to her import as a person.”8 Love, then, consists in the “intimate identification” that arises from having such person-centered emotions as pride and caring focused on another: “Thus, to love someone is for the beloved to be the focus of a rational pattern of the lover’s person-focused emotions.”9 (Helm calls the pattern rational because its person-focused emotions connect with one another in reasonable ways. For example, to feel pride in one’s wife for her accomplishments would lead to feeling ashamed for her if she embarrassed herself.) One might wonder here whether the definition he gives of love would also count for friendships. But, as we saw with Nozick, for Helm it is the level of engagement that constitutes romantic love: “We can understand the ‘depth’ of interpersonal concern at issue in such identification with another to be a kind of intimacy.”10 To identify more intensely with another through personfocused emotions, to have more and/or more tenacious threads of personfocused emotion, is to love someone. Another recent account of love, one that follows Helm in being oriented toward one’s relation to another but focusing on rational as opposed to conative elements, is offered by David Velleman in “Love as a Moral Emotion.” Velleman makes the unlikely appeal to Kant as the source of understanding of love. He is concerned that many thinkers consider love to be either outside or in opposition to morality. His proposal, then, is to ground Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

love in the Kantian idea of respect for others, a grounding that would place love strictly within the field of morality. On Velleman’s view, all people are proper objects for love, since all people are proper objects for the reverence that Kant associates with respect. This reverence removes people from any sort of comparison with one another. To be revered as a person is not a matter of being considered to have the highest value. It is instead to be removed from scales of value. It is to be valued without measure. To love another is to recognize this value and to become vulnerable to it: “Love is an arresting awareness of value in a person, differing from Kantian respect in that its primary motivational force is to suspend our emotional self-protection from the person rather than our self-interested designs on him.”11 Velleman’s approach is a singular one. Unlike the Platonic account of love, which would move us away from the individual to the universal, Velleman’s approach grounds love strictly within its object, the person herself. And yet his focus is on a characteristic that all people share, their rational nature, broadly construed: “Rational nature is not the intellect, not even the practical intellect; it’s a capacity of appreciation or valuation—a capacity to care about things in that reflective way which is distinctive of self-conscious creatures like us.”12 How, then, if everyone possesses this rational nature, are we to distinguish love from the respect that is due to everyone on the basis of this rational nature? We might say that in love one really sees and is gripped by that rational nature. One is taken hold of by it, seized by it, in a way that brings it vividly and inescapably before one: “Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other.”13 In this account of love, it is not difficult to see the distinction between love and respect. Friendship, in turn, might be thought to be a median between the two. It involves respect for the friend, to be sure. But it also involves a certain vulnerability to the friend. And when that vulnerability becomes particularly intense, it shades over into love. This is not to say that love replaces friendship, but rather that while many friendships are not love relationships, some of them can be. We might ask of this account what distinguishes romantic love from other kinds of love, for example, the love between close friends. Velleman does not offer an account of this, but it is not far to seek. Romantic love involves types of sharing with another that would render one particularly vulnerable to their humanity. One could see sexual expression in this light. To be sexually involved with another in the context of a love relationship, as opposed to having a passing affair or a fling, is to allow oneself to be touched Love and Death

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by the other’s humanity, by their “capacity to care” in a particularly intimate way. And as Velleman insists, anyone could be the object of such expression. It is only our limited ability to love only some and our limited ability to be gripped by the full humanity of others that prevents us from loving everyone. Niko Kolodny turns the discussion of love from the rational core of the beloved to the relationship itself. He is concerned that Velleman’s view misses the normative character of love relationships: what makes some appropriate and others less so. “What are we to say about a parent who just happens—it is a contingent matter, after all—to see an expression of rational nature in his child’s classmates, but not in his own child?”14 In order to avoid pitfalls like this, Kolodny insists that any adequate account of love must incorporate the bond one has both to another person and to the relationship one has with that other person. Love, in other words, is relational. It concerns not simply the other person—although that is also central—but in addition the character of the bond between them. Kolodny’s view of love, then, is not limited to romantic love, but seeks to understand the elements that underlie all forms of love: “There are important similarities between the attitudes of family members and romantic lovers, on the one hand, and the attitudes of friends, and perhaps even colleagues, on the other.”15 For Kolodny, “Love is a psychological state for which there are reasons, and these reasons are interpersonal relationships.”16 He offers six criteria for love, which center on being emotionally vulnerable to another particular person and intending to act in her interest in the context of a particular type of relationship that is considered to be appropriate for that vulnerability and those intentions. What matter in particular are the relationship and the person. One cultivates that relationship (romantic love, parental, friendship, marriage) with that person. One might ask what, in Kolodny’s account, would distinguish romantic love from other love relationships. As with the other accounts given here, it would have to lie in the intensity of the relationship to the other. But matters are a little more complicated in this case. While it might be reasonable to say that a romantic love relationship is more intense than a friendship relationship, the relationship with a child could be just as intense. What distinguishes romantic love, then, from other kinds of love would lie in the character of the relationship itself. Kolodny insists that there are different types of relationships, which can be more or less categorized. The normative appropriateness of love that he finds lacking in Velleman’s account is captured in his own through the recognition that appropriateness is found in the context of the type of relationship that is at stake. Thus it is not Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

intensity that distinguishes romantic love from parental love, but the character of the relationship itself. Romantic love is not in itself more intense than parental love. This leaves open the question of whether romantic love is more intense than friendship. It seems that, given the criteria of emotional vulnerability and intending to act in the beloved’s interest, the answer would be in the affirmative. While parent-child relationships might be described as being (potentially) just as intense as romantic relationships but in another way, friendships seem to be less intense but more like romantic relationships. One might object here that romantic relationships at the very least involve a sexuality that is missing among friendships. But this, it seems to me, is wrong from both ends. One can have a romantic relationship with another without sex, and friends can and sometimes do have sex together. (We return to this point below.) Thus, at least at first glance, we might argue that the distinction between romantic love and parental love is more qualitative while that between romantic love and friendship is more, or more nearly, quantitative. In canvassing these four views of love, I have tried to isolate a particular element common to all: the intensity of engagement characteristic of romantic love. I have done so by contrasting romantic love and friendship. We need to be clear, both for its own sake and for the sake of what follows, about the distinction that I’m trying to draw between the two. My claim is not that romantic love involves love while friendship does not. At least three of the four accounts, with Nozick’s being the possible exception, allow that friends can love each other or one another. (Even in Nozick’s case, the line between sharing and identity might well be a blurred one.) This is as it should be. There seems no bar to saying that relationships of friendship can involve love. Deep or close friendships certainly involve identification with the friend, recognition of their “rational core,” emotional vulnerability, and intentions to act in their interest and cultivate the friendship relationship. What distinguishes romantic love from friendship, then, is the intensity of engagement. What is intensity of engagement? It isn’t an unrelenting feeling of intensity. That is more characteristic of infatuation. However, it isn’t entirely divorced from feelings of intensity either. Intense feelings of love arise periodically in a romantic love relationship; a relationship without any of them would likely not, or no longer, be one of romantic love. It can happen at unexpected moments: when one sees one’s beloved across a room where one wasn’t expecting her; when she gestures or laughs a certain way; when one Love and Death

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has been away for a long time and returns to her. Intense feelings are also likely under certain circumstances: when a child is being born, for instance, or when the beloved is in danger. However, these intense feelings are occurrent rather than continuous. Intensity of engagement, rather, concerns the ongoing depth of concern one has for and with the beloved. It is tied up with one’s concern about how her life is going and with one’s own involvement in that life. The former is captured in different ways with Nozick’s conception of identity, Helm’s person-regarding emotions, Velleman’s arresting awareness of value, and Kolodny’s vulnerability to the other person. The latter, in turn, need not be in any way selfish. Nor is it a matter of calculating one’s own contribution to the beloved’s life and assessing whether it is a proper measure of involvement. It is instead what we might call a tending to the relationship, and often a thinking about that tending, in a way that is brought forward most fully in Kolodny’s idea that love is concern for the person and the relationship. That tending, in a romantic love relationship, is one that occurs not only for but also with the other. Because of this, it requires a relationship among two people who are in important ways equals and consider each other to be equals. This may be the central distinction between romantic and parental love. In the latter the two parties are not equals, and because of this do not see themselves tending the relationship in the same way. Romantic love, by contrast, requires that both take up a depth of concern for the relationship that presupposes that each is capable of contributing to it as an equal (which doesn’t require an exactly or measurably equal contribution). Love, Immortality, Mortality

There is, perhaps, no movie that gives a glimpse into immortality as keenly as does Groundhog Day.17 Directed by Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day concerns a television weather reporter who travels to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual emergence of Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who, as legend has it, is the harbinger of six more weeks of winter if he sees his shadow. Alternatively, if he doesn’t, spring is just around the corner. The reporter, Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray), covers the event but gets stuck in Punxsutawney when a snowstorm blocks his crew’s plans to travel back to Pittsburgh. The next day, Phil wakes up and gradually discovers that it is Groundhog Day all over again, except he’s the only one who knows it. It happens again the next morning, and the next one. He begins to realize Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

(although not in these terms) that he is in a Nietzschean eternal return of Groundhog Day. While for everyone else around him it is the first time this day has happened, and while each of them repeats the actions of the day before (except those who interact with Phil Connors, since he changes his behavior), he has to come to terms with the fact that no day will ever be any different from this one. Groundhog Day is often interpreted as a tale of a man who moves from narcissistic self-involvement and self-importance to decency and virtue.18 During much of the film Connors is an unappealing man. He believes he should be working at a major television station instead of the Pittsburgh outlet where he finds himself. He is condescending, often snide, and manipulative. Before he has his revelatory moment that leads him to become virtuous, he deals with his predicament by becoming reckless, abusive, and then suicidal. After his revelatory moment, which comes in the wake of his realizing that he is in love with a person much better than he is—his producer Rita (played by Andie MacDowell)—he copes with his fate by becoming a model citizen. Because he knows what will happen, he anticipates the difficulties people will face and is on the scene to assist them. He helps a carload of elderly ladies change a tire, performs the Heimlich maneuver on a man choking in a restaurant, saves a kid who falls out of a tree. For all this the town adores him, Rita finally falls in love with him, and at the end of the movie the next day finally becomes the day after Groundhog Day. This reading of a man becoming virtuous through a confrontation with himself brought on by the eternal return is, to my mind, not inaccurate. It is the most obvious reading of the film. I would like to concentrate on a different reading, however, one that is not as obvious and does not strike me as intended by Ramis. Instead of the reading that contrasts Phil Connors’s behavior before and after his revelatory moment, I would like to contrast the period of virtue with both the period before it and the few moments at the end of the film when the day has finally changed. Before the revelatory moment provided by a recognition of Rita’s innocent goodness, Phil Connors is ambitious and grasping. He wants more for himself and thinks he doesn’t belong where he is. In the few moments of the film after the day changes, he is in love with Rita and terribly relieved that he no longer has to live Groundhog Day again. Everything seems bright and cheery. He is energetic and warm toward Rita. One might say that these are opposite emotions: self-directed and other-directed. And they are. What they share is a passionate engagement with the world. By contrast, in that period in which he is no longer resisting the daily recurrence of Groundhog Love and Death

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Day, he is kind and considerate but not passionate. He knows what will happen and involves himself behaviorally in smoothing out the rough edges, but does so with a certain distance that the viewer can feel. This is in particular contrast to his relief and joy when the day changes, but upon reflection is also in contrast with the earlier stages of the film. There was an intensity of engagement early and late that gives way to a serene detachment during the period of virtuous activity. Why is this? The answer is not far to seek. The same thing is going to happen day after day. Nothing will ever change. He has nothing to look forward to in many of the ways that make a life fully human. There will be no development of relationships, no advancement of projects, no change of environment or even of seasons. There is, in short, no future. There is only the eternal present. To come to terms with that, as Buddhists in their way and Stoics in theirs have taught for many centuries, requires one to detach oneself from the passionate engagement in one’s life. One must take a distance on oneself and one’s desires. As it is with Phil’s life, so it is with his love. He can enjoy Rita’s company for the moment, but he knows that this moment will not lead to another, but only to the same moment over and over again. And so he must take a distance on his emotional involvement with her, as with everyone else, knowing that, precious as the moment is, it will only be repeated without development or evolution. One might argue here that matters with Phil are the opposite of what I have described. Because there is each time only this moment, with no future, it is more rather than less significant. Phil can involve himself more fully precisely because he can detach himself from any hope of where this moment will lead. He can allow the moment to absorb him completely because, in the end, there is nothing else. This view, while tempting, seems to me mistaken. Each moment is not a singular moment, without a future. There is a future to each moment: it is this moment again. And again. Whatever he does now he will do over and over. Or, more precisely, since his actions can change, whatever situation he finds himself in he will find himself in again. If he wants to have Rita’s respect and to feel good about himself, he must not only inhabit the moment; he must inhabit it each day in the same way. It is this, and not merely the lack of future, that introduces the detachment that Phil Connors exhibits, and, I think, psychologically must exhibit. The lesson I am drawing here for love is likely obvious by now. In the previous section we saw that prominent accounts of love reserve an intensity of engagement for the character of love they describe, however differently Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

in each case. What makes romantic love what it is and distinguishes it more sharply (or more nearly sharply) from non-love friendships is that intensity. Without it, romantic love becomes more like friendship. It is not that love falls away. We cannot claim that without that intensity of engagement there cannot be romantic love. That, it seems to me, would be going too far. The claim I am making is weaker. In a situation like Phil’s, where things drag on repeatedly day after day, the intensity that would characterize romantic love diminishes. Love loses an element of what makes it so significant in our lives. We can cope, to be sure, and can cope without necessarily losing our love for another. But a dimension of that love would likely be lost, the dimension that gives it the particular spark that so often animates romantic love. My assumption in this discussion of Groundhog Day is that the eternal recurrence Phil faces is a form of immortality. However, one might see the picture here as a skewed one. Immortality need not be seen as a recurrence of the same thing over and over again, but instead as an endless stream of time in which everything changes. Why should we use the recurrence of Groundhog Day as a model for immortality rather than a different model, one that stresses its endlessness but not its recurrence? In a sense, Amélie Rorty’s article “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love Is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” addresses this issue. She is not concerned with immortality but instead with the evolving character of love relationships. She discusses love between friends, but her claim could apply equally to romantic love: “There is a kind of love—and for some it may be the only kind that qualifies as true love— that is historical precisely because it does not rigidly designate its object. . . . Such a love might be called dynamically permeable. It is permeable in that the lover is changed by loving and changed by truthful perception of the friend. . . . It is dynamic in that every change generates new changes, both in the lover and in interactions with the friend.”19 Why not see immortality on this model of dynamic permeability? Romantic love keeps evolving and changing with the evolving and changing character of the lovers. For instance, as the beloved continues to grow and discover new interests, the lover can appreciate and at times participate in this growth. The relationship, then, is not a circular one of eternal recurrence but a historical one characterized by the endless dynamism offered by immortality. The problem with such a view (and it is, again, not Rorty’s, since she does not discuss immortality) is that it assumes that people can become anything at all, and, more specifically, that a relationship can sustain itself Love and Death

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through any sort of change. This would only be true if people did not have particular interests or projects that were theirs and that their love relationships didn’t have particular themes without which it would be something very different from what it is. The view has two problems. The first is that it is implausible in itself. Bernard Williams insists that if activities are to be genuinely fulfilling for a person, they must somehow be rooted in who the person is. He argues that “the ground and shape of the satisfactions that the intellectual enquiry offers [someone], will relate to him, and not just to the enquiry.”20 People are capable of certain interests and not others. Thus the idea of endless change over the course of immortality—if that change is to be meaningful to its participants—is an unrealistic possibility. The second problem is that if it were indeed the case that people and relationships were so malleable, it would have to be because people were not that committed to anything in particular. They would not be passionate about what they did, if they could so easily do something else. This, in itself, would be a mark of a lack of intensity and would not bode well for the passionate engagement of romantic love. But since people are not capable of immersing themselves deeply in just anything, in immortality they would have to immerse themselves in what interested them or what could reasonably interest them. This might constitute a wide field, but not a field of endless width. And thus, sooner or later, people in an immortal love relationship would have to tread the same ground again and again. Immortality, in short, because of what people and relationships are like, would sooner or later become a version of Groundhog Day. It would not, as with the movie, be the repetition of a single day. Rather, it would be a repetition of years or even decades of experience. This, in turn, would require a certain emotional detachment in order to be undergone, a detachment that diminishes the intensity of the relationship. We can see the same lesson if we look briefly from the other side, that is, from the side of mortality. There is a fragility to the ones we love, and because of this to the relationships we have with them. They will not always be with us, or perhaps we with them. If we travel some place with them, it could well be a singular experience. And even if we repeat it, it is often to return somewhere that will not always be available to us. A city we have visited with one we love will have meanings that unfold for us both because of the place it holds in our relationship and because it is not infinitely available to us. So, too, when we watch someone we love age. We see the fragility of her being, and it touches us. Her mortality, written in her features, reminds us that we have only so much time with her and not more, even though we Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

rarely know how much time we have. This, like the city that holds meaning for us, lends an intensity to a relationship that would, while nevertheless still loving, lack the urgency of a mortal relationship. The scarcity of our moments together confers on them a preciousness that might otherwise go missing or at least be diminished. What the previous thinkers we have canvassed have called the identification with the other, or the intimacy, or the arresting awareness or the vulnerability, in short, the threads that bind us in romantic love, are more taut because of our mortality. One might ask whether the same is not true of non-romantic friendships, which are also mortal. To some extent it is true. Recall that we have not drawn a thick line between romantic love and friendship. Friendship has its own intensity. But what distinguishes romantic love from other friendships is the level of intensity characteristic of the former. When that level wanes, romantic love becomes more like friendship—not without intensity, but without as much. To see this, imagine seeing a good friend for the last time, say because she is moving to place where she cannot be reached again. Then imagine your spouse or your lover doing the same thing. The insistence of those last moments would be different in one case than in the other. Coda: Mortal Relationships

Is there a lesson in all this, aside from the philosophical one that love and death, while not entirely inseparable, are deeply entwined? I believe there is. We can often see a mortality not only of romantic love but also within it, a mortality that arises from the same issue that would haunt an immortal love. Some relationships can, over time, begin to seem like Groundhog Day, where what is to come is indistinguishable from what has already come. And when that happens, intensity begins to wane. This is not to say, once again, that the love is lost. It is not to claim that when relationships become repetitive they are no longer characterized by love, or even that they are necessarily in trouble. There might be trouble, but there does not have to be. Recall the ability of Phil Connors to take the repetitive days in Punxsutawney as they came and to be a part of them—but only with a certain emotional distance, a certain reserve. One remains engaged, but not as intensely engaged. Whether this is a problem for the relationship depends on the relationship itself. How important is the intensity of engagement? How important is the intensity of the feelings to which the engagement periodically gives Love and Death

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rise? The answers to these questions depend on the history and character of the relationship as well as the character of its participants. As Rorty insists, the dynamic permeability of love often allows it to adapt to changing circumstances and to the changes of the lovers themselves. But this dynamism is not without its limits. In a relationship nourished on intense feelings or deep intimacy, the ability (or desire) of its participants to adjust to a diminishing of those qualities might be called into question. Not all of us can have the revelatory moments that Phil Connors experiences. Nor is it clear that all of us should. What we can glean from a reflection on love and death, then, is not a lesson on how to conduct a successful long-term romantic love relationship, but rather a recognition of the role mortality plays in love. It is, as it were, a cosmic gift to love, even if an ambivalent one. It takes our loved ones from us but gives them to us all the more while we and they are here. And it allows us to consider the mortality of our time together, how the dying of intensity can happen earlier than the end of our relationships. notes 1. Todd May, Death (London: Acumen Press, 2008). 2. The criticism of love as love of qualities is widespread but is well summarized in the first chapter of Troy Jollimore’s Love’s Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 3. Robert Nozick, “Love’s Bond,” in The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 70. 4. Ibid., 74. 5. Ibid., 84. 6. Bennett W. Helm, “Love, Identification, and the Emotions,” American Philosophical Quarterly 46, no. 1 (2009): 40. 7. Ibid., 46. 8. Ibid., 49. 9. Ibid., 52. 10. Ibid., 51. 11. David J. Velleman, “Love as a Moral Emotion,” Ethics 109 (January 1999): 362. 12. Ibid., 365.

Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

13. Ibid., 361. 14. Niko Kolodny, “Love as Valuing a Relationship,” Philosophical Review 112, no. 4 (2003): 177. 15. Ibid., 137. 16. Ibid., 150. 17. Groundhog Day, dir. Harold Ramis (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1993). 18. See, for example, Joseph Kupfer, “Virtue and Happiness in Groundhog Day,” in Visions of Virtue in Popular Film (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 35–60. 19. Amélie Rorty, “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love Is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1986): 402. 20. Bernard Williams, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 96.

2 Love’s Limit diane enns

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves. —Friedrich Nietzsche

The surgeon made a mark where I would run my hand, loving the shape, the soft hair and the muscle, the bone and skin of you. A black X made with what looked like a common magic marker. There would be no mistake. I will not forget the image: that surgeon, having had his morning coffee and checked his schedule on a muggy day in July, marked an X below the knee where he would perform a routine amputation. He would save a life and alter it completely in one morning between coffee and lunch. In the halls of hospital wards we find love stripped down to the bone. Love is there in the recovery room, in the rhythm of my fingers tracing the path of your pain. There in the waiting room, the air rank with anxiety as we who wait for news shift in our chairs, mechanically sip weak coffee, and watch the clock. This love is potent and sharp, all the accumulated misunderstandings, irritations, and wounds—the rise and fall of any living, breathing love—expelled like bad air, like so much banality in the face of death. The remainder: love boiled down to its purest form, its sole object the suffering body. Merciful, like the morphine that dulls your eyes.

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I was the eye of love’s storm, willing the destruction of your suffering with iron determination. But my will, in the end, betrayed me. This was the source of my own pain: to caress your face, smooth your hair, bathe your body, yet remain unable to suffer in your place. But now I know: to love you was not to suffer in your place and so alleviate your pain. There is no substitution—this is the limit of love. I could not be your leg for you. I could not be your crutches. I could not absorb your pain to free you of it. I could not be your will to live or your excuse to live badly. I could only love you beside you, fighting against the limits of what my love could do for you. In the end we can only live our own lives, in the most bearable way possible. I could only love you by letting you be, for this is love’s “incalculable grace” and its singular power: my desire to let you be—Augustine’s volo ut sis—my unsurpassable and inexplicable affirmation of you.1 No one can love or be loved without this wanting the other to be. Without it we arrive at love’s limit, at the mark of an X, the point at which we must choose life. For there is another amputation. My terrified lover begs with one hand and cuts furiously with the other. Do not abandon me but leave me now. Love me unconditionally but if you do I will destroy you. Be my leg for me and I will cut you off without mercy. Try to see for me and I will gouge out your eyes so we are blind together. I want to let you be, but you must also want to let me be. This might be the only reciprocity that love demands of us. I reflect here on the movement and limit of love—the other pulls us in and releases us, we project ourselves into another and draw back, we merge and we separate, we give and we take. Like acrobats we leap across an abyss of separation. The enabling condition for this leap is our vulnerability—by accepting the risk and the promise that is love, our capacity for love expands. But sometimes we must close the open hand because we love. The Ideal and the Pathological

In our thinking about love we must be careful to distinguish between the relationship that binds two in love—the world that is love’s context—and the love itself. Love is an emotion, perhaps the most powerful emotion one can feel, although hate and rage might be as intense, their effects as dramatic. An emotion does not fail because it is not an action directed toward an end. Love may motivate an action—when it is expressed as a desire to heal an injured psyche, for example—and we may fail to bring about the desired end. But emotions are simply experienced in themselves. Love, hate, anger, or Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

jealousy arises spontaneously, unbidden, without reason. It makes as little sense to speak of love itself failing as it does to say that hate fails. The force of this emotion called love appears to make us uncomfortable—so much so that we elevate love to a transcendent realm, we render it a property of God. The stronger the love, the more we perceive love to be inexplicable or irrational, the harder we try to deny its humble origin in human emotion. A transcendent view of love that renders it idealized and ethereal trivializes the extraordinary capacity of the ordinary human individual to love by giving credit only to God or some other metaphysical ideal. Love becomes sacred rather than embodied; we deny its fleshly constitution and, along with it, the vicissitudes of human love—that it can be weak or strong, accompanied by desire or protectiveness, mixed with anger, pain, or irritation; that it can grow or end altogether. How comforting to be fortified against the storm of human love, against the fear of its power, its ambivalence, against grief over its loss. We are foiled by God; if love never fails, as Paul told the Corinthians, if it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, then we who fail to love without conditions can never hope to achieve “true” love.2 But without our emotions and passions, there is no self who loves. If the force of human love is displaced in the Christian tradition by God’s inexhaustible love, leaving an empty self who yearns to be loved and lovable, in the liberal tradition love’s force is sterilized and institutionalized, its fundamental condition an autonomous self worthy of love from another autonomous self. The liberal ideal of love is not transcendent in the Christian sense, but similarly split between a perfect love and its defective imitation. Liberal love is dependent on a seamless symmetry of equality and autonomy between lovers. Measured by endurance and longevity, it is not supposed to fail. This love is a seductive ideal, easy to market; we find it in all our best contemporary descriptions of ideal couple love. Irving Singer offers a particularly appealing vision of romantic love, characterized by mutual respect, care, and the desire to please. The value we bestow freely on another when we love causes both lover and beloved to be created anew into augmented versions of their original selves. There is receptivity and responsiveness, mutual delight and sustenance.3 In Alain de Botton’s ideal version, the love of the couple must be “mature.” This is a pristine form of love marked by an active awareness of the good and the bad in each person. It is full of temperance, resists a superficial idealization of the beloved, is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession; mature love is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated.4 Love’s Limit

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Mature love is like the antidote for diseased love—discovered after loving the “wrong” person and failing to achieve happiness. Such accounts of romantic love idealize the context thought necessary for love to occur—its conditions. The ideal lovers are equal in their capacity for love, for generosity, and for intimacy. The essential condition for this reciprocal love is a strong, sovereign self, vulnerable enough to let the other in, yet secure enough in itself to be free of jealousy; a self sufficiently able to recognize a lover’s needs but equally able to demand generosity. This self knows itself as a discrete entity and is therefore thought capable of valuing, and being valued by, another such discrete self. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these ideals. Singer’s notion of love as bestowing value on another is quite beautiful, atypically focused on what the lover gains in loving rather than in being loved. Both authors depict a mutually affirming world created between two lovers, one that seems to express the “unsurpassable” affirmation of love we find in Augustine’s expression volo ut sis. But what remains unsettling are the ideal conditions that such visions of love presuppose. The logical conclusion is that we do not love when love is not reciprocated. We do not love when we love jealously, obsessively, when we abandon ourselves to another without shame. It is not authentic love when we love those who have wronged us, who love us within limits, or when we love the psychologically crippled—the mutilated, as Simone de Beauvoir will put it. These actual experiences of love between imperfect individuals in uncertain circumstances are pathologized within a liberal or Christian worldview. We have learned to dismiss love as the product of our (blind) imaginations or to reduce it to a pathology arising from the mysterious recesses of the unconscious. This reduction is particularly acute when the object of one’s love is deemed unworthy, unlovable (by the relationship “experts,” the psychotherapist industry, or even well-meaning friends). If love is not an equal exchange between two deserving, sovereign selves, we call it something else: masochism, repetition compulsion, fantasy, an unhealthy attachment. This reduction may acknowledge the power of love, but it gives the unconscious too much determining power, reducing the emotions to mere symptoms of sinister, secret, and unknowable desires. And so we learn, again and again, to mistrust our feelings for another. Freud diagnosed the pathologies created by cultural prescriptions for romantic love in bourgeois society in early twentieth-century Vienna. He argued persuasively that the submission of sexual impulses to the service of procreation caused all manner of nervous sufferings and perverse Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

behaviors, from psychical impotence in the male and frigidity in the woman, to incestuous fixations and infidelities. Freud did not believe that marriage was a panacea.5 A few decades later Beauvoir made a similar cultural diagnosis, equally negative, this time describing the pathological love of the heterosexual, bourgeois woman in mid-twentieth-century French society. This woman’s love for man was idolatrous, the outcome of a patriarchal socioeconomic order that bestows status and value on man, granting him the independence and autonomy to which woman has little access. Beauvoir heaps scorn on the woman who becomes both tyrant and slave through devotion to her lover; whose idolatrous love creates a living hell for him. The woman in love lives in her lover’s universe; she wants the air he has already breathed to enter her own lungs. She never tires of saying—even if it is excessive—this “delicious ‘we.’”6 Incapable of being selfsufficient, Beauvoir calls her “mutilated”; she offers useless gifts, trapped in a feminine universe, given “a sterile hell” for her ultimate salvation.7 As a result, she is incapable of giving or receiving authentic love. As the inessential other, woman is forced to find meaning and substance in her attachment to man. This is not masochism, Beauvoir insists, but the dream of ecstatic union. There is no enjoyment of the pain of self-sacrifice, only woman’s desire to appropriate the sovereignty of the male subject; through him she will achieve salvation from her own inessentiality. But if the woman in love abandons herself in order to save herself, Beauvoir warns, she paradoxically “ends up totally disavowing herself.”8 For the time being, love epitomizes in its most moving form the curse that weighs on woman. “The Woman in Love” reads like a 1947 version of our current self-help industry’s warnings against “codependency,” a state in which one is considered to have become overinvested in a loved one, dependent and without proper ego boundaries. It is commonly directed at women who “enable”; like Beauvoir’s mutilated woman, the codependent lives through her lover, takes responsibility for him, and thus risks excusing and enabling behaviors like alcoholism or abuse. The antidote: setting boundaries, detaching from the beloved. The liberal self must be self-governing, only secondarily in relation and minimally dependent on others; otherwise, one’s capacity to love is crippled. Love yourself first, we are instructed, know who you are, learn to be alone before being with another. For Beauvoir the conditions for an ideal love relationship, an “authentic love,” are found in the “reciprocal recognition of two freedoms.” Each lover would “experience himself as himself and as the other; neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves.”9 The Love’s Limit

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implication is that men are more capable of such authentic love, for they remain sovereign subjects; they hold something back. The woman they love is merely one value among others and they want to integrate her into their existence, not submerge their entire existence into her. They do not abandon themselves. The question of how I experience myself as a self and an other is hardly straightforward even outside of love relationships. Our diagnoses of pathological or neurotic love attest to the complexity and confusion of human intimacy, of our often conflicting needs for attachment and separation. There is some truth to the designations of “codependent” or “idolatrous” love, thanks in part to the reality of the social conditions that foster them: patriarchy, capitalism, the heterosexual imperative, family values, and a flourishing romance industry combine to encourage us to make impossible demands on our lovers. The unconscious leaps into the fray. In love relationships it is not always apparent where one self ends and another begins. The Self in Love

Faithful to a self-other dichotomy in which the essential and the inessential are perpetually engaged in a zero-sum game, Beauvoir misses the counterpart to woman’s pathological love: the man in love, at risk of narcissism, in love with his sovereign self and fearful of woman’s threat to his autonomy and freedom. This is Jean-Paul Sartre’s wish to be loved exclusively, to be chosen as an absolute end—to be “the world!” of one’s beloved.10 But without capturing the beloved’s freedom, and therefore eliminating the risk of her negative determinations of the lover, he cannot be saved from instrumentality. Sartre sums up the conundrum: “[One] wants to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom should no longer be free.”11 Here we find the precursor to Jean-Luc Marion’s question, “Does anybody love me?” There is demand and need for recognition, affirmation, justification—I am because I am loved—but the emphasis is solely on how the other can reflect me, what the other can give to me or do for me, or conversely, on what the other might take from me if I give her too much power. To understand the self in love, why not begin with the act of loving rather than being loved? Rather than “Does anybody love me?” why not ask, “Do I love?” and reconsider Beauvoir’s point—that I must experience myself as a self and an other—from the perspective of the loving self? This shifts the focus from the terms of autonomy, from withholding and protecting, to the terms of vulnerability, to openness and risk in the movement of love. For Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

there is no love without abandoning one’s position and “crossing” over an abyss like an acrobat. In one motion we abandon ourselves and reach for the other. This is Hélène Cixous’s analogy: love is the secret of acrobatics, she writes, and it is “useless to contemplate or fathom what separates: the abyss is always invented by our fear. We leap and there is grace.”12 The we is delicious. In taking this leap, we may find—rather than relinquish—our freedom in loving another. This is the freedom of creation, of entering into an “undivided situation,” as Maurice Merleau-Ponty aptly put it. Our selves do not unfold in solitary confinement. I perceive another and around her “a vortex forms, towards which my world is drawn and, so to speak, sucked in: to this extent, it is no longer merely mine.”13 The other invites me in; I respond to this call to be drawn in and, in doing so, create an unprecedented connection, an “interworld.” The selves within this interworld shift, accommodate, move together, and then move apart in a constant, if inconsistent and unpredictable, dance. The intensity of the love varies, as does the degree of the boundedness of the world the lovers create. Love is the emotional force that propels us outside of ourselves—tears us away from our lone selves—to experience in some sensual, affective way life on the other side of a body.14 To love is not then to crush the beloved’s freedom in order to stave off the threat she poses. “If one loves, one finds one’s freedom precisely in the act of loving,” Merleau-Ponty suggests, and not in “a vain autonomy.”15 This is not the freedom to do as one pleases regardless of others’ interests, nor is it necessarily existential freedom as the project of one’s intentional being; this is freedom from oneself. Love saves us from a barren solipsism or narcissism, propelling us into worlds of affect, sensuosity, generosity—and a will to be—that we never knew before we loved. We hold loved ones within us. Extract one significant love relationship and we are different persons. When a connection between two is most intense and the world it creates survives time and crisis, we could say that even physical separation is not separation in any meaningful sense. Not unlike a parent’s relation to her child, one’s consciousness becomes forever expanded to incorporate another’s life—her emotions, thoughts, desires, pleasures, and pains. The body of the beloved takes on a new significance, stretching the meaning of proximity. This explains why the end of a relationship and physical separation—even through death—may not mean the absence of the beloved. We may conjure up minute details of the loved one’s body—from scars to idiosyncratic gestures—and remain sensuously attuned to the absent body, the smell of skin, the taste of lips. In this way the Love’s Limit

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lost love continues to inhabit us, not only in our memories of the interworld we made, but in the sense that we will never return to who we were before we loved the person now lost to us. Thus the lone self does not disappear entirely; it retreats, altered by the relation with another. While it is never an entity unaffected or unaltered by another, never a sovereign self, there is still a self. We know this because no one can live our lives for us. The one who attempts to live another’s experience through blind sacrifice, like Beauvoir’s woman in love, might be considered altruistic. But as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, the interworld is still a project of mine in this case, and it would be hypocritical to pretend that I seek the welfare of another as if it were my own welfare, since this very attachment to another’s interest still has its source in me.16 I know this, too, because I am a mere spectator to your pain. I move beyond myself as much as is humanly possible, but I can only feel your pain metaphorically.17 My body feels an echo of your suffering, but it is an emotional, intentional suffering. I do not suffer as you do. Like your phantom pains, I feel what is not there in actuality. My anguish wrenches me from myself; I will the end of your suffering, but my love cannot collapse this abyss of skin and bone and pain between us. I can only transcend myself through empathy; at the side of a hospital bed I suspend my self, my needs and preoccupations, and become wholly consumed by love for the sufferer. I become, in fact, like Beauvoir’s scorned woman—breathing in the air you expel, oblivious to all but the “delicious ‘we.’” When we feel pain in our bodies it can dull our senses to the world; we turn inward, and the pain encases us like a cocoon. Love for the other in pain can do much the same. I do not look at the separation; I have eyes, a body, “only for there, for the other.”18 Volo ut sis

Saved not from pain but from myself, from the prison of invulnerability, in love I am free to will you to be. Who speaks of the lover’s voracious need to love and the joy of abandoning oneself to the giving of love? Who captures the exquisite delight I take in loving a person, a particular body: the lines that fan out from your eyes, the voice that provokes a rush of feeling like no other? Who knows of my pleasure in listening to your fear and your heartbeat, in absorbing your anguish, in binding your wounds, in telling you how immeasurably lovable you are? We leap and there is grace. Here we find something akin to the “supreme and unsurpassed affirmation” highlighted by Arendt in the expression volo Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

ut sis. “This mere existence,” she writes, “that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ut sis (I want you to be),’ without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.”19 We love a person who is more than the sum of her parts, a bare, embodied existence, not qualities or characteristics; in love we form attachments that deepen over time through the slow nurturing of a world, a history, through mutual care and survival. In this love, psyche and soma are in profound confusion—we do not love one without the other. As Felix Ó Murchadha writes, “The self becomes fully itself, becomes, that is, a person, only in love. To be a person is to be in love.”20 One who does not love or desire is a nobody.21 There is no reason in love, only grace. Love is a gift, not a sacrifice. I give to you what is good in me in the ardent wish to make your life better, but it is no sacrifice of self. The love of another is never a right, nothing deserved or owed to us. It is a gift in the truest sense of the word, its recipients the arbitrary beneficiaries of luck. But love is also a gift to its giver. If love is an emotion, intense, unruly, waxing and waning and sometimes dissipating altogether for good reason or none at all, the terms of our understanding shift. There is no ideal against which we must measure our emotions, no “true love” outside of the truth of our emotional response to another person. All love then is true, no matter how intensely felt, since anything that we genuinely feel is not false. All love is true, but not all love is propelled by the same force, the same emotional intensity.22 Love is only as complex as the person who feels it and toward whom it is directed. Like other emotions, love may take on a life of its own that becomes bigger than the one who feels it. This is not a transcendent love in the Christian sense, for there is nothing to repudiate; love rises from one body to enfold another. Emotions can overwhelm us, affecting us beyond the immediate world of the relation of two. In this Singer is absolutely right: love provides us with meaning. Love enhances, augments, affirms. When we lose love, it is the memory of this augmented life that overcomes us in our grieving. We recall the pleasure or pain of the emotions that suffused our lives with a loved one; we recall that movement outside of ourselves, that irresistible pull into another’s inner life. I swell with love for you. I surge toward you and experience the overwhelming pleasure of the flow of passionate feeling, desire, and care. My Love’s Limit

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life becomes meaningful in a way it was not before, urgent, in the awareness of the fragility of your life. I love you because I can. Because you are there naked before me, suffering, surviving, loving me with all your singularity, in ambivalence and failure. I love you for the vulnerable self that you laid at my feet and out of the stubborn belief that my love is omnipotent. Love is never the sole emotion we feel toward another—it is mixed in with anger, resentment, pain, desire, anguish, jealousy, even hatred. But it may be the most stubborn and the most irrational of these. Love may intensify over time, expand, deepen, or dissipate, but it is born in a moment of unnamable affinity. We do not love everyone. Something in another captivates us, draws us in—singularity exposed in an open face. An invitation is extended and we accept. A hand is opened and we grasp it. We let ourselves into another life and our own alters irrevocably. In this way our lives are inhabited or peopled, loved ones remain lodged within us, even when we lose them. If love is expressed in volo ut sis, it must remain an open gesture toward another rather than a flinching away, an outstretched hand that wills the other to be—essentially to be free—that accepts the risk and the gift together. It is my vulnerability in the encounter with another that enables me to love, for when I am exposed to the other’s perception of me, I experience myself as both a self and an other. This is the antidote to narcissism and its impenetrable barriers. I can attempt to see myself as he sees me, but because I am also a self I must withstand his anger or disappointment. In this way I protect my capacity to love: it is not keeping another at bay for fear of his power to determine me, but refusing to let him take from me the essential condition for me to love—that open hand. At the same time my fearlessness in the exposure to love allows the lover to flourish, to live his own life as best as he can. We thus abandon the language of liberal autonomy and throw out our scripts for authentic love. We acknowledge that we love the imperfect and we love them imperfectly. Not even God can do this; we imagine he loves the imperfect, but we do not allow him to love imperfectly. Imperfect love is uniquely human. Consider a brief moment in the poet Lorna Crozier’s memoir Small Beneath the Sky. It is an intimate family scene: Crozier’s mother, standing at the edge of a salty, alkali lake in Saskatchewan, scatters her husband’s ashes to the wind and says, “You made my life better.”23 This is a man whose drinking habits kept the family in poverty. He was not an abusive drunk but an embarrassing one, we read, whose disgraceful behavior required a cover-up of secrets and lies—his drinking “had to be carried invisibly, like a terrible disease that had no name.”24 Given the criteria established by Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

Singer, Beauvoir, or de Botton, this love is hardly mature or authentic. Of her mother’s parting words to her father, Crozier writes, “It was one of the most shocking things I’d ever heard. Only she knew what he had given her; only she could offer him those final words of love and praise.”25 This story provides a striking alternative to liberal or Christian ideals in its refusal of both an idealization of the relation between two, and an idealization of love itself. Here we have an honest appraisal of love for an imperfect being who made a woman’s life hell in one moment and worth living in another. At the same time, it is a grateful acknowledgment of the gift of his love, the love of a selfish man with little affection for his children, but love nonetheless. How this flies in the face of much of what we believe to be true of love: that it searches for perfection or that it is perfection itself, and that if such perfection is never achieved then we know not love—or only a poor imitation. Her love for an alcoholic might be called masochism instead, or codependency. We may find, paradoxically it seems, that our deepest love was for the most “flawed” person, in the most troubled relationships, or that we received the greatest gifts from someone who never knew what was given, who may not have thought he was giving anything. There is no consolation in this love—no airbrushed liberal equality to soothe us, no ascent to a disembodied, ethereal Christ-love—pure, undemanding, infinite. We get love wrong again and again. This is the point of Love’s Work, another memoir, written by Gillian Rose while she was dying of cancer at the age of forty-eight. She admits that she is “highly qualified in unhappy love affairs” but refuses to find solace in an idealized version of love as exchanged between two individuals equal in their capacity for love. 26 In her description of her own loves, and that of others, love is not conditional on an authentic or mature relationship; the distinction she makes evident between an intimate relationship and love itself means that failed relationships do not necessitate failed love. Love itself is the expression of this body toward that body—it is a work of expression, like a work of art. As F.  O. Matthiessen once wrote to his lover, in love we “must create everything for ourselves. And creation is never easy.”27 Rather than sovereignty, Rose highlights the vulnerability of the self as a condition for love. “There is no democracy in any love relation,” she writes, “only mercy.”28 Without the risk of having our mercy met with mercilessness, our forgiveness with retribution, there is no love, or at the very least, there is only what Rose calls an “edgeless” love. When we love, it seems we dwell on an edge, a precipice, but this should not lead to despair. Indeed, she enigmatically instructs her reader: Keep your mind in hell and Love’s Limit

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despair not. And Rose is no stranger to hell. Her body cancer-ridden and inoperable, she tells us that a crisis of illness, bereavement, separation, and even natural disaster could give us the opportunity to encounter the “deeper levels of the terrors of the soul, to loose and to bind, to bind and to loose.” It is this back and forth—being bound and unbound through love— that is the essence of the love relation, but Rose warns that the unbounded soul is as “mad” as the soul with “cemented boundaries.”29 And here again we encounter an articulation of love’s limit: “If the Lover retires too far, the light of love is extinguished and the Beloved dies; if the Lover approaches too near the Beloved, she is effaced by the love and ceases to have an independent existence. The Lovers must leave a distance, a boundary, for love: then they approach and retire so that love may suspire.”30 This is what Rose calls “love’s work,” and it is not unlike the work of Cixous’s acrobats or the work we find in Beauvoir’s insistence that love must be the “reciprocal recognition of two freedoms.” The limit described by Rose is a point at which lines must be drawn, space claimed, for lovers to breathe. While there is no equality in any relationship, no absolute reciprocity, there is a reciprocal passivity in the volo ut sis. When we love we give others the freedom to be, we let them be—this is the space for breathing. Not always, of course, and not without ambivalence. There is often the wish to control: the greater the attachment, sometimes the greater the belief that we know what is best for someone (our children, for example). There are other desires and emotions at play in this control—fear, jealousy, protectiveness, compassion. In letting the other be, we acknowledge the other’s freedom to make what may be obviously wrong choices, but we also recognize that she alone is accountable for her actions. A loved one’s actions never occur in a vacuum; when they affect us negatively, this may not mean that we cease to love or cease to want them to be, but that we enact a refusal, for we, too, must be free to breathe. In other words, letting the other be does not mean letting the other destroy us. To return to Crozier’s memoir, if this man made this woman’s life better, we need to consider not what he failed to give her, but what he did not take from her. No one else can measure the love that we receive from another, not even the one who gives it. Perhaps Crozier’s father gave to his wife not only his own limited love, but the opportunity for her to love with abandon, to love brokenness, even disease. We could not in any sense call this an equal, reciprocal love if we are measuring love only in terms of its give and take in a relationship. But if we consider the love itself, there should Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

be no surprise that he made her life better, no surprise that he gave her something. Love is not an equal exchange but a gift that bestows meaning and pleasure on the one who gives it. Its effects on the recipient are variable and unforeseeable. Perhaps what he did not take from his wife was her capacity to love. And this is not dependent on the relationship as reciprocal, but on the deep reserves of emotion and vulnerability that constitute a person’s ability to love. This, I argue, would constitute a limit to love, maybe even the only one: when one’s capacity to love is harmed or destroyed by the loved one. I am suggesting that there is no limit to love itself. We may experience a limitless love if our capacity for this powerful and transformative emotion is not eroded. This requires the protection of human vulnerability and along with it our ability to trust. It may not be our commonly diagnosed pathologies that cause this erosion; our imperfections, our struggles, and the crutches we reach for are not in themselves responsible for taking from us the conditions required to love. On the contrary, our vulnerability to these vicissitudes open us not only to risk but also to eros; in the encounter with another’s raw vulnerability, with his exposed wounds and sensibilities, we open ourselves to the transforming power of love; we love more intensely, more tenderly. Love’s Limit

When we love fiercely, it may take a long time before we find ourselves struggling to breathe. We may wake up one morning, like any other morning, and understand with sudden clarity that something has been stolen from us, siphoned out of us slowly, relentlessly. Our lungs clench, at risk of collapse. Yet love is stubborn and we may soldier on believing love will bear all things, endure all things, never fail. The irresistible impulse of love is to make another’s life better. Our love gives us the illusion of omnipotence— to give back what may have been taken from the one we love, the one who now threatens to take from us what we should never give. How are we to identify the limit, not of love itself, but of the lover whose capacity for love is harmed? When do we withdraw love in the face of violence? In the face of a lover’s self-destruction? When do we say enough is enough, I can bear no more? When must we close the open hand because we love? For lovers cannot endure all things. We must preserve the conditions for love: the exposure, the vulnerability, the breathing required by the movement of love between two. Love’s Limit

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This does not mean protecting a sovereign, autonomous self with fortified borders that might be threatened by the love and need of another, but protecting our ability to respond to another, to answer for ourselves and our actions in the context of a world created between two. The problem is not longing for the “delicious ‘we’” but creating a “we” in which one takes responsibility for another’s life or demands another do so. Agency and willing are the operative terms here, not sovereignty and autonomy. We can never love too much, if it is a love that wants the other to be, if it is a love that does not encroach on another’s freedom to be. What destroys the conditions for love is invulnerability. We cannot love without becoming vulnerable to another, without opening ourselves to the possibility of being wounded by another. Without this opening to the other—an abandoning of the self in the surge of love—we are unable to see ourselves through another’s eyes. And if we remain blind in such a way, we can neither give nor receive love; we remain sovereigns perpetually on guard, deflecting threats, to be sure, but gestures of love and generosity as well. When our capacity to love is threatened, we are presented with what may be the only condition under which we must withdraw love. This is still not the failure of love—on the contrary, we might think of it as the ultimate act of mercy, like cutting off a limb to save a life. We must live in order to say this: I loved. The stark simplicity of this claim belies the truths peddled by our stories of love, whether liberal, Christian, psychotherapeutic, or market-driven. For we will all love and lose, fail to love well or fail to be lovable in another’s eyes. We are all imperfect, prone to self-absorption, possessiveness, often governed by the need for certainty and a modicum of control over our lives. And yet we are capable of extraordinary love, even boundless love—from one imperfect individual to another. The point is, as Gillian Rose says with all the breathless urgency of the dying, “If I am to stay alive, I am bound to continue to get love wrong, all the time, but not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair, love’s work.”31 I carried the weight of your sorrow, washed away the vomit and the blood, wiped the sweat from your skin, filled the gaping mouth of your need. But the weight of your rage was too hard to bear. There was no way to know, in the end, what was love and what was hate, what was rage and what was despair, nor what love could have been. I could not let you take from me what was taken from you. I chose life, to hold on to what was good in me, my vulnerable self, the self that loved you. What matters is only that I loved.

Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

notes 1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), 301. 2. 1 Cor. 13:4–6 (Revised Standard Version). 3. Irving Singer, The Pursuit of Love (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 7. 4. Alain de Botton, Essays in Love (London: Picador, 2006), 203. 5. Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 23. 6. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 693. 7. Ibid., 708. 8. Ibid., 691. 9. Ibid., 706. 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 481. 11. Ibid., 479. 12. Hélène Cixous, “Tancredi Continues,” in “Coming to Writing,” and Other Essays, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman, trans. Deborah Jenson, Sarah Cornell, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 79. 13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 412. 14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 154–55.

15. Ibid., 154. 16. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 415. 17. Merleau-Ponty, Primacy of Perception, 154. 18. Cixous, “Tancredi Continues,” 79. 19. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 301. 20. See chapter 5 of this volume, Felix Ó Murchadha, “Love’s Conditions: Passion and the Practice of Philosophy.” 21. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 18. 22. For a discussion of love and intensity, see chapter 1 in this volume, Todd May, “Love and Death.” 23. Lorna Crozier, Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2009), 150. 24. Ibid., 121. 25. Ibid., 150. 26. Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (New York: New York Review of Books, 1995), 61. 27. F. O. Matthiessen (Letter 68, Hyde 71) quoted in Colm Tóibín, Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature (New York: Scribner, 2001), 14. 28. Rose, Love's Work, 60. 29. Ibid., 105. 30. Ibid., 142–43. 31. Ibid., 106.

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3 The Subject in Crisis Kristeva on Love, Faith, and Nihilism john caruana

Introduction

For Julia Kristeva the subject is given in love. When love is not present or deficient, the ever-frangible psyche risks falling back on itself, into an autism that inhibits, even forecloses, relations with others. The subject is born subsequent to the perilous traversal of the semiotic maternal body—which at a certain critical point in the mother-child dyad ceases to be a site of nurturance—to the symbolic realm of cultural and moral order. The child must acquire its own distinct psychic envelope, which Kristeva calls “narcissism”—not to be conflated with the autistic self-identification that we have come to associate with Ovid’s Narcissus. Without this psychic lining, the abject—the suffocating alterity of the semiotic zone (mucus, saliva, breast milk, and so forth)—inevitably smothers one’s being. But this transition is extremely fragile, for the infant must experience the loving assurance that it can cross the threshold separating the semiotic from the symbolic without being abandoned in the process. This raises the important question of the role of idealization, what Kristeva will sometimes simply call “belief.” The child must be made to believe that everything will be fine. For this reason Kristeva’s work turns to an underdeveloped notion first introduced by Freud: the “father of individual prehistory.” What this agent telegraphs to the child is the sense that it will

not be abandoned in its hour of need. According to Kristeva, in the past religion has served as the primary agent or proxy of this father of individual prehistory. In Christianity, the notion of a loving Father has functioned as that stabilizing agent, ensuring the proper embedding of the narcissistic substructures for subjectivity. But in our contemporary world, very little is in place to replicate this function. If the work of the social symbolic is to adequately symbolize the loss and suffering that mark the human experience, then our relativizing age, which prides itself on demolishing any title to truth, can only result in nihilism. Combined with the crassness and cynicism of late capitalism, where everything is commodified, one can perhaps appreciate why our age fuels psychic instability. Kristeva is unequivocal in her criticisms of the vacuous and exploitative discourses of love and romance proffered by our present age. These ersatz narratives fail to address what she has recently called “the incredible need to believe,” that is, the need to have faith in the world and in others. Under current circumstances, it should not surprise us that more and more young people are resorting to drastic measures in order to “heal” their distressed psyches. Self-harm, in particular, stands out as a paradigmatic symptom of our age. Abandoned to themselves, some young people enact a desperate and primitive ritual in response to those abject feelings that threaten to overwhelm them. The phenomenon of self-harm powerfully signals that we are undergoing an unparalleled crisis in subjectivity, an inability to love. Kristeva challenges our contemporary secular age to conceive of credible and edifying amorous narratives and images that can serve as the basis for ongoing psychic renewal, for believing in the world again. In the Beginning Was Love: The Birth of the Subject

In order for something like a subject to emerge, a number of critical elements must come into play for Kristeva. For our purposes, it is not necessary to rehearse in detail the complex account she has presented over a period that spans at least four decades. But in order to appreciate Kristeva’s philosophy of love, it is important at least to highlight certain features of this account. Where do we begin? Perhaps with a reminder that Kristeva emphatically returns to again and again: the process by which the infans—the one who as yet does not speak—becomes a speaking subject is rife with obstacles and ordeals. So much can go wrong in the establishment of the subject, and indeed it does. For Kristeva, subjectivity is best thought of as a continuum, The Subject in Crisis

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involving various degrees or gradients of adaptability and resilience. Some come out of this process as relatively intact subjects, others as more porous and brittle subjective formations. However, no one becomes a subject without some psychic scarring. Like Freud and Lacan before her, the subject for Kristeva is constitutively divided, a dehiscent compromise formation. To underscore this point, Kristeva famously qualifies the subject as “le sujet en procès”—by which she means to emphasize its dynamic nature (procès or processus as process), but also the fact that it is always to some extent under duress (procès as trial) because of the inexorable stressors of the outside world, the travails of the body, and internal psychic conflicts. The process begins of course with the mother, whom Kristeva conceives as a receptacle or matrix out of which will eventually (though not necessarily) emerge a new subject. The mother-infant relationship is characterized by a lack of differentiation, relative formlessness, and fluidity. This is obviously the case with the womb. But it continues to be the case with the postnatal infant. In the mother-infant dyad, it is not entirely clear where the mother begins and ends. Freud and Lacan failed—in Kristeva’s eyes—to properly grasp the subject’s birth. For the two male psychoanalysts, oedipalization through the Law of the Father marks the beginning of subjectivity. Kristeva troubles this view by refocusing our attention on that nebulous continent that Freud and Lacan hastily gloss over. The subject’s roots extend much deeper into this maternal region in ways that need to be foregrounded for Kristeva if we are to properly understand the psyche and more accurately diagnose its ailments. Kristeva conceives of the maternal continent in terms of the sacred. Following the tradition of Émile Durkheim and Georges Bataille, in particular, Kristeva understands the sacred to refer to a primordial phenomenon that generates intense ambivalent responses.1 The sacred is simultaneously pure and impure, life-giving and destructive. Human beings experience both attraction and disgust in relation to the sacred. The mother’s body manifests itself to the infant at times as a nurturing space where all of its needs are seemingly met and on other occasions as an excessive presence that threatens to swallow it up. Therefore, while Kristeva fully recognizes that a certain kind of loving disposition is at play in this space, it is not to be confused with the peculiar love that is required for subjectivity to emerge. “If love stems from [a special type of ] narcissistic idealization”—an idea which we will explore in more detail below—then “it has nothing to do with the protective wrapping over skin and sphincters that Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

maternal care provides for the baby.” Indeed, “if that protection continues . . . chances are that neither love nor psychic love will ever hatch from such an egg.”2 Culture requires that the child leave the immediacy of this undifferentiated zone in order to enter into the symbolic universe inhabited by her parents, older siblings, relatives, and community. Kristeva subscribes to the classical Freudian and Lacanian view that the lawmaking Father plays a vital role in securing a separation from the maternal universe. However, in contrast to both Freud and Lacan, Kristeva’s originality here is to insist that the separation process is already initiated within the space of the archaic mother. The too-muchness of that body serves to propel—even prior to the “no” of the Father—the infant away from the mother. But this places the infant in a bind. On the one hand it is repelled from the maternal body, as well as prodded to relinquish the maternal Thing in favor of signifiers, which promise to give the child a level of hitherto unforeseeable power and control. On the other hand the child has no obvious motivation to leave this place, even if it remains ambivalent about it. The mother continues to be a site of ongoing fascination for it. As the place of its origin, the region that envelops it, the maternal body—however unstable—remains the child’s sacred garden. Kristeva underlines the gap that exists between the maternal body and the symbolic order. The child cannot help but experience the push toward this gap as the terrifying hazard of falling into an abyss. It is in relation to that particular challenge that Kristeva introduces her notion of the “imaginary Father.”3 She finds its, albeit undeveloped, source in Freud’s notion of the “father of individual prehistory.” This “loving Father”—another name that she deploys in this context—is in her view a structurally necessary element in the constitution of subjectivity. Without it, the child lacks the support to traverse the chasm that separates it from the symbolic order. Rather than a defined object, at this intermediary stage, this “Third” is best conceived as a “magnet” (TL 29, 38, 123) that draws the child forward into an immediate and direct identification with it. The “third party” promises unconditional love: the child will not be abandoned as it exits its Garden of Eden, which despite its sometimes idyllic character nevertheless retains the indelible mark of the tohu bohu (the formless and empty darkness that precedes the world of order and meaning) that Genesis 1:1 famously identifies. Held by the Third as it negotiates the hiatus between the body and language, the child slowly acquires a sense of itself as distinct from the world. The Subject in Crisis

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Thus Narcissus is born. What comes into focus at this point is Kristeva’s unique rehabilitation of the concept of narcissism. While Kristeva sometimes uses the term in its popular sense to convey the idea of self-absorption—when she does so she carefully qualifies it as “negative narcissism”4— it is clear that she deploys it for the most part in a positive sense. Narcissism is another name for the subject, or more precisely, it is the envelope of the subject, its precious lining. It is the clean haven that is carved out within the child in order to keep certain impurities at bay. But the clean refuge that narcissism represents is never permanently accomplished. The self is a precarious achievement that finds itself persistently menaced by the ontologically unstable impurities of the archaic mother and the infant’s own body, what Kristeva dubs the “abject” (PH). But narcissism, as Kristeva will remind us repeatedly, is also already the foundation of what Freud calls the ego-ideal and, therefore, implicates someone or something other than oneself. This is an idea that Lacan would further develop. The French psychoanalyst demonstrated how our sense of self is inextricably imbricated with the Other, who brings the infant into subjective being through repeated interpellation: Look at you, how strong and special you are.5 In that way the adult entrusted with the child’s care mirrors an image of who it might be, an image that eventually congeals as it impresses itself on the child. But whereas Lacan wishes to underscore that the misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the self—my sense of “I”—is constituted by the desire of (not for) the Other and thus that alienation is constitutively built into our very subjectivity, for Kristeva the emphasis in the creation of an ego-ideal is to be placed less on estrangement and more on the beneficent assurance that is telegraphed to the child via the image of the idealized Other. These different emphases will have significant consequences with respect to the therapeutic orientation. If the (interminable) cure for Lacan requires persistent, unflagging disillusionment, a repeated making-aware of one’s alienated origins, for Kristeva, moving in the opposite direction, therapeutic treatment necessitates, more often than not, the nurturing and even bolstering of an illusion or idealization that failed to take proper hold in the patient’s early life. The loving Third neither affirms nor destroys the maternal-semiotic region or paternal-symbolic order; rather, it supplements maternal solicitousness while, at the same time, offsetting some of the sternness that will undoubtedly be experienced in relation to the paternal lawgiver. In any case, what is important to stress here is the necessity of the Third. Without it, any number of stillborn or damaged subjectivities might result. Among Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

these possibilities, the child may risk falling back into the enveloping and smothering region of the Thing. Or, perhaps, as a way to compensate for an absent loving Father, the child might overidentify with the power of the Father-as-lawmaker, in which case it might acquire an authoritarian disposition. Regardless of the outcome, the point is that unless narcissism is established—a form of self-concern that is supported by an ideal of a loving Other—the subject is incapable of forming more binding and nondestructive relationships. Kristeva conceives of the birth of the subject in terms of an immediate and objectless identification, her rendering of Freud’s Einfühlung (TL 25). The child models itself after the loving Father. It identifies with a way of being rather than this or that specific being (object). Once Narcissus is born, the subject can begin to love. Carrying forward an internalized image or ideal of the loving Father, the subject acquires the confidence to venture out into the social order. There it encounters other subjects who are equally beholden to one version or another of the imaginary Father. Together they project onto one another a certain level of reliance that makes it possible in turn for them to establish a myriad of amorous—licit and illicit—relationships and pairings. Lovers and friends alike are invested with the same trust that the child deposits in its image of the ideal Father. Even in the absence of ample evidence, the Other as lover or friend is idealized, the one who can be counted on. One can appreciate that a high degree of psychic investment is required in order for such relationships to work. But one can also glean from this that the cost of failure can be equally high. The breakdown of these relationships is injurious. It cannot be any other way. Love is the essential precondition for any flourishing subjectivity and, at the same time, love is the subject’s ever-possible albatross. Kristeva succinctly summarizes her view of love as follows: A miracle, indeed.  .  .  . The love object absorbs my narcissistic needs, erotic desires, and most phantasmatic ideals, like the ideal of eternity. The resulting amorous object is thus a phantasmatic construction, which becomes the subject’s absolute pole of stabilization, magnificence, or exaltation: the cornerstone of enthusiasm. But it is also the place where stability carries within it the risk of dissolving, either through an excess of manic excitation facing the constraints of limits and reality or through the risks of abandonment, separation, or rupture. That the amorous relationship is madness all of world literature is there to remind us.6 The Subject in Crisis

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Madness or not, what comes into sharp relief for Kristeva, as we will see next, is that love has its origins in an experience that, for all intents and purposes, is religious in character. In the Beginning Was Faith: Belief as Trust 52

The overview I presented in the previous section on love finds a deeper significance once we, following Kristeva, reexamine love from the prism of religious belief or faith. Kristeva had already signaled this very connection between faith and love in the full title of her little book In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Understanding this link will require a kind of second pass, a renewed account of love, but this time through a psychoanalytic engagement with religious experience. Even a quarter century after the publication of Au commencement était l’amour, such an engagement with religion might seem counterintuitive, especially when we consider that the founder of psychoanalysis was probably “the least religious man of his century.”7 However, it is worth keeping in mind that Freud, as Kristeva is fond of repeating, never spoke of the abolition of religion. Freud understood that religion is too important a phenomenon to be assessed as being either true or false. Religion indeed does respond to a genuine set of needs; its efficacy is verified by religion’s anthropological ubiquity. Freud recognized this fact, and for that reason he distanced himself from the God of the philosophers (a critical intellectual antecedent of the New Atheists). The philosophical God, Freud laments, is too much like “apple juice”—an insipid, watered-down version of the real thing (INB 2, 5), that is, the God to whom ordinary people pray and genuflect. Despite his own personal unbelief, Freud recognized religion’s remarkable power to effect changes, its capacity to track fundamental yearnings in human beings. Religion, for the founder of psychoanalysis, is no anemic beverage, but an intoxicating serum. Kristeva underscores the tenacity of religious experience by focusing on belief. As it turns out, belief has something very important to tell us about the nature of love. But the very mention of belief immediately presents itself as a stumbling block, especially if heard with a modern philosopher’s skeptical ear. The modern category of belief is a child of the Enlightenment, a product of secular reason, which is to say that belief today is conceived primarily in terms of epistemology. Analytic philosophers define a belief as a propositional attitude. I believe that someone is behind my office door right now. In expressing that belief, I am taken to be making a knowledge claim. Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

According to this way of thinking, the truth status of my belief in this instance can be tested quite simply. I can get up and check to see whether someone is actually behind my door. If someone is indeed there, then my belief is validated as “true.” If it turns out I was wrong, that is, no one is standing outside my office, then my belief is shown to be “false.” In the last few centuries, even religious belief has been made to incline in this direction. Similar assumptions are at play when philosophers conceive of belief in a religious context. The statement “I believe in God” is heard in much the same way as “I believe someone is standing behind that door.” In both cases, the assumption is that belief involves certain knowledge claims that can be confirmed or denied through evidence. In this context, Kristeva’s objectives are twofold: to show that (1) an examination of belief in religious experience should not be confused with the remarkably narrow range of human experience that our modern concept of belief is meant to cover (as we will see, a proper understanding of religious belief, especially as articulated in the Bible, reveals a much deeper understanding of belief as trust); and (2) the dynamics that subtend the religious understanding of belief are also at work in the experience of love. It is correct to assume that religious belief, like the modern epistemological category, implicates truth. But upon closer examination we see that the truth at stake in religious belief does not concern knowledge. The kind of truth at play within the context of religion precedes language and knowledge in general. As Kristeva puts it, religious belief involves a “truth that keeps me, makes me exist” (INB 3). The truth this implies concerns subjectivity itself. To state it strongly, there is no subject outside of this understanding of truth. To put it in perhaps less dramatic terms, the subject without belief finds itself in a terribly compromised position, with very little foundational support for psychological growth and substantial connections with others. “If this need ‘to hold true’ is not satisfied,” Kristeva maintains, then “my apprenticeships, convictions, loves, and acts just don’t hold up” (INB 3). Indeed, the entire symbolic order is for Kristeva premised on first acquiring belief. That is the insight of the Psalmist who avows, “I believed, therefore have I spoken: I was greatly afflicted” (Ps. 116:10). For Kristeva, this means, It’s because I believed I was able to speak, even though I was in a lamentable state. The term he’emanti, rendered in English here in the King James Version (and many other English translations of the Bible) as “belief,” has as its root the word ‘aman, which means “to support,” “to stand firm,” and “to trust.” The currently narrow resonances of the term “belief” fail to do The Subject in Crisis

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justice to the biblical Hebrew. As the modern era unfolded, the term “belief” gradually lost its connection to the sense of trust. But that is what is essential to the premodern, religious conception of belief. Belief and trust are inseparable in that context. It is this much older sense that Kristeva has in mind when she speaks of belief or faith. The religious deployment of belief represents for Kristeva a near-perfect articulation of the imaginary Father: the idealized image of love that initiates and perhaps more significantly sustains subjective life. We can see this more clearly when we look at the larger context in which the Psalmist expresses himself. Earlier in the passage the biblical author says, “I love the Lord, for he heard my voice; he heard my cry for mercy. Because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live”8 (Ps. 116:3). Such statements voice what Kristeva has most recently called “the incredible need to believe”—a need which is at the heart not only of what we might commonly think of as religious experience but also, more significantly, of subjectivity in general. If one could voice this psychic need, might it not say something like the following? Because I trust you to hold me through the travails of my life’s journey, I feel confident to speak. Because there is an abiding Other, I feel confident to love in turn. As I hope one can appreciate, the belief referred to here has little, if anything, to do with an epistemological claim. The biblical author of this text voices a powerful experience that lies prior to knowledge itself, and indeed one might say subtends it. None of this is to say that we lack a nonreligious way of expressing the phenomenon of the Third. Indeed, psychoanalysis, for Kristeva, is an example of such an enterprise. Psychoanalysis aside, perhaps the challenge for secular discourses in general has to do with the modern liberal conception of an autonomous self. That notion of the modern self, like Athena emerging from her father’s head, represents a complete disavowal of the radically passive and heterogeneous nature of its origin. Rather than a self that is given to me from an elsewhere or from the Other, the liberal self imagines itself to be a self-contained given. In the context of love, the modern liberal self is framed in terms of an active I who loves. The religious articulation of the self is for the atheist Kristeva a more honest and truthful account: the “I” is given in love. The subject is literally nothing outside of this love that sustains it. “In the love relationship,” Kristeva notes, the “stress is placed on its source, God, and not man, who loves his creator.” This in effect introduces an “inversion of Eros’ dynamics,” which sees love flowing from the subject to its desired object, but agape, “to the contrary, inasmuch as it is identified with God, comes down, it is gift, welcome, and favor” (TL Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

140–41). The biblical insight into the subject, for Kristeva, is that it is loved into existence. The view of belief qua trust pervades both the Jewish and Christian scriptures. It finds a particularly poignant expression in the New Testament. Kristeva reminds us that the Psalmist’s sentiment is deliberately echoed in turn by Paul in the second letter to the Corinthians, where he avows, “It is written: ‘I believed; therefore I have spoken’” (4:13). Surprisingly, though, Kristeva does not take up the rest of Paul’s passage, for he goes on to articulate an experience that finds deep resonance with Kristeva’s broader thought: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. . . . So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (4:16–18). Paul’s words reverberate with Kristeva’s repeated insistence that religion—and Christianity, in particular—mirrors the invisible, intra-psychic drama that involves the passing away of the various ego permutations we instantiate at different stages of our unique lives and the renewal, or, one might even say, resurrection of these same moribund psyches: “Because Christianity set that rupture at the very heart of the absolute subject—Christ; because it represented it as a Passion that was the solidary lining of his Resurrection, his glory, and his eternity, it brought to consciousness the essential dramas that are internal to the becoming of each and every subject. It thus endows itself with a tremendous cathartic power.”9 Trust and love are so deeply imbricated as to make it impossible to treat them as distinct and separate phenomena. It is because the infant has been loved in advance that it can trust the invitation to leave the archaic mother. But in a sense it is also true to say that trust is the precondition for the child’s capacity to love in turn. Because I have confidence—faith, trust—in the loving Father, I can love others. Nihilism and Self-Harm: Crises of Love

For Kristeva, pace the New Atheists, the opposite of faith is not enlightenment but rather something closer to nihilism. We will come back to this critical point shortly. If belief and love are connected, it is because love in its deepest sense for Kristeva is inseparable from an older meaning of belief (faith) as trust. As such, faith is the sine qua non for a loving subject. Such faith transcends the overly reductive distinctions that militant atheists and religious zealots The Subject in Crisis

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alike traffic in: believer versus nonbeliever, theist versus atheist, and so forth. Kristeva unsettles such distinctions. It is true that she does so in such a way that seems to privilege religious experience, but we must be very careful here lest we misconstrue her thought. The phrase the incredible need to believe already signals an important equivocation. Yes, Kristeva does mean to say that the subject’s origins are steeped in a remarkable (religious) belief. However, for Kristeva the nonbelieving analyst, belief is, when all is said and done, “incredible” in another sense that might be lost in the English: the ideal Father image is in-croyable, that is, perhaps not so credible—which is to say, that the need to believe is a powerful illusion, albeit a necessary one. Without the trust implied by faith, the psychic envelope fails to take hold: “The ‘primary identification’ with the ‘father in individual prehistory’ would be the means, the link that might enable one to become reconciled with the loss of the Thing.” That should remind us, Kristeva goes on, “of the bond of faith, which is just what disintegrates in the depressed person” (BS 13). For that reason the “depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist” (BS 5). The untrusting self—the “atheist” self—is also a loveless self. The reference to “atheist” here is not to be confused with our ordinary, popular meaning, for as Kristeva puts it, “Whether I belong to a religion, whether I be an agnostic or atheist, when I say ‘I believe,’ I mean ‘I hold as true’” (INB 3). The melancholic atheist that Kristeva has in mind is the one who misses the encounter with the imaginary Father. In this sense, the “atheist” might indeed refer to the nonbeliever in the traditional sense, but it could also be an apt way to describe certain self-identifying religious individuals. The atheist in this very special sense of the word is the one for whom belief as trust lacks credibility. Such an individual lacks within himself an ideal that can serve to mediate his relations with others such that he will not be overrun by the inevitable frustrations and disappointments that accompany our messy intersubjective interactions. The idealized image of the loving Father smoothes out or mollifies the inevitable bristly moments, annoyances, and resentments we experience in relation to others by encouraging compassion and forgiveness, classically represented by Jesus’s penultimate words, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). By contrast, the depressed atheist subject, for Kristeva, can rarely see beyond the immediacy of these inevitable failures. Until now, in this unfolding story of the subject-in-process, we have focused almost exclusively on the infant. But Kristeva recognizes that our psychic needs change at different points in the life cycle of the human being. Whereas Freud and Lacan gloss over the period between the oedipalized Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

child and the assimilated adult, Kristeva—in the past decade in particular— has turned her attention to adolescence. The adolescent presents us with a new set of concerns. The movement into the symbolic has been accomplished. However, this stage of human development introduces a different relationship to belief and idealization, and consequently a new minefield to traverse. The primary obstacle for the infant is the hiatus between the archaic mother and the world of the name-of-the-Father. So much rests for its psychic success on internalizing the loving Third. With adolescents, however, the danger lies in an overidentification with an impossible ideal. If the potential peril for the young child concerns the paucity of idealization, the adolescent’s problem concerns the extent to which he or she is prone to an excessiveness of ideality. The adolescent is a believer, for Kristeva, but in a strident form. Adolescents believe in absolutes. This rigid believer judges the world, along with its inhabitants, according to an unrealistic standard. As a result, everything seems to fall short of an imagined perfect mark. The world is experienced by this wounded psyche as constant disappointment. It is the adolescent sentiment that is expressed by Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye,10 who is quick to judge others—adults in particular—as “phonies.” That attitude is relatively harmless. Most adolescents outgrow it. But left unchecked this attitude has the potential to turn into something more nefarious. Increasingly, our culture provides fewer and fewer cues for helping youth to readjust their expectations. Rather than aiding adolescents to curb this excessive ideality, in certain environments it has become fodder for the development of certain extremist personality types. Here Kristeva sees a way to link together what on the surface might appear to be completely unrelated phenomena. For her the “malady of ideality”11 is the basis for the emergence of fundamentalisms as well as the self-destructiveness of anorexia, drug addiction, and self-harm. Frustrated that the absolute does not exist, this adolescent strikes out at the world: “Adolescent belief [in the absolute] inevitably goes hand in hand with adolescent nihilism” (INB 16). Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the alarming advent of religious fundamentalism: the ISIS terrorist who is prepared to maim and kill innocents, or the endtimes Christian who yearns for the actualization of his apocalyptic death wish. These individuals are prepared to reject the world, even destroy it, in the name of an unrealizable ideality. This destruction of the recalcitrant world is not merely directed outward. In its most virulent forms, the subject of such violence also becomes its object of sacrifice. For in addition The Subject in Crisis

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to the world that lets us down, these mortal coils that are our bodies also fall short of the mark of an impossible ideal. The hatred that is directed at the world likewise targets the defective vessel that is the body itself. This might explain the unnamable rage and despair that leads more and more young people to harm themselves.12 In the case of cutting, the actions are both at once intensely private and public. By cutting her own flesh, the cutter, much like the anorexic, is “an idealist who sacrifices her body to an ideal phantasmatic object” (HF 161). And despite their efforts to conceal their cuts, the cutters’ incisions often appear on parts of the body (the forearms, for example) that inevitably are exposed and perhaps meant to be seen by those imperfect adults who have let them down. In the absence of effective and meaningful images and representations, these individuals literalize the separation that should have been symbolically mediated by society. One might speculate here that the cutters’ self-inflicted incisions are meant to stand in for the separation from the maternal matrix. Unable to make recourse to metaphor and idealization, the cutters, in an act of perverse literalism that is as futile as it is tragic, attempt to revive their stillborn psyche. In “Extraterrestrials Suffering for Want of Love,” Kristeva observes that “Psychoanalysis  .  .  . reveals the permanency  .  .  . of crisis” (TL 372). Crisis is inevitable for the simple reason that the subjects who form any culture are from the start divided, wounded beings. In the past, Kristeva maintains, cultures, primarily through religious practices and rites of initiation, put into place mechanisms to minimize the psychic affliction of their members. Our culture, however, is unique to the extent that it is in denial about its own unique crisis, which Kristeva characterizes as unprecedented in scope. Concerning what she takes to be our current crisis, Kristeva asks facetiously, “Through what miracle of repression, idealization, or sublimation has the discontent with splitting been stabilized, or even harmonized within a code of believable, sound, permanent values?” (TL 372). Our denial is supported in large part through a thoroughgoing social and cultural game of smoke and mirrors. “Narcissus [is] drowning in a cascade of false images” (TL 373), flawless mirror images of itself that are reflected on the “glass and steel buildings that reach to the sky . . . reflect[ing] you, a city filled with people steeped in their own image” (NMS 27). The images and screens of our media-saturated environment eviscerate whatever meaningful content “I” and “you” might signify. Instead, these pronouns now merely confirm— think of iPhone and YouTube—the conventional sense of Narcissus fixated on his own deathly one-way reflection. Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

With the demise of what was hitherto a remarkably powerful discourse for the articulation of the imaginary Father, nothing of substance is in place to satisfy the incredible need to believe. Instead, contemporary culture proffers a mixed bag of mostly shallow and sometimes exploitative balms. For Kristeva it is clear that these are not working because they fail to address the nature of the dysfunction: the profound erosion of trust. That alone, in her view, can account for our current “crises of love” (TL 7). People, and we should not neglect to emphasize, youth in particular, are increasingly abandoned to their own ill-equipped internal resources for dealing with psychic stress and numbness. Without the buffer zone of the imaginary Father, countless numbers of already frail subjects are persistently exposed to the death drives, the tohu bohu, that threaten to unravel the achievement that is the psyche. The fact that more and more young subjects treat themselves as sites of abjection to be destroyed should signal as a warning that our current culture is failing at some deep level to address fundamental needs. If young people are not capable of loving themselves, via the route of an idealized Other, they are unlikely to establish loving and lasting relationships. The symptomatology of auto-mutilation that we are currently witnessing among a segment of youth is, for Kristeva, an instance of the proverbial canary in a coal mine. We ignore these warnings at our own peril. Though Kristeva herself does not specify the details of a secular symbolic discourse that would promote flourishing subjects, her work, nevertheless, powerfully conveys why we must attend to discourses of idealization that might instill greater faith in the world, the very basis of love. notes 1. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay University Press, 1996), 30. Hereafter on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New parenthetically cited as NMS. York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 5. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror-Stage Hereafter parenthetically cited as PH. as Formative of the I as Revealed in 2. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New University Press, 1987), 34. Hereafter York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1–7. parenthetically cited as TL. 6. Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, 3. Kristeva addresses the theme of the trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: “imaginary Father” in several places. One Columbia University Press, 2010), 162. of the most important discussions is to Hereafter parenthetically cited as HF. be found in “Freud and Love: Treatment 7. Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to and Its Discontents” in TL. Believe, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New 4. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, York: Columbia University Press, 2009), New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross xv. Hereafter parenthetically cited as Guberman (New York: Columbia INB.

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8. All subsequent quotes from the Bible are 12. A recent British study notes that 10 from the New International Version. percent of girls in the United Kingdom 9. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and between the ages of fourteen and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New nineteen engages in some form of York: Columbia University Press, 1989), self-harm. “Study Looks at Self132. Hereafter parenthetically cited as BS. Harm in Young People,” NHS Choices, 10. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye November 17, 2011, http://www.nhs.uk/ (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, news/2011/11November/Pages/study1951). looks-at-self-harm-in-young-people.aspx. 11. Julia Kristeva, “Adolescence, a Syndrome of Ideality,” Psychoanalytic Review 94, no. 5 (2007): 715–25.

Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love

4 The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love in Continental Philosophy of Religion christina m. gschwandtner

Love is central in the work of several contemporary thinkers who can be loosely identified as Continental philosophers of religion.1 Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness culminates in the erotic phenomenon; love is important in Jean-Yves Lacoste’s phenomenology of liturgical being-before-God; for Michel Henry the Truth of divine Life is expressed as love; Emmanuel Falque’s project ends in a phenomenology of marriage patterned on the Eucharist; love is the topic of several of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s writings. Although some attention to love in writers informed by the Christian tradition may not surprise, the heavy emphasis placed on love—much stronger than that on faith or other topics one might expect from writers committed to Christianity in some form—is relatively unprecedented. What sort of phenomenological work does the topic of love accomplish in their writings? In this essay I will look closely at what a selection of French thinkers say about love and suggest that despite some slight disagreements among them, they share a fairly monolithic and rather extreme picture of love as complete kenotic2 abandon. As Marion has written most extensively on this topic, he will appear somewhat more prominently here, although I will show that his assumptions about love are taken over by the other writers, even on the occasions when they diverge from his account. I raise some

questions about these depictions of love and the definition of love on which they converge, suggesting that their account is too extreme and does not ultimately depict how love is actually experienced. I also question the frequent equation of divine and human love; kenotic love cannot be separated from its creedal or theological context quite as easily as their work seems to imply. 64 The Centrality of Love

The book cover of Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon calls love “a strangely neglected subject.”3 Marion himself points out in the first line of the work that “philosophy today no longer says anything about love, or at best very little.  .  .  . Philosophers have in fact forsaken love, dismissed it without a concept and finally thrown it to the dark and worried margins of their sufficient reason—along with the repressed, the unsaid, and the unmentionable” (EP 1). Due to the contribution of the abovementioned book and some of his other writings, as well as those of several other contemporary thinkers, this evaluation is no longer correct. Instead, love has become an important topic and can no longer be considered marginal. This is most obvious for Marion’s work, which may well be identified as a phenomenology of love. Marion himself acknowledges its centrality in his work, saying of The Erotic Phenomenon, “This book has obsessed me since the publication of The Idol and Distance in 1977. All the books I have published since then bear the mark, explicit or hidden, of this concern. . . . All of my books, above all the last three [Reduction and Givenness, Being Given, In Excess], have been just so many steps toward the question of the erotic phenomenon” (EP 10). In fact, Marion’s concern with love goes even further back, at least to an interview about belief in God, in which he participated as a student and which explicitly identifies love as characteristic of God’s self-giving inviting us into “the game of love.”4 Although Marion’s phenomenology is more popularly known as one of givenness, love and givenness are so closely associated in his work that they are virtually indistinguishable, both structurally and in terms of content. While Being Given shows how givenness can set aside metaphysical constrictions in developing a phenomenology that reconfigures traditional notions of space, time, phenomena and their reception, The Erotic Phenomenon makes the same argument about love. The book is explicitly posited as a rethinking of Descartes’s Meditations in terms of love and assurance, complete with radical, systematic doubt that leads to hatred of all against all and the insight that I cannot love myself.5 Marion’s Love, Desire, and the Divine

goal in the book is to overturn Cartesian certainty and develop a phenomenology that would make the question of love central rather than that of being. The erotic phenomenon emerges as the saturated phenomenon par excellence, the phenomenon that most fully turns us into a “devoted,” completely dedicated to the beloved and the experience of love. That the new self of Marion’s phenomenology is called l’adonné—the one devoted, given over, or addicted to the phenomenon—is itself telling.6 The recipient of the saturated phenomenon is a lover, one overwhelmed by the abundance of the phenomenon. And Marion’s description of one’s reaction to a saturated phenomenon more generally, whether a historical event, a work of art, or the face of the other, is precisely a description of disoriented addiction, loving devotion, even blinding passion. Encountering a saturated phenomenon is like falling in love, being swept off one’s feet—bedazzled and intoxicated—and succumbing to infinite devotion. Love, hence, is always excessive to an infinite degree, considered in its most extreme fashion. Beyond this larger structural framework, Marion has devoted a significant portion of his writings to examining the phenomenon of love more specifically. Already Prolegomena to Charity provided preliminary descriptions of love, primarily in an argument with Levinas.7 Marion contends against Levinas’s description of the face that only love can truly individuate the other. Levinas’s ethical analysis is not enough for individuation; we get only some other, not a specific other: “The injunction gives rise not so much to love as to duty, for, like duty, the injunction concerns every other, universally. . . . The formal universality that determines my behavior toward the other does not in any way depend on the particular identity of this or that other . . . I do not feel for this other, this face, this individual, but rather for the universal law alone” (PC 91). Only love can provide specificity and individuation; we love not just any other, but this particular other. In this context, Marion defines love as a “crossing of gazes” (PC 86–87). The phenomenon of love is experienced when my gaze (and my flesh) bear on that of the other and when I experience myself as exposed to the other’s gaze (and the pressure of his or her flesh). This initial definition of love is worked out in much more detail in The Erotic Phenomenon, where Marion tries to provide a phenomenological description of love that would confirm its univocity, rationality, and particularity (i.e., a description on its own terms instead of subjecting it to ontological parameters). He provides analyses of lover, beloved, acts of love, the loving oath, the arousal of the flesh, the speech of love, the child, and other issues associated with love. Love becomes Marion’s primary if not exclusive account of the other, and he repeatedly The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love

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chides Levinas for focusing exclusively on ethics in his account of alterity, insisting that love is more important and more inclusive.8 Yet love is central not only in Marion’s phenomenology. Although The Erotic Phenomenon remains for the most part a strictly phenomenological work, it is deeply informed by Marion’s theological commitments and presuppositions. This becomes abundantly obvious in the final paragraphs of the book, where God is identified as the first and supreme lover, who has loved us before our birth and will continue to love us into infinity, making possible our own more fragile attempts at love. In his more explicitly theological works Marion often identifies love as the most important contribution Christian thinkers can make to philosophical rationality.9 In an early article considering the possibility of a renewed apologetics he insists that “if ‘God is love’ (John 3:8), then love alone—and thus the will—will be able to reach him” (PC 61). Apologetics “culminates at the threshold of Love, which only love can cross with an unbalanced step that singularly starts us off, and which is often experienced as a fall” (PC 62). In a language that anticipates his descriptions of the saturated phenomenon, he speaks of love as a kind of bedazzlement that provides its own evidence. Later he calls a “theology of charity” the “privileged pathway for responding to the aporia that, from Descartes to Levinas, haunts modern philosophy—access to the other, the most faraway neighbor,” and concludes that “it is doubtful that Christians, if they want seriously to contribute to the rationality of the world and manifest what has come to them, have anything better to do than to work in this vein” (PC 169). More recently, he suggests that love is the central Christian contribution to the rationality of the world. Christ delivers “a nonobjective and saturated phenomenon without equal, one that would remain inaccessible without him—love or the erotic phenomenon” (VR 152). Examining what insights about love Christianity gives us, he concludes, “Christians have nothing better to propose to human rationality” (VR 154). One may well say that Marion’s work as a whole is motivated by communicating this vision of love via his philosophical contributions. While it is not hard to see how love is central in Marion’s work, it is an important topic in other thinkers as well. Jean-Louis Chrétien devotes several writings to the topic of love. Even when love is not his explicit topic it is often present in the background. In L’effroi du beau love plays an important role as what guides us to beauty.10 Only love gives access to truth. Chrétien juxtaposes Platonic love of possession in the Phaedrus with Christian love. Beauty is the very origin of love, and it is beauty that makes loving possible (EB 53). He analyzes Platonic insights about love such as the equation of the Love, Desire, and the Divine

beauty of the beloved with a vision of the divine and the intoxication that results from love as it seeks to regain access to the divine sphere. Unlike Marion, Chrétien distinguishes between eros, philia, and agape. While philia is defined by symmetry and equality, eros is always asymmetrical: “The lover only sees the beloved in the altitude of beauty and by the delirium of his love. To love, in this sense, is always to love first and as the first, even if, as Plotinus says it with profundity, love has seen the beloved before even the lover has seen it” (EB 60). Throughout Chrétien maintains a strong connection between beauty and love. In L’intelligence du feu, he analyzes various Christian texts on the fire illuminated by Christ on earth.11 The final chapter focuses on the mystical “blaze” of love and the ways in which the mystics interpret these texts. Chrétien cites various mystics who speak of this fire and its inextinguishable passion. They are absorbed by the “wound of love” in the Song of Songs, which Chrétien had already discussed in his earlier work. Although his analysis of the meaning of fire in the tradition is primarily exegetical, it is significant that it culminates in an analysis of love. Le regard de l’amour deals even more fully with the topic of love, although it also considers various other topics only tentatively related to the central concern.12 True to his usual practice of close readings of texts, Chrétien’s book is a collection of essays about others’ writings on love and makes few independent pronouncements. He begins with an analysis of humility, which he regards as an essential ingredient of love. Relying on a thirteenth-century thinker, Chrétien speaks of love of Christ and love of other humans as intimately connected. Love is charity that links us with others. By loving God we participate in God’s immortality, just as God in loving us via the incarnation participates in our mortality. Indeed, only love can procure immortality. He chides theologians who defer the reality of love to some afterlife at the expense of life here and now (RA 209). We must love God above all things, but this enables us indeed to love all things now. Love already lives among us and only in this way leads us toward eternity. Employing Aquinas, Chrétien maintains that “the summit of the highest speculative theology is only the very beginning of love” (RA 216). It is essential “to affirm the identity and continuity of charity’s love at any human stage” (RA 220). Relying on the tradition, Chrétien speaks of love’s perfection and happiness, which lead us into the divine life. The finite and infinite aspects of love must be held together: “Love in this life gives us an analogy, where the consciousness of never loving to the extent of what we love, never loving enough, does not mark the failure of love but its accomplishment” (RA 227). The vision of God, which is the culmination of love, The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love

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constitutes a participation in the divine life. We can (and should) progress in love infinitely: “Eternal life, as participation in the eternity of God, implies that eternity consists of acts of vision and love. This love, even when it is thought as movement and progress, will remain, unlike temporal love, perpetually love” (RA 251). Love implies freedom of the will and perfection. The vision of God loves God for God’s own sake, yet it also brings together a communion of neighbors through grace. This eternal love works backward into our lives and transforms them according to its paradigm. Chrétien concludes his reading with the centrality of love as praise of God and adoration of Christ (RA 258). Although most of this culminating chapter draws extensively on theological sources, Chrétien’s own commitment to the centrality of love conveyed by these texts is evident in his extensive citations. As for Marion, this vision of love is profoundly shaped by the Christian tradition. In the writings of Jean-Yves Lacoste and Michel Henry, the centrality of love cannot be ascertained from the quantity of treatments devoted to it, but rather from the role assigned to it. Although Henry does not give many descriptions of love as a specific phenomenon, his analysis of the Truth of Life in I Am the Truth culminates in a chapter on love where he maintains that Truth is love.13 We must be born in the divine life and bear the Son of God within us—only thus can we love. The commandment of love is precisely “the process of absolute Life’s self-generation . . . the Commandment is only a Commandment of love because Life is love. Life is love because it experiences itself infinitely and eternally” (IT 186). God is love because he generates all “livings” eternally in himself. Henry outlines love as the core of Life’s self-generating and affective force, as the very condition of being “Sons of God.” Therefore, “those who, feeling themselves in infinite Life’s experience of self and its eternal love, love themselves with an infinite and eternal love, loving themselves inasmuch as they are Sons and feeling themselves to be such—in the same way that they love others, inasmuch as they are themselves Sons” (IT 186). Love is the very presupposition of this commandment, because it is phenomenological life itself. Love is not ultimately a command, but the self-giving of Life (IT 187). Consistent with his larger analysis of the Truth of absolute Life, he portrays this as an eminently active command, where generation of life and practice occur simultaneously. Love, for Henry, is also tantamount to self-affectivity, filled with the pathos of Life. Through love we can find our way back to our true condition as children of God. This love, then, is really God loving Godself: “In the practice of the Commandment of love, absolute Life gives the Son to himself by being given to the self who acts, in such a way that in this practice it is God himself who is revealed, who loves himself Love, Desire, and the Divine

with his infinite love  .  .  . in his self-enjoyment [the human being] is nothing other than Christ’s self-enjoyment as the Father’s self-enjoyment” (IT 188–89). We realize the truth of all this if we turn it into practice, something Henry stresses again at the conclusion to Words of Christ. It is especially Henry’s linking of love with the very Life of God and its pathos that shows the centrality of love for him. If love is Life and the very core of its self-affective force, then love is the highest expression of Henry’s phenomenology of self-affective flesh. And it is equated with the divine: we are to love in the same way God loves, because love is precisely the divine life active in us. The significance of the topic of love is evident also in Emmanuel Falque’s work. Love appears already as an important theme in his Dieu, la chair, et l’autre.14 It is most fully treated in the final part of the book, both in terms of the “passion of charity” as explicated by Origen and in the culminating section on John Duns Scotus, which considers love between God, other, and self. Falque shows that for the theological tradition love is the very being of God. According to Origen, God is defined by profound loving compassion. Relying on Scotus, Falque agrees with Marion that only love is truly able to singularize or individuate the other (DCA 456). It is able to establish relationships between me and the other via the other’s relation with God. God’s love explicitly aims at eliciting love for others. God’s glory is precisely conveyed by this love among humans. Falque’s Les noces de l’agneau is an analysis of sexual difference and marriage, evoking the “marriage banquet” in its title and connecting it to the eucharistic meal.15 He argues that sexual difference is central for an analysis of the body and the flesh, especially for their organic and chemical nature, aspects he contends are often ignored in phenomenology. In its emphasis on the “lived body,” phenomenology has forgotten other bodily aspects and has re-created ancient dualisms on a new level. Falque seeks to combat this with an analysis of our drives and passions. These primary urges that threaten us with the dark chaos of our existence are only tamed and experienced in a fully human way via sexual difference and erotic gratification. Falque links this to a religious analysis of the Eucharist and Christian marriage, which come together in an account of eros and agape that is fully corporeal and fleshly. He superimposes the “consuming of the eucharistic body” on the “consummating” of a marriage (consommation du corps) and alludes to the erotic references in the Song of Songs, which are often applied metaphorically to the eucharistic meal and Christ’s marriage to the “bride” of the church. He criticizes both Nygren’s strong separation (equivocity) of eros and agape and Marion’s move to complete univocity between them. A reconsideration of the flesh and of sexual The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love

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difference helps him maintain a distinction between them. God is agape, not eros, and human love is like divine love only by analogy. Falque describes eros as the very modality of the Eucharist, which is the culminating point of his discussion. Despite his desire not to conflate eros and agape, ultimately he contends that agape transforms and elevates eros (NA 228). Throughout his account is deeply informed by Christian theological sources. 70 The Nature of Love

As is evident in the brief summary of the claims made about love, the analyses provided by these thinkers are clearly inspired by central Christian theological affirmations: love is patterned on Christ’s kenosis, his utter condescension and ultimate self-sacrifice. Love is an abundant gift that calls for complete devotion. It is sacrificial to an infinite degree. The accounts of love in these thinkers are extreme and absolute: love gives everything and holds nothing back. This intense nature of love is most evident in Marion’s writings. The very nature of love is self-sacrifice. Already in God without Being he argues that defining God as love is not constricting or blasphemous (as defining God as being is) because love is entirely self-emptying and hence has no substance remaining that could be defined; it is pure gift.16 Marion consistently stresses the kenotic character of love. Love is given as a gift and empties itself entirely, expects no response, no return, no reciprocity. Even the definition of love as “crossing of gazes,” which at first glance seems mutual or even reciprocal, turns out to be a complete renunciation of reciprocity in utter vulnerability to the other’s gaze (PC 100). In love one renders oneself in an unconditional surrender. This is precisely why he judges it so useful as an alternative to metaphysical certainty, which is about equality, economy, and reciprocity. Love gives itself to the other without any determinations or demands: “Love of the other repeats creation through the same withdrawal wherein God opens, to what is not, the right to be, and even the right to refuse him. Charity empties its world of itself in order to make place there for what is unlike it, what does not thank it, what—possibly—does not love it” (PC 167). This love expects no response from the other but ultimately may not even need any response. It is sufficient unto itself. Similarly, The Erotic Phenomenon seeks to establish love as completely without conditions, determinations, residue, or expectations. Love holds nothing back. I give myself entirely without any assurance that my love will be returned. Only such an intense gift of self can qualify as love: “Either loving has no meaning at all, or it signifies loving utterly, without return” (EP Love, Desire, and the Divine

72). Marion speaks of love in The Erotic Phenomenon as a phenomenon of abandon, a saturated phenomenon par excellence in the sense that it gives itself completely without holding anything back: “The signification only imposes itself upon me if it gives itself without foreseeing taking itself back, and thus gives itself in self-abandonment without condition, or return, or prescription” (EP 104). Like the given phenomenon more generally, it gives all from itself and is not dependent on constitution by an autonomous subject. It is fully love even if it is not received or reciprocated, although it becomes visible only in a similar move of abandonment, which is not reciprocity but a kind of mutual asymmetry: “Love always loves without condition, never on condition, in particular not on the condition of reciprocity” (VR 153). Love gives all, hopes all, bears all. This is evident not only in The Erotic Phenomenon but also in his analysis of Augustine, where he maintains again the univocity of love.17 The kenotic nature of this love is essential to Marion’s account. Love as kenotic self-giving is not merely the crowning feature of Marion’s work but the core and principle that makes his entire phenomenology possible. The phenomenology of givenness is a phenomenology of the saturated, overwhelming, excessive gift of love that expects no response. This is how love is defined also in Chrétien’s, Lacoste’s, Henry’s, and Falque’s writings, although they do not always make these presuppositions as explicit as Marion does. In Chrétien’s work the connotations of vulnerability are particularly strong. In Le regard de l’amour he closely links love and humility: “A love without humility does not love, for it does not see the heights of the other with a clear eye . . . a hope without humility is only presumption” (RA 12). Everything great in “the order of love” is accomplished by humility (RA 20). He explicitly regards Christ’s extreme humility as an example for our own actions. Most fundamentally, God is love. The very secret of Christianity is this essential link between humility and love: “Only humility is truly loving, for only love is really humble” (RA 43). “Free humility” is “continually improvised by love” (RA 44). Humility enlarges and liberates us, ultimately divinizes us. We must descend with Christ into the fires of hell. If we entirely escape ourselves and move toward God, we love truly and become incapable of death. Love of God is more than self-love, it is an originary and excessive love, a love without limit. Throughout, love of God and love of neighbor are closely linked. Christ’s death has love as its beginning and end. Chrétien pushes this notion of self-giving and self-sacrifice to its utmost extreme, drawing on Augustine, Kierkegaard, and various biblical stories. To lose oneself is to lose even one’s speech. The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love

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In other texts, where love is not the central topic of discussion, the stress on weakness and vulnerability is nevertheless present. Many of his treatments of the human voice or the body emphasize their vulnerability and at times link it explicitly to love—for example, an essay on touch maintains that “only a thought of love” “gives the flesh its full bearing of intellect and leads touch to its highest possibility.”18 Touch is a motion toward the other in an entirely kenotic register: “When the entire body radiates and burns through this divine touch, it becomes song and word. Yet that which it sings with its entire being, collected whole and gathered up by the Other, is what it cannot say, what infinitely exceeds it—excess to which touch as such is destined, and which in the humblest sensation and least contact here below was already forever unsealed to us.”19 Our voice must lose itself in the other, as it is shattered or wounded and given entirely as gift. We see and hear truly only as we listen to the other. In one of his most recent books Chrétien again discusses woundedness and vulnerability with the aid of various literary texts and the “wounds of love” discussed in mystical writings.20 The wound of divine love gives life and manages to overcome the power of evil. He shows how in Dante and other thinkers the paradigm of divine love becomes superimposed on human romantic love. The wound of love excites passionate desire yet also purifies and imitates the passion of Christ.21 In The Unforgettable and Unhoped For, similarly, divine love “gives itself to see and to love, completely and in all suddenness.”22 Divine love as the paradigm for human love is always kenotic: “What more, after all, could God give than Himself?”23 The book as a whole examines God’s fidelity and sacrifice on our behalf, which becomes the ground of all hope. Yet one may wonder whether such an utter openness to being wounded, such an extreme commitment of vulnerability, is always the best expression of love. Might it not open the vulnerable to abuse and exploitation or deprive them of any resources in the face of violence? While Lacoste does not explicitly speak of the nature of love, when love appears in his writings it is always assumed to have the kenotic Christian character we have seen in the other writers. Lacoste’s work on liturgy stresses its liminality and devotion, which goes to extremes of self-sacrifice, as exemplified by all-night vigils, extensive fasting, and various other ascetic practices.24 The holy fool gives all to the point of renouncing sanity itself. Being-before-God in utter devotion is a privileged, albeit not strictly necessary, form of being-in-the-world. We can choose to devote ourselves to the divine, but such devotion is always lived at the edge. It is only in this extreme stance that it can challenge standard ways of being-in-the-world. Love, Desire, and the Divine

Although Lacoste does not always call this stance “love,” when he does speak of love it is precisely such complete devotion and radical self-abnegation. The very logic of love is risk.25 Lacoste stresses the theological history that identifies God as love. God gives in love and for love. Knowing God or speaking of truth is consummated in love (PD 110). For Lacoste this is rooted in theological affirmations about human knowledge of the divine. He argues that we can get beyond traditional divisions between “faith” and “reason” by realizing that God is known as loving and “loveable.” Love does not come after faith as a kind of subsequent step but is deeply implicated in it. There is no knowledge that would precede love or become its precondition. What we know of God is a “pure act of love,” more fundamental even than being (PD 93). Belief only becomes intelligible because God is manifested in love. Lacoste points out that “love has its reasons, whether it is a matter of the reasons God has for manifesting love for human beings, or the reasons which lead us to respond to this love with our love” (PD 95). What we must believe is not some abstract information but the manifestation of God’s love. Faith or hope can never be independent of this love. Even philosophically, Lacoste insists, the phenomenality of love is the phenomenality of faith; they are one and the same (PD 97). We do not know if we do not love. These insights open a particular region of experience and phenomenality. The traditional distinctions between natural and supernatural, or reason and faith, are hence overcome: “God gives himself to be known by giving himself to be loved” and the issue is not proving God’s existence but returning the divine love (PD 108). Not only is God known as love, but such knowing happens in loving response: “The rational affirmation of his existence includes an act of faith and an act of love” (PD 109). God is the “first truth” precisely as “first love” (PD 110). Knowing God requires a prior love: “Human things are known before being loved, but divine things are loved in order to be known” (PD 113). He analyzes various aspects of Heidegger’s Being and Time (anxiety, solicitude, affection) and concludes, “If there were then a place for God in what would no longer be quite the ‘world’ and ‘existence,’ God would appear by soliciting our love. And if we were not to yield to this entreaty [sollicitation], we would remain in ignorance” (PD 132). Genuine loving means yielding to God in complete devotion. This insight is generalized in his phenomenological account of liturgical being before the Absolute as complete self-abnegation. Finally, Falque’s account of love, although it is the one most attentive to biological and organic aspects of sexuality, is most explicitly characterized by Christian parameters and culminates in a “phenomenology of marriage” The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love

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deeply informed by Roman Catholic presuppositions about marriage, sexuality, gender, and love. Falque provides an updated version of traditional Catholic assumptions about marriage, one that would be more egalitarian and more aware of what he calls our “animal” nature, namely, our passions, drives, and urges, our “flesh and bones” in all their concrete immediacy. The Christian account for Falque ultimately elevates and redeems the more biological account, although it does not erase it. Rather, eros is transformed by agape, human love is embraced by the divine (NA 228–29). God’s love is free and gratuitous, it awaits no return. God’s love is pure, abundant, disinterested, pure liberality (DCA 457). This divine self-giving becomes the ultimate paradigm for any human love. It is in speaking of the nature of love, then, that the work of these writers is most explicitly informed by their Christian commitments. Love is ultimately always kenotic charity. The Exclusivity of Love

It is not at all clear, however, that a Christian conviction about God’s selfemptying kenosis can really be employed as a paradigm for all human loves. While the biblical and Patristic writers certainly do use divine love as an example they wish their audiences to emulate, it is far from obvious that such an account of love can function as a general phenomenological description of all love when it becomes separated from its theological underpinnings. Even with the divine example in mind, Christian love often falls woefully short of its ideal. Can this excessive account of complete self-sacrifice really serve as a genuinely phenomenological paradigm for the erotic phenomenon? A first question in this respect is raised by the intensity and excess of the accounts. Love is always extreme and absolute, entirely pure and sacrificial, giving itself without holding anything back. The “essence” of love is this kenotic definition. Love is an absolute experience that leaves no space for other emotions, actions, and relationships. It is all consuming. Yet is this truly a phenomenological account of love or is it a theological presupposition about the nature of love superimposed on ostensibly phenomenological analysis? Is this how we actually experience love? Is it not often a very mixed experience, where selfishness, jealousy, and a desire for power compete with or are even intimately linked to self-sacrifice, devotion, and care for the other? Marion addresses some of these more “negative” aspects of love but ultimately employs them to get beyond erotic sexuality to a higher account of love (EP 151–83). They are stages along the way, showing merely that one is not yet loving sufficiently. Yet can these aspects really Love, Desire, and the Divine

be so radically excluded for an entirely sanitized and purified version of love? Here it seems that a claim about the divine—as absolute and abundant self-givenness—is simply taken as the paradigm for the human without further examination of whether humans could ever love to such an excessive degree. A phenomenological description of love should be able to provide a faithful account of love in its many iterations and concrete experiences, instead of focusing entirely on the limit-experience of absolute self-denial. This also raises the question of whether such intense and excessive love can ever be rejected. Although Marion insists that the lover never imposes love on the beloved but is always open to rejection, and Chrétien consistently stresses the vulnerability of love, this love is so extreme that it is hard to see how the beloved really has any choice in the matter. Is the beloved actually free to turn down this excessive offer of love? Furthermore, most thinkers consistently picture the active lover as male and the passive or receptive beloved as female.26 The lover initiates the movement of love and stakes its playing field, prepares everything for the beloved. Although rejection remains theoretically possible, the implication seems to be that it would be at the very least supremely ungrateful and at best unthinkable.27 Although the utter condescension of the lover to the beloved is to achieve their meeting on a relatively equal level, it always seems implied that the lover divests himself freely and willingly, while the beloved is primarily pictured as the passive recipient of this loving offer.28 At the same time, the requirement of utter vulnerability and the insistence that only such completely self-sacrificial love counts as an adequate account raises diametrically opposite issues. Not only does it make rejection of such love next to impossible, it also makes it very difficult to respond to any exploitation of such devotion. Women in particular have often been told that love means complete self-sacrifice and utter devotion to the other, and therefore one must be willing to take any amount of abuse. Kenotic love easily provides a justification for telling an abused partner to “bear” the abuser and not confront the exploitative injustice that is occurring. Chrétien, as we have seen, even explicitly stresses the aspect of woundedness in vulnerability. It seems that if the vulnerable partner is wounded by the lover’s violence, love is heightened and elevated. This leaves little recourse for addressing the kind of injustice and violence that often characterizes supposedly loving relations, not just marital violence but also child abuse. Some safeguards must be in place in any account of overpowering and intense love to ensure that this absolute devotion does not turn exploitative and manipulative. This is not to say that love is never wholly devoted The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love

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to the other for the other’s sake or that there should be no call for selfsacrifice or self-emptying in love. In fact, these accounts may well provide us with a good phenomenological description of religious devotion and love for the divine. For that they seem eminently appropriate, certainly if examining Christian spirituality and religiosity. It is less obvious that such infinite devotion to the divine truly makes us more attentive and loving toward our fellow humans. Indeed, it is far from clear that divine love can really be superimposed so easily on human life or serve as its paradigm. Theologically speaking, there are various difficulties associated with applying claims about who God is and what God does to who humans are or what they are to do.29 We do not know nearly enough about how God loves to determine with any assurance what this would mean for human love. These difficulties become exacerbated when love of humans is thought via or through love of God, as happens in several of these thinkers: we only love others because God has loved us first and enables us to love. We are called—by Marion, Chrétien, and Lacoste most obviously, but to some extent also by Falque and Henry— to devote ourselves entirely to the divine in order to love humans similarly. Yet when we examine examples of such utter devotion to the divine as they were actually practiced within the Christian tradition, a different picture emerges. In early desert monasticism, for example, love for the divine often explicitly excluded love for others, especially for women even if they were closely related, such as a mother or sister.30 The sayings of these monastics are full of warnings about the ways in which love of others distracts us from our total devotion to the divine.31 The very presupposition of virginity, whether in a celibate priesthood or in the monastic life, assumes that human attachment can get in the way of total devotion to the divine and that such devotion is best expressed in a life that does not involve other loves. Here love for God and love for humans are seen as at least in competition with each other or possibly even exclusive of each other. This is obviously not to say that a monastic lifestyle cannot also lead to loving behavior toward others. In countless instances, religious devotion has led to genuine acts of charity and loving behavior toward others, especially the poor and suffering. And yet the instances of exclusivity at least raise questions about any simple equation of divine and human love or the assumption that utter kenotic devotion to the divine will automatically and necessarily lead to more loving behavior toward other humans. And it is also unclear that, once that connection is severed and the divine no longer serves as an effective paradigm in a functionally agnostic culture, kenotic love can really still be Love, Desire, and the Divine

enjoined on people. What sort of justification or moral example is to convince them of this as a worthy paradigm? This leads to a further problem, which is only implied, but which the comparison to monasticism might illuminate. Although monasticism is conceived—as indeed the visions of love in these thinkers also are—as selfsacrifice and devotion to another, as total renunciation of self, it is at the same time intensely concerned with the self. Love and sacrifice are pedagogical tools for one’s personal journey to the divine and hence profoundly preoccupied with the self and its personal progress toward one’s ultimate spiritual pinnacle. Love of others becomes a means to become more genuinely oneself, a better lover or a fuller person. Similarly, in the contemporary religious thinkers, this kenotic love also ultimately displays some fairly solipsistic tendencies. It often appears more concerned with the loving self than with the beloved other. For Marion, for example, the lover can operate the loving “reduction” entirely without a beloved. The insistence on the lack of any response, that love is not reciprocal, leads to the conclusion that the lover can love entirely from his or her own initiative and requires no beloved for such love (although the lover ultimately discovers himself loved by God). In Henry love is equated with the divine and ultimately with the self. We are all “livings” within the divine life and not really distinct from it. Our very life is the divine life flowing within us. Love is ultimately selfaffection. It is shared with others only as we find ourselves together as sons within the divine life. And in Lacoste and Chrétien it is also fairly clear that love has mostly implications for the self in search of the divine. It makes us more fully who we are, which means that this account of love ultimately returns on the self. It is finally not so much an account of inter-human relation, but of the self as lover. If I love in this way I become more fully myself, more authentically human, a genuinely individuated self. Even completely “self-emptying” love can lead to a certain “filling” of the self. Maybe the most troubling aspect of this picture of love is its exclusivity. Grounded in claims about the relation between God and the human soul (as agape), the phenomenological applications (as eros) seem to limit love to one particular kind of relationship, namely, to the traditional image of a male initiator of love and a female respondent who come together in a heterosexual coupling. Yet, although heterosexual eros is the most common pattern for love in the Christian tradition, it is not clear that it is an adequate pattern for every loving relationship. It says very little, for example, about the relationship between parents and children: self-sacrificing eros and being utterly consumed with each other are not the most appropriate patterns The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love

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for such a relationship. Being a parent can involve great sacrifice, yet it neither depicts the love of the child for the parent nor does it really get at the core of how parental love is experienced. This phenomenological account of love also excludes same-gendered love, whether erotic or the love two friends share with each other without being sexual partners.32 Furthermore, the kenotic account of love does not apply to more complex relationships that involve more than two people and where love is both complicated and enriched by the crossing of many relationships on a variety of levels. Finally, it says nothing about the love we may bear animals, a home, a garden, a particular place of beauty or one rich in memories. Love is not only sexual and it is not always kenotic in this intense degree. A truly phenomenological account of love must be able to provide a depiction of a much wider variety of experiences. The vision of love portrayed by these philosophers is based so heavily on very specific theological presuppositions that it excludes other ways of loving. This need not mean that the kenotic portrayal of love must be entirely rejected. Rather, it ought to be more honest about what it is really is, namely, an account of a particular religious phenomenon of agape, not a more general phenomenological account of all loving relations. As a more limited description, it provides a meaningful account of religious experience and shaping of religious identity in phenomenological terms and important insight into the meaning and patterns of religious experiences of love. It should not, however, pretend to be a description of any and all experiences of love. Indeed, it is doubtful that a kenotic vision of love in the intense sense of self-sacrifice, total abnegation, and complete devotion to the other can be maintained as a viable or even desirable vision of love outside its theological framework. At the very least it must be supplemented by other accounts, less excessive, more diverse, more inclusive. Self-sacrifice and vulnerability are an important aspect of loving relationships, but they are not and cannot be the sole paradigm of love. Falque’s phenomenological account of marriage grounded in the eucharistic nuptials, Chrétien’s poetic descriptions of the utter vulnerability of the voice lifted in prayer, Henry’s powerful account of the self-affection of our flesh in the depths of the divine life, Lacoste’s profound abnegation of the human being-before-God, Marion’s erotic phenomenon of absolute devotion and addiction to the saturated phenomenon—all are beautiful accounts of divine kenosis calling the believing human being to religious devotion. Yet disconnected from the vision of divine self-givenness that undergirds them, they cannot be said to provide a complete phenomenological account of the experience of love. Love, Desire, and the Divine

notes 1. This has become the standard terminolbe defined not only as the other person of ogy in the English-speaking context, ethics (Levinas), but more radically as the but one should note that it is an English icon” and moves to love at the end of the term that makes little sense in France, chapter. See Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: where most of these thinkers work. Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. 2. The central text for the theological noRobyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New tion of kenosis is Phil. 2:5–8, where the York: Fordham University Press, 2002), writer encourages the Philippians to have 118. It is somewhat ironic, however, that the same mind as Christ, “who, though love becomes in some way an equally he was in the form of God, did not regard exclusive paradigm for Marion. equality with God as something to be ex- 9. This is an important point to which ploited, but emptied himself [ekenosen], Marion returns often. He speaks of this taking the form of a slave, being born as a distinctively Christian contribuin human likeness. And being found in tion to rationality. See Jean-Luc Marion, human form, he humbled himself and The Visible and the Revealed (New York: became obedient to the point of death— Fordham University Press, 2008), 152. even death on a cross.” Kenosis hence reHereafter parenthetically cited as VR. fers to this self-emptying and voluntary In fact, Marion frequently appeals to humiliation on behalf of another. Pascal’s distinctions between the three 3. Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, orders in his work, especially when trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: speaking of phenomena of revelation. University of Chicago Press, 2007). Such phenomena are only accessible Hereafter parenthetically cited as EP. through the highest order of charity, 4. Jean-Luc Marion, Avec ou sans Dieu which is precisely a way of knowing via (Paris: Beauchesne, 1970), 59. This citalove rather than certainty. The “Christian tion and all subsequent French-language philosopher” who has exclusive access to passages are translated by the author. these phenomena formulates them rigor 5. This juxtaposition with Descartes perously in philosophical terms and thereby meates the book. The French subtitle of introduces them into the realm of phethe book is “Six Meditations,” but unfornomenology, which would not otherwise tunately this subtitle is not given in the have had access to them (VR 72). There English translation. In the introduction they are “abandoned” in kenotic fashion, Marion examines Descartes’s ignoring of so that anyone can work on them. Marion loving as one of the activities of the ego explicitly speaks of the phenomenon of and concludes that “it will be neceslove as the preeminent example of such sary to substitute erotic meditations for a phenomenon discovered by theology metaphysical ones” (EP 8). and introduced by Christian thinkers into 6. For Marion’s fullest explication of the the more general philosophical realm “self that comes after the subject”— (VR 75–79). In other places he considers l’adonné—see Part V of Being Given: love as an alternative way of knowing in Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness a more structured philosophical sense. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, Love is able to access phenomena that 2002), which is entirely devoted to this cannot be discovered by certainty. It topic. enables us to “see” the phenomenon in a 7. Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to way that imposing parameters on it does Charity, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New not (VR 154). Love therefore stands for York: Fordham University Press, 2002). the reduction to givenness. In his book Hereafter parenthetically cited as PC. on Augustine he also tries to demonstrate 8. Marion makes comments like this how love functions as a notion of truth in frequently, often as asides in speaking of the Confessions. See In the Self’s Place: The the face of the other. For example, in the Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey chapter on the face in In Excess, he conL. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University tends that “what imposes the call must Press, 2012), chapter 3.

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10. Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’effroi du beau (Paris: Cerf, 1987). Hereafter parenthetically cited as EB. 11. Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’intelligence du feu (Paris: Bayard, 2003). 12. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Le regard de l’amour (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2000). Hereafter parenthetically cited as RA. 13. Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Hereafter parenthetically cited as IT. Henry does briefly analyze what he calls an “erotic relation” in Incarnation, where he portrays it in terms of anguish and a failure of desire and analyzes its relation to self-affectivity and touch. Michel Henry, Incarnation: Une philosophie de la chair (Paris: Seuil, 2000), §§40–43, 292–318. 14. Emmanuel Falque, Dieu, la chair, et l’autre (Paris: PUF, 2008), trans. by William Christian Hackett as God, the Flesh, and the Other: From Irenaeus to Duns Scotus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015). The French hereafter parenthetically cited as DCA. 15. Emmanuel Falque, Les noces de l’agneau: Essai philosophique sur le corps et l’eucharistie (Paris: Cerf, 2011). Hereafter parenthetically cited as NA. 16. Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 137–38. 17. In the Self’s Place, 270–71. 18. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. Anne Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 129. 19. Ibid., 131. 20. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Pour reprendre et perdre haleine (Paris: Bayard, 2009). 21. Ibid., 210–11. 22. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 116. 23. Ibid., 117. 24. Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark RafterySkehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). 25. Jean-Yves Lacoste, La phénoménalité de Dieu: Neuf études (Paris: Cerf, 2008). Hereafter parenthetically cited as PD.

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26. This is dissimulated to some extent by Stephen Lewis’s more inclusive translation of The Erotic Phenomenon, which alternates between male and female pronouns in the text (see EP 24). Marion, however, rarely uses the female pronoun and, when he does, it always refers to the beloved, never the lover. 27. This is particularly obvious in Falque, where the analysis culminates in a fairly traditional account of heterosexual marriage, with the male as active and the female as receptive partner. Falque attempts to articulate these as equal relationships, but finally they seem to succumb to the usual gender stereotypes. 28. The fact that God is usually the paradigm for the lover is hardly helpful here, especially when this God is always pictured as the Father. 29. Karen Kilby has shown this for twentieth-century Trinitarian theology, where assumptions about human relationships (often about “love”) are superimposed on the Trinity while claiming that one is deriving such patterns for human relating and loving from who God is in God’s very self. “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity,” New Blackfriars 81, no. 957 (2000): 432–45. 30. See, for one of many examples, the story about Abba Poemen and his brothers, where a weeping mother is first ignored, then has the gate shut in her face, and is finally sent away with promises of heaven if she never sees her child again. The Book of the Elders: Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. John Wortley (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 46, 54. 31. For example, the desert fathers say that we “are unable to enjoy the sweetness of God as long as we long for human company.” Ibid., 22, 300. 32. Marion argues that his account of the erotic phenomenon is also applicable to friendship, which “takes the very path of the erotic reduction” (EP 219). Although I do not have the space here for a full refutation of Marion’s arguments on this point, I do not see how this can possibly be taken as a convincing depiction of the experience of friendship.

5 Love’s Conditions Passion and the Practice of Philosophy felix ó murchadha

To speak philosophically of love is to be doubly entangled. While our everyday, non-philosophical lives are already in multiple ways entangled in love, a certain dominant tradition of philosophical practice directs the self to love, but to love without passion. Such a practice of philosophy is one rooted in self-reflexivity and self-reflection, where philosophical thought reflects back on its own conditions within the philosophical life. Such self-reflection is grounded in a principle of self-responsibility first declared by the oracle of Delphi as γνῶθι σεαυτόν, know thyself, which is at the roots of Socratic irony and therein can be found a certain skeptical moment that, as Husserl rightly saw, lies at the origins of transcendental thought.1 To take responsibility for my thoughts it is not enough to judge them to be true, it is also necessary to know their source. This requires a new and indeed unnatural disposition toward things, which understands them not in terms of their actuality, but rather with respect to their possibility: to things in the possibility of their appearance to thought, to things as justified in their being on the grounds of their possibility for thought. Such unnatural thinking requires a certain discipline, a discipline premised on radical self-examination. Selfresponsibility is for that which is within the self’s power. From ancient Stoicism and Skepticism through Montaigne, Descartes, and Spinoza to Kant and Husserl, such an account of self-responsibility is

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premised on an understanding of a capable self which functions both as a precondition for philosophical reflection and as the goal of philosophical practice, an understanding of the self which claims at once to be descriptive and prescriptive, and which presents the self as self-relating, auto-affecting, and immune from heteronomy. This account of the self presupposes a dualism which is both a methodological and an ontological principle: all things are understood as either within the power of the self (i.e., each self-responsible philosophical practitioner) or in a realm of necessity indifferent to the self’s desire. This fundamental duality lies at the core of the stoic discipline of thought and of the skeptical deflation of philosophical absolutism; it is a common claim of both absolutism and skepticism.2 There emerges in the philosophical tradition both in antiquity and in modernity a Skeptical-Stoic understanding of a self (for all the distinctions between Stoicism and Skepticism), which informs philosophical practice in essential ways. This is so because the philosophical project of self-understanding is forever threatened by a certain alterity in the self, that of the passions. Self-knowledge, responsible selfhood, self-legislating reason: all terms cluster around the formation of a self capable of philosophical reflection and all are rooted in an ascetic discipline of control, perhaps even elimination, of the passions. Informing philosophical reflection in its transcendental movement is a fundamentally Stoic reflection on the self which, taking Socrates also as its source, thinks the self as integral and sees this integrity as finding expression as apatheia—feeling without passion, action in the suspension of passivity. But can such an integral, apathetic being love? Is love possible for a being concerned with his own self-responsibility in thought? St. Paul responds in a radically negative manner to this question: for Paul, the call to love is a call to give up the seeking after wisdom, the seeking after self-responsibility in thought.3 This most radical critique of philosophy, this critique of the sense of self and the project of the self underlying philosophy, in the end sees philosophy as loveless. But conversely, without self-responsibility, without a self which knows itself and which knows its own being, can there be love? Eros: Loving Indifferently

To think love philosophically is to think its possibility. While love may be actually present in many ways and in many relationships, the philosophical question of love cannot take that actuality for granted. It cannot do so Love, Desire, and the Divine

for many reasons, but above all because of a fundamentally transcendental movement in philosophical reflection. To think love transcendentally is to think its conditions, to think that without which it would not be. To radically think love is to think it as not being, as not made possible, as that which would not be possible. In short, it is to think love in its reducibility, that is, to think its conditionality. Such a project assumes that there are conditions to love, that love is conditional, yet love seems to have a certain unconditionality. Unconditionality with respect to love can mean at least two distinct things: either that love is sui generis, that is, depends on no prior conditions outside of itself, or that though conditioned by different factors (desires, inclinations), once given, love remains despite changes in the self and its object. Leaving aside the question of whether either of these forms of unconditionality is sustainable, it would appear that both are conditional at least in one sense: they depend on a being capable of loving and a being capable of being loved. Even if love is sui generis, it is something which a self does and, as such, it would seem, must be something of which such a self is capable. The first step then is to explore this conditionality of the “unconditional,” the self capable of loving. A self capable of loving would be one which had within itself the power to love. But to have a power to do something is at the same time to have the power not to do that same thing. A self which can love can also not love, can refrain from loving. To refrain from loving would not mean to hate. Rather, it would be to disengage from the dynamic of love or hate. In exercising its capacities such a self is affirming its own capacity to be. Such an affirmation cannot—on pain of self-contradiction—destroy its self-capacity. This Spinozistic insight into the conatus essendi must be affirmed here: the being of the self derives from the power of its own essence.4 The exercise of this capacity cannot be a self-destructive action, and as such the capacity not to love differs fundamentally from, say, a disengagement from nutrition or other things necessary for existence. The exercise of this capacity must rather affirm the power of the self. The power involved, however, is neither the power of the body, either perceptive or kinesthetic, nor the power of the intellect. The intellect cognizes that which can be known in its conditionality; it knows in terms of reasons. However, beyond such reasons is the choice for or against reasons, for or against the objects of sense (either in terms of their reality or in terms of their worth). The capacity to choose such reasons and such objects, to affirm or deny, has traditionally been associated with the faculty of the will. Love’s Conditions

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In suspending all relations of love (and hate), the self finds within itself that capacity to love and to hate. But such a capacity must be free from love or hate, must be prior to the difference of love or hate, the difference of affirmation or negation. The self discovers in itself an indifference between love and hate: before all preference, before all choice, is a will which is indifferent to that which is to be chosen. This is the fundamental Stoic insight into the self.5 The capacity to love or not to love is as such a capacity indifferent to all which is to be loved, is a will to nothing. In discovering this faculty within itself, the self opens up the possibility of a radical disengagement with the world; precisely at the source of its love the self finds its firmest anchorage in the world and its possibility to weigh that anchor. The choice to love is a choice which at least potentially subjects the self to an other. In finding within itself the capacity to subject itself in that manner, the self discovers itself as its own subject. The Skeptic’s denial of cataleptic force,6 the denial that impressions are compelling and binding, is here a matter not of neutral sense impressions, but rather of that in the object which gives itself as lovable (or repelling). Affirmed here is will as ultimate arbiter, a will which expresses the fundamental, indeed divine, capacity of the human, a capacity of Epicurean divinity: that capacity of sublime indifference. Such a will is at once apathetic and skeptical, impassable and sovereign. It is a will which begins with itself, but itself as empty, as without content, without passion. This is a free will, but free precisely in its absolute capacity to decide, a freedom necessarily compromised in the act of decision itself, an act which depends for its very possibility on phenomena which affect the self and give it cause for action. Such a self is prior to all experience, is, so to speak, a court which judges the witnesses to such experience from a serene distance. This is a will not to power or to truth, but an indifferent will to nothingness, a will which does not love, but which at most chooses to love. Indifferent to the world, indifferent to all others, this self in choosing its objects of love chooses without passion and chooses with no criteria outside it. An indifferent will needs be indifferent also to itself. Its love of its own idols is a love without passion, a love of pure act. While neither the Stoic nor the Skeptic necessarily affirms such a will, tendentially both of these ways of philosophy tend toward an understanding of the self as guarding itself from passion, blocking off the heterogeneous; its love of wisdom is founded on an immunity from all which originates beyond the self. But can there be love without passion? In other words, is a self understood from itself capable of love? The indifferent will excludes the stimulating presence of the other. The indifferent will in Love, Desire, and the Divine

seeking to motivate itself is sovereign to the extent which it has control over the criteria of its own choice. It is here that intellect functions with will to choose. The choice of the will, guided by intellect, is the choice of that which the intellect can affirm from itself as preferable.7 We can understand this choice in practical or theoretical terms, as good or as true; in each case the criteria is in the self, namely, in its positing of the true or good. But what such a choice of preference gives is an appropriable object, an object of erotic desire understood as desire for incorporation of the preferred thing in the self. But this drive to incorporation must derive from a sense of incompleteness, of lack.8 Whether out of melancholic despair or ravenous greed this sense of lack motivates such eros, which begins in the auto-affecting self. Such a self is motivated by its own self-relation and finds in the other nothing beyond the occasion for the exercise of its own masturbatory needs. Agape: Being Loved Overwhelmingly

The aporia of the loving will, capable of choosing to love but as an indifferent will not able to fulfill that capacity, mirrors impotency: possessing all that is necessary to make love, but unable to respond to the stimulating presence of an other. The experience of being loved, however, seems one which is saturated by the presence of the other. This is expressed in Greek myth by the figure of Eros shooting arrows at unsuspecting “victims.”9 To be “wounded” by love is to be overcome by an other, to be acted on and subject to an other. This other is experienced not through an inferential move from an impression to the source of the act of being impressed on, but rather a sense of the other as more immediate and real to the self than it is to itself. Love understood in terms of the Judeo-Christian account of agape begins not with a capable being, but rather with one who recognizes herself as nothing in the face of the lover. But such nothingness is higher than any being, because it is a receptivity to the other beyond herself. The “organ” for such receptivity is understood already in the Hebrew scriptures as the heart. The heart begins not from itself but, so to speak, from before its own being touched. In other words, the heart is not strictly speaking a faculty at all but rather a sense for that which has already happened. As such a sense it needs to be capable of receiving, but this is a capacity for incapacity, an ability to be outside itself. Paradoxically this is a capacity not to be, a capacity which, far from affirming itself in the manner of the conatus essendi, denies Love’s Conditions

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itself. Overwhelmed and surprised by love, the self reflecting on itself can find no justification for that love. In receiving love it is taken aback, thrown back not on itself as the basis of that love, but on the lack in itself of a cause for being loved. Not knowing the will of the lover and finding its own belovedness not in any capacity of its own, but rather ungrounded in itself, such a self is engulfed in the unconditionality of an other’s love. Loved unconditionally in this manner, the self cannot recognize in itself any value to justify that love. Rather, the self finds itself loved but unworthy of that love. As such the self in experiencing the other as loving experiences itself as not only unworthy of being loved, but also as incapable of loving in return. This is so for two reasons. First, the act of love requires an affirmation of the self as capable of loving, but it can find in itself nothing which is lovable and love remains intangible for it, a mysterious gift which it receives without any warrant. Second, if that gift is without warrant in the self, then love is greater than the self is. It precedes the self in a fundamental sense: it is experienced as a creative love, as that love in and through which it is. Such love is strictly nothing, nothing in or of the world, a nothingness which the self contaminates in its very being as an entity. As such the very being of the self as a self, its affirmation of existence, which for it is inescapable, removes it from the love out of which it comes, and leaves it in a constant agony of withdrawal. Being loved in this way is the extreme case of agapeic condescension, whereby the self loses itself in the source of its being and becomes alienated from its own capacity to be. Such a radically incapable self cannot justify itself, nor does it have the means for goodness and fulfillment. It is a self fully dependent on love or, in more theologically charged terms, on divine grace. It is a self which in the very exercise of its will cannot but be guilty and for which all decision remains in the end arbitrary, totally dependent on an inscrutable love and forever anxious of betraying that love in its very being. Being in Love

It is remarkable that the Greek and Christian traditions, beginning in some of their fundamental movements in hymns to love (Plato’s Symposium and Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13), contain within themselves the tendency toward love’s dissolution. Taken to its extreme in absolutely unconditional love, agape brings us to a remarkably similar situation to the erotically conditioned love: an arbitrary will and a situation of radical separation of lover Love, Desire, and the Divine

and beloved. Yet this is not to understand but to dissolve the phenomenon of love: in both cases the relational quality, love as binding of two, the duality of loving and being loved, is lost. Furthermore, in both accounts there occur distinct but nevertheless related movements of disembodiment: in the one case disembodied, indifferent will that as such is prior to any being set in an embodied relation, prior also to any enticement of embodied allure, and in the other case, the disembodiment of a love which has no bodily, hence conditioned, source and also no bodily, hence attractive, object. To avoid this dissolution it would appear necessary to eschew any priority of the self—either as capable or incapable. The transcendental assumption of conditionality in the self or the faith in a transcendent source of love undermines or mystifies the unconditionality of love. It is vital now to attempt to think that unconditionality, but at the same time to displace it: the unconditionality of love not so much a matter of the will or of unmotivated grace, but an event which refigures the world for those who find themselves touched by it. The previous discussions suggest that the attempt to think agape without eros, or eros without agape, misses an essential messiness in love, a lack of purity, a contamination in love. Such contamination puts thinking itself at risk, or rather puts the self at risk in the responsibility of its own thought. To approach that risk what may be needed is a thinking of conditional unconditionality, or perhaps unconditional conditionality. In beginning again to think love—thinking love in its relationality— what is immediately apparent is the diversity of the objects of love: parents, children, siblings, teachers, wives, husbands, lovers, god or gods, saints, pet dogs, sheep, insects, ideas, paintings, seasons, countries, and so forth. The objects of love are not just human; they have nothing in common except that they are or can be loved. As such, not one of these objects can claim priority. Let me begin then with one such object, chosen without any compelling reason: one of Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire,10 which I love. I do not simply like it or appreciate its qualities or enjoy looking at it. To love a painting is to say more than this. It does not mean I wish to possess it. I want of course to have access to it, but in loving it I don’t believe I could possess it—it remains beyond me, outside my grasp. If asked why I love it or what about it I love, I can make an attempt to respond, point to the shades of greens and blues, the way the scene slowly takes on substance as I view it, the remarkable stillness of the landscape. But very quickly my discourse becomes neutral, critical, and I break off, admitting that nothing I said really explains my love for this painting. The painting simply is for Love’s Conditions

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me and when I am in its presence it becomes the center of my world. Did I choose for that to happen? That seems unlikely. How does love arise? This painting provokes in me a response. That response was not an automatic one—like a reaction to a stimulus—but rather was a response to the allure of the painting,11 to that which attracted in the painting. That which attracted in the painting is not reducible to the qualities of the painting, not because it has nothing to do with them (if not them, then what makes it lovable to me?), but rather because these qualities are not attractive as qualities, as that which can be expressed propositionally. Rather, it is as if a space opened up between me and the painting, a space in which, before I knew it, the painting with all its qualities conspired, colluded with secret feelings and preferences in me, and brought me out to find myself already in love. Being in love (with a painting, a landscape, a person, an idea) is to find myself already there, already within love. It is a sense of being-in, which can be a sense of expanse and openness, but also as contracting, smothering. Being in love is being-in as we are beings in the world: to be in love is to exist relating not simply to the object of my love but to myself and my object as they relate to love. While I say, “I love you,” to my lover, I can say also, “I am in love with her,” as “I am in love with Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire,” or “I am in love with justice,” or “I am in love with sunflowers.” Despite the variety of these loves, each can be expressed by the prepositions “in” and “with.” In love, I find myself with an other. To be with that other is not primarily to recognize that other’s qualities, nor even to address that other as “you,” but rather to find myself in a relation of being-with that other. “With” comes from the Old English wið, meaning “against.” The with-relation is both an association and a separation, a finding oneself in relation to the other, but not because of her or it or him, but because of that which binds us together even as we find ourselves placed over against each other: that event of love which associates us and yet toward which we relate separately, perhaps in opposed ways. In the case of a painting or (even more so) of sunflowers or a landscape, the relation of the other to this event of love is a dormant one: the Cézanne painting is not relating of itself to the love between us. But with a person it is otherwise. Again, we can think of different modes of these relations: child to parent, young lovers to each other, friends, a follower to an inspiring figure (politician, artist, teacher, etc.), a carer to a sick or vulnerable person, and so on. Again these relations differ in their manifestations, but in each case there is the sense of being-with “in” that which encompasses us. The Love, Desire, and the Divine

“us” is, nevertheless, contestable and contested. The space opened up by love may not be a tranquil one, as with the child attempting to break from the confines of his parents’ love, responding against that love in his claustrophobia, or the beloved who does not requite the love which she unknowingly entices in her lover, or the manipulative politician secretly despising those whose love he inspires. Yet in each case the rebelling or manipulative or unknowing lover or beloved is implicated in the loving relation, even the unknowing beloved unaware of her shy and unapproaching lover’s intentions participates in an event of love, if only in her lover’s fantasy. This relation of “in” and “with” is one in which there is love, but there is love only for a self which is in love. The self which finds itself in love is directed lovingly toward the object of its love. Such directedness is irreducible to need. To need something is to relate to it as a more or less sufficient object of satisfaction; the claim to love, however, appears to exceed all need, all interest, all solidarity or generational duty. It calls on a desire in the self to be toward an other as excessive to its needs and interests. Such desire responds to the excessive claim of love, but the latter calls forth not an immediate response, but rather a hesitation on the part of the self, a hesitating in response to her undoubted biological needs and interests. In that moment of hesitation, in the capacity to defer (perhaps indefinitely) response to such needs (and as such to make this a response rather than a reaction), the self develops into itself. Such a self is no longer self-sufficient but is in the full sense of the term a person. The person emerges when the movement to and away from stimuli is interrupted such that the stimuli are recognized as alluring for the self. Without that hesitation there would be no relation of return, and without such a relation the self would not recognize in itself any surplus of its simply animal being, but would remain at the surface of those things which stimulate its reactions. Being a person, the self finds itself in relation with other things and persons in which it finds them to be more than their surface being, finds them rather disclosed in the singularity of their being as moments of exteriority within relations of pleasure and pain. Such singular exteriority is that which makes the entity excessive to the generalizing sway of need and inspires in the self a personal relation of attraction or repulsion at the inappropriable selfhood of the object. Faced with such an object, which attracts and remains beyond its power, an entity experiences itself in relation to that before which it hesitates and stands in awe.12 Standing in awe it finds in itself more than simply a needy being; it finds in itself an interiority of being-in its desire for that entity which stands before it as a surface being marked with interiority. The personal emerges Love’s Conditions

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from this hesitation of the movement of self-projection. Such a hesitation is a being toward others which responds to other entities as they appear to it in their hidden depth. Such a being toward others as possessing hidden depth allows the self to be toward an other beyond the observable factors which constitute its own needs as a natural being. It is here that passion emerges, precisely as a personal relation to others. In relation to the hidden depth of an object the person can only await the sparks of that being in the space opened up by its own hesitation toward it. Therein the entity appears as more than its surface being; it appears namely as that which has affective power. A self open to affective power is a passionate self, a self which allows itself to be drawn into the transcendent by that which affects it. Such passion is not without auto-affectivity, without the passion of self with respect to itself. Yet such auto-affectivity is not of a self immanent to itself, but rather to a self which is being affected by itself in its own being drawn outward toward the alluring object of its passion. The self comes to itself in finding itself always already with others in the world opened up in its depth by the affective power of that which appears to it. Love is not simply one passion among others here, but is rather the gateway to the passions, because to allow itself to be drawn into affective space is not simply to be acted on but also to trust the world as that place in which it can be in excess of itself. Such trust is already a movement beyond itself, a movement toward the other as that which is beyond the power of the self, and is at that fundamental level a finding of itself in love. So understood, being in love is a being in relation to an other as that which allures it beyond the satisfaction of its needs toward the exercise of its personhood as a being with an other. Far then from love being the choice of an indifferent self or being a gift to an unworthy self, the self becomes fully itself, becomes, that is, a person, only in love. To be a person is to be in love. If we return to the roots of the Christian and Greek traditions, we see this acknowledged. “God is love,” says St. John (1 John 4:8), but how are we to understand the copula? Do we understand this as a predication—God is love as the cat is black—or as a statement of identity—God is nothing other than love? Clearly John wants to express more than one accidental quality of God. “God is love” states something essential about God. Furthermore, as John’s letter goes on, “whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him” (1 John 4:16). To be in God is to be alive, not in the sense of surviving, but in the sense of being a self in living the source of life in oneself.13 “God is love” means that God has being out of love, that God is first a relation of love. This is expressed in later Christian thought by the account of Love, Desire, and the Divine

the Trinity. At the core of that account is a relation of love and fecundity in God: the creator God is not first a sovereign will which then decides to create; God is only in relation to his own loving relation—father and son are only in the spirit, which is the love in and through which they and all things are. In other words, at the core of the Christian account of God is an understanding of being as love: nothing is except out of love, and this is the case for God and for creatures. Understood in this way creation, fecundity, is at the core of the divine. The creation of the world is an expression of love: creatio ex nihilo is a creatio ex caritate.14 To say then that the divine love is unconditional is to say that all being, to the extent that it is, is conditioned by love. To love and be loved, in such a view, is to feel in the being of the self a source beyond itself, a source of itself as a prior gift. The agapeic element in love is its gratuitousness, its lack of reason. But such lack of reason shows not the worthlessness of the self, but rather that the self in his personhood originates before all worldly economy: to be a person as nothing other than to find oneself in love. To find oneself in love is to find oneself in relation to an event which is not itself subject to other beings, but is the source of what is. But that event is always a binding to an other, to an other with which the self first is, with which the self finds itself in love. But that sense of agapeic gift at the source of the self is at the same time an erotic movement toward an other, in which the self in praising the situation of finding itself in love directs itself toward the object of its love as that which allures it, as that which draws the self out toward an other as a being in depth. In and through being so drawn toward an object of her desire, the self’s own interiority first emerges. Finding herself in relation to her desire’s object the self recognizes herself through her being in relation to that object, understanding her world as centered in that object, the erotic response seeks two things: to find an intimate space with that object and to gain and retain the love of that object. While agapeically the self finds herself in a relation of gift without reciprocity, that is, the gift of her own self as a being-in-love, in the erotic relation she is driven to find that intimate reciprocity from the object of her love. The erotic relation is one which seeks a response, seeks the other’s desire. As such, it is a relation between persons—or is experienced as with a putative person (hence the personification of nonpersonal objects of love, countries, cars, animals). This seeking for reciprocity responds to the attraction of the other and seeks to be attractive for the other in turn. Objectification is essential to the erotic relation, but an objectification first of the self as the one who loves: the self makes itself into the object of Love’s Conditions

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another’s love, it is for itself that object—I want her to want me as an object of her love. In that sense I bring myself in my being as flesh before the one I love and offer myself to her as that object. I desire the other in the love in which I find her and subject myself to that love, make the project of my life nothing other than being-in that love. To be in that love is to be a self in the interiority of my being, but at the same time to be convulsed into the open, placed in absolute vulnerability in the presence of the beloved. The interiority of my self found in love is my interiority as given to her, is there only for her. But the self which is founded in love is in this sense in danger of losing itself, being enveloped—devoured—by the other. Capacity, Vulnerability, and Beauty

The self is fully itself only in love, but love threatens to devour the self. Finding herself in love, the self is as vulnerable to that with whom she finds herself in love. The being-in of love oscillates between expansion and contraction, joy and horror. The self which finds herself in love renders herself vulnerable in her very being, not primarily in terms of survival as a physical being but in living her body as a personal being. The self in love, feeling herself devoured by the other, loses above all else her sense of her own autonomy. This vulnerability is not only a matter for the self, but is crucially an issue for philosophy itself. If philosophy is in one sense characterized by an erotic movement of desire, equally we can detect the tendency, driving in particular the transcendental movement of thinking, within philosophical practice to protect and preserve the self from possible loss in the erotic relation. At the core of the erotic movement of philosophy is disclosed a fundamental anxiety for the self, which motivates a securing of the self against the alterity set loose in erotic relations. The love of youths, the carnal and spiritual relation to contingent and passing others, is disclosed as a pale image of an eternal beauty, which draws the self away from the earthly and hence from its own earthiness and vulnerability, to that which is “neither more nor less, but still the same inviolable whole.”15 Philosophical accounts of the self are as much about preserving the self as they are about describing it. But while the danger of the erotic is undoubted, an overly robust defense of the self as an autonomous self-willing being undermines the very originating force of the self as its being-in-love. The self thrown back to its own capacities to be cannot know whether its objects of love are anything other than its own idols. Kant responded to this problem through the principle of universalization, but given radical evil we can never know that we have used Love, Desire, and the Divine

this principle correctly, we can never know that self-love has not secretly motivated our acts.16 Kant’s metaphysics of morals responds to a concern which can be traced back to Augustine, namely, that the philosophical aim toward truth is secretly corrupted by (self-) love. But if we begin with being-in-love, which is to say, beginning with the heterogeneous, with the self as emerging out of heterogeneity, another picture emerges. This can be understood in terms of two issues: the command to love and the beauty of things. Love in Christian thought is a command: “You ought to love.” But this is a command which the self is not capable of obeying. The command to respect others as ends can be obeyed. But the self cannot obey a command to feel something, cannot be commanded to be in love with an other. The command overpowers the capacity of the self, shows the self its own incapacity. “God bids us to do what we cannot, that we may know what we ought to seek from him,” says St. Augustine.17 The command to love is a command to seek beyond the self for the source of the self’s own being and action. It is a command to make the self fundamentally vulnerable to the other—to all others—so that it can let itself be led by others, by all others, such that every other becomes the center of its being, so that it sacrifices itself for all others, that it never places itself above the other. The question of love is one of motivation, of what motivates the outward movement toward an other not in the striving to fulfill need, but in the hesitant, self-forming movement of desire. Paradoxically the modern striving to give firm foundations for knowledge, culminating the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Husserl, have obscured that inner striving.18 Husserl in his account of intentionality brought to its culmination the history of forgetting surrounding this movement of subject to object. But precisely in so doing he made this forgetting evident and in his analysis of passive synthesis discovered at the heart of knowledge the affective movement of being drawn to the object, the pull of the object which is not simply a matter of brute impressions but an attraction through excess in the object.19 Such attraction, however, is systematically discounted in transcendental philosophy, which begins with the self’s capacity and hence with the will. But this points to a loss in the very notion of the transcendental itself, which serves to undermine the possibility of thinking love. Rooted in Plato’s understanding of the ideas of goodness, justice, and beauty as belonging to all the forms, as being characteristic of forms as forms, the medieval idea of the transcendentals developed an account of those qualities which transcend any particular genus or species.20 The Love’s Conditions

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transcendentals are the most abstract of qualities, belonging as they do in each thing which is, but at the same time they are also the most concrete. While general terms such as animal, tree, and water are qualities abstracted from individual beings, the transcendentals are manifest each time differently in each being. What the transcendentals make manifest—that which is not immediately obvious in the general concepts—is the attractiveness of every entity, an attractiveness which for the medievals is the being manifest of their creatureliness. This attraction is not simply a contingent factor of my likes or dislikes, but rather that in the entity which shows itself my sensibility and intellect at the same time. It shows itself to me both sensibly and intellectually, to both at once. It is this mixing of the sensible and the intellectual which suggests that God the Son be understood as beauty. The Son by bringing pure form and matter together embodies the ambiguity of beauty as splendor which appeals from the entity to the incarnate being of the human intellect.21 Stoic and Skeptic philosophical tendencies are rooted in ascetics of the self: practices of self-discipline which work against the fundamental attractiveness toward the world, in the end work to diminish and qualify the beauty of the world. But prior to its ascetic exercise of apatheia, prior to its discovery of its capacity for indifference, the self finds itself as loving, but loving in response to that which entices and allures it. At the core of Platonic philosophy is such allure. The figure of Socrates is not primarily ironic but rather erotic, or his irony is a form of his erotic seduction. In a Platonic eros any indifference of the will is excluded and the prospect is opened up of wonder in the face of goodness in which all that is participates and yet is beyond being; Christian agape calls all things back to the source of their being and goodness in the loving gift which is the being of God. What is glimpsed here in both traditions is being as being drawn away, being as movement without end but with purpose. It is this being which requires phenomenological elucidation. Before all ascetic practice, before all scriptural exegesis, there is a being drawn forth, a being allured and enticed. All practice and all tradition depends on this enticement, which is nothing less than the coming to be of the self as a person. As person the self finds himself in love; the self is from the beginning subject to the call of this love, a prior, constituting call. To be called is to be attracted; to be is to desire. But to be a person is not first to be sovereign and self-affective; it is in responding that the self is constituted in its own desiring. The openness to that which entices is not itself a prior condition; rather the attractive thing tears open the self, gives it to itself as heart. Love, Desire, and the Divine

The object as attractive awakens the self as attention.22 This movement begins with the object, and the heart knows it as such. The heart responds to the object as the source of this attraction, and in responding to this source outside itself knows love, but knows it as a response to a prior gift. Far from finding in itself the conditionality of love, the self in her heart finds love as that for which she has no conditions and no capacity within herself. The attractive object is both enticing and forbidding, draws out and yet remains inappropriable, gives itself and yet cannot be taken. The object is experienced agapeically as that before which the self hides at the very moment when she is drawn in. The self finds himself in relation to selves, to that which gives itself in person. The other, whether as thing or as person, gives itself as self; it both gives itself to appearance and as a self remains hidden in the depths of its own being. As selves entities remain hidden, phenomenologically understood are things which are only as horizonal beings. The self in its beingtoward lives in that which makes on it a claim as that which radiates its allure—actually or potentially—toward a desiring being. The attractive object—whether person or thing—shows itself as expressing a loving gift, as a self which gives itself, but in its giving itself discloses itself as in excess of its very appearance. That excess is the agapeic nature of entities in their givenness, to which the self responds in a love which is one of self-dispossession, a sacrificial act, which in a moment gives up everything, every sovereign claim, for the sake of the beloved object. The making receptive of the heart is an infinite task which undermines every limit placed on it. Love is experienced as coming not from me but from the beloved in its being with me in the space of love: love is experienced not as my doing but as that which has been placed in the self, as an infection, an acting in (in facere) the self of what is not itself. What this means is that a self who loves is called to that for which he is incapable, because he is called beyond his own being from the very source of his being. As such the moral claim is a claim of beauty, which is a claim to be loved, one which primarily addresses the heart.23 This claim calls forth desire as an obligation. Such a calling commands love, commands a love which begins not from the self but with it, a love which seeks to find itself transformed in the other which calls. The turning of the heart toward the other is a turning which happens only through the other, obeying a logic of grace, where the self’s turning begins not with it but with an other. But this turning is itself gratuitous, because the infinity of the object in its being inspires in the self a desire which cannot be justified, is a turning beyond all Love’s Conditions

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need and as such beyond all economy of exchange. In turning toward the other, the self finds itself in love as in a world. Conclusion

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To be in love is to be a self and to be a self is to be overtaken with passion, that is, ruled by an alterity both transcending and within the self. To follow such desire in trust is for the self to give itself to that alterity, to trust in a passionate feeling which remains always in part opaque. To respond to such desire is to trust first the alterity in the self, while all the time conscious of possible destruction. The will to love and be loved does not begin with itself, but is a response to that which entices and allures it. It is a response to a heteronymous logic. The philosophical impulse to sovereignty and autonomy forgets the source of self-responsibility, which is not in the self but in the place from which the self emerges, the between space of being in love. In this sense philosophy in its transcendental movement of self-responsibility remains always in tension with the call to love, for the most part sensing it only in fleeing from it. The will to suspend this love is a will to deny a prior dependence of love. It is a will to begin, to initiate; a will, in short, to freedom as self-determination. Such a will to freedom denies agapeic love, perverts erotic desire, and remains closed to the primordial being-in: the being in love. To think love philosophically is to begin in and with passion, to begin as already in love. It is to practice philosophy otherwise, beyond the Skeptical-Stoic inheritance which continues to inform the ascetics of philosophical reflection.24 notes 1. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24): Erste Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte, in Husserliana, vol. 7, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 7–8. 2. See Epictetus, “Discourses,” in Discourses and Selected Writings, trans. and ed. R. Dobbin (London: Penguin, 2008), 14: “Whoever desires or avoids things outside their control cannot be free or faithful, but has to shift and fluctuate right along with them.” See also Descartes, “Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 379: “Regarding those things that depend only on us . . . our knowledge of their goodness ensures that we cannot desire them with too much ardour. . . . Regarding the things that do not depend on us in any way, we must never desire them with passion, however good they may be.” 3. 1 Corinthians 2:6–10. 4. For Spinoza, love is fundamental to the self, but such a love is one which expands the self and as such is subject to the self’s own self-realization. See Spinoza, Ethics, trans. E. M. Curley (London: Penguin, 1996), bk. III, prop.

13, 78: “Love is nothing else than pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause.” 5. See Epictetus, Discourses, 44–45: “You have a will incapable of being coerced or compelled . . . your will cannot be hindered, forced or obstructed.” 6. See Sextus Empiricus, The Skeptic Way, trans. Benson Mates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 7. See Descartes, Meditations, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. and ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 41: “It is clear by the natural light that the perception of the intellect should always precede the determination of the will.” 8. See William Desmond, Perplexity and Ultimacy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 105. 9. See Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996), 61–85. 10. One of the last paintings of this subject now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 11. See Husserl’s account of allure with respect to passive synthesis in his Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, trans. Anthony Steinbock (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2001), 196: “By affection we understand the allure given to consciousness, the peculiar pull that an object given to consciousness exercises on the ego.” 12. See Klaus Held, “Fundamental Moods and Heidegger’s Critique of Contemporary Culture,” in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 295–96, 299. 13. Michel Henry in his account of auto-affection takes up this fundamental feeling of life in the being of the self in what he terms “transcendental affectivity.” See Henry, L’incarnation (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 268–69. Henry’s analyses here are profound but suffer from a certain dualism of life and world, which reinforces the Skeptical/Stoic philosophical practice (in a Gnostic mode) I am here critiquing.

14. See my A Phenomenology of Christian Life: Glory and Night (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 74. 15. Plato, Symposium, in The Complete Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 211b3. 16. See Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. and ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 56. 17. Augustine, “On Grace and Free Will,” in On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, trans. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6, 32. 18. See my A Phenomenology of Christian Life, 41. 19. See Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, 196. 20. For a brief introduction to the problem of transcendentals among the scholastics, see Francesca Aran Murphy, Christ, the Form of Beauty (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995), 216–18. 21. Possibly the subtlest account of this incarnate splendor we have from the medievals is from Bonaventure’s The Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996). 22. See Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1999), 118: “Attention is bound up with desire. . . . Attention alone—that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears—is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.” 23. See Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’appel et la réponse (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 23–24. 24 I would like to acknowledge the very helpful discussions with both editors of this volume, Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno, concerning the themes of this chapter, and the members of the Philosophy Department at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal (Germany), where I presented an earlier version of it.

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6 What Can Love Say? Lyotard on Caritas and Eros mélanie walton

Introduction

What can love say? In the beginning of The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asserts, “Philosophy today no longer says anything about love, or at best very little.”1 In fact, philosophers have “forsaken love,” he suggests, “dismissed it without a concept and finally thrown it to the dark and worried margins of their sufficient reason.”2 In apparent opposition, JeanFrançois Lyotard reflects, “Nothing else, with the exception of love, seemed to us to be worth a moment’s attention.”3 In truth, however, both agree on the reason for philosophers’ silence on love, and both clearly avow the need to rethink its centrality for human experience. Marion explains that philosophers are afraid to say anything about love, “and for good reason, for they know, better than anyone, that we no longer have the words to speak of it, nor the concepts to think about it, nor the strength to celebrate it.”4 Lyotard’s investigation into love proves productive precisely because he shows that this insight grounds our obligation to reflect on love. To be caught unable to speak is the state of being before a differend, to be a silenced victim of communicative impasse, to experience reason’s failure. In this silence, in exhaustion, it is love that commands and becomes speech. Thus Lyotard’s focus is not that we no longer know how to speak of love, but that now we speak through love what we cannot speak.

Lyotard is a philosopher of the event and in constant pursuit of that surplus of meaning not quite contained by it, that meaning that is just out of our grasp, and that meaning of which only love can speak. There are two discussions of love in his mid to late work that implicitly but eminently illuminate its ability to say something about this unsayable excess of meaning.5 The first is an examination in The Differend of the Christian narrative of love as the most powerful means of designating meaning, and the second is his posthumously published examination of St. Augustine’s desperate love for God.6 The first permits an investigation into the meaning of love as caritas (charity), the second considers its meaning as eros (erotic desire). Our concern will be to show how these types of love can overcome inexpressibility, and to argue that the love at work in chaste, friendly charity is less effective than sensual, amatory love in undoing the effects of silencing and victimization. To explore how Lyotard’s two accounts of love can say something about the unsayable, it is necessary to outline why complete knowledge of the event may never be had. The impossibility rests in the differend, “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be put into phrases cannot yet be” (D §22).7 A differend is a case wherein normally successful communication confronts an impasse, an insurmountable gulf between heterogeneous phrase regimes that forbids the translation of meaning into anything that the other side could comprehend. Lyotard offers numerous examples of differends: from classic paradoxes that yield double binds in which one party is unable to either affirm or deny something, to everyday cases wherein one is challenged to name an unknown masterpiece or empirically demonstrate that which does not exist. These are situations in which any answer violates the law of noncontradiction or stands without any possible proof (D Gorgias Notice and §§3–5). His most poignant example of a differend, however, is the Holocaust survivor whose testimony is rendered illegitimate by a logical bind born from revisionist claims that no gas chambers existed in Nazi concentration camps. The rules of this logical bind limit the survivor’s testimony by prohibiting the objective demonstration of personal experience—the living witness is forbidden from testifying to her own death. The revisionist’s vicious logic thus perpetrates a second wrong: silencing the already victimized. Instead of dismissing paradoxes as impossible, or historical revisionism as hate speech, criminal, or inhuman, Lyotard takes up the binds and endeavors to unravel them from within their own framework to prevent silence from bolstering their power and falsely affirming their “logic.” Ultimately, Lyotard reveals the flaws of each, but he What Can Love Say?

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also shows that differends remain significant because they point beyond themselves to the true challenge: all events exceed what we can capture and encapsulate by knowledge. To address them is necessary, even if the possibility of bridging these impasses is likely to fail. To realize the commonplace nature of differends, and their essentiality to the living of life, is to echo Marion’s remark about our lack of words, lack of concepts, lack of strength to be able to say something. Yet, to follow Lyotard’s thought, we must rally courage and refuse to sink into nihilism. It is in the face of the impossibility of the full and complete capture of knowledge that we are most forcefully called to try anyway. This is the command of every lover, especially the lover of wisdom. The realization of the centrality of the differend to experience implicates all aspects of experience—ethics, politics, aesthetics, and spirituality—and sanctions our attempts, failures, and reattempts to capture and express the meaning of events. This struggle is simply an echo, a reiteration of Lyotard’s foundational investigation of the nature of postmodernity that revealed meaning to be forged in and by “grand narratives.” These stories may conjure national identity, caricature capitalist political economy, or invoke proletariat struggle or emancipation from marginalization. Love can be a grand narrative. Every story is effective in coalescing distracted masses to effect social change and revolution, but may ultimately result in the totalizing imposition of a rigid identity and a closed intellectual perspective. Postmodernism is a method of criticism that attempts to uncover these limiting narratives, but it is a mistake to presume that their diagnosis provides a manifesto with instructions for their destruction.8 Thus, as we move to investigate the meaning of love as caritas and eros, we must keep in mind that while narratives are the clearest indicators of the truths under which we live, they do not capture the full meaning or any fixed truth of the event itself. The Christian Narrative of Love

Narratives are powerful means to unite, and love may be the most powerful of them all. The Christian chronicle of love “vanquished the other narratives in Rome,” Lyotard argues, by dictating a “love of occurrence”—a love of the event—into the narrative fabric of the growing community (D §232). The love of occurrence owed its particular power to its designating what is at stake in both the genre of narrative itself (that a phrase always occurs) and its Christian instantiation (God’s commandment to love). The Christian narrative of love synthesized these stakes by instructing its Love, Desire, and the Divine

followers “to love what happens as if it were a gift, to love even the Is it happening? [Arrive-t-il?] as the promise of good news.” This command “allows for linking onto whatever happens, including other narratives (and, subsequently, even other genres).” This narrative succeeds precisely where the differend fails us: to have its expression denote an originary cause and to cause the proliferation of flexible and productive possible linkages, that is, those connections between language games that contribute to meaning and comprehension. We can know the originary event (God) and its nature (love), and thereby know the obligation to love that commands us to act inclusively. Biblically and theoretically, Christian love reveals itself to be a consummate narrative because it proves capable of saying what cannot be known, let alone said otherwise: “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”9 This story becomes an “antidote to the principle of exception that limits traditional narratives.” Lyotard illustrates such an exception through André-Marcel d’Ans’s account of miyoi, the traditional myths of the native Cashinahua Indians, who granted power through the strict naming of who among them was included and constitutive of the history of the tribe (D §232 and pp. 152–54).10 In contrast, the Christian narrative does not found its congregation by distinguishing the included from the rejected; instead, it bids, “Love one another” (D §232). The community is authorized as such by this “command of universal attraction” given through the “primordial story in which we learn that the god of love was not very well loved by his children and about the misfortunes that ensued.” The narrative of the origin of and command to love makes love an obligation, one that is universal, circular, and conditional: “If you are love, you ought to love; and you shall be loved only if you love.” The exceedingly powerful, universalizing logic of love that encompasses all creation seems to solve all differends by making all possible phrases linkable by the command to love all that occurs as God’s gift. But this very universality also shows that this narrative of love is no solution for those silenced by the differends experienced. First, this is the case because language, for Lyotard, refuses its own encapsulation within a closed system that could allow for a universal authority. This rejection is demonstrated throughout The Differend but presented more explicitly in The Postmodern Condition: the State and Capital serve to close systems (including certain narratives) by taking control of scientific knowledge production—which only properly works on the condition of truth’s fallibility and developing theses that require demonstration by a community—and enforcing a What Can Love Say?

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“performativity criterion” that views value as determined by efficiency.11 Those who refuse this end have their “move,” their attempt to proffer a different end, “ignored or repressed . . . because it too quickly destabilized the accepted positions” (PMC 63). For Lyotard, the silencing is terrorist behavior: “By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him.” He further explains, “It says ‘Adapt your aspirations to our ends—or else.’” In contrast to closing the system so as to permit only a single authority, Lyotard insists on openings that language itself will force: “There is not yet one world, but some worlds (with various names and narratives)” (D §235). To struggle productively against the failure of grasping meaning in full, there must be the possibility of opening other meanings. The second problem that Lyotard diagnoses within the Christian narrative of love, which closely relates to the first, is that its universal, circular, and conditional logic too closely mimics the binding structure of a differend. Love takes on an authority beyond even that of the tribunal called to judge a case like that of the revisionist’s against the Holocaust survivor; its logic becomes inescapable as its circularity universally entraps. To exemplify the behavior of such an authority, Lyotard notes Orwell’s paradox, quoting the bureaucrat from Nineteen Eighty-Four: “We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When you do finally surrender to us, it must be of your own free will” (D §222). A closed system’s universality and circularity necessitates a forced freedom because it has a single source of authority that enacts this “terror,” not through explicit force but through context control.12 The sense, the meaning, has been given in advance; this meaning—love—necessitates one’s free commitment. A singular authority over love, and love’s consequent restrictive operation, compromises the origin to which love first pointed and by which it received its power: the occurrence. Narrative love unites all past events into a tradition that can be projected onto future events, thereby prohibiting any possibility of a true occurrence, an event whose nature renders it impossible to grasp in any comprehensive sense. Further, universal love becomes so systematically restrictive that it eliminates the role of the responsibility one has to respond to the occurrence: “Christian narrative not only tells what has happened, thereby fixing a tradition, but it also prescribes the caritas for what can happen, whatever it might be” (D §233). Herein lies the paradox. When meaning is dictated, we are kept from granting the event our true commitment. Even when the sense given is love, to which we must freely acquiesce or surrender, this freedom is not the same as the free Love, Desire, and the Divine

commitment to respond by engagement that is commanded by the unfettered occurrence. The unconstrained occurrence is a call that institutes responsibility.13 That it happens is inevitable, but it does not happen as a subject’s experience. Rather, the event is that which makes possible experience and subjects in the first place. Experience and subjectivity only come to be with the reality that is instituted by our active, cooperative situation of content into the four moments of the event’s phrase universe. The event conveys and invokes the feeling that something remains to be phrased; this is the emotive birth of duty that commands us to take up the pieces and make sense of them within this grid of givens—we must situate its moments. This is not a simple, confident placing of correct pieces together into a whole, but a messy struggle with infinite pieces from disparate puzzles. That is, the event as a call engenders responsibility; it provokes these feelings in us, the feeling of the phrase, of the not-yet-specified form that pleads for its elusive content to be determined or phrased. We have a duty to honor the occurrence. This is more than an ethical duty; it is a necessity, for it is only when we actively situate reality by identifying the moments within the phrase universe that we achieve the status of subjects and have experience. The Christian narrative of love forbids us free play with the pieces of the occurrence and, thus, divorces us from our responsibility to do just that, thereby making ourselves subjects capable of experience, capable of freely giving ourselves in obedience to the transcendent. The Christian interpretation of love fails precisely because of its success. It fails because the universalization that love engenders undermines itself and burns itself out: it robs us of being true subjects who constitute its loving moments. It prescribes love without permitting us the possibility of freely taking up the obligation and determining its enactment for the other. It is successful because its power is undeniable: as a potent grand narrative it can fuel even its complementary opposite, a “secular, universal history in the form of republican brotherhood, of communist solidarity” (D §235). “Christian love” can be identified as the force of moral commands and the heart of many good actions, but its permutation into everything makes it lose the universal status of the original message, thus undermining its capacity to subdue all differends. In other words, the subject marching under this banner does not actually have the freedom to choose and enact love toward another subject; the prescription is too universalizing and blinds one to the exceptionality of the experience of love. Lyotard has thus uncovered the first of love’s paradoxes: that which permits Christian love to accomplish what no other narrative has been able What Can Love Say?

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to do—to detour around differends—is also what undoes its own success. The second paradox will be that the equally Christian but very different version of love found in Lyotard’s writings on Augustine’s Confessions is elaborated as an instrument of weakness as well as authority, thereby exponentially increasing love’s power to speak; this love loses its totalizing tendency. This newly cast love must be better examined so as to determine whether its differences from the traditional Christian narrative can permit it to say the unsaid and the unsayable. Augustine’s Erotic Love

The main difference between the accounts of love Lyotard provides in The Differend and in The Confession of Augustine has to do with love’s nature, which is described as caritas in the former text and eros in the latter. These different natures yield distinct styles: caritas receives a brief and analytic exposition while eros provokes a reflection that merges the voices of Lyotard and Augustine. Their autobiographies and arguments intertwine; in Lyotard’s nineteen fragmentary sections on Augustine’s yearning for God, we find a communion between thinkers who both alternate between deeply personal, phenomenological writing and more detached scholarship and criticism. The Confession of Augustine is an intimate, spiritual union of two thinkers who seek a way to express the inexpressible by shifting their focus from answer-giving caritas to the disruptive force of eros. Lyotard’s engagement with Augustine begins with a section titled “Blazon,” which means a prominent, vivid, or sensational display; its archaic use, born from the Old French blason, or shield, denotes a coat of arms or the action of inscribing something with one’s heraldry or name. Thus he begins his investigation by considering presentations and names. For Augustine, the question of knowing was mostly indistinguishable from that of naming, for Neoplatonic emanation theory justified knowledge of God Himself as the knowledge of the names of all that was of God (that is, creation). Through the use of the title “Blazon,” Lyotard invokes the long history of the singular importance and difficulty of discerning the names of the presentation that is, and yet refuses to present Himself, showing Himself only through His imprint of creation. The world is of God, and we are receptive to all its sensory information; the presentations call to us, and yet we are still kept from knowing the totality of the One who is. Lyotard quotes Augustine’s Confessions, X, 27: “Thou calledst and criest aloud to me; thou even breakedst open my deafness: thou shinest thine beams upon me, Love, Desire, and the Divine

and hath put my blindness to flight: thou didst most fragrantly blow upon me, and I drew in my breath and I pant after thee; I tasted thee, and now do hunger and thirst after thee; thou didst touch me, and I even burn again to enjoy thy peace” (CA 1). The sensory knowledge of God is sensual. By uncovering and magnifying the eroticism of Augustine’s Confessions, Lyotard shows that this revelation is the genesis of the saint’s torment and his ultimate redemption. As autobiography, Confessions chronicles Augustine’s intellectual, spiritual, and ultimate religious conversions, each step excessively anxious because each is purportedly taken only as a logical result following from a rational judgment on divine knowledge—and yet none of the conversions actually operates in this way. Lyotard’s hyperbolically sexual reading shows Augustine’s love is fed not by reason, but by the sensation of an intense desire for reunion. The sensual longing stands in stark relief against Augustine’s search for God, which literally consists of his repeated demands to know Him. Lyotard reveals that it is not by apodictic truth, but by the disruptive force of eros that Augustine becomes religious.14 The structure of Augustine’s Confessions supports Lyotard’s case that eros solves the ultimate differend that is God. While the autobiography progresses chronologically, Augustine’s path to becoming a Christian is neither linearly logical nor a tight circular narrative of Christian caritas. His narrative demonstrates the disruption of a simple flow of time, leading us back and forth through a multiplicity of conversions. Furthermore, when his memory catches up, he proceeds to offer present insights into recollection and into a futural expectation, as found in his exegesis of Genesis. This movement exemplifies Lyotard’s standard form and lesson: thought must make a lover’s leap, cast itself adrift between the archipelagos of meaning, those shape-shift-like clouds; it must be open to new configurations and free play’s reinterpretations: “We have to drift.”15 His story refuses the foreclosure caritas enacts. But the Confessions is also far more than autobiography. It is a story that reflects on confession (an inquiry into the human perpetuation of evil) and relates his confessions (theft, licentiousness, lack of faith in God). Confession of one’s guilt to an omniscient God, however, cannot logically be for the sake of telling Him something unknown. While confession typically includes a request for forgiveness, Augustine never asks specifically for absolution, despite asking God, his “inmost Physician,” to keep him from temptation.16 His confession is not a request for divine forgiveness or personal salvation; it is for knowledge that can only be born through love. Augustine, addressing God, tells us in Book X: “You love the truth,” and What Can Love Say?

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coming into the truth is coming into your love: “This is what I want to do in my heart, in front of you, in my confession, and in my writing before many witnesses.”17 Augustine’s confessions are his intellectual turning toward truth, which he does in the only way he can: through a passionate opening of the self and a desirous reaching for the other. Lyotard describes the Saint before conversion as “infatuated with earthly delights, wallowing in the poverty of satisfaction, [where] the I was sitting idle, smug, like a becalmed boat in a null agitation” (CA 2). But then the event happens: “You sweep down upon him and force entrance through his five estuaries,” that is, through the ears, when you “calledst and criest aloud to me,” through the eyes, when you “hath put my blindness to flight,” through the sense of smell, when “thou didst most fragrantly blow upon me,” through taste, “and now [I] do hunger and thirst after thee,” and touch, “and I even burn again to enjoy thy peace” (CA 2, 1). Like a “destructive wind, a typhoon,” God swept down upon the saint and turned him inside out (CA 2). The violence of His sensory assault is patently erotic: this is how the “lover excites the five mouths of the woman, swells her vowels, those of ear, of eye, of nose, of tongue, and skin that stridulates.” Augustine’s reception of the occurrence is sensory, his response is sensuous: he hungers and burns for God: “At present he is consumed by your fire, impatient for the return to peace that your fivefold ferocity brings him.” Lyotard makes apt selections from among the ample stock of erotic passages in the Confessions for his unusual reading. His emphasis on the sensual illuminates divine truth as passionate, a necessity for reason and faith. In passionate suffering Augustine can begin to grasp the metaphoric, he can “understand” and respond to God. His account of God is entirely tied to the inner and exterior senses of the mind and body, for his love for God is fueled in this way, by what he suffers. Augustine expresses this passionately: he calls, cries, tastes, thirsts, and touches, he breaks open deafness, shines light against blindness, and counters scentlessness with fragrance. God is intelligibly unknowable, but we “know” Him in the only way we can, by loving Him through the sensory. This reveals the paradox. We cannot know Him, for He is no particular being, but we are called to love Him; He cannot be grasped by the mind, but He calls us to respond. There is an incomprehensible obstacle, according to Lyotard, in the instance of the addressor in this religio-erotic phrase universe (D §25). Augustine, plaintive, desperate, cries out to God: “Let me know you, my known, let me know Thee even as I am known”; “How shall I find you if I do not remember you”; “How can one pray to you unless one knows you?”18 How can I love Love, Desire, and the Divine

You, Augustine demands of God, if I cannot know You?—and yet, I cannot know You without loving You. Lyotard unveils the nature of how Augustine loves God: “When as I love my God, I love a certain kind of light, and a kind of voice, and a kind of fragrance, and a kind of meat, and a kind of embrace—embrace, taste, fragrance, voice and light which are of the inner human in me” (CA 5). Our flesh, “the most repugnant and the sweetest Christian mystery,” that was created in His image, cannot be forgotten when we ask how we may know Him (CA 4). The flesh is how God called us though His Son and how the latter (and later priests) reveals the truth of the Father to us through the transformation of the sweet wine and dry cracker into the blood and body: a transformation made “without the concept, next to the flesh, in a convulsion.” The Eucharist, Lyotard writes, defies any juridical logic: “This spasm is the sole witness to grace. It cannot be submitted as evidence to the tribunal of ideas, which declines comment: confession does not come under its jurisdiction.” No matter how capable flesh is to sully the spirit, grace is demonstrated with and through it, and it is by the flesh, and not by reason, that we may know God. The way Augustine knows God, loves God, is not through a rational deduction of absolutes—“The invention itself, the encounter with, the discovery of God does not take place in the stores of memory. Such apprenticeship exceeds the mind”—nor can he come to the truth of God by writing a narrative that ensnares every possibility past and future in its universal logic (CA 51). When the event happens, “it invites a fairy-story, a fable, not a discourse” (CA 6). When the unthinkable possession by God happens, and after the faithful person catches his breath even while burning for more, he weaves the Absolute into a tale of love to call God back and to call us, his audience, to behold the event. His fairy tale calls us most powerfully by love, by the sensual, though the flesh: the witness feels God, he does not know God: “Augustine’s stilus, to be in keeping with vibrant weakness, bends to the timbres, the movements of assonance and dissonance, the rhythms of poetry.” This tale’s content is unthinkable; we must be made to feel it: “The flesh, forced five times, violated in its five senses, does not cry out, but chants, brings to each assault rhythm and rhyme, in a recitative, a Sprechgesang [a chant, or singing speech]” (CA 3). Flashed throughout with the intensity of divine penetration, the faithful’s body must respond, animate its lips into chants that speak through their tone, speed, character, and the flitting movement of “speaking a song.” This practice was invented by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, as a controlled and respectful modulation What Can Love Say?

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of many voices together reading the Psalms: “But is the poem of the five torments a psalm? Or the blazon of a body in ecstasy?” Less a sacred song that the angelic accompany with harp, the story that the sycophant to the divine sings is how “the ancient figure of the erotic blazon lends itself to words, that they may confess holy copulation” (CA 6). 108

Eros over Caritas

Eros, rather than caritas, renders Augustine’s Confessions more promising (albeit more shocking) in that eros endeavors to say the unsayable. Caritas is chaste love, a translation of the Greek agape, and known in English as “charity.” Eros is sexual love, Greek for the low sense of the Latin amor, as derived from lubet, “pleasing,” and lubido, “desire” or “libido.” Why does the variation of love’s nature make a difference? I propose a thesis that is a reinterpretation of the classic paradox that eros is a lack, that it both is and is not; it is, and so is something, yet it is a lack, and hence it is nothing. This proposal itself is a differend that demands elaboration in order to see why it may be that eros best addresses differends. We inherit our understanding of eros as a lack primarily from Plato’s Symposium. Its neat encapsulation is found in Socrates’s telling question, “Isn’t it certain that everything longs for what it lacks, and that nothing longs for what it doesn’t lack?” Yet the very same dialogue has him pronounce that “love is the one thing in the world I understand.”19 What does one know of something that is nothing? If love is an event centrally creative of meaning, but also creative of a differend, being a lack we can neither define nor understand, then we are given and robbed of this essential dimension of human meaning. Any given must be capable of being “known” in some way; therefore love must be something other than pure lack. To account for how Socrates can have what is not, we recall his myth of the birth of Eros, the child of both Poros and Penia: “As the son of Resource and Need, it has been his fate to always be needy . . . [but] he brings his father’s resourcefulness to his designs upon the beautiful . . . at once desirous and full of wisdom.”20 He is of both poverty and plenty; he is both desirous, hence lacking, and full. Eros may be a privation, but its object and content are neither nonexistent nor vacant of attributes and potential for action. The nature of eros parallels Augustine’s use of the Neoplatonic definition of the One as what is and what is not. It also parallels Lyotard’s testimony to the differend that is both speechless and overfilled with speech. “The paradox” is that “the vertigo of what cannot be phrased” is also the Love, Desire, and the Divine

“irrefutable conviction that phrasing is endless” (D §17). In the face of the differend’s silencing of some instance of the phrase universe, Lyotard urges that one “must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge” (D §93). To listen thusly is to forge linkages that evade the rules of knowledge but may also loosen the silencing bind. While Lyotard does not exhaustively delineate their possibilities, he gives as examples the use of “and” in Gertrude Stein’s poetics, Adorno’s parataxis, John Cage’s silence, and a diverse number of methods in avantgarde art (D pp. 67–88, §§100–101, 105, 152, 180). None of these forms will “say” anything according to a tribunal, and yet all of them “say” something considered under a different set of rules for the meaningfulness of expressions. It is the lack that is nevertheless had that motivates the saying that can be meaningful. Differends parallel eros in that both are events that are something and nothing. Exploring the operation of linkages offers a productive model of action that will inspire a reading of eros as force, since linkage is the preferred response to a differend. Lyotard unfolds their operation in his frequent invocation of Kant’s idea of purposiveness without purpose—that enactment of action as if with, but actually without, a purpose.21 Frequently, what is lacking in a differend is a criterion by which to judge.22 What must be done is to act while being guided by a purposiveness without purpose, to engage linkage. This is demonstrated in The Postmodern Condition by paralogy, that is, by reasoning that does not conform to the rules of logic. In paralogy, “it is now dissension”—a lawlessness—“that must be emphasized,” but this is “not without rules” (PMC 61). The lack is that law cannot be founded on a presumed universality or sensus communis: “It seems neither possible, nor even prudent, . . . [to orient] our treatment of the problem of legitimation in the direction of a search for universal consensus through  .  .  . Diskurs, in other words, a dialogue of argumentation” (PMC 65).23 Much like caritas, Diskurs commands a meta-prescription that is universally valid for all language games encapsulating expression in a system with a single source of authority. Diskurs requires the presumption that consensus is an end, rather than an acknowledgment of what consensus is: a particular state of discussion or particular genre of discourse among others. The rule is that we must act as if there is an end, but an end that is not an end: by paralogy for paralogy. Paralogy, defined here as an example of purposiveness without purpose, also describes how linkage operates. As Lyotard offers in his lecture “Why Desire?” the function of eros is the same; it “does not establish a relationship between a cause and an effect,” hence it resists logic. Rather, What Can Love Say?

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he adds, eros “is the movement of something that goes out toward the other as toward something that it itself lacks,” acting under the rule of purposiveness without purpose.24 It drives us, frenzied, to a desired end, yet eros would be no more if it actually achieved its end, its consummation. The sense of purposiveness without purpose in paralogy and eros allows the openness that caritas shut down in its totalizing system. As Lyotard writes, “We should be happy that the tendency toward the temporary contract is ambiguous: it is not totally subordinated to the goals of the system, yet the system tolerates it” (PMC 66). And yet these forces can operate within the system because their openness, their lack that holds forth, has another side: they are something, as witnessed by their production of responsibility. The emptiness of eros is a fullness, a fuel that forces us to seek linkage. Its attributes and aims sufficiently permit us to see it as purposive, even while it lacks concrete purposiveness, thus granting us the justification for acting in face of its ambiguity and the impossibility of its actually being had. Furthermore, the lack of actual purposiveness keeps love from being a universalizing narrative that would fail as the Christian narrative of love failed. Its lack of an end (for consummation eliminates it) permits us, as subjects, to take up the encounter of love that is exceptional, freely turning it toward another and bearing the full weight of its responsibility. Desire is as strong as it is fragile. Desire is enacted anxiously because its ambiguity gives us nothing concrete to hold, despite the fact that we feel intensely its somethingness when we are grasped by the erotic.25 Conclusion

The inexpressible and the exhausting lie at the heart of Lyotard’s oeuvre because there is always a surplus of meaning in the event. Love motivates his work. “The visit is both an encounter and not,” and yet it is a call to which we must respond, even as the event cancels “the a priori forms of inscription and hence of possible testimony” (CA 2, 5, 8). The silence that love’s event causes, the exhausted speechlessness it inspires, also grounds our obligation to respond to it. We respond in kind: through love. The nature of this love, however, is critical for the success of our response. Lyotard demonstrates that eros is better than caritas at speaking of that which we cannot speak because it is both something and nothing: eros operates as linkages, carrying out the active work of opening to confront differends. Caritas encapsulates the event in a totalizing narrative that becomes overly constrictive, circular, and universalizing, and suffocates the true, Love, Desire, and the Divine

originary indeterminacy of the occurrence. It possesses its object; it avoids any exception by its creation of the narrative whose form authorizes every past, present, and future possibility as already denominated as an instance of God’s love. The having of eros, on the other hand, is only as a not-having: “Past, present, future—as many modes of presence in which the lack of presence is projected” (CA 17). The time of eros is delay, every feverish instance of presence, of having, is only ever a sensual arousal that speaks of absence. Augustine pleads, “Let me know you, my known, let me know Thee even as I am known,” and has only longing, “consumed by your fire, impatient for the return to peace that your fivefold ferocity brings.”26 Thus, with Augustine as our model, the lover is a “witness in proportion to there being none, and there can be no witness of this blow” (CA 8). He responds in the only way he can: with his flesh, he yearns, he hungers, motivating his lips to make words into songs and fairy tales because the object of his desire cannot be had by any concept. Eros best succeeds in speaking of that inaccessible excess because it fails to do so, yet it tries. It burns. It tries. Lyotard’s reading of love is provocative: to solve impossible ruptures of meaning that prohibit equitable communication and communion one should not promote caritas, but eros; one should not love thy neighbor in that friendly, charitable way, but one should erotically desire the other. Charity’s embrace is a love with a clear object and end that inevitably engenders totalizing closed-mindedness. Erotic desire—otherwise conceived as tumultuous, jealousy-inducing, inequity-inspiring enslavement to an uncontrollable force and dictating lover—is, instead, the superior route for genuine communication of productive truth seeking. The argument for the latter hinges on the disruptive ambiguity inherent in eros. It is unpredictable and, hence, remains open; it is a lack resisting an end or consummation; and, yet, it is forceful, it commands our dedication and freely given duty, honor, and respect. Even as it exhausts us, eros endows us with the energy and courage to speak. notes 1. Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, references is he and Pierre Souyri, his trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago: friend and colleague with whom he University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1. wrote much of his early work on radical 2. Ibid. politics. 3. Jean-François Lyotard, “Afterword: A 4. Marion, Erotic Phenomenon, 1. Memorial of Marxism,” trans. Cecile 5. There are other occurrences, of course, Lindsay, in Peregrinations: Law, Form, perhaps most obviously in his Libidinal Event (New York: Columbia University Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant Press, 1988), 47. The “us” Lyotard (London: Continuum, 2004); or his

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writing on the painter Monory, in The Assassination of Experience by Painting, Monory, trans. Herman Parret and Sarah Wilson (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2014), but my chosen foci, I believe, represent his most important and under-considered works and two of the most striking, unusual accounts of love in contemporary Continental philosophy. 6. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Hereafter parenthetically cited as D. The Confession of Augustine, trans. Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Hereafter parenthetically cited as CA. 7. Further: “I would like to call a differend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that reason a victim” (§12); it is “a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy. However, applying a single ruling of judgment to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule)” (xi). 8. There are numerous reasons why we would not want to destroy all grand narratives—because they can effect very positive social change, they exist as a productive organizing force to promote societal stability, they allow us an immediate epistemology of ethos, and so on—and also little chance that we could ever do so, for these narratives are as foundational to the creation and structuring of meaning. Lyotard’s postmodernism is a “re-writing of modernity,” a re-reading and re-thinking, a productive study in critical theory, and not a normative handbook. See Lyotard, “Re-writing Modernity,” SubStance 16, no. 54 (1987): 3–9; “Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix,” trans. Brian Massumi, Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986–87): 209–19; and The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence, 1982–1985,

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trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1992). 9. 1 John 4:8 (King James Version). 10. D’Ans’s original account of the Cashinahua miyoi is found in his Le dit des Vrais Hommes: Mythes, contes, légendes et traditions des Indiens Cashinahua (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). 11. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Hereafter parenthetically cited as PMC. 12. Linguistically, we would express this as a communicative system, what Lyotard calls a “phrase universe,” composed of the four moments of addressor, addressee, sense, and referent. The addressor is the single source of authority and the one who gives reality; the referent singularly bestows the sense, that is, the sense that predetermines and establishes the meaning and rules of what is given. 13. Below, these claims will reveal their perplexing nature more fully, for a free commitment that also commands intense responsibility ideally invokes an engagement that is hardly a duty-bound response; rather, the engagement is frenzied and may appear as an unavoidable surrender that is greater than what caritas demands. 14. The most sustained investigation into religious eroticism remains Georges Bataille’s Eroticism, wherein he writes, “All eroticism has a sacramental character, but . . . the quest for continuity of existence systematically pursued beyond the immediate world signifies an essentially religious intention. In its familiar Western form religious eroticism is bound up with seeking after God’s love.” Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 16. 15. Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: Galilée, Union Générale d’Editions, 1973), 12–13. 16. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Putman, 2001), X, 28–42, and X, 3. 17. Ibid., X, 2.

18. Ibid., X, 1; X, 17; I, 1; the italics cite 1 Cor. 13:12. 19. Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 526–74, 200a–b, 177d–e. Eros having lack becomes it being lack. The interchange of having and being is important. Socrates declares himself to be ignorant in Plato’s Apology, insisting, “I have no claim to wisdom, great or small,” but then shows wisdom in knowing what one does not know—hence, he is wise for he has a knowledge of a lacking object. Plato, Socrates’ Defense (Apology), trans. Hugh Tredennick, in Collected Dialogues, 3–26, 21b. Similarly, in the Symposium, Socrates claims to have knowledge of love, knowledge of that which is not. All knowledge, as Plato’s Meno instructs us, must be chained down within our minds, for it is quick to flee like the statues of Daedalus. This knowledge of absences, then, presumably, must be something that can be caught and tied down in Socrates’s mind. 20. Plato, Symposium, 555–56, 203b–d. 21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §§10–17, 23, 26. 22. Purposiveness without purpose also appears in Lyotard’s work when an act

is undertaken without knowledge of an object, for example, when an invented interlocutor complains, “Lacking a definition of phrase, we will never know what we are talking about, or if we are talking about the same thing,” and Lyotard responds, “It’s not easy to know what one is phrasing about . . . but it is indubitable that ‘one is phrasing,’ be it only in order to know this” (D §108). The lack is the definition of the referent, the certain capture of the object, and its activity is the encouragement to act with a seeming, with a presumption of a definition that is not actually held. 23. This orientation he attributes to Habermas. 24. Lyotard, Why Philosophize? trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013), 20. 25. Roland Barthes captures the force of this grasping when he writes of the agony of love, first introduced in his definition of anxiety: “The amorous subject, according to one contingency or another, feels swept away by the fear of a danger, an injury, an abandonment, a revulsion—a sentiment he expresses under the name of anxiety.” A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 29. 26. Augustine, Confessions, X, 17; CA 2.

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7 Finding a Place for Desire in the Life of the Mind Arendt and Augustine antonio calcagno

Hannah Arendt’s most sustained treatment of desire or appetite (appetitus), what is often translated as “craving,” can be found in her doctoral dissertation, now published as Love and Saint Augustine.1 Arendt had intended to republish this dissertation in the early 1960s, but the plan never materialized. Desire makes neither a sustained nor a significant return in her later thought. Like Augustine, Arendt associates one form of desire with the appetites of the body; it is understood as an inferior kind of love that largely confines oneself to one’s own ego interests. Ultimately, desire, craving, or appetite is redeemed, indeed transformed, through social interactions or an encounter with God, or so, at least, Arendt reads Augustine: appetitive cupiditas and concuspiscentia yield to agape the highest desire or love for God. Given both Arendt’s and Augustine’s understanding of desire as present in human beings and human life, we must ask why desire does not appear as a significant part of the structures of thinking, judging, and willing, faculties she discusses in her monumental work, The Life of the Mind. I argue here that a more robust understanding of desire must play a role in the life of the mind as Arendt describes it, and it must do so primarily as a motivator, an experience of being pushed or pulled toward a desideratum, an object of desire that lies outside us, which moves us to desire to think, judge, and will. In short, an appetite for the life of the mind begins from a

desire that need not start with us but can also be elicited by objects, people, or the world and our interactions with it: desire is passively incited in us. Moreover, if the desire is pleasurable, this can intensify our desire for pursuing a life of the mind. Finally, it is precisely by yielding to the desire to know oneself, when one becomes, following Augustine’s insight, a question to oneself: quaestio mihi factus sum, that one can employ thinking, judging, and willing to begin to answer the question of the who of the self. Who we are, however, obtains fullness in meaning with and between others, the inter-esse of Arendtian politics. Desire, then, must be seen as playing a role in the life of the mind that Arendt advocates. Hannah Arendt’s Augustine and Desire

Reading Augustine, Arendt establishes a curious, perhaps even problematic, notion of love as desire. On one hand, love causes an identification of subject and object: they are both taken up and determined by love, and this presupposes that both subject and object lose or de-emphasize aspects of themselves that are not somehow determined by the emotion of desire or love. This means that when a person desires or is in love, she loses a sense of herself, fusing with the object of desire. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott argues that Arendt sees the intimate love of others as possibly resulting in a dependency that forsakes a subject’s independence, which ultimately produces the “frustration of freedom,” as lovers are confined to their own world rather than being part of the larger world.2 On the other hand, the object of desire is given primacy in determining how and where one will live in the world: the love object colors and structures the world we live in, the object is no longer neutral, but now is determining or conditioning. In addition to this strange formulation of love, which Arendt maintains is the nature of Augustinian love, she also admits that love cannot be thought outside of freedom. Unlike Plotinus, Augustine is a Christian and believes that both desire and freedom are concomitant, perhaps even problematic (A 21–22). For Plotinus, freedom cannot exist if there is need, and desire is conceived of as necessary. For Augustine, one is free by virtue of one’s creation: it is a gift of God, and desire for God is not a necessity but a free act of the human person. If we examine closely the aforementioned paradox that Arendt’s reading of Augustine poses, we arrive at a very important understanding of human nature. Humans feel desire: the desire they feel is for an outside object that does not belong to the self. In order to satisfy the desire for the object Finding a Place for Desire

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desired, an identification arises between the self and desideratum. Once the desire is fulfilled the person returns to her self, perhaps again longing to fulfill certain new desires that overcome her, that stem from her interaction with the world but that are not proper to her. The very moment that humans try to actualize themselves by fulfilling their desires, they lose themselves. A dialectic of exitus/reditus (A 24) is established: one exits oneself because of desire, but one also returns to the self once desire is fulfilled. Unlike Plotinian immanent necessity that surges with desire, Augustine focuses on transcendence: one transcends oneself in order to fulfill oneself. But when one returns to the self, one finds that one is still unfulfilled. For Augustine, the experience of transcendence is where one rests and where one is taken up into a higher reality: this is the key to not remaining unfulfilled by desire. The rest or quietude that Augustine desires is sought in other human beings, but remains unfulfilled there; rather, it is in God that one finds the ultimate transcendence where the self can rest and even become anew (A 26–28). According to Arendt, Augustine establishes a hierarchy of desire that finds its ultimate resting point in caritas or the love that is God. Desires of the body and psyche seek fulfillment in and through the obtaining of certain ends. For example, Augustine’s famous description of his desire for pears in Book II of the Confessions was not so much a desire for the fruit, nor a desire for the pleasure of eating it, but the sheer desire to cause evil and enjoy his ability to do so. This is what Augustine calls cupiditas, a covetousness that is not only directed toward objects but also bespeaks a psychic pleasure to control. In fact, in the Confessions Augustine identifies three forms of cupiditas or greedy desires: libido dominandi, libido habendi, and libido nocendi,3 the desires to oppress, possess, and kill. Recall that desire is love, but there are many kinds of love depending on the object of desire or love. The problem with this lower form of love is that it is completely self-referential. Once the love or desire is fulfilled, one is firmly returned to oneself and one craves again, as the object of desire is temporary and does not perdure. Augustine recognizes that we must exit the self if we are to find greater fulfillment for our desires, for our loves. He moves from the self to the other, the neighbors that Christianity asks Augustine to love as he would love God. But this form of transcendence is unfulfilling, too, although it moves one outside the realm of the self. Arendt remarks, “Therefore, the commandment ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ is understood in a literal sense by Augustine, ‘Love of one’s neighbor recognizes as its limitation the love of one’s self,’ and he who ‘loves his neighbor more than himself’ is guilty of transgression. Obviously, the love of self and neighbor in this context stands in curious Love, Desire, and the Divine

contradiction to the original definition of love as desire, which seeks a thing for its own sake, is affected by it, and consequently depends upon it” (A 38). Love of neighbor as oneself establishes a fruitful but limited situation. On one hand, one can perform the exitus/reditus that fulfills the push of desire for transcendence, but, on the other hand, the love of the neighbor must never exceed the love of self or vice versa. We encounter both transcendence and limitation, the same dynamic that frustrates the self as it searches for a place to rest that is not limited as in both the cases of bodily desire and desire for the neighbor, according to Augustine. It is only in and through the love of God that one not only finds genuine transcendence but also rest and a fuller understanding of oneself and others as creations of God that ultimately will return to and rest in God. One of the more unique contributions of Arendt’s reading of Augustine lies in the connection she makes between love of neighbor and love of God. The neighbor is not an end in herself; rather, the love of God and love of neighbor share a unique relationship and are vital for salvation. The communal City of God can only be achieved—that is, salvation can only come about—through God working in and through social life. Arendt interprets Augustine as arguing that loving one’s neighbors is one of the higher forms of love vital for human flourishing: “I never love my neighbor for his own sake, only for the sake of divine grace. This indirectedness, which is unique to love of neighbor, puts an even more radical stop to the self-evident living together in the earthly city. It turns my relation to my neighbor into a mere passage for the direct relation to God himself. . . . We are commanded to love our neighbor, to practice mutual love, only because . . . in doing so we love Christ” (A 111). The Lack of Desire in the Life of the Mind: Thinking, Willing, and Judging

If love, understood in all its forms, including desire and the love of objects, self, others, and God, is seen to condition a love for the world and neighbors, as Arendt reads Augustine, why is it that we do not see the same love appearing in Arendt’s later work, The Life of the Mind? Given the heavy reliance of Arendt on her “old friend” Augustine, one cannot easily dismiss the absence as being the result of a specific past research interest. In other words, we cannot say that Arendt’s dissertation displays just a onetime interest in Augustine; rather, given Arendt’s use of Augustine both in The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind, we have to account for the noticeable absence of the discussion of desire as a form of love. This section of my Finding a Place for Desire

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essay, then, intends to show how Arendt’s later work has little to say about desire. Numerous studies exist that examine Arendt’s comments on love and politics in The Human Condition, including the essay by Sophie Bourgault contained in this volume. Readers are familiar with her famous claim that love cannot be political, for it is too private a sentiment.4 Love is viewed as incapable of entering the public realm as it is confined to intimacy of the lovers’ particular world (HC 242–43). In a famous letter to Karl Jaspers, Arendt confesses that she was thinking of Amor mundi as a possible title for The Human Condition. Scholars have understood amor mundi or love of the world as a genuine aspect of Arendt’s political project,5 distinguishing it from intimate love with the help of Arendt’s work on Augustine. From this point of view, intimate love is purely subjective, whereas the love of the world evokes political freedom,6 responsibility,7 action,8 citizenship, and democracy.9 While fine scholarly works10 detail how Arendt reworks the notion of love, they say little about what role love plays in Arendt’s later work, The Life of the Mind.11 For Augustine there is only one reality: love/desire. It is the true arché. According to Arendt, the role of the human individual is to find one’s place in this totum by discovering the right measured (pondus meum amor meus) relation to self, others, and God, all of whom form one community. We come now to the question of desire or love and its relation to the mind. Thinking, willing, and judging are all embodied and social faculties, each of which also holds a central place for the questioning self. How can desire be seen to be present in these faculties? Concerning thinking, Arendt does admit that there is desire for thinking when she treats Aristotle’s notion of the mind’s desire to know, but the desire here is understood as that which draws one to a specific end, namely, knowledge: it is understood in terms of efficient causality. It should also be noted that, for Arendt, the Aristotelian view suffers from its connection to science: when thinking becomes a matter simply of knowing things for what they are, knowledge cuts itself from its deeper function within the life between human beings, the inter-esse. Thinking’s fullest expression manifests itself in philosophy as practiced by Socrates: Socrates was motivated to think because of wonder. Desire does not occupy the primacy of place in Arendt’s discussion of her response to the question, so why do we think? In fact, she looks at three possible responses from the Greeks, the Romans, and Socrates, ultimately siding with the Socratic option. As we shall see below, desire is hardly discussed. Love, Desire, and the Divine

Thinking is the faculty that makes present what is absent, and it does so largely through metaphor as opposed to sheer representation. Arendt discusses the need for immortality, the quest for truth and meaning, and wonder as Greek responses to the question of why we think. All thinking requires a withdrawal12 from the world in order to make time and space for thought to happen. Yet the withdrawal from the world does not presuppose some kind of suspension of belief. The world and others continue to persist in our being as they are part of us and who we are, but the withdrawal creates the right conditions by which we can engage in the silent dialogue with the self, what Arendt calls the two-in-one. The self that caries out a dialogue with itself exists in the world and is deeply informed and affected by it. The dialogue that Arendt has in mind is one of constantly turning over thoughts and insights about oneself, others, and the world in order to acquire a deeper understanding of oneself and reality, which is what Socrates practiced in his life through philosophy. We shall discuss this further, but first let us turn to Arendt’s reading of Greek literature and philosophy. Examining Greek literature and philosophy, Arendt concludes that thinking is depicted largely as need: the need for immortality and the need to understand the meaning of our lives and the truth of reality. Need is a lack for the Greeks, a poverty. One can easily think of the myth of Poros and Penia in the Symposium: Penia (poverty) seduces Poros (resource) in order to fulfill her own needs. The child that is conceived is love, Eros. Diotima claims that Eros is always in need or lacking something because of his mother, but it is also due to his father that he is always searching. Eros’s desire always required fulfillment and was perpetually incomplete, suggesting that desire itself was not the highest form of love. This is why Diotima, at the end of the Symposium, maintains that the fullest experience of love does not lie in desire but in the contemplation of the very form of love, a view attributable to Socrates as well as Plato and his early interpreters. Furthermore, Plato rightly understood that the contemplation of the forms was a necessity not only for good governance but also for a happy life. The forms are eternal and the contemplation of them gives the philosopher king access to the good that is beyond being: the good of the happy life, eudaimonia. The source that can illumine what is necessary for earthly, finite humans to live a good life does not lie within this world, but in the world of the immortal forms. We must live as inspired by these forms in order that we can participate in the good they offer us. We also find the need to know having its ultimate end in contemplation of the eternal gods, the bios theoretikos. Arendt remarks on the connection between the drive for immortality and Finding a Place for Desire

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thinking: “The many share in the divine passion to see. What was involved in the Pythagorean spectatorship, in the position outside all human affairs, was something divine. And the less time a man needed to take care of his body, and the more time he could devote to such a divine occupation, the closer he came to the way of life of the gods” (LM, T 131). Thinking, then, is understood as a grasping or understanding of the forms, not as desire. The conversion one achieves in seeing the forms is not one of desire, but of being: understanding of the forms, seeing them, transforms our being and we can no longer be in the same way. This is the fate of the philosopher king who knows the good. In addition to a quest for immortality the Greeks also saw thinking, according to Arendt, as a quest for meaning and knowledge (LM, T 62). The quest for knowledge is the end of science. Science can describe and instruct us about the nature of things, but it cannot tell us what to do with them or how to value them. Arendt sees truth, by contrast, as not only about discovering what is the case, what truly exists, but also about the power of truth to move us, much like truth moved Socrates. Truth demands things of us; it requires a response and invokes responsibility. The meaning we make of our individual and collective lives is a meaningful response to human interactions and the world that surrounds us: we strive to make sense of, and respond to, the unanswerable questions that surround our existence. Missing in the descriptions of thinking as quests for meaning and truth is a discussion of desire. Arendt conceives of the Roman response to the question of why we think as therapeutic (LM, T 152ff.). Roman philosophical movements like Stoicism and Epicureanism required that individuals withdraw from the world in order to acquire the necessary time and space to practice certain mental exercises that would assist one in finding relief from the anxieties and stress of the life of business and politics. Here, we can think of Seneca, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius. Thinking was to bring healing and was functional: it was a tool that could help us achieve ataraxia or apatheia. Desire in the Roman context was something that had to be controlled, as much as it could be. We had to learn to discipline the effects of desire. Thinking is a solitary exercise, a discipline, where we separate ourselves from the world and its tedium in order to train the mind not to suffer unnecessary effects of the impressions that the world and others make on us. But the solitude of the Roman philosophers is markedly different from what Arendt sees happening in the later Roman philosopher Augustine. Augustine carries out his soliloquies or dialogues with himself while concomitantly recognizing Love, Desire, and the Divine

that he never can separate himself from the social foundation of his world rooted in God and neighbor. He never withdraws completely: his thinking is embedded and takes nourishment from a rich social context. Though classical Roman thinking produces great thought-objects, for example, Cicero’s dialogues On the Laws and On the Republic or Seneca’s profound Letters, the isolation it requires leaves Arendtian inter-esse with little room. In the end, classical Roman thinking becomes functional in that it is a tool at the disposal of a select group of male leaders, designed to give them some consolation and relief from the brutal world in which they dwelled. For Arendt, it is Socrates who embodies the epitome of what it means to think. Socrates was gripped by wonder—he did not need to wonder—and it pushed him to ask questions, to dialogue with himself and others, in order to try to answer what was unanswerable. In this sense, Socrates, too, sought meaning, but his search, at least as Plato depicts it in the early dialogues, ended in aporia: there was a genuine impasse. Arendt describes thinking for Socrates in metaphorical terms. He embodies three crucial aspects about thinking and why we think: Socrates lives thought as paralyzing, stinging, moral and maieutic (LM, T 172–79). One of the more important things that thinking does is stop us in our tracks. When we think, we stop to ponder what is manifest before us. Arendt describes many situations in which Socrates is often paralyzed by thought, much like the stingray that temporarily shocks and stuns us, and this paralysis interrupts his life: he stops and begins to wonder or give thanks to the gods or tries to make reparation for some kind of omission. Recall the beginning of the Phaedrus, where Socrates is suddenly gripped by the thought that he has somehow offended the gods just as he was about to engage the discussions about the nature of love. Arendt also sees that thought stings, much like the gadfly. Socrates engages various elite members of Athenian society, usually asking them to clarify what they mean when they describe their thoughts or deeds. Inevitably, neither Socrates nor his interlocutor could answer fully the question of the dialogue. Euthyphro, for example, knows that he has to fulfill some ritual obligation, but neither he nor Socrates knows what piety is. Socrates stings his interlocutors: he is the gadfly that annoys his dialogue partners because he shows they know nothing. In this way, he urges them to think and be more aware of what they are doing both as individuals and as members of society. Thinking, for Socrates, not only has this paralyzing and stinging function; Arendt points out that it also helps gives birth to ideas: it is maieutic. The role of the ancient Greek midwife was to help give birth to a child but also to decide whether the child was fit to live or die. The wisdom of Finding a Place for Desire

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the midwife was necessary in order to help decide whether the child could flourish. Socrates, understood as a midwife, could help bring ideas, that is, thought-things, to presence. In his dialogues, he worked on trying to figure out whether the things brought forward in thought should live or die: this was the nature of the elenchus. In dialectical thinking, one could examine and critique various thoughts and their implications and/or omissions. Desire does not enter into Arendt’s discussion of Socratic thinking. In addition to the maieutic function, thinking also has a moral function. This is true for both Arendt and Socrates. Thought can stop us in our tracks, it gives birth to new ideas and things, but it also allows us to ponder and judge what we have before us. Thinking makes things appear, but judging helps us distinguish between what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Arendt remarks, “I shall show that my own main assumption in singling out judgment as a distinct capacity of our minds has been that judgments are not arrived at by either deduction or induction; in short, they have nothing in common with logical operations. . . . We shall be in search of the ‘silent sense,’ which—when it was dealt with at all—has always, even in Kant, been thought of as ‘taste’ and therefore as belonging to the realm of aesthetics” (LM, T 215). It was thinking, according to Arendt, that allowed Socrates to put forward two important ethical dicta: “It is better to be wronged than do wrong” and “It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord and that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me.”13 Arendt chides Adolf Eichmann, for example, for not thinking. He reverted to stock clichés and banal answers to justify his thoughtless actions and the ensuing destruction and violence of his crimes. The banality of evil that Arendt attributes to Eichmann, his thoughtlessness, might have been avoided if he stopped to think and took responsibility for what thought brought forward. It should be remarked, at this point, that even the heroic figure of Socrates, at least as Arendt interprets him, does not have room for desire in this threefold view of thinking as maieutic/moral, stinging, and paralyzing. No mention of it occurs. If thinking makes things appear and judging helps us distinguish good from bad, beautiful from ugly, and both of these have nothing to do with desire, what about willing? What is its connection to desire? As in her treatment of judgment and thinking, Arendt looks at key thinkers who have written on the will, including Paul, Augustine, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Peter John Olivi, and German thinkers like Kant and Nietzsche. Arendt argues that desire and will are present in the soul or the psyche, but they are distinct. Will Love, Desire, and the Divine

is not identical with desire (LM, W 57). Desire, Arendt adamantly insists, withdraws when willing happens. In order to will, the will must withdraw from the immediacy of desire which, without reflecting and without reflexivity, stretches out its hand to get hold of the desired object; for the will is not concerned with objects but with projects, for instance, with the future availability of an object that it may or may not desire in the present. The will transforms the desire into an intention. And judgment, finally, be it aesthetic or legal or moral, presupposes a definitely “unnatural” and deliberate withdrawal from involvement and the partiality of immediate interests as they are given by my position in the world and the part I play in it. (LM, T 76) Willing arises out of a tension: the nolo-volo of St. Paul and Augustine is key for understanding what Arendt means by willing. When thinking makes present a situation and when judging helps us distinguish various elements in it and when they come into conflict, pushing for some resolution, this is when the will arises. Willing comes to be when one is confronted with having to respond to what thinking and judging have brought forward: one must decide yes or no, and one feels the conflict between the various thought-things that stand before us. In the end, it is the conflict that pushes the will to act or not act, to make a decision (LM, T 213). Desire and the Life of the Mind

As we have seen, Arendt, like Augustine, admits that desire or love is part of being human. Unlike Augustine, who sees desire as always pushing the mind either toward or away from God, who is love and can condition the will and reason, Arendt sees desire as its own thing, striving for its own objects, but not necessarily coloring the faculties of the mind: desire or love does not occupy a place within Arendt’s view of mind. Thinking is not moved by desire, but by Socratic wisdom and aporia. Unlike Plato, Arendt never discusses at any great length the erotic aspect of wonder. As we saw, desire can motivate knowing but not the quest for meaning. In judging, desire is not mentioned, even if what we have is incomplete on the subject, as Arendt never completed the section on judging. Finally, the will is distinguished from desire, even transforming it into intention. Augustine, true to his Neoplatonic roots, believes that the soul is always moved by desire, including all of its capacities Finding a Place for Desire

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and powers like reason and the will. They work with desire, love, in order to pursue their objects. In making the distinction between desire, thinking, judging, and willing as well as by keeping desire distinct or transforming it into something other, Arendt introduces a significant cleavage into her description of mind. Love or desire does not collaborate in any significant way with the faculties of the mind, as they are distinct and powerful, autonomous but related. Why does this matter? The separation of desire from the faculties of the mind strips these faculties of passion and pleasure, the two fundamental affects of love or desire. Surely, thinking, judging, and willing can produce their own pleasures, but when they are lived out with passion and desire the pleasures they offer can be intensified. They can also cause anguish, as Augustine admits in his Confessions. Let us recall his famous call for chastity, which he simultaneously asks to be delayed. I do believe, along with Aristotle and Epicurus, that we are born for pleasure and that pleasure is a desired end. Desire can help us achieve that end, especially if it is directed to some good, as both Aristotle and Augustine maintain. It would also be remiss not to mention that desire can produce suffering when unfulfilled or when the love goes bad. Augustine believed that the orientation of desire to the right objects, through God’s grace, could help one intensify the pleasure of reason and willing: “Hence the mind is fed by the source of joy.”14 Augustine’s conversion to God reorients his whole being and world. His Confessions are full of delightful and heart-filled praise for what God has accomplished in him. One of the great perils of correlating love and desire with the faculties of the mind is that desire may thwart the very activities of the mind, but both Augustine and Arendt admit that this is part of human fallibility. Also, according to Augustine, one can grow in love, as social relations between humans and God, and those between humans and others, can become more robust, if one commits oneself to the desire or love for God. If we correlate the faculties of mind with desire, we can have more intense experiences of the life of the mind as it lives itself out. Furthermore, such intensity of pleasure and delight can also induce us to lead a life of the mind, encouraging us to think, will, and judge, all of which can lead to a better life, alone and together. I read Arendt’s Life of the Mind as a description of the faculties of the mind and its urgent need to help make moral decisions and avert evil, as we are told at the beginning of the book, but I also believe that she wishes us to experience a kind of life that is a fruitful form of life, open to those who wish to follow it. The desire and ensuing pleasure that can come from leading such a life can motivate one to love this life, Love, Desire, and the Divine

to live it more intensely. To attach desire and love to the life of the mind enhances and intensifies life, extending it beyond the exercise of the faculties of thinking, judging, and willing. Let us not forget Socrates’s delight in the mania that can come to the lover as the lover pursues the form of love. Think of the descriptions of mania that one finds in the Phaedrus and the Ion: Socrates recognizes the place of mania in the structure of eros, even though he is critical of it, if it remains an end in itself, as it can never lead to self-disclosure. The Phaedrus shows that in the ascent to an understanding of eros, one must go through the mania of desire, but one must never rest there. There is pleasure in the mania as highlighted in both the Symposium and the Phaedrus. Indeed, this is the critique of Ion the rhapsode: he loses himself in his imitation of Homer. The eros, the driving love, that motivates us to pursue philosophy works in conjunction with the dialectic and with Socrates’s tireless questioning and indefatigable stinging. He desires it and uses the faculties of the soul to achieve it. Arendt, though admiring of Socrates, strips him of his desire, privileging the object of Socrates’s search, namely, wisdom, but not paying enough attention to the engine that drives Socrates, an engine which is constituent of wisdom itself, namely, love and desire. If we accept the Augustinian claim that we are questions to ourselves and that the experience of the aporia of our own meaning as well as the meaning of others and the world pushes us to seek answers to unanswerable questions, it would appear that the tension between question and response motivates us to dig deeper into ourselves and the reality in which we dwell. I would not disagree with such a claim, as I think Arendt captures this fundamental aspect of our reality in a deeply moving fashion, but I wish to add a possibility, namely, desire: the aporia of ourselves, which Socrates translated so brilliantly as his knowing that he did not know, can be helped along its path of discovery, of question and answer, by desire as well. We can desire to know more about ourselves, and this desire can influence acts of thinking, willing, and judging. Desire can push us, much like Socratic eros, to new situations that require the life of the mind to make sense of them, to give them meaning. If we accept the Freudian insight about the unconscious and that desire itself has unconscious aspects to its being, then perhaps desire can act as an instigator that leads us first to an aporia or a situation that makes us wonder and search out meaning. The whole of the Confessions witnesses Augustine’s quest for meaning but also his desire for meaning and understanding, a desire to love, a desire to find rest and quietude, for we are restless until we rest in God. Finding a Place for Desire

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The fact is that the life of the mind Arendt describes is marked by a powerful capacity to receive, to be impressed on, to bear: it is receptive and can be affected by the world, self, and others. In order for things to appear in thinking, for example, the mind must receive objects. The thought-things of thinking, judgments, and willed acts are not creations ex nihilo; rather, they require to be affected by things and realities, even ourselves. Desire and love can emerge as responses, both conscious and unconscious, to that which strikes the mind. Edith Stein, for example, wonderfully notes in her Münster lectures15 on philosophical anthropology that intentionality is a two-way street: the knowing subject may intend objects of consciousness in order to understand what things are, but things also intend us, they capture our intention and impress themselves on us. The reaction they produce in us could be understood in terms of desire: they elicit us, they make us desirous to think them though, judge them, to act or not act on them through acts of will or non-will. Joseph Torchia reminds us that Augustine does not view concupiscence in exclusively negative terms, for it can also turn our attention and desire to useful and enjoyable things that originate in the outside world. Our attention to things in the world can help us acquire knowledge and contemplate the world, self, others, and God. Torchia argues that Augustine is more worried about idle curiosity, understood as the desire for superfluous knowledge, rather than the concupiscence that averts our attention to important facts about the world.16 The activity that Arendt ascribes to the mind cannot be complete unless we also admit a kind of passivity or receptivity to the mind, which becomes desirous once affected by that which is not reducible to our own interiorities: self, others, and world. The activation of the mind stems, in part, not only from its own energy but also from its being elicited or solicited by desire—the mind needs to be seduced by a desire that emanates from external objects and the world. Perhaps, then, we can read desire, as does Michel Henry,17 as a passivity that can help awaken our being and the mind to live. Conclusion

Though Arendt draws heavily from her “old friend” Augustine of Hippo when it comes to thinking about love and politics, she does not extend her earlier insights on desire into her later treatment of the life of the mind. I have shown how desire is largely absent in her discussion of thinking, willing, and judging. If we admit, however, the motivating or erotic force of desire as Augustine develops it, namely, the desire to know and think as well Love, Desire, and the Divine

as the desire to know who one is in relation to others (the positive sense of concupiscentia versus curiositas), then desire can be seen to have an important place in the life of the mind. notes 1. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, trans. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Hereafter parenthetically cited as A. 2. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, “A Detour through Pietism: Hannah Arendt on St. Augustine’s Philosophy of Freedom,” Polity 20, no. 3 (1988): 394–425. See, in particular, pp. 408–9 and 416. 3. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 47–48. 4. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 30–31, 50–52. Hereafter parenthetically cited as HC. 5. Shin Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political: Love, Friendship and Citizenship,” Review of Politics 57, no. 3 (1995): 505–36; Patrick Boyle, S.J., “Elusive Neighborliness: Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of Saint Augustine,” in Amor mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt, ed. James William Bernauer (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 1987), 81–113; Patricia Bowen Moore, Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality (London: Macmillan, 1989). 6. Scott, “Detour through Pietism.” 7. Garrath Williams, “Love and Responsibility: A Political Ethic for Hannah Arendt,” Political Studies 46, no. 5 (1998): 937–50. 8. Stephan Kampowski, Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

9. Chiba, “Hannah Arendt on Love and the Political”; Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethics of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 10. Lucy Tatman, “Arendt and Augustine: More Than One Kind of Love,” Sophia 52, no. 4 (2013): 625–35. 11. Francis Moreault refers to thinking and freedom, but he largely contextualizes them in terms of a public politics. See “Hannah Arendt: Eros de la liberté de penser et amour de la liberté politique,” Horizons philosophiques 11, no. 2 (2000): 109–29. 12. Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978), Thinking, 96. Hereafter parenthetically cited as LM, T followed by the page number. Part II of the work, Willing, will be designated as LM, W followed by the page number. 13. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 181. 14. Augustine, Confessions, 299. 15. Edith Stein, Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person, ed. Beate Beckmann-Zöller, in Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe (Freiburg-imBreisgau, Germany: Herder, 2004), 123. 16. See Joseph Torchia, O.P., Restless Mind: “Curiositas” and the Scope of Inquiry in St. Augustine’s Psychology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2013). 17. Michel Henry, L’essence de la manifestation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).

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8 Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love Toward a Social-Material Theory christian lotz

But love!—yes, with Feuerbach, love is everywhere and at all times the wonderworking god who should help to surmount all difficulties of practical life—and at that in a society which is split into classes with diametrically opposite interests. At this point, the last relic of the revolutionary character disappears from his philosophy, leaving only the old cant: Love one another—fall into each other’s arms regardless of distinctions of sex or estate—a universal orgy of reconciliation! —Friedrich Engels

Introduction

Engels is not the first one to complain about conceptions of love that are all abundant, mystical, universal, essentialist, and idealized, but he is unmatched in his ironic subtlety. Essentialist conceptions of love, Engels tells us, tend to overlook the material, historical, and social form that love takes on in real individuals, that is, as formed by different interests determined by class positions. From a social-materialist standpoint, essentialist visions of love need to be rejected, and at the end of this essay we will see that contemporary versions of love that have been developed within

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recent left political philosophy, namely, by Hardt/Negri and Badiou, fall back on a similarly shaky basis and consequently turn into deeply ambivalent projects that lead to a mystification of love by giving it a metaphysical status. Against these contemporary reimaginations of love, I claim that we need to distance ourselves from these mystifications. Instead, I propose, we look again, ever more closely, at Marx’s early philosophy and see how we can develop a social-material conception of love from his decisive break with essentialism that is at once immanent, critical, and historical. Marx proposes a conception of love that is tied to its social form, inasmuch as it is unable to transcend this form as its independent ontological, ethical, or anthropological principle and foundation, despite the fact that it might have a core that points toward a new society, given the contradictions in capitalism. As such, love is not the ontological or ethical basis from which all other elements of society emerge, but one moment of a social form that depends on the categorial system of reproduction, which is the way in which love concretely exists. Love, taken here as the sensual form of being social (which in turn depends on social reproduction), remains, accordingly, distanced from religious, romantic, anthropological, or legal conceptions of love. Against such reductionisms we must maintain that love is a form of being social in which the sensual life is as complex as the social world, and not simply an abstraction from the latter. This is of especial importance for a critical theory of love. Love not only requires a different “distribution of the sensible”; rather, it is a different distribution of the sensible. The question, then, is how this distribution can be grasped as a social form. Let us see how this works in Marx, as he himself states in The Holy Family: love “cannot be construed a priori, because its development is a real one which takes place in the world of the senses and between real individuals.”1 Instead, it is tied to real individuals and cannot be seen in an ahistorical fashion, even though it needs to be grasped in its specific, that is, categorial form. I will first present reflections on love in pre-Marxian terms, as Marx’s break with essentialist conceptions of love depends on his critique of Feuerbach; I will then reconstruct Marx’s early philosophy of love as a philosophy of sensuality and expand this position by taking the “standpoint of reproduction” (Althusser) into account, before I finish with contrasting the social-material theory of love with what I conceive—despite my deep admiration for and commitment to Negri’s philosophy—as a regressive position in recent political philosophy.

Love and Politics

Feuerbach: Love as the Principle of Sensuality

In order to understand the Marxian viewpoint, we need to recall, briefly, Feuerbach’s conception of sensuality and love. Though Feuerbach reverses Hegel’s philosophy by turning Hegel’s concept of spirit into a sensual concept, according to Marx and Engels he remains tied to an abstract anthropology and essentialism that does not understand humans as social beings or their sensuality as activity. As Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach states, “Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity” (MEW 3:5). Put differently, what Marx claims is that sensual objects need to be grasped as the result and being of social activity. What we can see, feel, hear is not sensual in an abstract sense; rather, it is the result of concrete historical forms of how we are related to one another, and of how the sensual world is itself reproduced through labor. For example, seeing a table depends on and is determined by the table as the result of a social formation. It is in this context that Marx and Engels take on Feuerbach’s philosophy of love, as it is closely related to his philosophy of sensuality. Feuerbach’s conception of love, however, is not as simple as it seems, since love, for Feuerbach, is a form of self-consciousness and self-affectivity in which the sensual world is itself being felt. Love, in other words, cannot simply be an object of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach in the first Theses on Feuerbach, given that for Feuerbach love is a “meta principle” within the sensuous sphere. We are affected by sensuality in love. In this sense, affection is prior to abstract thinking and defines us as real, existing individuals. For Feuerbach the “truth of feeling” (Empfindung, i.e., in the sense of self-affection) is “the truth of love.”2 Accordingly, what we really are in our concrete existence depends on our ability to accept and embrace the sensual reality before we enter abstract thinking and reflection. The thisness of sense certainty that Hegel abstractly determines at the beginning of his Phenomenology is conceived in its full sensual extension by Feuerbach. Love, in other words, enables us to enter into a unique and nonabstract relationship with the world within which each thing remains itself and is permitted to be what it is. We might say that love individualizes our relation to the reality, as it allows us to have a nonabstract relationship with it, which is therefore also not reducible to an intersubjective relation between two persons. As Feuerbach puts it, “Someone who does not love anything—whatever the object might be—remains indifferent toward whether something exists or does not exist” (W 3:300). Feuerbach thinks of love as

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a relation toward the world and things (sensually and bodily determined) that leaves their identity and their being intact. As such, love acknowledges the difference between subject and object and does not assimilate or reduce the thing. Similarly, Feuerbach argues that only love as the real existing sensual principle is a counterweight to abstract thought, as thought, following Hegel, is based on the principle of identity (W 3:300). Love, then, becomes a universal principle of all sensuality that establishes the relations between humans and reality as well as the relation between humans and humans as I-though relationships. As love establishes the independent reality of the other (i.e., the otherness of the other as either person or thing), it becomes the principle of a flourishing existence. The more an individual differs from others, the more this individual becomes an individual. The scope of sensuality thereby determines the extent to which humans can realize themselves in the world, and the scope of the sensual world is determined by our feeling of it, that is, by our feeling of love. “The more one loves,” as Feuerbach puts it, “the richer one is, and the other way around” (W 3:302). Again, the main point is that Feuerbach presents a material, that is, an anti-speculative and anti-psychologist version of love, and, as a consequence, sensuality receives a status that it did not have in German Idealism. Recognition of what is not me, we might say, is for Feuerbach a sensual and bodily relation: “The living body [Leib] belongs to my essence; even more, the living body is in its totality my ego, my essence as such” (W 3:302). For Feuerbach, a communist is someone who knows that her real existence is tied to a bodily and sensual foundation that we share with others, which is unified and made possible by love. As Reitemeyer has it, “Love as the primordial principle of human existence opens up the possibility of living-with-each-other in sensuality.”3 Though Marx is clearly fascinated with this return to sensibility as the real foundation of existence, he accuses Feuerbach not only of overlooking the social-material determination of the sensual reality, but also of ultimately mystifying sensuality and love, as Feuerbach’s universal conception of love makes it the core and essence of every human activity: “Feuerbach’s conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to the mere intuition [Anschauung] of it, and on the other hand, to mere feeling [Empfindung]; he says ‘human being’ instead of ‘real historical human being’” (MEW 3:42). As Engels puts it rather mockingly, “But love!—yes, with Feuerbach, love is everywhere and at all times the wonder-working god who should help to surmount all difficulties of practical life—and at that in a society which is split into classes with Love and Politics

diametrically opposite interests” (MEW 21:289). Moreover, in The German Ideology Marx charges Feuerbach with abstractions: Certainly Feuerbach has a great advantage over the “pure” materialists in that he realizes how human beings, too, are an “object of the senses.” But apart from the fact that he only conceives them as an “object of the senses, not as sensuous activity,” because he still remains in the realm of theory and conceives of men not in their given social connection, not under their existing conditions of life, which have made them what they are, he never arrives at the really existing active human beings, but stops at the abstraction “human being,” and gets no further than recognizing “the true, individual, corporeal human being,” emotionally, that is, he knows no other “human relationships” “of human being to human being” than love and friendship, and even then idealized. He gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it. (MEW 3:44) Three aspects of this central passage are of importance: in essentialist conceptions of love, (1) love is abstracted from its real existing form and idealized; (2) it is not critical; and (3) it is contemplative and not practical, that is, it is not analyzed in relation to the historical development of production, productive forces, or relations of production, that is, to the real life activity of humans who reproduce themselves through and by these activities. As a consequence, the Feuerbachian sensuous world does not appear as one that is changeable and as one that is able to be subjected to revolutionary activity. As the sensuous world is not simply the result of activity, but exists only as and in activity, it is the true “motor” and movement of history itself. When, in a famous statement, Marx defines communism as the “real movement of history” (MEW 3:35) and not as the goal of history, he brings together both the sensuous world as “perceived perception” and the reproduction of this unity of perception and the perceived through labor. The unity of perception and the perceived can, thus, in a next step, be conceived as the relation between humans and nature through its reproduction, which Marx and Engels call “industry.” Accordingly, the sensuous world is identical with the stage of industry as the overall form of the sensuous world, now conceived in its social-material concreteness, and not through the lens of abstract epistemologies. As love is not conceived as an activity in Feuerbach, Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love

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Marx consequently states, “So much is this activity, this unceasing sensuous labor and creation, this production, the basis of the whole sensuous world as it now exists, that, were it interrupted only for a year, Feuerbach would not only find an enormous change in the natural world, but would very soon find that the whole world of men and his own perceptive faculty, nay his own existence, were missing” (MEW 3:44). 136 Marx: Love as Social Relation

We have reached two conclusions in the foregoing section: (1) If sensuality and perception are, as Marx puts it, the result of the whole history of humankind, then we can immediately see what is lacking in Feuerbach’s emphasis on sensuality, dialogue, and love, namely, the social and historical form of sensibility. This categorical constitution of social reality is for us today a reality constituted by the commodity form, that is, by money and capital. Love cannot be thought of independent from its mode of reproduction. (2) Feuerbach’s conception of love and dialogue remains in some sense asocial, insofar as he reduces love to an I-thou relationship. Conceiving love as a social concept, however, implies understanding it under the form that makes personal relationships possible. Love can therefore not be interpreted as intersubjective recognition, as any recognition must be mediated through the social distribution of the sensible. The last point is especially important, since the early Marx is often reduced to another version of Hegel’s philosophy of recognition. What we find, however, is the possibility of a being together that is mediated by its social form and not reducible to two. Consequently, it can also not be conceived in moral terms if by the latter we mean a-bodily relationships based on duty, commitment, principles, and so forth. Though most of those conceptions, such as Kant’s, acknowledge the “force” of sensuality, sensual love is ultimately elevated, ordered, framed, and organized by morality and morals (Sittlichkeit). Marx and Engels criticize these conceptions, as they remain abstract, speculative, and imply a degradation of bodily sensuality and a socially mediated sensibility (MEW 2:68). Let us first look at a central passage from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Marx writes, The positive transcendence of private property—that is, the perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements—should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided Love and Politics

enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his total essence in a total manner, that is to say, as a whole human being. Each of his human relations to the world—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving—in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. (MEW 40:539) The following aspect of what Marx has in mind is especially important: whereas the act of possession remains an abstraction from social reality, since it reduces the object to a subjective relation in which a person takes something away from the common and turns it into something personal, all other sensual activities are object-oriented, as these are mediated through sociality. For example, the richer and the more beautiful a work of art is, the more complex and refined the acts of seeing and participation need to be. Similarly, the richer and more complex a person I encounter is, the richer and more complex the act of personal love needs to be. Both sides are dialectically related. As Marx puts it in a telling example in the introduction to Grundrisse, “Hunger is hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth. Production thus produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively. Production thus creates the consumer” (MEW 42:27). In a similar fashion, we might say that love is love, but love that exists through contract, property, money, and capital is different from love that exists through feudal social relations. Love is therefore not simply a subjective act, defined in psychological or mental terms; rather, it is a form of sociality itself, which is related to the mode of production and the social totality of which the loved is mediated and part. Again, this does not exclude that love can occur between two individuals, but the love of two individuals cannot be grasped independently from its social form, as the social form produces the social individuals who could possibly be loved. The love between two individuals is the way society exists as this relationship. Accordingly, only this position allows us to interpret “legalized” love as something born and belonging to bourgeois society. Similarly, a position, such as Badiou’s, which claims that love is “Two” overlooks that such a position projects and depends on a conception of Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love

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society that exists in the “Two” relations. Love defined as an I-thou relationship is an idealization, as it overlooks that the conception of two-person love is a reflection of a social form and mode of (re)production that needs bourgeois love in order to reproduce itself. A specific sociality, accordingly, is already presupposed for the establishment of a person-person conception. The communism of the senses, however, describes more properly, we might say, the whole relation and the way sociality exists in its actuality. If we follow Marx and assume that sensual objects are necessarily social (and the product of social-historical reproduction), then sensual activities, including love, are necessarily social and historical, too. Accordingly, they are bound to specific modes of production and specific forms of reproducing these modes. It is therefore not so much the case, as some—most prominently Heidegger—have argued, that by reversing Fichte, Marx claims that sensuality is ultimately bound up in a metaphysics of subjectivity; rather, what we find in Marx is a rich concept of sensuality, sensual activity, and love that we need to describe, in opposition to Heidegger’s charge, as participation. Love is thought of in Marx as a way of being-in-the-world, that is, as a disclosure of social reality. The claim that all senses have been framed in modernity with a sense of having, presupposes an understanding of sensual activity as participation in and opening up of the social world. Participation is juxtaposed with being external to the social whole. The opposite of having is not being but rather sharing. Possessing things means, for Marx (at least in these early works), that we remove things from the world, that is, we remove them from their network of social relations and, thereby, that we no longer see the things “I have” as things we live with being the result of social cooperation and the production of social reality through labor. Love, thought of as “Two,” is a form of having. Love is the way in which we encounter one another socially, not personally or psychologically, as the latter are derived from the former. Sociality, however, cannot be reduced to intersubjectivity; rather, it is the framework that makes concrete intersubjective relations possible. In this way, communism of the senses is in truth common-ism of the senses through which we share the world and participate in it. Whenever capitalmediated privatization of the world occurs, we no longer participate in the whole of social relations and instead encounter one another as abstract individuals who are held together by money, capital, and the legal forms belonging to it. Accordingly, it is not simply the case that we alienate ourselves from our being human; rather, as our self-realization only occurs in social production, creativity, talking to one another, eating, and so forth, the capitalist form of reproduction establishes these self-realizations as abstract relations, that Love and Politics

is, as no longer shared in the objects we see, move, touch, change, and create. As Marx has it, “Social activity and social enjoyment exist by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity and directly communal enjoyment, although communal activity and communal enjoyment—that is, activity and enjoyment which are manifested and affirmed in actual direct association with other men—will occur wherever such a direct expression of sociability stems from the true character of the activity’s content and is appropriate to the nature of the enjoyment” (MEW 40:528). Accordingly, love cannot be grasped in an essential sense as a property of human beings as such; instead, love as sensuality is a historical relationship, which can only be understood in its concrete social-material practice, that is, as a social relation determined by the form of reproduction under which these social relations are constituted. Love, then, is a form of social participation and not, as some contemporary Marxists claim, a property of life as such. The Standpoint of Reproduction: Capitalist Love

As a consequence of how I have argued in the prior section of this essay, we need to claim that breaking down the essentialist position involves an analysis of love under the capitalist mode of production. As we know, the capitalist form of social reality is ruled by real abstractions such as money, commodity form, and capital. If love is to survive in capitalism, then it must have its form, that is, it must exist in a way that it can be subsumed by capital itself. Put simply, love under capitalism must be able to become part of the overall capital accumulation and its principle of generating more money out of money. Love can only exist as a general form of social relationship if it is productive in the favor of capital. Consequently, it must first take on the money form (which establishes its exchangeability in, for example, class-bound marriage, sex work, love markets, and labor-related effects between the genders) and then the capital form (the production of surplus value in relation to the money form of love). Put differently, it must exist in commodifiable ways in order to become a value-relevant category within societies that are determined by capital (i.e., love depends on a network of products, industries, consumption, etc.). The following three aspects of love under current capitalism are important: love must be bound to the existence of classes, it needs to fit the commodity form, and it increasingly takes on a rational character. In what follows, I briefly outline these aspects. The difficulty in detecting the existence of classes in capitalist modes of love lies in its ideological character, which exists in the fetishism of the Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love

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commodity form. Social divisions, the relation between gender and labor/ capital, as well as the real class structure of love, gets covered over by its own ideological structure, which projects a universal image of love as the intimate bond between two people that seems to transcend all class divisions. This image does not exist in the form of mental imaginations and representations, but primarily exists in the form of a wide-ranging system of industries that produce love and loving individuals through psychological and educational techniques, images, products, food, and travel. In addition, since it places women into a double exploitive position of being value-related through increasing integration into the labor market and of being excluded through non-value-related reproduction work (such as care, education, love, etc.), it can also be successfully projected and marketed as an ideal that seems to be achievable for all classes so that the individuals within the classes no longer experience this projection of love as one that capital produces, which is ultimately exclusively in the interest of capital. Ironically, the more we experience our modern forms of love as being “liberated,” “independent,” “enlightened,” and so forth, the more we actually become dependent on capital itself, as the liberating effects of modern forms of love are only possible through its increasing subjection to the commodity form. Through the commodity form love is produced as a specific need and as desire within an ever-expanding system that has taken on affects, language, desires, self and body descriptions, as well as all general “noetic” activities of humans. Indeed, general human activities and abilities are now subjected to capital by and through noetic industries, such as electronics, chips, digitization, medicine, chemical industries, media, and immaterial labor, as well as by control and communication as general principles of labor organization—as a consequence, human activities are increasingly becoming productive through these transformations. Love is no exception. As the reproduction of the relations of production produces the needs and desires, that is, the types of subjectivities that can function within and for the overall social reproduction, love does not exist in some mysterious mental, philosophical, religious, or “intersubjective” space; rather, it becomes a fine-grained system of productive activities, tasks, and relations that bring it about as something that fits the commodity form. Even religious ideas of love can nowadays only exist in a contemporary commodity-related way, mediated by technologies, capitalist spaces, book industries, transportation, and the “advertisement” of these ideas on religious broadcasting shows: capitalism “has made emotions into micro public spheres, that is, domains of action submitted to the public gaze.”4 Ideology Love and Politics

is always material. Advertisement industries, image production, therapeutic discourses, TV shows, travel industries, communication techniques in companies, and the beauty industries in general produce and create loving and desiring subjects that experience a “natural” desire to express “love” through the consumption of products that enable love to function in capitalism, that is, productively. This mode of consumption, as some have argued, is deeply related to the production of “therapeutic” selves that are increasingly, on the one hand, forced to objectify and rationalize themselves, and, on the other hand, forced to project ever more romantic and utopian ideas of love: “We are increasingly split between a hyper-rationality which has commodified and rationalized the self, and a private world increasingly dominated by self-generated fantasies.”5 The class aspect of all this can be seen in two respects: on the one hand, class is the effect of the division of capital and labor (now including all human activities), and, on the other hand, class is related to the global divisions implied in our system of commodity production. Using your beauty product that makes you smell good and ready for a romantic evening with sex and champagne is, in fact, through its current system of social relations, related to the proletarians who produce shampoo bottles in China, to designers who produce the sexy smell connected to your shampoo in Southeast Asia, to researchers all over the world who try to find the most animating smells by spending grants on psychological and neurological research, and to the chemical knowledge produced and patented in the United States at MIT. What we are really consuming, then, is not simply a product, that is, a means or an instrument to realize our love (“I have a romantic evening with my partner” or “I have a date”); rather, love is ultimately identical with the real existing network of all these relations implied in the way we love, such as online dating, yellow press journals, film, Dr. Phil, restaurants, Valentine’s Day specials, and sex toys. Love is becoming productive because it is framed by a distribution of loving subjects that, in turn, are created as consumers of love products and activities related to these products. In one word, it is ultimately standardized love though we as agents might not experience it that way. The distribution of the sensible is framed and produced through a capitalist schema that makes “love” possible. All of the aforementioned aspects, each of which would deserve treatment on its own, lead to two consequences: on the one hand, love becomes a task to which we have to respond, continuously, as the systemic pressure to live love productively is experienced as a possible failure and results in psychological problems, emotional discussions, and further Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love

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communication (which, in turn, can then be subjected to capital again). On the other hand, problems we have through our labor-related activities are now in the same fashion love related, as love is in fact really subsumed by capital. What we experience as a “problematization” of love is in truth the adaptation of love to its socioeconomic frame. As Illouz has it, “This in turn suggests a somewhat paradoxical observation: the therapeutic persuasion offers a variety of techniques to enable awareness of one’s need and emotions, but it also makes emotions into objects external to the subject, to be observed and controlled.”6 Additionally, the task and labor character of love, despite its romantic and “irrational” images, leads to a general “intellectualization of intimate bonds,”7 that is, it is instrumentally controlled. Finally, the gender divisions and the division between productive and unproductive (reproductive) work, which is mainly done by women, get buried under these processes of rationalization. Illouz underestimates this aspect, as she does not connect her analysis to a critique of political economy. For example, her thesis that love is tied to a contradiction between classless emotion and the “market based romantic utopia”8 underestimates that the romantic vision is itself not universal, but based on the standpoint of capital that produces the transcending and boundless idea of what love is. For lower-class and minority women in particular, love is work that needs to be done in addition to labor both at home and in the labor market.9 In sum, this brief description of the capitalist mode of love shows further evidence for the claim that essentialist and I-thou conceptions of love are ultimately meaningless, as they take the individuals involved as “abstract” entities that are as such not dependent on what made them, in fact, possible, such as their class position, their labor, as well as the dialectical relations between production, consumption, distribution, exchange, and subjectivity (i.e., need and desire). Love in Recent Materialist Theories: A Critique

In recent work of radical philosophers, rather surprisingly, love has been the object of reflection, particularly in Negri/Hardt’s writings on empire and in Badiou’s essays and interviews on love. Both positions need to be rejected from a social-material position, however, as they either, in Negri’s case, turn love (again) into a metaphysical and speculative principle or, in Badiou’s case, take it to be an “event” that, being truth-related, reorganizes the reality for only Two. In this concluding section I shall offer brief critical Love and Politics

remarks about their conceptions that stand in opposition to the position developed in this essay. Negri/Hardt

Negri and Hardt’s reflections on love are related to their overall reflections on the multitude and its political potential, as well as to their concept of immaterial labor that, they claim, can no longer be grasped with Marx’s theory of value. Negri/Hardt try to uncover a conception of love that can be used for political imagination. On the one hand, as they argue in Commonwealth, love is creative and disruptive. It is, as they put it, “an ontological event in that it marks a rupture with existing being. . . . To say love is ontologically constitutive, then, simply means that it produces the common.”10 Although love is here conceived as both an ontological and social concept, Negri and Hardt’s conception of love should be confronted with the argument that I presented in this essay, namely, that we need to think about love as having a specific social-historical form. Again, conceiving love as an ontological concept leads to the return of empty universal concepts, and Negri and Hardt’s “descriptions” of love are, consequently, totally emptied of any specific content. As they argue, love should be understood as “the production of singularities and the composition of singularities in a common relationship.”11 Accordingly, both love as constitution and love as composition are put up against “identitarian” conceptions of love (family, nation, race, neighbor) as well as “unification” conceptions of love (romantic love, commodified love, religious love). Difference, in other words, is the key term for Negri/Hardt, and Negri in particular ties the concept to ontology and Spinoza, insofar as love is taken to be the desire of life not only to conserve its life, but also to develop it from within.12 As a consequence, they reject conceptions of love that bring the multitude into a unified social form. Instead, they propose a poetic vision of love as “wasp-orchid love.”13 Whatever this poetic image might contain, as long as it is not conceptualized in the context of concrete productive activities and, instead, is abstractly taken to be productive as such, love remains an empty abstraction and can stand in for everything. As long as it is not seen in the context of social organization, even if this organization is no longer capitalist and directed toward the “common,” love is here somehow conceived as being beyond its social form—ahistorical. This ontological conception is in danger of falling back onto an empty essentialism that we had already rejected Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love

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above with Marx. What Negri imagines is a truly anarchic form of love, the pure ability to love, distributed before all social distribution, productive before any specific productive and social horizon. If, however, I argue, life reproduces itself through labor and expresses itself in and through its productive relations, then it cannot be conceived as pure productive immanence, as the body, nature, and desire (self ) are the mediations and forms through which life becomes productive life. Consequently, against the essentialism of Negri and Hardt, love from a Marxian point of view must be understood as a social form of sensual distribution and not as the cause, force, or ground for something other than itself. If love is production and composition, as Negri and Hardt try to argue, then the social (and even the political) is conceived as the effect of the being of life. So, even if we follow Negri and Hardt’s reconceptualizations, love as a sensual praxis is at the same time a communal praxis or an activity in community. It is very difficult to see how this “communalization” of the senses would not be related to some form of unification. As such, it can of course exist in myriad relations, such as in eating, drinking, playing, and laboring, but even in a noncapitalist future love will be object-mediated and therefore socially related to the form under which this noncapitalist society is constituted. Only a different form of products and production can lead to a different form of love, but as “pure possibility” it has no form and, hence, no social-categorical determination. A non-categorial love is nothing at all and remains empty. Negri/Hardt claim that “love is able . . . to generate new forms of conviviality, of living together, that affirm the autonomy and interaction of singularities in the common.”14 This thoroughly non-dialectical position neglects the simple fact that love as such, pure and simple, cannot create ex nihilo its form, given that, according to their own position, it does not have a form. Accordingly, we need to critically ask, why should love produce “conviviality” and not, for example, war, destruction, and commodified love? Why, given its emptiness, would it necessarily lead to the positive results Negri and Hardt have in mind? I do not think that they give any argument for speculative assumptions implied in their analysis. The causal connection, in other words, that is implied in their claim that love necessarily brings out “conviviality” is nowhere explained and justified. Though I much appreciate their attempt to come up with a communist idea of love, the abstract way they deal with the social as something external to the productivity of life is precisely what Engels scoffs at in the quote with which this essay started out.15 Love and Politics

Interestingly, Hardt/Negri not only return to Spinoza with their conception, as they claim, but also to some aspects of pre-Marxian utopian socialism à la Moses Hess, who in his Communist Credo says the following: “It is love itself, which creates everything and makes its regeneration possible.”16 As a consequence, then, this merging of God into life itself and the attempt to reach a point of immanence leaves out, as I claim, the standpoint of reproduction, which will not suddenly disappear in a future society based on the multitude. Badiou

Badiou argues that love is an event within which a world is constructed that overcomes the “One.” Though he argues against romantic notions of love and, instead, brings love closer to truth “that derives from difference as such,”17 he nevertheless claims that the world that overcomes the “One” is only a world of “Two,” which is established by difference. Love, he says, “is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One, but from the perspective of Two,”18 the constitution of which comes about through “commitment” and “fidelity.” As Badiou rejects ethical interpretations of love, perhaps we should name his conception “militant love.” This militant love has, according to Badiou, three aspects: subjectivation, incorporation, and that it follows a procedure. For the sake of brevity, I shall only discuss these aspects briefly. Once the event of love has taken place, the thus-far inexistent element of love takes on an “intensity” that “passes from the minimal or nil degree to the maximal one.”19 As Badiou argues, this intensity turns the body into a body of truth, which is in this case a body of love. As such, this body is, in Badiou’s terminology, a “subjectivizable” body, since through the incorporation of love the individual becomes a subject of love. The effects of the statement “I love you” lead to a quasi-Christian conversion (though Badiou avoids references to the Christian tradition) that decenters all narcissistic enjoyments into affects incorporated into the body of love.20 The “intensity” of love depends on how faithfully the initial declaration is transformed into and becomes the body. As a consequence, as Badiou in his essay on the idea of communism similarly argues, this conception of love is modeled after a revolutionary moment in which an idea is incorporated into a “body of truth,” thereby establishing a procedure to follow. This procedure is imposed on a militant subject that becomes an idea by accepting its internal implications for future history. Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love

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In light of what I have outlined in this essay, we should remain skeptical about Badiou’s position, mainly for two reasons: first, the difference between the committed subject of love and the committed subject of politics remains unclear.21 Though both, according to Badiou, are based on the same procedure, one establishes the world for Two, whereas the other establishes the world for everyone, as Badiou assumes that politics is ultimately based on the idea of an egalitarian society. The consequences implied by the “becoming truth of the body” and the consequences implied by the “becoming love of the body” are opposed to each other, insofar as a political procedure requires a militant discipline, a rigorous form of organization, and so forth, but the love procedure requires fidelity alone. Unfortunately, Badiou does not offer any criteria to differentiate between love and other “events” that are declared and named in a similar fashion. For example, one could argue that the primordial statement “I hate you” initiates the same procedure that Badiou argues belongs, exclusively, to love. In order to differentiate these phenomena, however, Badiou would need to offer a psychological distinction between love and hate, which his ontological framework does not permit him to introduce. Hate is, then, for Badiou only something that appears in politics and requires an enemy.22 But this thesis is not very convincing, given that one can operate against a political enemy—even when both enemies are militant—without hating this enemy. When both aspects are taken together, Badiou’s quasi-existentialist version of militant love remains (similar to Negri’s conception) unsatisfactory, inasmuch as the same mystification of love takes place in his account. Instead of determining love as a social relation, it is in some sense its opposite, namely, an asocial relation, for it separates the lovers from the whole of society. This fact is supported by Badiou’s claim that love is not a relation; rather, it is a “situation.”23 Put differently, the “Two” introduces a new division, namely, the division between the “Two” and the “Third.” Importantly, this division between the lovers and society cannot be covered over by Badiou’s claim that certain social formations, such as communism, allow for a reinvention of love.24 Consequently, turning love into the absolute separation of the lovers from the social, which is visible in the total commitment towards the other, mystifies it as an abstract notion and universal human possibility, within which the love between Mickey and Mallory Knox and the love between two New Guinea tribe members are the same as the love between Tristan and Isolde.25 In this way, Badiou’s notion of love is, in its essence, the ideological projection of a specific (modern) version of love into the realm of abstract considerations. Love and Politics

Conclusion

Instead of thinking about love in terms of a truth procedure (Badiou) or an ontological event (Negri), we should see its social character and thereby turn our attention to its particular social productivity. As Bertolt Brecht writes in “Me-ti,” “The most excellent are able to bring their love in harmony with other productions; their kindness becomes then a universal kindness, and their creative manner becomes useful for many, and they support everything productive.”26 notes 1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx Engels Werke, 42 vols. (Berlin: Dietz, 1956–2014), 2:23. Hereafter parenthetically cited as MEW. All quotations are checked for their accuracy, as some older translations of Marx’s work are at times inadequate. The reader can easily check my English citations by searching for phrases in the Marx and Engels Internet Archive, at http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/index.htm, which contains the collected works by Marx/Engels in English. 2. Ludwig Feuerbach, Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Erich Thies (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 3:301. Hereafter parenthetically cited as W. 3. Ursula Reitemeyer, Philosophie der Leiblichkeit: Ludwig Feuerbach’s Entwurf einer Philosophie der Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 126. 4. Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 2007), 37. 5. Ibid., 113. 6. Ibid., 35. 7. Ibid., 34. 8. Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 111. 9. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminine Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 23–27. 10. Michael Hardt and Anotonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 181. 11. Ibid., 183.

12. See Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2008), 166. 13. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 188. 14. Ibid., 380. 15. Hardt implicitly contradicts this position in a different essay on the commons and communism, in which he says the following: “Instead the positive content of communism, which corresponds to the abolition of private property, is the autonomous human production of subjectivity, the human production of humanity—a new seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving.” “The Common in Communism,” in The Idea of Communism, ed. Slavoij Žižek and Costas Douzinas (London: Verso, 2010), 141. Using the formula “a new loving,” which presupposes different forms of love, implies that speaking of “love” as an undefined “potentiality” does not make much sense. 16. Moses Hess, The Holy History of Mankind, and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 127. 17. Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012), 38. 18. Ibid., 29. 19. Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Louise Burchill (London: Polity Press, 2011), 83. 20. Ibid., 88. 21. Badiou himself operates with analogies. For example, the “obscure” form of love, jealousy, is paralleled with fascism (Second Manifesto, 103). The analogy with “revolutionary politics” is drawn in

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Badiou, In Praise, 61. It is, then, consehe claims that there is something univerquent, though deeply disturbing, to see sal in all stories and literature about love Badiou admiring the “intensity” of love (In Praise, 39). Accordingly, even the love for leaders such as Stalin (70). between Tristan and Isolde must fall 22. Badiou, In Praise, 71. under his general notion of love. 23. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven 26. Bertolt Brecht, “Me-ti: Buch der Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2008), Wendungen,” in Prosa 3: Sammlungen 182. und Dialoge, vol. 18, ed. Werner Hecht, 24. Badiou, In Praise, 73. Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and 25. On the one hand, Badiou claims that the Klaus-Detlef Müller (Frankfurt am Main: love between Tristan and Isolde is not a Suhrkamp, 1995), 176. love based on “Two.” On the other hand,

Love and Politics

9 Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil on the Significance of Love for Politics sophie bourgault

I don’t think that you can mix up love and politics. In my opinion, the “politics of love” is a meaningless expression. I think that when you begin to say “Love one another,” that can lead to a kind of ethics, but not to any kind of politics. . . . The problem politics confronts is the control of hatred, not of love. —Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

There has been a remarkable surge of interest in the affects and emotions in political science in recent decades, and perhaps among the most surprising objects of this scholarship has been love. Among countless others, Elizabeth Porter has shown the significance of compassion for international relations, Michael Morell has underscored the intimate ties between empathetic love and democratic deliberation, and Michael Slote and Martha Nussbaum have both shown the degree to which love/empathy can be vital means to social justice.1 If Nussbaum concedes that compassion is not “the entirety of justice,” she insists that it ought to be regarded as “the basic social emotion” and as the bridge to a more egalitarian and just society.2 Naturally, not everyone has been receptive to Nussbaum’s thesis or to Slote’s paean to empathy and caring: many feminists have insisted that to celebrate the “feminine” virtue of empathy (or to link it up to activities

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traditionally associated with women) is extremely problematic. Numerous others have insisted that to base our hopes for meaningful citizenship practices, social justice, or world peace on love is at best utterly naïve, at worst highly hazardous. Sometimes pointing to the work of Machiavelli or Nietzsche, many of these critics have argued that there is a great risk that this politics of empathy/love might turn into empty sentimentality or a cult of suffering.3 Besides, wasn’t there something to Nietzsche’s claims that to offer compassion/pity is “as good as to offer contempt,” and that humans ought to share joy rather than suffering?4 And thus the quarrel goes on between the fans of Rousseau and the fans of Nietzsche, between the fans of compassion and its detractors. This chapter proposes to look anew at this important scholarly dispute over the significance and desirability of love and compassion in politics by turning to two twentieth-century writers whose work appears to capture the most extreme positions that could be taken in this battle: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil.5 Readers familiar with Arendt’s work will recall the fervor with which she denounced compassion in On Revolution and the care she took to underscore, in The Human Condition, the degree to which love had no place in action. It is not without reason that her work has been so often invoked by the anti-compassion camp in recent years.6 Arendt was convinced that love was “not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces” (HC 242)—a remarkable claim on the part of an author who considered giving the title Amor mundi to her famous paean to active citizenship, The Human Condition. The contrast with French philosopher Simone Weil could not—at least at first glance—be starker. While Weil is not as well-known as Arendt, her contribution to political thought has been increasingly acknowledged in the last ten years. Many commentators have shown the sharpness of the essays she wrote on such varied topics as Marxism, colonialism, technology, and Greek tragedy. More important for our purposes, Weil penned rich reflections on the political significance of compassion and its intimate ties to justice. Weil went so far as to claim that the only way to get closer to a just society was through the “madness of love.”7 Not only did Weil theorize compassion, she also actively practiced it—as several of her biographers have indicated. Indeed, Weil is commonly remembered as a “saint” and a martyr, as an intense and strange intellectual (a cross between Jesus, Joan of Arc, and Marx), as a radical activist who felt such deep love for the poor and hungry prisoners of war that she put her life at risk by forsaking food. Weil once noted that her compassion for the suffering of the poor and of the Love and Politics

French people (under the Occupation) was simply unbearable.8 It would be tempting to draw a sharp contrast between this declaration and Arendt’s well-known assertion that she never experienced love for any collectivity or group.9 The contrast would certainly be comforted by much scholarly literature: if Weil has been chastised by commentators for her undue compassion and her disturbing love of poverty, Arendt has been criticized for being overly “heartless” and cold10—especially following the controversy stirred by Eichmann in Jerusalem. What we will see below is that while these accusations are not completely baseless, they do rest on accounts of Weil’s and Arendt’s works and lives that are quite simplistic. Neither the label of “compassionate saint” attached to Weil, nor that of “heartless individualist” attached to Arendt, captures the complexity of their life experience or political thought. In the first three parts of the chapter, we will discuss some of the main reasons informing Arendt’s case against compassion and we will consider how Weil might have tackled these had she lived long enough to read Arendt. We will pay particular attention to the intimate connections Arendt drew both between compassion and speechlessness, and between compassion and the needy body. What I will indicate is that Weil and Arendt’s distinct positions are highly dependent on Weil’s Platonist and Arendt’s phenomenological perspectives on things political. Finally, in the concluding part of the essay, I will show that despite their fairly distinct positions on compassion’s role in politics, both women agreed that solutions to modern ills should include “sober” kinds of love—a political philia. I also note briefly that a positive outlook on love need not necessarily entail a progressive politics. Indeed, Arendt and Weil were both wary of efforts aimed at translating “love” into strong welfare state measures and, more important, they both worried about the large bureaucratic apparatus that typically accompany such measures. Compassion’s Awkwardness with Words and the Problem of Publicity Compassion . . . remains, politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence. —Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

In On Revolution, Arendt suggests that one of the main reasons the American Revolution succeeded where the French one failed is that the latter was besieged by great concerns about the poverty of le peuple. As a result, the French revolutionaries were overtaken by “the most powerful and perhaps Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

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the most devastating passion motivating revolutionaries, the passion of compassion” (OR 66). And sadly enough, the story only repeated itself throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (OR 65). The “problem” of compassionate love was thus of utmost importance for Arendt: after all, a great part of her lifelong intellectual project was to rehabilitate the dignity of action (most clearly manifested in revolutionary politics) and to better understand the forces that can corrupt it. Chief among the sources of corruption of revolutionary politics was, in her view, compassion (and its twin brother, pity). One of the main reasons Arendt is convinced that compassion is so antithetical to action is that she regards it as incapable of speech. While at times she goes so far as to claim that compassion is completely mute (OR 80–81; HC 168), Arendt most typically suggests that an individual overwhelmed with compassion will simply be “[awkward] with words” (OR 81). If feelings are fit to produce sounds or gestures, they cannot yield persuasive speeches. The examples to which Arendt appeals in On Revolution in order to illustrate her claims are those of Billy Budd and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Readers will recall that Melville’s work tells the tragic story of seaman Billy—a truly virtuous young man, good to all and loved by all, except for one horrid fellow named Claggart. Envious of Billy, Claggart falsely accuses him of mutiny. When he is summoned by the captain and asked to respond to the charge, Billy is unable to speak—he simply stammers. Billy may be a good and compassionate man, but these qualities are damning, according to Arendt: Billy is incapable of what matters for action—namely, arguments and mastery of the art of persuasion. Indeed, compassion (like goodness more generally) simply cannot learn the “arts of persuasion and arguing” (OR 82). For Arendt, what is even more damning (and politically significant) is that precisely because of his awkwardness with words, Billy’s response to the accusations could only be a violent and deadly one (OR 82). The rest of the story further serves to reinforce Arendt’s perspective on compassion and speechlessness: Billy is condemned to death and until the very end of his life remains filled with compassion for the suffering of others (including for Captain Vere). To the end, Billy thus remains dumb (alogos). His last words—“God bless Captain Vere!”—do not constitute speech according to Arendt: they are, at best, a “gesture,” one of compassion for a man who will be tormented by guilt over Billy’s death (OR 81). For Arendt, the world of politics can be divided roughly into two great types: first, the “good” politics of speech, persuasion, power, and freedom; second, the “bad” politics of silence, violence, and force (e.g. HC 26). Billy’s stammering Love and Politics

and “awkwardness with words” inevitably limit him to the type of human interactions that belong to the latter category. Arendt thinks that a similar lesson about compassion can be drawn out of the story of the Grand Inquisitor—and, more specifically, out of Jesus’s silence. We know that Dostoevsky’s Jesus does listen attentively to the Grand Inquisitor, but the only response he can come up with is a kiss, a compassionate gesture. Arendt argues that one of the reasons feelings are not likely to produce a verbal response is that they are simply too intense, they strike us “in the flesh” (OR 80, 84). And as she insists in The Human Condition, intense feelings are incommunicable (51). It is because Jesus listens with such intense compassion that his encounter with the Inquisitor can only end with “the gesture of the kiss, not . . . [with] words” (OR 81). What cannot be communicated and discussed among human beings is, for Arendt, politically irrelevant. Melville and Dostoevsky both knew this: “Jesus’s silence  .  .  . and Billy Budd’s stammer indicate the same, namely their incapacity (or unwillingness) for all kinds of predicative or argumentative speech, in which someone talks to somebody about something that is of interest to both because it inter-est, it is between them. Such talkative and argumentative interest in the world is entirely alien to compassion, which is directed solely, and with passionate intensity, toward suffering man himself” (OR 81–82). Since politics is so heavily about speech (we could even go so far as to claim that Arendtian action is speech), then what is speechless must necessarily be unfit for action. We can thus make sense of Arendt’s thesis that what cannot be put into words is “irrelevant and without consequence” from the perspective of politics or of the world (OR 81). Arendt is not making a factual observation about compassion’s “irrelevance”: she knows, after all, that compassion and pity can have grave consequences on politics (the Terror convinced her of that). Arendt’s observation is rather a normative one: she invites us to consider compassion as an emotion that ought to be placed at a safe distance from politics in light of its speechlessness, its intensity, and its tendency to abolish the distance between citizens (a distance necessary for the existence of the public realm) (HC 52). The immense importance Arendt attaches to speech is largely the result of her phenomenological approach. And it is certainly in light of Arendt’s phenomenology of publicity that we can best appreciate the reasons behind her critique of compassion and also, more generally, her great suspicion vis-à-vis all motives,11 passions, and sentiments. Like her former teacher Heidegger, Arendt was convinced that appearance is reality, that living things possess an urge for self-display or self-revealing (LM 20–21). For Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

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something to exist and possess political significance, it has to be seen and heard by another (HC 50). As she writes in The Life of the Mind, “Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator” (19). But there is more: without the presence of different (plural) others, an individual cannot be sure that she, or the world, exists. And it is in that context that words come to play such an immense role. Arendt explains, This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his words and his deeds; yet obviously the affinity between speech and revelation is much closer than that between action and revelation. . . . Without the accompaniment of speech, at any rate, action would not only lose its revelatory character, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject, as it were . . . the actor, the doer of deeds, is possible only if he is at the same time the speaker of words. The action he begins is humanly disclosed by the word, and though his deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done and intends to do. (HC 179; emphasis added) I have cited this passage at length because it captures what most defines Arendtian politics, and also because it will help us draw out most clearly the area of disagreement between Arendt and Weil. Indeed, if Arendt sometimes defines action in terms of both “words and deeds” (HC 198), we clearly see in the passage above that what mattered to her the most is talk (MDT 25). Deeds devoid of speech, deeds by themselves, have no meaning; they cannot reveal an actor. Others have to hear me give an account of my deed and discuss its worth; others can and must give further accounts of my deeds. And it is because these others are plural that their words matter. “Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position,” explains Arendt. “This is the meaning of public life. . . . Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity . . . can worldly reality truly and reliably appear” (HC 57). It is thus through verbal exchange, through the public formulation of claims and the public sharing of stories, that we reveal ourselves and that our existence is confirmed. Only words are truly fit to respond to the most important question posed by fellow human beings, “Who are you?” Emotions, sounds, and gestures (like the intense ones Love and Politics

experienced by Billy and Jesus) do not possess that revelatory power and are thus unworldly. Part of the beauty and the problem with the passions and other phenomena of the inner life is that they cannot be seen or experienced directly by others; there is always a mediation taking place. I have to describe my feeling in order for others to be able to sense it (if imperfectly); some words (and thought) are required in order to make my feeling “fit to enter the world” (HC 168). Moreover, even if our fellow citizens could, somehow, get a little glimpse of our inner lives, it would be too brief to be significant. In Arendt’s view, feelings and passions are too fleeting to be perceived by others for long enough, and this is one of the reasons why she considers them “unworldly” (LM 40). And besides, in contrast to a (military) deed or a stirring political speech, which can serve to show how unique one is, our emotions are incapable of establishing distinctions. Indeed, one more reason why Arendt doubts that our inner life might have political significance is that she is convinced our psychic life is at base banal and unexceptional (it is “typical,” as she suggests in The Human Condition) (206). Apart from the mentally ill, nobody can shine or distinguish themselves through their emotional lives. As she puts it bluntly in The Life of the Mind, “It always remains true that ‘inside we are all alike’” (37). Weil on Love, Speechlessness, and Suffering

What we have seen thus far is that compassion is “politically irrelevant” and unworldly, according to Arendt, because it cannot be perceived by others, it abolishes the distance between us, and it is speechless (or at best, “awkward with words”). Weil could not be more in agreement with Arendt on the latter point: as we will see, she is convinced that compassion tends to be mute, that it prefers gestures and silence to elaborate arguments and speeches. But this is precisely the reason why Weil thought compassion (or love of neighbor)12 to be of utmost political importance. In her writings from the early 1940s, Weil insisted that what was most needed in France was more compassion in courts, schools, factories, and, more generally, in our daily interactions with others. What sociopolitical reforms should aim for is not more speech (or more deliberative “noise”), but rather, more compassionate silence. Let us look more closely at the reasons for these remarkable and counterintuitive claims. Throughout her life, Weil concerned herself with the problem of affliction. “Suffering” (souffrance) and “affliction” (malheur) are terms of art in Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

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her work; Weil insists repeatedly on the importance of this distinction. If all individuals have to struggle with some suffering in their lives (it is part of the human condition), only some will experience true affliction. Malheur for Weil entails not only significant physical and mental distress; it also includes social degradation, humiliation, and a painful invisibility (WG 134). As she explains, “Affliction is a device for pulverizing the soul; the man who falls into it is like a workman who gets caught up in a machine. He is no longer a man but a torn and bloody rag on the teeth of a cog-wheel” (HP 331). The analogy drawn to machinery and the workman is not fortuitous: labor (and factory technology) were crucial objects of reflection throughout Weil’s life. Taking a leave of absence from her teaching job in order to work in factories for a year at the age of twenty-five, Weil sought to understand better the nature of oppression. What she discovered therein and described in her Journal d’usine was the peculiar type of affliction that flows from the inability to use one’s thought at work, from the humiliating submission to a foreman, and from the harmful relationship of the worker to time (the inevitable upshot of piecework). But malheur can also be found outside of factories—Weil considered it ubiquitous among prostitutes, prisoners, the unemployed, and the homeless. What matters most for us here is that one of the elements Weil identifies with affliction is the compromising of one’s ability to speak clearly, to formulate strong claims. Affliction tends to be mute and it makes mute (in part because of the shame attached to it).13 Arendt expressed a similar idea in her “Thoughts on Lessing”: unlike joy and gladness, which she considered “talkative” and communicable, she described sadness and suffering as dumb (alogos).14 But if Arendt thought that this speechlessness was primarily the result of the intensity of the affective phenomena, Weil explained it by appealing to the limited cultural capital and education of the afflicted. Weil describes as follows what happens when the afflicted are the object of injustices, insecurity, or harm: “They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out. . . . When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard” (HP 332–33).15 It is in light of this that Weil suggests that what social life urgently requires—in addition to measures aimed at redressing material deprivation16—is more silence and more compassion. Given that the afflicted speak inaudibly and given that their claims are often too hesitant and jumbled to be taken seriously, it is most urgent that political leaders, judges, police officers, and all individuals in positions of authority learn the art of Love and Politics

compassion—which is understood by Weil as the art of listening attentively. In her reflections on “love of the neighbor,” Weil goes so far as to claim (in a moment of flippancy fairly characteristic of her) that it would be better for an uneducated and penniless individual to face a death sentence than to go through our modern penal system. “Nothing is more frightful,” she writes, “than the spectacle, now so frequent, of an accused, whose situation provides him with nothing to fall back upon but his own words, and who is incapable of arranging these words because of his social origin and lack of culture, as he stands broken down by guilt, affliction and fear, stammering before judges who are not listening and who interrupt him in tones of ostentatious refinement” (WG 97; emphasis added). For Weil, when a compassionate judge or a police officer truly listens to what is said by an accused, what is offered is not simply a comforting feeling but, much more significantly, an identity. A truly attentive gaze offers recognition; it makes one real. If Weil and Arendt were both convinced that one of the most painful things for an individual to experience is invisibility (or lack of recognition), a crucial difference in their treatments of social recognition rests with Weil’s belief that compassion can be an important means to sociopolitical recognition. For Weil, only love can see “what is invisible” (WG 92). If Arendt believed that only the existence of those we hear is fully recognized, Weil rather wished to insist that “among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized” (GG 64; emphasis added). For Weil, it is love and attention that are truly creative and identity-giving. It is for this reason that Weil suggests that the afflicted “have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them attention.” As she explains, “The love of our neighbor . . . means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction” (WG 64). This helps us make sense of Weil’s claim that what a healthy civic life requires is not simply talk, but even more important, attentive listening: “The spirit of justice . . . is nothing else but a certain kind of attention, which is pure love” (HP 36). Not surprisingly, Weil considers the love of our neighbor as a perfectly legitimate and powerful impetus for political participation. If Arendt saw the longing for immortality and glory as the greatest motivations for entering politics (and one sees here her Machiavellian pedigree), Weil shunned these and stressed, instead, compassion as a most potent motive for civic involvement. In “Luttons-nous pour la justice?” she was Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

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explicit: “Compassion is, for any kind of action (including military ones), a much more commanding motive than the longing for greatness, glory, and even honor. It leads one to put aside everything for the sake of the struggle [for justice]” (EL 56; my translation). While this section has underscored a remarkable difference in Weil’s and Arendt’s perspectives on the issue of compassion’s dumbness, what should be noted here is that Weil does not entirely eschew Arendt’s thesis regarding the revelatory power of speech: she, too, knows that individuals become more socially “significant” and visible when they can offer “great speeches,” when they can give a coherent account of their deeds. It is for this reason that Weil insisted that a better public education system was urgently needed in postwar Europe, to increase the cultural and linguistic capital of the less privileged. She writes, “What is first needed is a system of public education capable of providing [the afflicted] with means of expression; and next, a regime in which the public freedom of expression is characterized not so much by freedom as by an attentive silence in which [their] faint and inept cry can make itself heard; and finally, institutions are needed of a sort which will, so far as possible, put power into the hands of men who are able and anxious to hear and understand it” (HP 316). This passage is quite revealing: we see here that while Weil may agree with Arendt that speech is central to agency, she nevertheless insists that it is inadequate to simply ask the poor to speak louder. Instead, Weil invites us to put the onus on the powerful and eloquent in order to work our way to something akin to an “ideal speech situation” and to justice. Indeed, instead of asking the “awkward with words” to speak more loudly, she invites the privileged to be quiet and to pay attention. Also, contrary to Arendt, Weil does not regard speech as what ultimately defines the political (or the human for that matter). Things do not have to be seen and heard for them to exist or be human. Unlike Arendt’s phenomenological approach to human affairs, which did not permit her to consider otherworldly matters as possessing political significance, Weil’s Platonism made her appreciative of the things that cannot be said, heard, or seen. For instance, Weil was convinced that what truly defines the human being is his or her link to the good—namely, a basic expectation we all possess that good (rather than harm) will be done to us. Weil was not naïve: she acknowledged that this expectation would be inevitably crushed throughout our lives. But she still went on to insist that we ought to think about political community in terms of shared duties to protect, in all human beings, to the best of our ability and power, this longing for good. Love and Politics

Compassion and Needy Bodies It was necessity, the urgent needs of the people, that unleashed the terror and sent the Revolution to its doom. —Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

If acts, gestures, or gazes of compassion are of this world, according to Weil, they are also manifestations of our link to something higher, to a pure divine goodness that we can only approach but ought to desire. Had Arendt read Weil’s later work, she would have had little patience for what she would have considered a disturbingly escapist and unworldly longing. Moreover, she would have objected to Weil’s readiness to consider politics and morality so closely in tandem. Indeed, Arendt insists that the claims of morality and of politics should not be mixed, and that one should be wary of political actors who invoke “goodness” or moral absolutes (OR 79). In On Revolution she claims that the “men of compassion” Saint-Just and Robespierre gravely erred by mixing talk of “pure virtue” with revolutionary politics, and also by misidentifying the true curse of poverty—which is not hunger, but anonymity. Citing John Adams, Arendt writes, “The poor man’s conscience is clear; yet he is ashamed. . . . He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. . . . He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen. . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable” (OR 63–64). It is this desire to be seen and acknowledged by others in public that so deeply motivated the American revolutionaries—a most legitimate desire from the point of view of politics according to Arendt because it rests on the recognition that material comfort is not the highest goal for politics (freedom is). More important for our purposes, Arendt believes that rebelling in order to attain “visibility” is safe for politics because it is not likely to rouse the sick feelings of compassion and pity in others. She insists that “only the predicament of poverty” can arouse compassion in others; the sight of social invisibility cannot (OR 68). Hence, the fact that the Americans were not faced with a considerable problem of poverty was their great luck (OR 63). The French revolutionaries, on the contrary, were confronted with such dramatic problems of hunger, and they quickly sacrificed the cause of freedom for the sake of feeding le peuple. This was a tragic mistake in Arendt’s view, since no politics whatsoever could ever address the problem of want: “Every attempt to solve the social question with political means leads into terror” (OR 108). Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

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We noted above that compassion is problematic for Arendt because it is too bodily and intense an experience—it abolishes the distance between us and hence destroys politics. What we see now is that yet another problem with compassion is that it is too closely related to the hungry body. For Arendt, compassion inevitably flows from the witnessing of serious bodily deprivation, and this is of utmost significance to her because she does not believe that problems related to material necessity or poverty (i.e., “the social”) are political in nature. As she explains in The Human Condition (28–37), poverty, economic matters, and material questions are all administrative problems best left to experts and technocrats. She is convinced that modernity gravely erred when it turned politics into a bureaucratic matter of “housekeeping”—or put differently, when it allowed the concerns of the private sphere (concerns linked to biological necessity) to take over and spoil the public realm (HC 28, 68–73). In her discussion of the public and the private Arendt is explicit: bodily necessity and material needs are to be associated with mere animality, with futility, darkness, violence, and shame.17 While answering the needs for food, clean water, housing, or hygiene is no doubt necessary, this by no means makes such needs political. People address those needs for instrumental reasons (whereas action is done for its own sake), and answering them does not establish anything durable (read political) (HC 57). It is here, around the question of needs, that we can pinpoint the second clearest area of disagreement between Weil and Arendt on the issue of compassion. This contrast can be best captured if we make a quick foray into Weil’s last work, The Need for Roots. Written by Weil while she was serving the French Resistance in London in 1942, The Need for Roots is largely a detailed reflection on the principles that should inform a postwar French constitution.18 Weil is convinced that a sound political theory (and a sound constitution) should primarily be anchored in a rigorous account of human needs (bodily and psychic), and that to each of these needs should be attached a universal obligation. Weil begins her account of the political with the problem of hunger, seeing here the most obvious and nonnegotiable need—and the most selfevident obligation. (So obvious is this need for food in her view that she thinks it ought to serve as the model on which to design the entirety of our list of needs and obligations.) Aside from food, her list of bodily needs includes housing, clothing, heating, hygiene, and medical care (all of which would be considered by Arendt to be administrative rather than political matters). Weil insists that in both our public and private lives, we should Love and Politics

all be subject to “a unique and perpetual obligation to remedy, proportionally to our responsibility and power, to all the privations of the soul and of the body that are likely to destroy or mutilate a human being's earthly existence.”19 In a separate piece that revisits the list of needs and obligations, she proposes an oath that all citizens would be asked to take—with a separate, additional clause for individuals in positions of authority (teachers, judges, police officers, etc.). These individuals would be asked to be particularly attentive and compassionate to the individuals for whom they are responsible. I have underscored Weil’s deep concern with feeding the body and addressing material destitution not simply in order to draw out an important contrast between the two authors. I have also done so in order to nuance a common interpretative binary that can often be found in comparative studies of Weil and Arendt—one that sees in the former a kind of apolitical amor fati and in the latter a fully immanent and politically charged amor mundi. For instance, Courtine-Denamy has suggested that if Arendt’s work is primarily guided by a great concern for the world and a vibrant call to action, Weil embraces what amounts to an apolitical stance and encourages us to accept the suffering of worldly life.20 But one should not overstate this contrast, for as we just saw, Weil had her two feet planted solidly on earth and was concerned with addressing concrete political problems. And while Weil offers us a disturbing panegyric to the suffering involved in physical labor, she certainly never urged us to accept the reality of social injustices or of most material deprivations. Weil thought that there was a type of suffering that ought to be addressed (and that justified revolt) and another that called for a thoughtful and stoic consent. It was, according to her, a matter of great philosophical and political significance to be able to distinguish between the two. What also ought to be underscored here is that while Weil’s account of politics begins with the issue of material want, this does not mean that for Weil politics (or human life more generally) ought to be summed up as an affair of consumption or satisfaction of bodily needs. Like Arendt, Weil considered freedom to be among the greatest political goods, and she certainly knew that there was something beyond what Hobbes called “commodious living.”21 Weil believed (and here she would have found a receptive ear in Arendt) that “workers need poetry more than bread” (GG 180). But the chief difference is that, unlike Arendt, Weil did not fear that to experience great love for the hungry and to wish for them some beautiful poetry could compromise healthy politics. Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

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Weil and Arendt on Friendship and Attention in the Modern Bureaucratic Age There is not friendship where distance is not kept and respected. —Simone Weil, Waiting for God

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It might be tempting to infer, based on what has just been said on the importance Weil attached to addressing bodily needs, that the French philosopher must have been calling for the creation of a strong interventionist welfare state. But such a conclusion would be too hasty. Certainly numerous passages in her work suggest that institutional measures should be taken to remedy existing material deprivations and prevent new ones. Note how she defines equality in a companion piece to The Need for Roots: “Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed via institutions and mores, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.”22 Moreover, in “Human Personality” she insists that justice requires the offering of compassion to individuals who are suffering harm, and she explicitly called on all citizens to address the “material consequences” of harm done to these individuals (39; emphasis added). Unfortunately, Weil never spelled out what could be done concretely, at the institutional or state level, to address (and prevent) material inequality and social injustices. More significantly, Weil expressed great concerns about large state structures and any centralization of power, and it seems fair to suggest that these two things are typically required for the implementation of any strong welfare-state program. At the end of her Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression, Weil explicitly identified centralization as one of the greatest plagues of modern sociopolitical life. In her view it is excessive centralization that corrupted business, bureaucracy, political parties, and unions; everywhere, she claims, is shown great “contempt for the individual, separation between thought and action, the mechanization of thought” (OL 113). It is hence not surprising to see that Weil’s chief source of hope rested in a decentralization of institutions and politics, in giving back autonomy to the local level, to small-scale organizations. Her enthusiasm for decentralization (nourished by her deep concern about totalitarian regimes) can also be seen clearly in her plea to replace large factories with small workshops, where individuals would be able to exert more control over their time and be able to use their imagination and critical thinking skills. In her notebooks and in Waiting for God, Weil also repeatedly decried the growth of “the social,”23 linking it up with the devil (“le domaine du diable”).24 Love and Politics

Any reader familiar with Arendt will have noticed here a significant similarity with much of her work. In The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Crises of the Republic, for instance, Arendt built a strong case against bureaucracy and what we can call, without doing much violence to her work, strong state intervention. Like Weil, Arendt saw large bureaucratic organizations as antithetical to individual liberty and distinctiveness, and as excessively controlling.25 Because bureaucracy rests on rules, statistics, and numbers (on “everyday” or average behavior), it feeds into one of the most worrisome trends of modernity according to Arendt—namely, the movement toward “normalization,” uniformity, and conformity (HC 39– 40). Since, as we noted above, politics is about rare deeds and rare events, the fixed rules and statistical predictions central to bureaucratic organizations are at odds with it; they cannot account for “spontaneous action or outstanding achievement” (HC 40). Like many other political philosophers in the 1950s and 1960s, Arendt was ready to assert that “bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act.”26 Regardless of whether we accept Weil’s and Arendt’s harsh accounts of bureaucratic organization and of “big government,” we are certainly left with serious reasons to doubt that either author would have been highly supportive of a strong social-democratic welfare state. This is important for two reasons: first, it is worth pointing this out because many readers of Weil tend to see in her work a strong (and even disturbing) call for state control and intervention. Second, it is important because in the “battle over political compassion,” some have insisted that to be a fan of compassion necessarily means to be supportive of a progressive politics and of a large welfare state. Weil’s work suggests that this connection is far from obvious. Not surprisingly perhaps, given the fact that both women witnessed the horrors of Nazism and totalitarianism (or in Weil’s case, foresaw many of them), Weil and Arendt had remarkably similar qualms about centralized big government. In addition to their similar takes on the bureaucratic state, Arendt and Weil share something else that is most pertinent for us here: a similar account of friendship. Philia was, for both, understood as a kind of love and affective experience most suited for our troubled times and for politics. Indeed, Arendt does not reject all types of love as fit for politics—and the rare type of love she considers fit for civic life is friendship (a word she uses in some places interchangeably with respect). She describes it as follows: “What love is in its own, narrowly circumscribed sphere, respect is in the Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

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larger domain of human affairs. Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politikē, is a kind of ‘friendship’ without intimacy and without closeness. It is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us, and this regard is independent of qualities which we may admire or of achievements which we may highly esteem” (HC 243). This is quite reminiscent of Weil’s account of philia, which she also described as a kind of “cold” attachment, as a meaningful relationship that presumes a certain distance. In Gravity and Grace, for instance, Weil makes it clear that the pure experience of love that both friendship and compassion allow requires the willingness not to seek to control the other or to fuse with the other: “To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil. To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love” (GG 65). Like Arendt, Weil seems to have been aware of the risks attached to an excessively intense affective experience—one in which the distance between each of us (in the public world) is abolished. Ideally, then, a true (and politically responsible) Weilian love of neighbor calls for a sober detachment, not teary sentimentality. For Arendt, philia is capable of politics because it is a type of love that is not too intimate and intense; it does not “strike us in the flesh” (OR 80). Not only that, but a genuine type of philia will be capable of speech, of arguments; in short, it is equipped for action. As Arendt argues in her essay on Lessing, the Greeks knew—unlike us moderns—that “the essence of friendship consisted in discourse. They held that only the constant interchange of talk united citizens in a polis. In discourse the political importance of friendship, and the humanness peculiar to it, were made manifest” (MDT 24). Moreover, unlike romantic love or compassionate love, friendship is capable of surviving the bright light of the public. Put differently, it can appear and be seen: it can thus be politically relevant and significant (HC 52–57). Deborah Nelson believes that it is appropriate to speak of “heartless” and “cold” to describe Arendtian friendship, but she insists that this cannot be equated with indifference. She explains, “The austere rule of heartlessness, which seems to apply equally to friendship, politics, and aesthetics [according to Arendt and McCarthy], should not be confused with insensitivity. . . . [It] does not entail desensitizing but resensitizing, becoming more and more responsive to the world. . . . Heartlessness, practiced with others but without their company, necessitated a peculiarly severe and painful discipline of representation and of attention—the hard look, not a looking away.”27 And indeed, Arendt repeatedly insisted on the importance of paying attention—to others, to our worldly environment, to the particularities Love and Politics

of a given political situation, to our universal capacity for evil. Attention is a central ingredient of political judgment that has, in my view, been insufficiently acknowledged by commentators.28 I would like to end by suggesting that despite great differences regarding the hope they vested in political compassion, Weil and Arendt agreed that our modern world needed a lot more thoughtfulness and (empathetic) attention. Indeed, there are striking similarities between Weilian attention and what Arendt saw as lacking in Eichmann: sustained and reflective consideration of others and of the consequences of our actions (LM 4). Arendt would no doubt have had little patience for Weil’s belief that the cultivation of attention mattered greatly because it prepares us for loving the Good and loving God. But she would certainly have appreciated the suggestion that good judgment and responsible citizenship are both tied to the faculty of attention and that it is here, at the end of the day, that one might find the basis for a safe love of the world. notes 1. Elisabeth J. Porter, “Can Politics Practice thought Nietzsche was right. See Men in Compassion?” Hypatia 21, no. 4 (2006): Dark Times (London: Lowe & Brydone, 96–123; Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals 1970), 15. The following abbreviations of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge and editions will be used in this chapter: University Press, 2001); Michael E. for Arendt, The Human Condition (HC), Morrell, Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Thinking, and Deliberation (University Press, 1998); Men in Dark Times (MDT), Park: Penn State University Press, 2010); op. cit.; On Revolution (OR) (New York: Michael Slote, The Ethics of Care and Macmillan, 1963); The Life of the Mind Empathy (New York: Routledge, 2007). (LM) (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978); 2. Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion as the Eichmann in Jerusalem (Eichmann) Basic Social Emotion,” Social Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 2006); for Weil, and Policy 13 (1996): 27–58. Waiting for God (WG), trans. Emma 3. Clifford Orwin, “How an Emotion Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, Became a Virtue,” In Character, Spring 2001); Oppression and Liberty (OL), trans. 2008, http://incharacter.org/features/ Arthur Willis and John Petrie (New York: how-an-emotion-became-a-virtue; Routledge, 2001); Gravity and Grace Kathleen Woodward, “Calculating (GG), trans. Emma Crawford and Mario Compassion,” in Compassion: The Politics von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002); and Culture of an Emotion, ed. Lauren “Human Personality” (HP), in The Berlant (New York: Routledge, 2004), Simone Weil Reader, ed. George Panichas 59–86; Roger Scruton, “Totalitarian (New York: David McKay, 1977), 313–19; Sentimentality,” The American Spectator, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres (EL) December 2009–January 2010, (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). http://spectator.org/articles/40477/ 5. While born roughly at the same time as totalitarian-sentimentality. Arendt, Weil died too soon to have the 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts opportunity to read the latter’s work. on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. But we know that Arendt had the chance Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge to read Weil’s work—most notably, La University Press, 1986), 86. Arendt condition ouvrière. Weil’s writings seem to

Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil

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have ended up on Arendt’s desk largely as the result of the enthusiasm expressed by a student of hers and by her friend Mary McCarthy. Even though they are brief, the two mentions of Weil’s work in The Human Condition are positive: one is an approving nod to Weil’s critique of Marx (HC 131) and the other a mention of Weil’s “very illuminating article” on quanta theory (HC 287). 6. Myriam R. d’Allones, L’homme compassionnel (Paris: Seuil, 2008); Deborah Nelson, “Suffering and Thinking,” in Berlant, Compassion, 219–44, and “The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and the Anesthetics of Empathy,” American Literary History 18, no. 1 (2006): 86–101. 7. Weil, “Luttons-nous pour la justice?” in EL 45–57. 8. “The affliction found all over the earth obsesses me and saddens me to the point of annihilating my faculties.” EL 199; my translation. 9. The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. Ron Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 246. 10. Nelson, “Virtues of Heartlessness.” 11. OR 91–92; HC 205–7; Eichmann 277–78. For the difference between principles and motives, see “What Is Freedom?” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 143–72. 12. Weil uses these terms interchangeably. 13. Œuvres Complètes, 6 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1989–2006), 2:729. 14. See also OR 82.

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15. See also WG 97. 16. See, for example, HP 355. 17. These are the terms she employs in chapter 2 of HC (28–78). 18. The Need for Roots, trans. Arthur Willis (New York: Routledge, 2002). 19. Étude, 78, in EL. 20. Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, Trois femmes dans de sombres temps: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002). Compare with Emmanuel Gabellieri, ed., Amor mundi, Amor Dei: Simone Weil et Hannah Arendt, Actes du colloque de Lyon 2003, in Theophilyoni 9, no. 2 (2004): 325–579. 21. See her Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression, in OL 36–117. 22. Étude, in EL 81; emphasis added. 23. Weil’s “social” is primarily about public opinion, mass society—unlike in the Arendt’s work, it is not primarily about material needs and economic questions. 24. See WG, Letter II. 25. See “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvin Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 327–28. 26. Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 178; Eichmann, 289. 27. Nelson, “Virtues of Heartlessness,” 100. 28. One exception is Joan Tronto, who briefly underscores, in Moral Boundaries (New York: Routledge, 1993), the similarity between Arendt’s concern with “thoughtlessness” and Weil’s critique of inattentiveness.

10 Trust and the Experience of Love fiona utley

There are two ways in which the reference to love in philosophical work creates a curious space for reflection on trust and its role in love. Discussion of love often emerges in philosophical analysis as a primary example of human existence. That love becomes an exemplar of existential experience is perhaps due to the fact that we all have some sort of phenomenological understanding of what it is to desire love, to love, and to be loved. However, the centrality of love to human existence ultimately lies in its associations with transcendence and thus growth, development and transformation, and the possibility of fulfillment. The possibility of creating loving bonds with another person, bonds that both uplift and ground existence, also creates the possibility of a touchstone in life: affectively, corporeally, reflectively, indeed in all senses of what it is to be human, we find in love a point of reference that we can trust, namely, another self who shares and knows the intimate structures of our world. If love is sustained by trust, then trust seems also to be central to human existence. But the focus on their intertwining is rarely developed within discussions of love’s affective structure. The second reference is in the use of the language of and about love in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. For example, in his discussion of the artist in “Eye and Mind,” he uses the language of love to reveal depth as the first dimension of perceptual experience.1 Merleau-Ponty does not explicitly refer to the experience of love, yet his discussion of the artist’s

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perception and his work evoke the sensual, carnal intertwining of rapture that is also associated with love, thus opening a space for the reader to enter the depths of perceptual experience. While these depths remain invisible, within or “behind” our body schema, they are there, as the dimension of the hidden,2 waiting to be ignited. What he explores in “Eye and Mind,” then, is not only depth but its belonging to all perception; he amplifies the felt “experience of the reversibility of dimensions” (EM 369) and thus reveals how corporeal existence is both the ground of and response to this dimension. This experience of depth appearing as the experience of being within reversibilities is also present in the experience of love. The language Merleau-Ponty uses when he speaks about love, however, is more tempered and in this it opens onto something else. He expresses something more cautionary than an account couched in a language of the sensuous and affective aspects of loving might. While reference to reversibility is clearly central, this presentation of the experience of love opens onto something else that significantly distinguishes it from the experience of the artist; trust becomes prominent in love in ways that it does not in the case of the artist. Like the philosopher, the artist wishes to “bring to expression” the “things themselves, from the depths of their silence,”3 and Merleau-Ponty here evokes the power of affectivity in perception without necessarily bringing it back to our experience of the other as a limit to our selves as centers of meaning. Thus he points to the presence and role of trust as central to human existence. In what follows, I explore three pieces of writing that expose our opening in love’s vision: a seeing of the other that is both a conflagration of manifestation and inner vision that involves a pre-reflective synthesis and that draws the unreflected into life. The artwork of Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg presented by Linnell Secomb, along with the writings of Adriana Cavarero and Hélène Cixous, demonstrate love as a way of seeing but also open us to the significance of trust as structuring our experience of vulnerability and opening. My focus here is on love between human beings that is generally characterized by differential phases; for example, the passionate erotic nature of love’s beginnings differs from the mature love that develops when love is lived over time.4 I then explore love as openness and vulnerability, two features it shares with trust. I take up an understanding of the experience of love that Merleau-Ponty says is “a way we face others.” He remarks, “Other persons are there too . . . not there as minds . . . but as we face them in anger or love—faces, gestures, spoken words to which our own respond without thoughts intervening.”5 The Phenomenological Experience of Love

Recognizing the importance of trust in love as a way we face others entails exposing the experience of unperceived depth as one that belongs to all perception. Our openness and vulnerability in love are what allow our experience of “seeing more,” a seeing in which a profound trust sustains me in and as the emptiness through which the other appears. Accounts of trust as basic openness recognize trust as a presence in our embodied experience, an opening onto an other, but it is trust and its pre-personal operation through our affective depth and its role in processes of institution that remain to be explored, and is the focus I take up here. This chapter examines trust as an affective reversibility of anxiety and courage that forms our fundamental affective experience and that is characteristic of human existence.6 I explore how this reversibility forms a unity that exceeds its component parts. This relation of becoming, I argue, is both the condition of possibility of trust and the affective grounding of trust. The Artist’s Gaze and Love

In one of Merleau-Ponty’s late reflective notes, he says that “it is obvious that the Bild is not gazed upon as we gaze upon an object.”7 He goes on to say that we gaze “according to the Bild”; that is, the painting “gives what it does not have” (NWN 440). The Bild works by not “by offering us an in itself to be observed, but by acting laterally on the gaze, by sketching a meaning that the gaze validates. And this segregation opens . . . What?” (NWN 440). This note is dated May 13, 1960, the same time of the publication of his final completed essay, “Eye and Mind.” What strikes me about this note is that we could well be talking about love, for it is obvious that the beloved is not gazed on as we gaze upon any other. Take another example, of the artist: “In the immemorial depth of the visible, something has moved, caught fire, which engulfs his body; everything he paints is in answer to this incitement, and his hand is ‘nothing but the instrument of a distant will’” (EM 376). Here, if we think especially of the early phase of love, it is in the immemorial depth of the visible as the beloved, that something is moved, is caught on fire, and engulfs one’s body; everything one is and does is in answer to the incitement of love. The will of which one becomes an instrument is not the will of an individualized subject, but a will produced in the immemorial depths of a loved being that is a crossing over; it is the will of “two in one Being” (NWN 443). One need not look far to find the language of the sensuous and love in Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the lived experience of perception. This language evinces carnality and creativity. The previous quotation presents Trust and the Experience of Love

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us with the metaphor of fire, its spark and burning, in order to evoke the chiasmic crossing over of the creative act of expression. The experience of embodiment drawn into consciousness through recognition of other sensing sensibles, and through touching, “between the hand and the hand” (EM 355), is evoked through love’s language. The emergence of depth in this encounter, however, is no “accident.” The arrival of love in our lives feels like a significant encounter between two persons. The ways we have built up around our experience and its emergent meanings are sedimented into our personal style and ways of life, which both appear and feel natural. In the intertwining of love through the interweaving of the invisible dimensions of two centers of meaning, we seem to experience the movement of the world’s appearing; new meanings emerge. We understand deflagration as a power within the voluminosity of existence to eclipse and expose new ways and new meanings that may come into being. In this way depth is the most existential of dimensions;8 the self emerges from depth, from a vision that is within the body and that opens onto the world, a vision that opens the world by opening onto it. This self is corporeally and affectively grounded. Merleau-Ponty’s talk about love, however, is much more tempered and in this something else emerges: “To love is inevitably to enter into an undivided situation with another. . . . One is not what he would be without that love; the perspectives remain separate—and yet they overlap.  .  .  . To the very extent that it is convincing and genuine, the experience of the other is necessarily an alienating one, in the sense that it tears me away from my lone self and creates instead a mixture of myself and the other.”9 We have here the sense of self as emerging through our experience of the other; there is an overlapping and interweaving of selves that is clearly central. Merleau-Ponty cautiously qualifies his discussion of the sensuous and affectivity, for though our experience of the difference of the other is signaled as affective, the intertwining is not presented as rhapsodic: The experience of the other does not leave us at rest within ourselves, and this is why it can always be the occasion for doubt. If I like, I can always be strict and put in doubt the reality of the other’s feelings towards me; this is because such feelings are never absolutely proved. This person who professes to love does not give every instant of life to her beloved, and her love may even die out if it is constrained. Certain subjects react to this evidence as though it were a refutation of love and refuse to be trusting. (CRO 182) The Phenomenological Experience of Love

What is lost in these accounts is the sense of the immemorial depth of the visible in our gaze on the beloved. He has introduced a sense of restless anxiety, of doubt; the idea of “proof” for affection and a need to trust come to the fore. Yet it is precisely depth that provokes such insecurity. He observes that it is only when relations with others are “deep enough” that they can bring about a “state of insecurity” (CRO 182). We are opened to the significance of a pre-reflective experience of trust in our immemorial depth. The concept of the immemorial is an important development in Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the dimension of depth. The sense of the immemorial refers to the way that depth contains existential experience that has not been drawn into our perception and consciousness. It has not been part of our present nor is it part of our past; it is thus immemorial. This dimension is central to understanding Merleau-Ponty’s development of Husserl’s notion of institution,10 in which love is presented as an example of the institution of a feeling. We find that this cautionary tone, as well as the reference to the constraint and the dying out of love, is also present here. Certainly love was always central as an affective experience for Merleau-Ponty, featuring as it does in his chapter on “The Body in Its Sexual Being” in the Phenomenology. He claims that we must look to the examples of our affective experiences, including love: they exist with “significance and reality only for us” (PP 154) if we want to see how the world comes into being as our world. These processes involve reversibility and sedimentation, as the earlier quotation showed. Further revealed is the powerful creativity of such reversibility, which is made possible through the dimension of depth and the corporeality of existence—two seemingly opposed dimensions. Openness, reversibility, and the affective aspect of depth all facilitate the process of institution in the self and in the relationship—a sense of place, new knowledge, and wisdom emerge. In institution, Gestalt shifts occur (the movement whereby one view eclipses another). According to Merleau-Ponty, however, the shifts move from an individual perceptual experience to the belonging to something larger. His notion of institution seeks to demonstrate that it occurs at all levels of existence, in life itself through to the levels of the social institution of knowledge and history. A deeper engagement of both the precariousness and ambiguity of meaning as instituted occurs. Temporality becomes the model for the processes of institution (IP 7). Merleau-Ponty goes on to explore doubt, self-doubt, the anxiety that crystallizes, fear, suspicion, jealousy, deceit, and domination (IP 32). Toward the end of his notes he says, “Love is clairvoyant; it addresses us precisely to what is able to tear us apart” (IP 38), and that “jealousy, lies, domination are transcended in a desire to die, a desire for truth, abnegation” (IP 39). While Trust and the Experience of Love

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it would be easy here to be drawn into discussions of love as desire for what we lack, the lack being the reason for not being at rest, I would also focus on the desire that can become controlling, developing into feelings of jealousy and suspicion. The desire here is one that transcends such states, yet this transcendence occurs also in the loss of self that comes to be by allowing the other to appear. Paradoxically, then, an immersion in depth and the loss of self must occur in order for transformation to take place. Most striking is Merleau-Ponty’s discussion about the experience of love wherein the language of warmth, passion, and sensuality is not given priority. Instead, we find words of more cautious exploration. I suggest that love needs to be understood as intertwined with or structured by trust. But trust must be understood in its relation to depth. For Merleau-Ponty, the gaze is always tempered by existing sedimented structures and our sense of being a self, which are threatened by the other as another center of meaning: this is experienced as the anxiety of the world of the other looming over and encroaching on our world. In love this experience is intensified; it is “alienating . . . in the sense that [this experience of the other] tears me away from my lone self” (CRO 183). Merleau-Ponty’s cautionary tone does not clearly capture the courage present in love, understood as our openness, our active embrace, as being within and of this world of the other. This open heart of love exists as intertwined with our anxiety, as the other side of this affective tone of metamorphosis, of deflagration. Trust, in MerleauPonty’s cautionary tone, appears to work against or constrain the potential of the reversibility of depth, which is so clearly apparent in love. Yet trust seemingly exists in love’s early phase, not as constraint, but as supporting love’s initial openness; when we go back to the experience itself, trust is experienced as both being and not being in the experience. It is there, sustaining our openness and vulnerability, sustaining our experience of crossing over with this other, in depth; we do not stand outside the other reflectively choosing to trust the other. This more reflective sense of trust will emerge as a core affective structure in the ongoing lived experience of love, forming an interwoven affective structure of our new world of intimacy. The nature of this intimacy and the form of our love reflect potentialities for and from trust in the ground of our immemorial depth. Love, Vulnerability, and Trust

That love and intimacy create new worlds is reflected in the nature of the language we use and the stories we tell. As human beings we tell our stories The Phenomenological Experience of Love

of love. They provide comfort, hope, and inspiration. They bring together disparate aspects of what it is to experience existence—its corporeal, affective, intentional, and transcendent aspects—and, momentarily, make them whole. When we love, it is not enough to live it; we want to tell others of both our joy and the perfection of our beloved. In the telling of the love story, we capture something of the transcendence we have lived, the sense of possibilities that transcend our everyday experience. Indeed, because of the way our love builds these possibilities, which are not yet lived, our stories can sometimes be mere fantasies. The telling retains an aspect of the love story itself. Love will eventually become incorporated into the ongoing negotiations of our day-to-day lives, thereby losing some or all of its piquancy. While the love story often presents us with the possibility of fulfillment, this is rarely told as an ongoing achievement. This sense of love has been understood, in particular by Socrates, as a movement between the lack that is desire, and its fulfillment. Because love stories are always our stories, they also tell of more ambiguous experiences. We recount stories of beguiling loves that never quite fit and of loves we wish we never had. Our desire takes us to many places we do not understand, not then, not now, and perhaps never. Some of our loves express contingencies triggering associations belonging to our immemorial depth, igniting desires that, for a moment at least, bring forward what has been latent and silent. In many, perhaps even most descriptions of love, the centrality of our vulnerability and our trust are already assumed to be present: trust exists as the ground for love. We need trust to experience love as openness, as joy, as tenderness and renewal, and as the possibility of emergence into authentic being. Love as openness is also the possibility, indeed inevitability, of loss, heartbreak, and unyielding grief. Love as openness contains the possibility of betrayal and pain. Love as openness also holds the possibility of violence, cruelty, and death. The risks inherent in opening to love, in particular the inevitability of loss, crown it not only as an experience to be craved, but also as one that yields an experience that must be contained in order for it to perdure, thus also leading to the possibility of manipulation and cruelty or the suffocation of what makes love what it is. That love can be destructive in many ways is something Linnell Secomb makes clear in her example of “love gone wrong,” where she powerfully articulates love’s paradoxes and dangers.11 Through reference to film, literature, and video, Secomb speaks of love as blurring beginnings and endings, tenderness and violence. She quotes the language of love’s emergence from Trust and the Experience of Love

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the video collaboration Love, by Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg, where the sense of intertwining is most profound: “When I am close to you like this there’s a sound in the air like the beating of wings. . . . My heart—beating like a schoolboy’s,” to which she replies, “Is it? I thought it was mine” (PL 1). Intended to be played on a continuous loop, the video contains a pastiche of film clips that go on to depict love degenerating into argument, hatred and, finally, violence (PL 1–2). Secomb references the words that end each play of the video before the loop restarts; when asked by her if this is the end, he replies, “No, it’s only the beginning” (PL 1). The fantasy of romantic love refers to its beginnings, where our openness toward the other and the possibilities for our world that this enables are fresh, embraced, and profoundly trusted. The possibilities for our openness as vulnerability are, however, seemingly endless, and the path to anger, resentment, and violence, or alternately, boredom and indifference, exist as much as do our anticipated joys; its pathways are myriad. Love does not always, thankfully, end in violence. That the difficulties and dangers of love do not deter us from seeking out its more inspirational possibilities remains a testament to our desire to experience both the freedom offered in love and in the other as a center of meaning outside our own through which our transformation is possible. While interest in love’s potential for loss and tragedy is perhaps as great as our interest in its joyous aspect, the role of trust and how its affective ground of an intertwined anxiety and courage propel us forward have not yet been properly explored. Anthony Steinbock argues that trust and love are related, but they do not always necessarily coincide;12 his interest lies not in identifying how trust might operate to make love what it is, but to differentiate the two in order for aspects of trust to be brought forward. Steinbock does claim that trust is a “resting in, a relaxing into and even an intimacy and being supported by another” (TTT 94), and this does sound a lot like love. This is because trust and love both refer to experiences of vulnerability. Steinbock characterizes loving, like trust, as an interpersonal act (TTT 92) and an orientation to deeper possibilities (TTT 89). In trusting, he says, we essentially invite the love of the other toward us: “Trusting is most deeply an openness to the person as loving—that which reveals ‘person’ as such” (TTT 93). There is resonance here with Merleau-Ponty’s cautionary words on love, where he qualifies our gaze on the other in love—this will make us anxious to the extent that it is genuine and authentic. The other’s appearing to us, their revelation as genuine and authentic, will also displace us as a center of meaning. The Phenomenological Experience of Love

Secomb’s example of our vulnerability and exposure in loving raises the question of whether one can love and not trust. Steinbock takes up this issue briefly, suggesting that further exploration of the relation between love and trust would focus on how “loving is foundational to trusting” and “how one can love others but not trust them” (TTT 101). This seems to challenge Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of love as an example of the institution of a feeling, where the sense of love as sustained by trust is presented as characteristic of love.13 Trust is clearly intertwined with love. In the example presented by Secomb of a love that spirals toward damage and ruin in an endless loop, while there is clearly love expressed, it is a harmful love and we question how trust can be present. Furthermore, the seeming lack of trust that occurs in some experiences of love points us to differing experiences of trust and of the affective mixture of anxiety and courage. In depth, contingencies resonate with other contingencies, often through associations, as unthought but attracted, but also as attracting further surface contingencies. Patterns form, disrupting a central order, and they account for not only the transcendent and mysterious nature of love in its potential for joy through a heightened openness but also its potential for destruction through the abuse of love. Such emergent patterns can mean that our attractions and desires are for loves that may harm us. As what emerges becomes central, any patterning of harm will become more concrete, experienced, and known, and thus the conditions of trust we experience are of a form that is naïve and remains always only a possibility. I may trust someone to love me (in the way I pattern love), and in this love I may hope they will stop beating me when they are drunk. My love and its courage can and does make me stay. I may not expect this person to stop beating me, but I will continue to hope that they will try. While I may experience enhanced anxiety in such a relationship, I will also exhibit intense and perhaps even ill-informed courage. Such experiences tell us that trusting does not feel the same for everyone. We will do the best we can with whatever capacity for trust we have, for it seems we cannot do without it in our intersubjective existence, exposed as it always is to more than what is given. To be exposed, and vulnerable to the other, is to stand with both anxiety and courage in the face of the other. That this is heightened in the experience of love reflects our plunging into this depth and its opening; indeed, this heightened openness in trust forms part of the frisson of our desire for the other. This aspect of love, however, is discussed largely in reference to desire as associated with jealousy and suspicion. Lacking in such accounts Trust and the Experience of Love

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is a more substantial discussion of depth as a particular form of vulnerability that facilitates this opening to the other. We meet the loved person in the sense of their depth—that is, all their possibilities remain as distant possibilities, “not yet legible in them as the monogram or stamp of thetic consciousness.”14 To love in this way is to trust the other in our vulnerability to all those possibilities. 178 Coupling and Deflagration: “We are two in one Being”

For Adriana Cavarero, love exists as the “clearest proof that the uniqueness of the who always has a face, a voice, a gaze, a body, and a sex.”15 The uniqueness that she refers to is clearly identified as the unrepeatable and embodied lived existence that is a self. This sense of proof is of particular interest, given Merleau-Ponty’s introduction of the possibility of doubting the other’s feeling in the experience of love. This proof exists, for Cavarero, in the words of love that are spoken, each to each, in what we take as the heightened, indeed, more true perception of the other that love opens up to us. Cavarero says that the appearing “to each other together” and the drawing on the “corporeal and verbal language of meaningful transparency” (RN 109) are privileged aspects of the lovers’ relationship. This sense of love’s perception as enabling the lover to see the unique individuality of the loved presents us with a perception that sees more, more deeply, more fully, and thus seemingly more accurately. This “seeing more” can differentiate between the mere social personality of the person and the unique individuality of the person.16 It can also be the space for the other to exist in her openness, in herself, as the gaze of both trust and trustworthiness.17 For Cavarero, to be seen is not enough; the desire to be seen is bound up in what she argues is our tenacious desire to hear our own story (RN 32), and thus an intimate relation of desire exists between identity and narration. Cavarero privileges the storytelling of love. In her focus on the art of narration, an art that is aligned with the form of oral storytelling and close description of events as experienced, she retains a focus on the “who” of the narration: the “who” is in my corporeal gaze rather than in my imagination. While Cavarero clearly separates the corporeal from verbal expression by distinguishing body language from “the language of storytelling,” she speaks of these as intertwined and forming a “secret rhythm” that is the “alternation of caresses and narration” (RN 109). The bodily and the verbal are intertwined as originary existential experience. The Phenomenological Experience of Love

In speaking of love, Cavarero also evinces the vulnerability of our corporeality and the role of trust. Lovers, she claims, “fully perceive the fragility of their reciprocal appearing. Trusting in the touch of each other, once more naked like the day they were born, they entrust one another to the language of the body. . . . The truth is that the human being when totally exposed, is totally fragile” (RN 113). This is not simply vulnerability understood as fragility, the fragility in our bodily nakedness; it is a vulnerability in the fact that “who am I?” and “who are you?” are open questions, becoming both explorations and expressions of our hopes as we know them and of possibilities yet unknown. The sense of the open question of who we are is often forgotten in our relationality, wherein our names form tags to our identity. I am reminded here of Cixous’s words from her notebooks: If I knew the names of things of acts of places I would not write, I would name, and everything would be said If I knew your name, I would call you, I would cry out the name that summarizes you, and so it would be Sunday and I could rest. I am turning around you I am describing you minutely, once the turn is complete, I re turn around you and you have completely changed, I describe you entirely a-gain, so time passes, I describe you year after year. As each year you are different. ——— I don’t know the proper names—I want them. I want their armorial bodies, . . . .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  Such is the immense poverty of my speech: no proper names, no wreaths, no That is why I must work like (a farmhand) the earth18 Cavarero’s secret rhythm, which is an alternation between caress and words, is also the rhythm of minute descriptions, where I find upon my return (in one glance) that you have changed completely and I must describe you again. The words of being belong to love’s gaze where trust takes us to depth and sustains our open gaze. Each time I turn, I am in depth’s appearing. I am open to the advent of meaning rather than meaning itself. I am open to the new in the familiar. I am passive in opening onto this newness, Trust and the Experience of Love

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yet active and drawing to myself new contingencies and phenomena that have a sense but are not yet thematized. Thus it is that depth is in our world, and it is made visible, ironically enough, through the experience of ascent, of climbing out of ourselves, a transcending of our very being. We are “lifted” out of ourselves and simultaneously plunged into the depths of our own being and the being of the other. Words come from a rich earth, a ground that is both a corporeality that is and a deep ground into which I reach in love. I am sustained in these rich depths through trusting. I reach also for my stability in such openness; being the emptiness through which the other appears, the other is the emptiness through which I appear; my being able to, my “I can,” resides here as pre-personal. It is through the experience of each other in depth that we find the possibility of immense differences wrought over time and emerging out of the darkness and strangeness of immemorial time. The endlessness of these possibilities afforded by depth demands a trust that is strong; the anxieties of such openness want names and armorial bodies, but, without these, our courage must also be strong to work in such a rich earth. What is important to bring forward is that love is experienced as being “within”—we feel intertwined with the other, and thus within his or her very being, as well as within the world of the other. Being open within this shared relation involves trust, and with its presence we can feel more deeply within our own feelings and more deeply within our own world. We see more, and time alters from this perspective of being deeply within, from the perspective of depth as the experience of the reversibility of dimensions. It is also within depth that the self can be eradicated, that the precariousness of existence looms (PP 283). Within this depth the other is not only our touchstone, we are theirs, and, in our mutuality we are an intertwined sharedness. In an undated note from this later period of reflection, Merleau-Ponty writes: Verflechtung (interweaving, entanglement with other). Means finally: We are not one side of the wall but two. And finally: We are not perspectives on a surveyor’s plan (for then one would not understand substitution). We are two in one Being. (NWN 443) Our entanglement with the other, and the interweaving from which the self emerges, begins affectively. This sense of beginning, of interweaving and of The Phenomenological Experience of Love

self-emerging, is returned to us in the experience of love. Accounts of falling in love, including those given by Secomb, refer to experiences of overlapping existence. Merleau-Ponty states that “in perceiving the other, my body and his are coupled, resulting in a sort of action that pairs them. This conduct which I am able only to see, I live somehow from a distance” (CRO 118). Love is strongly associated with becoming and this becoming exists through the loved presence of another. However, it is always through the other that the self emerges. We see in the other a certain way of having a world, and in this world they exist as the center of meaning. Thus the other is experienced as a limit, but this is only so because we feel the potentiality of this other world—what it would be like to live these gestures and have this world. While the other, experienced as a center of meaning, can be experienced as a threat, an indifference, or as a desire, for example, all these are experienced as an affective resonance between myself and the other through which the corporeality of our “I can” will emerge. This is a resonance of the intertwining and is the condition of possibility for discovering a new world through the other, seen both as the effect of the feelings but also, as Merleau-Ponty notes, as feelings themselves. Conclusion: Coupling and Habituation

When we incorporate others into our lives we do so with a sense of the relationship of power that necessarily emerges, that is, as both the condition of possibility and the limit of our ability to shape our world, thereby bringing to expression our experience of precarious existence. How, then, do others continue to open us up to the possibility of transformation and to the development of new paths, and how is this transformation a process of love? Seeing the experience of love as affectively structured through the trust that encompasses both the pre-personal and the personal through its grounding in depth gives us an account of love that accommodates both its anxieties and its courage. Love’s corporeality can be ambivalently desired: it can be desired as the experience of openness and creativity, where our courage matches our anxieties, and it can be resisted as vulnerability to damage and loss, where our anxieties outweigh our courage to find out more. Understanding the dimension of depth as having an affective aspect that seeds the existence of whole worlds is crucial. Love is experienced through our arms that embrace, our lips that kiss, and our bodies that entwine—clearly, the lover “takes his body with him” (EM 353). But it is also through our actions, which coordinate and negotiate the broader space, Trust and the Experience of Love

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that our bodies carve out our worlds, bringing them together as a shared world.19 These actions, both the embrace and negotiations, come from the world as much as from each individual; it is in coming from the world that they produce the shared world where each being emerges. This cocreation is an act of love, an act of trust. We do not remain in the heightened phase of falling in love; rather, our lives settle as new sedimentations occur—we build a new world together. Out of depth and its reversibility of dimensions, through entanglement and interweaving, a metamorphosis occurs and I am altered, you are altered, through becoming, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, two in one Being, and through the new understandings from this, a new world, our world, is created. The material reality of loving is achieved alongside our embraces. Often in the later stage of love, this reality overtakes and overwhelms our embraces and they subside because they are insufficient for building a shared world. The initial phase of falling in love, however, does not last. Armstrong discusses mature love, arguing that things move in us through these later phases of love until we are able to see what is, differently; that is, our perception shifts, albeit far less dramatically than when we fall in love (CL 146–60). Armstrong identifies mature love as a positive term that functions “to draw together a group of characteristics which are central to a reasonable account of the capacity to cope with the problems of existence” (CL 154). It is through experience that we learn about our priorities and what we are willing to trade for them. We learn about where we want to put our attention, our efforts, and our time. We also learn about what patterns of movement will need to become habit if something is to come into being, for it is through particular ways of moving, thematized in habits, that my body has a schema. Merleau-Ponty says, “Habit expresses our power of dilating our being in the world, or changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments” (PP 143). It is through these domains of habit and expression that self-transcendence is possible. For example, I cannot be a realized artist without learning to wield the brush. There is, in the sense of maturity, a closing down of vision. What is at stake in the experience of mature love is our sense of wonder in the world, as this is associated with being open, and especially open in love’s first visions. This wonder is also associated with being open to depth. All seems possible because we see more of what the world has to offer; we are open and this is experienced through our corporeality that opens onto the world. But we are corporeal and our existence is finite in a number of directions: the length of years lived, the hours in a day, the The Phenomenological Experience of Love

need for bodily rest, the capacity for strength, emotional and nervous system attention, and engagement. We cannot fire up all that being without alternately needing to close it down; we need to retreat and rest, sleep, reflect, and restore ourselves. We are rhythmic in these needs, and eventually even an intense cycling through them will lead us to see that we are not in this openness anything other than beings swept along by the world. This can be a life, but love generally wants other things, and these other things include producing a world and creativity, which itself requires not only inspiration but the more boring components of habit, routine, repetition and, thus, stability. The artist must practice for hours so her body schema develops to include the brush and canvas as organs of expression and the self as an artist-self. It is this need of developing our habit body that draws us back to repetition, routine, and knowable days. And love must also endure these days and these patterns, if love is indeed to be instituted, for love is more than its beginnings. If one retains sufficient courage and a robust but sensitive anxiety about choices and their application toward the self’s possibilities, he or she will retain a sense of wonder in discovering what is possible from routine and repetition. One discovers that it can be the basis of creativity and a different sort of satisfaction. There is love and wonder in our development through repetition and routine. This is eclipsed, however, and must be rediscovered. Lovers must be capable of allowing each other to develop their capacities, and this cannot be done as a merged being. My body schema is in my body as my materiality of flesh—muscle, tendon, and bone of existence that moves me toward or away from you. As much as you will haunt my schema and be in the scope of my actions, you will be in my muscle tone, my bone density, and my tensile reactivity; but you will not be my bones, muscle, and nervous system. These are my materiality and, thus, it is I who must both wield the brush and love you. You will either become bored with my withdrawal into my own needs or see this as your beloved’s world in action. Love will endure, not only if you facilitate my development and I yours, but as we are able to enfold each other into what this is. My activities will have your supportive gestures of accommodation and they will be within me. My schema will be haunted by these inputs just as they are now haunted by earlier inputs. If I undertake my tasks because someone is sharing in my delight and expectation of something better, or something more, then my schema will have this happiness within it. And so we come back to a final reflection on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of institution. He remarks, “Love is not created by circumstance, or by decision; it consists in the way questions and Trust and the Experience of Love

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answers are linked together—by means of an attraction, something more slips in, we discover not exactly what we were seeking, but something else that is interesting. The initial Sinngebung [is] confirmed, but in a different direction, and yet that is not without a relation with the initial donation of sense” (IP 39). We need to choose our partners carefully, and yet this is often our most intuitive and least reflective choice; our selection relies on its beginnings in depth, where we allow our future as unknown to be drawn by its own possibilities rather than by what we actually know and can discern. I do not advocate irresponsibility in love but the recognition that our knowing, as depth, goes beyond any moment of thought or reflection. In the end, we must and do trust as we go forward, knowing that whatever we build remains precarious. notes 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 369. Hereafter parenthetically cited as EM. 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 219. 3. Ibid., 4. 4. John Armstrong uses the phrase “mature love” to guide part of his broader exploration of love. See Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy (London: Penguin, 2003). Hereafter parenthetically cited as CL. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 181. 6. This understanding of phenomenological trust is argued in Fiona Utley, “Considerations towards a Phenomenology of Trust,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 18, no. 1 (2014): 194–214. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “New Working Notes from the Period of The Visible and the Invisible,” in Toadvine and Lawlor,

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Merleau-Ponty Reader, 440. Hereafter parenthetically cited as NWN. 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 256. Hereafter parenthetically cited as PP. 9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Child’s Relations with Others,” in Toadvine and Lawlor, Merleau-Ponty Reader, 183. Hereafter parenthetically cited as CRO. 10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). Hereafter parenthetically cited as IP. 11. Linnell Secomb, Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 1–2. Hereafter parenthetically cited as PL. 12. Anthony J. Steinbock, “Temporality, Transcendence, and Being Bound to Others in Trust,” in Trust, Sociality, Selfhood, ed. Arne Grøn and Claudia Welz (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 83–102. Hereafter parenthetically cited as TTT. 13. This sense is supported in MerleauPonty’s reference to adult love when he is discussing Freud in an early exploration of processes of institution. Here he

says that “adult love, [is] sustained by a trusting tenderness which does not constantly insist upon new proofs of absolute attachment but takes the other person as he is, at his distance and in his autonomy.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Man and Adversity,” in Signs, 228. 14. Merleau-Ponty, “Philosopher and His Shadow,” 165. 15. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London: Routledge, 2000), 109. Hereafter cited parenthetically as RN. 16. This point is also made by Sue Cataldi in a footnote on love in her exploration of sensitive space. See Emotion, Depth,

and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space; Reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Embodiment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 203–4n3. 17. For further discussion of the phenomenological relationship of trust and trustworthiness see Arne Grøn, “Trust, Sociality, Selfhood,” in Grøn and Welz, Trust, Sociality, Selfhood, 13–30. 18. Hélène Cixous, The Writing Notebooks of Hélène Cixous, ed. and trans. Susan Sellers (New York: Continuum, 2004), 5. 19. See John Russon, Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things, and the Nature of Erotic Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), for an excellent extended discussion of this aspect.

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11 The Time of Possible and Impossible Reciprocity Love and Hate in Simone de Beauvoir marguerite la caze

Beauvoir scholars have often focused on her fascinating accounts of love and desire in The Second Sex.1 In this chapter, I bring her view of love from that text into conversation with her descriptions of hate and vengefulness in the early essay “An Eye for an Eye.”2 I show how her position differs in The Second Sex and in other texts from that of the essay and argue that we must distinguish these emotional reactions of outrage from reciprocal loving relations. My intention is to trace the development in her views and demonstrate the insights that may be drawn from her work on both love and hate. “An Eye for an Eye,” written amid the postwar purge, clarifies why vengefulness is almost bound to be disappointed. For her, the extreme crimes of the Nazis and collaborators taught anger and hate to people in a manner not experienced before. This experience was thought to promise a corresponding joy when the worst criminals were punished, but instead disappointment resulted. Although Beauvoir argues these particular negative affects of anger and hate are both ethical and understandable, ultimately they cannot be satisfied or resolved. She aims to comprehend why the need for a restored reciprocity in the light of these crimes usually cannot be fulfilled. Both private revenge and state punishment fail to establish the perpetrator’s recognition of what they have done, a realization of their own ambiguous existence, or an acknowledgment of the perspective

of the victim. There Beauvoir parallels this impossible reciprocity with that of love. However, in other texts she suggests that reciprocity in love may be possible, and in The Second Sex Beauvoir argues that reciprocity in love is possible, or at least would be if women were not oppressed. By investigating the differences between her accounts of hate and love, I extrapolate structural differences between love and hate in relation to reciprocity and time. I begin by examining how Beauvoir understands hate and vengefulness. Vengefulness and Hate

I am using the term “affect” to include the range of moods, passions, and emotions described throughout Beauvoir’s texts. I am not arguing that Beauvoir had a theory of the affects, although we could articulate certain features to provide an outline of an account. Her early work reflected on the affects in particular contexts and by looking at specific affects, and nowhere did she publish a treatise on the emotions, as Sartre did in A Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions.3 Nevertheless, the issues of affect, passion, and emotion were clearly engaging and interesting for her and play an important role in much of her work. My primary focus is on her philosophical texts, although her fiction is another rich source for descriptions of affects. Let me turn to the essay “An Eye for an Eye,”4 published just after the liberation of France and during the trials of collaborators, which describes the worst of crimes as those that reduce the human being to a thing. Here Beauvoir explains her refusal to sign a petition for clemency for Robert Brasillach, an anti-Semitic writer who was tried, convicted, and executed for treason. He edited the fascist newspaper Je suis partout (I am everywhere), which revealed the identities and addresses of French Jews during the Nazi occupation of France. Beauvoir undertakes a phenomenological investigation of what lies beneath our everyday experiences of anger and hatred through the more spontaneous experiences of the liberation, which she calls a revolutionary period. She suggests we can only truly understand reactions of outrage to crimes, such as vengefulness, in these extreme situations when we feel them in their “true concreteness” (EE 246). When the experiences of these affects are directed against serious offenses, their proper significance is revealed. Beauvoir looks for the reasons for the disappointment felt after the punishment of the worst perpetrators, as well as the surprise and the worry that come from seeing new meanings in both vengeance and justice. There are a number of reasons for the lack of satisfaction: one is the complexity of the purge of collaborators after the war, Possible and Impossible Reciprocity

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another is the brutal deaths and disappearances of war criminals, and yet another, German attitudes. However, she admits, “this is not enough to explain why a revenge so eagerly desired has left this taste of ashes in our mouths” (EE 246).5 She asks if the need for vengeance is well founded and whether it can be satisfied. Her answer to the first question is yes, but her answer to the second question is no. These experiences reveal something profound about the nature of vengeance and hate, Beauvoir claims. She argues that vengefulness is a response to a deep feeling: human beings have a spiritual appetite for revenge that is a “metaphysical requirement” (EE 247) or a basic need. In order to understand the meaning of this need, she maintains that we must describe spontaneous examples of revenge, rather than cases obscured by societal accretions. These experiences of revenge can be seen in the period following the liberation of France, and Beauvoir mentions the shaving of the heads of women who slept with the Nazi occupiers, “lynching of snipers, summary executions of certain of the collaborationist police, and massacres of the S.S. prison guards by their freed captives” (EE 248). This revenge is aimed at the individuals held directly responsible for wrongs and carried out immediately. In certain specific cases, like the acts of recently liberated camp inmates, vengeance against the worst criminals may be justifiable or at least appear justifiable, according to Beauvoir. In this case, the emotions of vengefulness and hate may almost reach their goal. What this goal is needs to be investigated. Beauvoir appeals to the feeling of hate to explain what she means here. She argues that hate is the only justification for the retaliation against collaborationist police and SS guards, for example. Her claim is that hate is not a capricious passion. This contention is best understood as a normative account of hatred (la haine) or genuine hate, which takes hate to have a proper set of objects as well as proportionality. Beauvoir’s account of hate directed against oppressors should be contrasted with prejudicial hate often directed against an oppressed group. The hate toward oppressors is an ethical response to specific kinds of wrongdoing, as Beauvoir states that hate is “aimed at free beings actually engaged in evil” (EE 252). According to her, hate is directed toward abominations or scandals and a desire to eliminate such realities from the world. She holds that one only hates people, rather than natural evils, “because they are conscious authors of genuine [true] evil” (EE 248).6 The contrast with Sartre’s view of most emotions as “magical” responses to frustration is striking here,7 for Beauvoir is taking these emotions as an authentic response to an extreme situation. We do not The Phenomenological Experience of Love

hate soldiers, she argues, as they are following commands and we share a common situation with the enemy. However, this goodwill between warring countries could break down if extreme propaganda against the enemy were spread or if one or both sides were to commit atrocities and war crimes. This is Beauvoir’s point: what she calls “outrages” occur when one person treats another like an object by humiliating, torturing, assassinating, enslaving, and forcing them to labor. Authentic hatred, unlike prejudicial hatred, focuses on another’s use of his or her freedom to demean a human being into a thing.8 Furthermore, Beauvoir sees hate as having an immediate connection to a desire for revenge that will “strike out” the evil. Let me examine Beauvoir’s argument concerning absolute evil, the object of hate, in more detail. This evil consists in the denial of others’ subjectivity, “when a man deliberately tries to degrade man by reducing him to a thing” (EE 257). People react to that denial through hate and vengefulness against the freedom of the perpetrator. Similarly, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir writes, “A freedom which is occupied in denying freedom is itself so outrageous that the outrageousness of the violence which one practices against it is almost cancelled out: hatred, indignation, and anger (which even the Marxist cultivates, despite the cold impartiality of the doctrine) wipe out all scruples.”9 In “An Eye for an Eye” she explains that the ambiguity of the human condition is that every person “is at the same time a freedom and a thing, both unified and scattered, isolated by his subjectivity and nevertheless coexisting at the heart of the world with other men” (EE 258). We are all a subject for ourselves and an object for others. We are both consciousnesses and material beings and we have a moral obligation to treat others not as objects only but as conscious creatures that know how they are being treated. Otherwise, in refusing to acknowledge this ambiguity, we are both in bad faith and unethical. Beauvoir explains this point in The Ethics of Ambiguity: “The tyrant asserts himself as a transcendence; he considers others as pure immanences: he thus arrogates to himself the right to treat them like cattle. We see the sophism on which his conduct is based: of the ambiguous condition which is that of all men, he retains for himself the only aspect of a transcendence which is capable of justifying itself; for the others, the contingent and unjustified aspect of immanence” (EA 102). The tyrant acts in bad faith and in an unethical way in not acknowledging either his own or others’ ambiguity. In the same text, Beauvoir uses the example of the lynching of African Americans in the United States and says that it is “a fault without justification or excuse” (EA 146). Absolute evil is unlike those ordinary crimes, like stealing and murder, which are committed because of Possible and Impossible Reciprocity

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the inequality that exists in society, which may be excused though perhaps not justified (EE 245). The perpetrators are also different. They acknowledge only their own consciousness or subjectivity and only the physicality or materiality of the victims. The hate is directed against perpetrators of these specific crimes. One apparent problem with Beauvoir’s view of absolute evil is that crimes or cruelty could be very much focused on the consciousness of the victim, rather than their materiality. However, even these kinds of crimes may aim at hurting the person by not allowing them to enjoy their consciousness fully, such as the way the Nazis made people in concentration camps perform useless tasks. In The Ethics of Ambiguity she describes this experience as cutting transcendence off from its goal (30–31). Thus the perpetrators may be concerned with the effect of their actions on the victims, but what their actions actually do is limit the victims’ expression of their freedom. In the early essay, Beauvoir does not make the complexity of her concept as explicit as it is in The Ethics of Ambiguity, where she contrasts freedom as a basic or ontological capacity for spontaneity applicable to all, with freedom as a capacity or expression that can be limited by oppression or our own failure to assume it (EA 25). In the most extreme cases of brutality, our basic freedom can be damaged, sometimes beyond the possibility of recovery. In The Second Sex Beauvoir uses the term absolute evil differently. Rather than using it to describe extreme kinds of actions or to condemn the perpetrator, she declares both oppression and bad faith to be absolute evils, in that they reduce a person to immanence and therefore should not occur (SS 16).10 But it does not follow that every oppressor or every woman acting in bad faith has committed absolute evil. This difference can be understood as the difference between saying that something is an evil, which we can say of a tornado or a tsunami, and saying that a person or action is evil. So far I have reconstructed Beauvoir’s account of appropriate hate and desire for revenge. In the next section I explore the difficulties that Beauvoir finds in the expression of the strong affects of hate and vengefulness, in that reciprocity cannot be achieved. The Impossible Reciprocity of Hate

Having clarified why Beauvoir believes we properly experience hate and vengefulness, we need to understand the implications of these affects. Beauvoir accepts the law of retaliation with a like punishment, or lex talionis The Phenomenological Experience of Love

(hence the title of her essay), an equivalence between the wrong and the punishment, arguing that it reflects a profound human need, as I noted (EE 248). Hate may be expressed through acts of revenge or through punishment, yet as we will see, both fail in various ways to achieve reciprocity. Beauvoir does not push the analogy between crime and revenge or punishment too far by suggesting that punishments must be similar to the original crime. For her, revenge aims at getting the perpetrator to understand in a practical, Heideggerian sense “the process by means of which our entire being realizes a situation” (EE 248). The evil cannot be remedied by the torturer feeling what their victim felt. Torturers must understand in a concrete and genuine way that the victims are also free like themselves. Beauvoir sees this as reestablishing the reciprocity between the perpetrator and victim, and argues that vengeance is justified as a response in the extreme cases of reducing others to a thing because it reestablishes the reciprocity that was destroyed by the crime. This reciprocity should not be seen as simply inflicting a like suffering on the perpetrator. In vengeance perpetrators are reminded of their thing-like aspect while at the same time the victims’ consciousnesses are affirmed. Both are restored to ambiguity and recognition of that ambiguity on both sides. Beauvoir sees this kind of vengeance as justice: “The affirmation of the reciprocity of interhuman relations is the metaphysical basis of the idea of justice” (EE 249). Victims reassert their subjectivity and force perpetrators to face their own materiality to establish reciprocity between them. Yet Beauvoir immediately acknowledges a problem with this vengeful approach to justice and to finding a resolution for hate: it tries to force someone who is free to take up a certain perspective, which is contradictory and doomed to fail. There is a fundamental paradox here of the kind Sartre explores in his account of our relations with others in Being and Nothingness.11 If perpetrators feel remorse of their own accord and punish themselves, then the desire for vengeance is not fulfilled but rather “disarmed” (EE 249). In contrast, if they are subjected to violence, they may not come to feel what the punishers think they should feel, as they are free to take up their own attitude to both their crime and punishment. They may not recognize the consciousness of the victims or the reasons they are being punished. So perhaps what is needed is a punishment that does not entirely compel perpetrators to realize their ambiguity, a punishment partly freely accepted, partly imposed. Beauvoir distinguishes between punishment and the conflict of war, the latter being a case where hurting or harming someone is a means to an end. Furthermore, she distinguishes between punishment and Possible and Impossible Reciprocity

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utilitarian considerations, such as prevention of similar crimes. Utilitarian considerations may mean punishment is avoided, as we may think it is better for everyone to let a crime go unpunished. Beauvoir concludes that in cases where executions are carried out to make an example or where they “proceed from preestablished orders, one should not speak of punishment” (EE 247). Punishment is defined by being aimed at the individual, rather than the group, and at affecting the individual.12 In that sense, it retains a connection to the crime and to the emotional responses of vengefulness and hate, because they concern the individual. Punishment should communicate the reciprocity of perpetrator and victim. What should happen then, according to Beauvoir, is that punishment should work like seduction, so that the perpetrator comes to freely “recognize its [his or her] past faults, repent, and despair” due to the external force compelling that feeling (EE 249). This idea of seduction has resonances with Sartre’s discussion of seduction in Being and Nothingness, the idea that we can aim at “causing to experience.”13 We try to arouse certain feelings—in one case desire, in the other remorse—in other human beings by presenting ourselves and treating the other in specific ways. However, like the failure of seduction to do anything but present oneself as a precious and fascinating object, punishment tries to cause perpetrators to experience remorse but can only present an authority who condemns their actions. Reciprocity cannot be restored in that way. Another contradiction or impossibility appears in the way we wish that force, in other words, the perpetrators, will see themselves as weak while still being a force, before they become objects of our pity or contempt (EE 254). According to Beauvoir, this was close to being true at Lüneburg, the war crimes trial at the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where the perpetrators came to see their crimes as others saw them. But such is generally not the case. Again, she concludes that the inconsistent character of hate and vengeance in this form cannot be satisfied. If the guilty suffer too much, they cannot become properly aware of their guilt; if they do not suffer, they are free to feel however they like. The perpetrator can refuse to acknowledge the meaning of the punishment, by becoming happy, by exhibiting ironic detachment, resistance, resignation, or arrogance. Like seduction, punishment fails, and hate, in yet another sense, does not achieve reciprocity. Life imprisonment may be one way to effect true punishment. In The Ethics of Ambiguity Beauvoir says that “life imprisonment is the most horrible of punishments because it preserves existence in its pure facticity but forbids it all legitimation” (31) in the sense of goals projected into future The Phenomenological Experience of Love

free existence. However, in “An Eye for an Eye” Beauvoir claims even life imprisonment is flawed, as we cannot ensure that the wrongdoer will feel what they should feel. She then says, “Lacking the power to control the hated enemy indefinitely, one must resolve to kill him” (EE 250). This death is supposed to represent the realization of what they have done, a realization that could occur in the last moments of life.14 Such a realization may not occur, as the criminal could be detached or feel no regret at all. Her point here is that if perpetrators live on in prison they can start to understand their situation in their own way. Instead, a true reciprocity would involve the perpetrator’s acknowledgment of mutual ambiguity. Thus, for Beauvoir, capital punishment is a “last resort” because a punishment that effects this acknowledgment is impossible to achieve. The “privileged case,” as mentioned above, is the immediate vengeance taken against the SS concentration camp guards by former inmates (EE 25– 51). Other cases are more problematic, and I believe that her argument, on this particular point, can be given more support. Beauvoir does not discuss in detail the common distinction between feeling a passion or emotion and expressing that passion, yet that distinction is at work in her essay. One way of understanding her argument is that in spontaneous revenge the two are tied together. The unplanned acts of revenge in a time of crisis are an immediate expression of the feeling. Thus they are concrete and genuine: authentic. Yet as time passes, the affect and its expression are separated and the feeling becomes a dwelling on the past, abstract and less genuine. The experience of hate and vengefulness becomes less meaningful over time and so people will try to find a less relevant and less justified outlet. Another problem Beauvoir acknowledges concerns the indirectness of some revenge. Revenge is even more unlikely to reach its metaphysical goal of reciprocity when a third person takes revenge on the victim’s behalf, as is so often the case in punishment. Third parties can only carry out revenge insofar as they are members of the human community and take punishment to be a right. However, Beauvoir argues that this makes them a tyrant and a judge, as they are not in a position to represent justice. Rather, “vengeance is a concrete relation among individuals in the same way that struggle, love, torture, murder or friendship are” (EE 251). Here vengeance is equated to love, at least in respect of its concreteness. Taking revenge on behalf of someone else is to deny this individual and tangible character of revenge. So Beauvoir does not advocate private vengeance on behalf of another person, because people’s motives for taking vengeance are suspect—it could be simple will to power instead of an attempt to restore reciprocity. Moreover, Possible and Impossible Reciprocity

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such action can easily lead to a cycle of violence, as vengeance is not accepted as just by the perpetrators. The state takes over the role of punishment, and revenge becomes sanction instead. In this case, Beauvoir argues, the attempt to establish reciprocity and the passions of hate, anger, and vengefulness are given up in recognition of their failure. Rather, the goal is to take the perpetrators out of the community and to recognize community values. Beauvoir believes that the lex talionis is not the basis for state-sanctioned capital punishment.15 She says that rather than the death penalty being founded on the lex talionis, it expresses how strongly society condemns the crimes (EE 252). However, Beauvoir observes that it is the verdict and sentence that matter more than carrying out the sentence, as occurred for Pétain.16 Thus, she believes that trials and punishment have primarily a social role. These punishments do not establish reciprocity and do not satisfy hate and vengefulness. Moreover, the temporal aspect of society’s punishment alters our perception of criminals and our emotional response to them. The more time passes, the less they seem like the person who did the crime and they begin to evoke our pity instead. Furthermore, their changed situation alters how they seem to us, as does the bureaucracy and pomp surrounding trials. Usually the ceremony and spectacle of state trials do not approach the concrete reality of the crimes. In “An Eye for an Eye” Beauvoir notes that she is struck by Brasillach’s demeanor during the trial: “Whatever this life had been like, whatever the reasons for his death, the dignity with which he carried himself in this extreme situation demanded our respect in the moment we most desired to despise him” (EE 253). This change suggests something about the nature of hate—that it alters with time and situation. While love can also be ephemeral, hate and love differ in their relation to time. The time that passes from the original crisis is one that makes the experience of hate, anger, and vengefulness less and less legitimate. While it could be argued that anger and hate deepen over time just as all kinds of love and desire do, Beauvoir’s argument suggests that there is something deeply disturbing about such an increase in depth. We would expect that these affects will cool, and that was certainly the case in postwar France, where those who evaded trial for some time, even years, received lighter sentences.17 Conversely, weakness and denial in the wrongdoer also destroy our desire for revenge, according to Beauvoir, because they disgust us. Therefore, both respect and disgust drive out hate and revenge. Hate and revenge even in the extreme circumstances as responses to acts of absolute evil fail to create reciprocity between victim and perpetrator in multiple ways. The Phenomenological Experience of Love

This general failure of hate, anger, and vengefulness can be contrasted with the possible reciprocity in love that Beauvoir comes to accept, and I trace that difference and the reasons for it in the next section. The Possible Reciprocity of Love

The reciprocity of hate and regarding someone as a thing can be contrasted with the reciprocity of being both subject and object in love in The Second Sex. In “An Eye for an Eye” Beauvoir writes, “In the same way as hatred and revenge do, love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting” (258). The failure is one of not being able to achieve our goal of reciprocity with the other, a failure analogous in all the affects. The Ethics of Ambiguity presents an importantly different view. In her discussion of the passionate man, Beauvoir distinguishes between maniacal and generous, authentic passions, a distinction that will enable her to conceptualize the success of love in The Second Sex (EA 64). She suggests that a real passion “asserts the subjectivity of its involvement” while simultaneously being “a disclosure of being” (EA 64). Using the example of love, Beauvoir distinguishes genuine or authentic passion from the spirit of seriousness in that objects are not set up as absolutes detached from one’s subjective response. However, in the maniacal passions, freedom does not take an authentic form. The passionate person—or as Beauvoir says, “man”—tries to achieve being through passion and in failing lacks fulfillment. The examples of maniacal passions here are hatred, fear, or faith, and they are linked to tyranny and oppression. One way of interpreting this discussion in the light of “An Eye for an Eye” is that she is centering on the way the passionate person holds to his or her passions, rather than the passions themselves. Then hate may still be legitimate in certain cases, but not when it is a fanatical and maniacal fixation. That is a danger in private revenge, for example, as she observes in “An Eye for an Eye.” Furthermore, here Beauvoir points to the possibility of authentic passion, a “conversion” that can come from within passion itself. If love, for example, accepts the freedom of the other, then it can become authentic: “And to love him genuinely [authentically] is to love him in his otherness and in that freedom by which he escapes” (EA 67). Passion can only become freedom through this openness to others. So, while the question of “authentic” hate is not mentioned, we can infer that since hate is directed toward not fully accepting the possibility of the other’s freedom escaping us, a conversion of hate can only lead to its dissolution rather than its establishment Possible and Impossible Reciprocity

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as authentic. Beauvoir is clear here that failure comes from the attempt to overcome ambiguity, and she condemns hatred, albeit for others’ ability to limit my world in general, as naïve (EA 70–71). Instead, we should affirm the existence of others who give shape and significance to the world and my own actions. However, it is not just after “An Eye for an Eye” that Beauvoir demonstrated a sense of the distinctiveness of love and other emotions that tie us to others while remaining open to their changeability and mystery. Even in “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” a text written earlier, she notes that “to live a love is to throw oneself through that love toward new goals: a home, a job, a common future” (PC 98). That connectedness to other projects is another way that the temporality of love differs from that of hate. Love links us to an open future, to other possibilities, whereas hate involves a desire to end a situation of ethical imbalance and faces the past of the injustice and oppression. One can imagine a person whose hatreds lead them to further hatefilled projects, but that does not provide a sense of the general structure of hate in the way that Beauvoir’s description of love does. Such hate would also cease to mark a genuine response to the worst kinds of deeds. By the time of The Second Sex, Beauvoir argues that desire and love can succeed—they can be reciprocal and mutual, we can be both object and subject at the same time as and with the other. Eroticism based on respect as well as desire can lead to “the reciprocal recognition of self and the other  .  .  . in the keenest consciousness of the other and the self” (SS 415).18 Beauvoir also refers to the “reciprocal generosity of body and soul” that is often hampered by pride in men and hesitancy in women. At its best, erotic sensuality reveals human ambiguity in a way that can be fully enjoyed. Unlike the similarity between her account of the failure of punishment and Sartre’s of seduction, here we see a profound difference between the two philosophers. “An Eye for an Eye” asserts that love is just one concrete relation among others, as I quoted above (EE 251), and to accord with Sartre she would have had to argue in The Second Sex that love, like other concrete relations, is bound to fail. Instead, Beauvoir distinguishes between inauthentic experiences of sexuality and idolatrous love—where women search for a justification of their existence in a man—and authentic love. Idolatrous love, or what is often called romantic love, is like that of the passionate person in The Ethics of Ambiguity, who seeks to fill his lack of being through passion. Like hate, idolatrous love can become a mania. Here Beauvoir develops the idea of a generous or authentic passion. In contrast to idolatrous love, she writes, “authentic love must be founded on The Phenomenological Experience of Love

reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other; neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world. For each of them, love would be the revelation of self through the gift of self and the enrichment of the universe” (SS 706). The reciprocal recognition of freedoms entails that women give up putting men on a pedestal and that men accept that women have their own lives and projects. Oppression distorts the experience of love for both sexes by making love mean too much for women and too little for men. The unrealistic expectations of idolatrous love create demands that need to be reined in to make reciprocity possible. The situation of men and women has to be transformed before truly reciprocal love is possible. When women are no longer oppressed, in that they do not experience themselves as the Other and are economically independent, can aim at their own goals, and can participate in the community without men as mediators (SS 707), they will be able to enjoy free, equal, reciprocal, and mutual desire and love. The love will be free in the sense that it will not be the only possible occupation for women and that it can be chosen. Love would be equal in that the lovers are equal and respect each other. Love would be reciprocal in that both acknowledge the freedom and ambiguity of the other. Love could be mutual in that the love is returned. This would not mean that the lovers must love each other the same amount, even if such a calculation could be made. Rather, unlike in the case of the idolatrous love, where women give and men, somewhat reluctantly, receive, both lovers give and receive. Beauvoir states explicitly that such equal loves are possible, although the example she gives is of the fictional characters from André Malraux’s novel Man’s Estate,19 Kyo and May. Unlike hate, anger, and vengefulness, where we aim to impose or lead the object into experiencing themselves and others in a certain way, in love we are open to how the other may change, how their ambiguity escapes us. Love affirms our own and others’ ambiguity as subject and object and revels in our body and consciousness. In love, as in desire and friendship, we can hope to achieve reciprocity and mutuality through an ongoing commitment to the other that is continually renewed. Thus love becomes more meaningful over time, unlike hate, which loses its point and its connection to the object of hatred. However, if there were no oppression and attempts to reduce others to a thing, there would be no proper hate, in Beauvoir’s sense, although there might be unjustified hate. Hate can only be a response to the worst kind of degradation and ultimately must be given up as a failure. I argue Possible and Impossible Reciprocity

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that Beauvoir came to acknowledge that whereas reciprocity in love and sexuality is a worthy and ethical aim, reciprocity in degradation and hate is not. Even though she means that we realize ambiguity in both cases, not that the other wholly becomes a thing when we try to restore reciprocity based on hate, we still need to understand love and hate differently. At most hate might lead to a fleeting recognition of the victim’s humanity by the perpetrator. In addition to Beauvoir’s becoming ever more optimistic about love over time, she further clarifies the distinction between negative and positive attitudes and affects after “An Eye for an Eye” and even The Ethics of Ambiguity. In The Second Sex Beauvoir takes reciprocity to be the original or basic relation that emerges after conflict, and the oppression of women to be one of the deviations from it, along with race and class oppression, noting in her introduction that “whether one likes it or not, individuals and groups have no choice but to recognize the reciprocity of their relation” (SS 7). In this work, an asymmetry between love and hate exists, one that makes sense of our different experiences of these affects. Love achieves the reciprocity and ambiguity of our proper human state, whereas hate involves stressing the material, object status of the hated offender. Furthermore, true love and desire do not work to cause others to feel something, as in seduction, but sincerely and spontaneously reach out to the other. The lover can be honest in a way that the seducer cannot. Similarly, in “Must We Burn Sade?” Beauvoir says that in sadism the sadist is distanced from his body, so he is not recognizing his own ambiguity, his subjectivity and passivity.20 The sadist has the wrong kind of aim in trying to dominate the other and to use him as an object or thing, not recognizing properly the subject status of the other and communicating with him. The sadist’s desire is incomplete as he is neither able to forget himself nor to appreciate the other, and thus also a failure. While we may mutually hate or mutually feel vengeful, that is not the necessary form of these affects in the way that mutuality and reciprocity are key to love and desire. Even though it might be understandable and even ethical in some extreme situations to experience these affects, as Beauvoir argues, they have a different structure from affects of love, desire, and generosity, which can be experienced authentically in non-oppressive contexts. Hate is always a response to a world gone wrong, unlike love, and so is linked to failure in a way love is not. Usually our hate is not justified; when it is, we generally cannot achieve reciprocity with the other through revenge or punishment, and hate loses its meaning over time. Her description of and reflection on these experiences in a time of crisis casts light on The Phenomenological Experience of Love

our more “ordinary” everyday experiences of anger, hate, and vengefulness. My reading of Beauvoir also demonstrates how they are distinct from positive, affective responses of love and friendship, which we can at least realistically aim to freely, equally, mutually, and reciprocally enjoy with others and that grow and deepen through time and commitment. Reciprocal love is possible in a way that hate is not. 199 notes 1. The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). Hereafter parenthetically cited as SS. [Le deuxième sexe, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).] See, for example, Rosalyn Diprose, “Generosity: Between Love and Desire,” Hypatia 13 no. 1 (1998): 1–20; Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); and Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Romantic Love, Altruism, and SelfRespect: An Analysis of Simone de Beauvoir,” Hypatia 1, no. 1 (1986): 117–48. 2. “An Eye for an Eye,” in Philosophical Writings (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 237–60. Hereafter parenthetically cited as EE. [“Oeil pour oeil,” in L’existentialisme et la sagesse des nations (Paris: Nagel, 1948), 109–43.] 3. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Routledge, 2001). [Esquisse d’un théorie des emotions (Paris: Herman, 1938).] 4. It was first published in Les Temps Modernes, in 1946. 5. See Herbert R. Lottman, The Purge (New York: William Morrow, 1986), for a discussion of the complexities of the French purge. 6. Thomas Brudholm suggests that we may hate animals and inanimate objects, but this would not be moral hatred. See “Hatred as an Attitude,” Philosophical Papers 39, no. 3 (2010): 302. Anne Morgan contends that what makes an action absolute evil is willfully choosing

evil. See “Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Freedom and Absolute Evil,” Hypatia 23, no. 4 (2008): 75–89. However, Beauvoir’s account is flexible enough to allow that the evil of treating someone as a thing could be done negligently or thoughtlessly as well. See EE 255. 7. Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, 34–61. 8. Beauvoir sounds quite Kantian here: we must not treat another as a thing or mere means. See Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 429. However, Beauvoir is proposing a narrower view of treatment that neglects consciousness entirely and/or involves degrading consciousness. Her idea can also be compared to Hannah Arendt’s view that the Nazis went beyond treating others as a means to treating human beings as superfluous. See The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), 457. In many of the cases, as Arendt argues, the person is not being used for a purpose. 9. The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1997), 97. Hereafter parenthetically cited as EA. [Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté suivi de Pyrrhus et Cinéas (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)]. 10. Developing her ideas in “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” Beauvoir argues that violence is a failure and that to oppress a single person is to treat the humanity in them as a thing (Philosophical Writings, 138). Hereafter parenthetically cited as PC. 11. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003).

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[L’Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943).] 12. Here Beauvoir is closer to the Kantian tradition of punishment than the utilitarian. However, Kant does not link punishment with vengeance. 13. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 395. Beauvoir also discusses this idea in “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” where she says it is absurd to try to gain love or admiration through violence (PC 136). 14. I believe Beauvoir is wrong here, but that is the subject for another essay. 15. Furthermore, the lex talionis does not appear to be applicable to her discussion in “An Eye for an Eye” since Brasillach did not actually murder anyone. Yet it could be argued that Brasillach’s actions led to the deaths of Jewish people because he exposed them to deportation and hence to their deaths. Beauvoir makes that point in Force of Circumstance, where she says, “There are words as murderous as gas chambers,” and argues that Brasillach’s writing amounted to direct collaboration. Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (Harmondsworth,

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UK: Penguin, 1968), 30. [La force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963).] 16. In that case, one could argue that Brasillach’s sentence should also have been commuted. Henri Philippe Pétain, chief of the Vichy state, was sentenced to death for treason, but the sentence was commuted due to his age (eighty-nine in 1945). The Vichy prime minister, Pierre Laval, was tried and executed. 17. See Lottman, The Purge. 18. As Julie K. Ward notes, Beauvoir also argued that some women will find reciprocity in lesbian relationships. See “Reciprocity and Friendship in Beauvoir’s Thought,” in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays, ed. Margaret Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 158. 19. Man’s Estate (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961). 20. “Must We Burn Sade?” in Political Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmerman (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 59–60. [Faut-il brûler Sade? (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).]

12 Intentionality and the Neuroscience of Love dorothea olkowski

Introduction: What Is Love?

In 1966 MIT philosopher Irving Singer published the first of three volumes of a book titled The Nature of Love.1 Volume 1 is a comprehensive account of the Western idea of love in the ancient world and religious love in the Middle Ages. Volume 2 appears some time later, in 1984. Its contents briefly reprise philosophies and narratives of love in the Middle Ages, then move on to courtly and romantic love, whose various types—passion, romanticism, and pessimism—are handled in greater detail.2 Volume 3, The Modern World, appears in 1987 and purports to bring the reader into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as to point to the future, a “future without illusions,” a reference no doubt to the famous Freudian text debunking religion, The Future of an Illusion.3 Modern love, Singer maintains, perpetuates courtly and romantic concepts of love, a mixture of suffering arising from social constraints as well as from an individual’s own passions. Nevertheless, one of the chief problems with romantic love is that it fails to fulfill the sexual instincts—it is about emotions, not orgasms. Volume 3 concludes by positing that being in love is the middle ground between falling in love, with its feverish yearnings, libidinal impulses, amorous emotions, but frequent lack of benevolence—and staying in love, a code word for diminished sexuality.

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Although Singer’s examination of the nature of love is comprehensive with respect to the history of the idea of love, it remains the case that Singer is unable to point to any workable ontology that serves as the framework for the ideas of love he puts forth. This raises the question of whether such a framework is even possible given the multitude of ideas about love. That will be our task here, to develop an ontological framework for love—in particular, one that takes up that uniquely modern task of correlating the ontology with scientific accounts of the physiology and neurophysiology of love. In order to do this, we will have to ask whether love is an emotion; if it is, we will have to ask what an emotion is. That is, when we are speaking of an emotion, are we referring to a product of sensation or something correlated with intentions? Love may be romantic or familial, passionate or convivial, sexual or platonic, sadistic or generous; whatever form it takes, we will have to go back to the same questions Singer asked in his work. Is love something learned, is it an instinct, is it a creative act, or is it something else altogether that we have not yet examined and may not even understand? To address these questions in the context of neuroscience, let us turn first to the empiricist foundations of the contemporary idea of love, foundations from which contemporary neuroscience takes its method and many of its ideas. The Empiricist Foundation of Love

In his 1738 Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume argues that although it is “almost entirely new,” “the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences.”4 This is because even mathematics, natural philosophy (physics), and natural religion depend on human cognition and are judged by human powers and faculties (THN xix). This new science is to be modeled on the natural sciences, and so on the newly affirmed experimental method in the natural sciences. This method is understandably applied in book I to the understanding, including reason, but Hume devotes all of book II to “The Passions.” The reason for this only becomes clear much later in the Treatise. Natural science has provided humanity with necessary principles governing the relations between material bodies. As for matter, the same for mind. They follow the exact same principles insofar as they have the same feeling of necessity, that is, we feel the necessity of the connection; this is what is meant by the term moral evidence, which refers to conclusions about human action derived from a consideration of motives, temper, and situation (THN 406). Minus necessity, actions can be neither praised nor blamed. When we feel a passion, we act on it, unless it is founded on false suppositions or the The Phenomenological Experience of Love

means are insufficient to accomplish the desired ends (THN 416). But this situation is not trivial. Founded on false suppositions or unable to achieve its ends, passion will be countered by reason. Convince me of my error and my longing ends! Reason’s intervention functions quite well for the calmer passions, which do not generate much emotion. A false supposition or the insufficiency of means quickly deters the action that would have followed the effect. But what about violent passions? What about love? According to Hume, perceptions of sensation result in impressions (sensations, passions, emotions) or ideas, the fainter image of impressions in thinking or reasoning (THN 1). Ideas are connected or associated in the mind through resemblance, contiguity in space and time, and cause and effect, all of which are derived from the constant union of two impressions or of an impression and an idea, which, as we have seen above, is a necessary relation (THN 11). Our original impressions of sensation leave ideas behind, but they also directly affect the body as pleasure or pain, on which we may also reflect. These secondary impressions of reflection result in passions, and passions may be calm or violent (THN 276). Were we unable to reflect on our pleasure or pain, we would not experience passions. Among the calm passions is beauty. Among the violent passions is love. Not only is love a violent passion; it is also an indirect passion. This means that it does not arise immediately from the perceptions that affect the body with pleasure or pain but rather arises only in conjunction with other sensations, other qualities. Hume hypothesizes that the rational association of ideas does enhance the association of impressions of pleasure and pain, such that a man in a bad temper will have many ideas concerning things about which to be mad. Thus, there is a double impulse, an association of ideas and an association of impressions, resulting in a passion of ever-greater violence (THN 285)! So even reason contributes to violent passions. Now, what is it about the passion of love that places it among the violent passions? First, love and hatred, which Hume addresses together, are said to have a strong resemblance to pride and humility, and when it comes to pleasure and pain, resemblance is what matters most. Yet the object of our pride is, of course, ourselves, but the object of love is another person (THN 329). Yet pride and humility, love and hatred, resemble one another with respect to the object of pride and humility and the cause of love and hatred. We love or hate the object, usually a thinking being. The object gives us a feeling, a sensation of pleasure or pain. The object causes our feeling but not our emotion. Only the sensation, our own sensation, pleasure or pain, causes us to make the kind of associations that lead to love or hate. In this manner love and hatred are indeed like pride and humility. The Neuroscience of Love

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Because our own feelings are so strong, Hume says that the mind passes with great ease from one feeling to others that resemble it. But really, what we feel is either a feeling of pleasure or a feeling of pain; in and of itself, feeling has no other distinctions, no other qualities. So in order to constitute emotions, what the mind must really be passing to are ideas that are associated with the object that causes the feeling, and this is what causes a specific passion (THN 338–39). When the ideas associated with an object that causes us to feel pleasure, more and more pleasure. Rather than simply loving virtue or generosity, or taste or wit, the feeling of pleasure induces us to love the thinking person displaying these ideas; we love the cause and revel in our feeling of pleasure (THN 297). Love is about the quantity of pleasure we receive from the ideas associated with others through our own experience of pleasure. The more pleasure, it seems, the more love. Can this be right? Is the association of ideas connected to the object that causes our pleasure indeed the source of our love? Is it true that we cannot prefer strangers with superior qualities to those closest to us, even those lacking those qualities? The mind is insufficient, says Hume. It seeks the pleasure that comes from others, from “foreign objects,” but only insofar as those foreign objects are associated with sensations that cause us pleasure, but such impressions of sensation arise only to the extent that the other person is like me and I am like the other. If the other is close to me in space and time, contiguous, then I perceive the resemblance between the ideas that I associate with one another and with the person who is the cause of my sensation (THN 354). If this is so, then association, contiguity, and cause, the association of ideas, make the world go round, elevate our hearts, make our blood flow, enliven our other ideas so as to cause even more pleasure (THN 352). This is truly the sense in which reason, the association of ideas, serves the passions; it contributes to the creation of the passions. This helps to prevent a third person from weakening the tie between the first two (THN 356). But the mind wavers. The mother remarries. The lover departs. The spouse engages in an affair. The child detests the parent. We do wander even from those persons closest to us whose qualities we admire. So perhaps after all, reason, the association of ideas, may not be enough to account for love. The Neuroscience of Love

Hume’s “experiments” with respect to love and hatred are primarily observations. He has observed that the “relation of blood” produces the greatest love, since the transition, the resemblance between ourselves and that The Phenomenological Experience of Love

person, is generally the strongest (THN 352–53). We are also drawn to those who most resemble ourselves in temperament and disposition. The mind makes constant use of resemblance, which provides us with the memory of our perceptions and ideas, and so allows even our distant perceptions to influence our present pleasures or pains (THN 253, 260–61). This is why our idea of ourselves is so strong and why it associates with similar ideas of other persons. Such an idea coming from another person can be strong enough to leave an impression that is soon transformed into pleasure, then quite possibly into love. Modern neuroscience would seem to have at its disposal more effective means of carrying out experiments that test Hume’s observations. Many neuroscientists remain indebted to Hume’s associative account of the generation of violent passions; however, at least one contemporary neurophysiologist has argued that the model of experimentation Hume utilizes is one that operates within a framework of simplistic, linear modes. As Walter J. Freeman has pointed out, such linear models have overtaken research and resulted in the virtual disappearance of a concept Hume infrequently references, that of intentionality, which Hume refers to only as motivation.5 Since Hume’s first steps in the direction of understanding the mind, neurobiologists have sought the elementary components of the brain; neuroanatomists have studied the intricate anatomical connections of neurons; and physiologists, behaviorist psychologists, developmental biologists, immunologists, neurochemists, neuropsychologists, neuroradiologists, and geneticists have all added vastly to our knowledge of the brain (SB 19–22). Yet let us recall that laboratory work is most effective in “a framework of simplistic, linear modes of circuits, nets, maps, alphabets, and bit maps from information theory,” whereas unifying hypotheses require a more holistic framework and greater tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty (SB 23). For Freeman, many theories are like Hume’s insofar as they postulate or infer that the brain is fundamentally passive, meaning it is an effect of nature and natural forces. Some impressions appear to us but “depend upon natural and physical causes” (THN 275). By contrast, Freeman insists that brains are creative: “They actively stretch forth in search of input” (SB 38). More recently, given the technologies of PET scans and MRIs, it has been suggested that the tissue formed in brain neurons is absolutely unique, and that it is the basis of adaptive, goal-directed behavior. Also, this tissue (called neuropil) is thought to evolve ontogenetically in abrupt, nonpredictable, and self-determined steps (SB 38–39). To characterize the relationship between neuron activity and behavior, Freeman introduces the The Neuroscience of Love

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concept of neuroactivity, defined by relations between electrochemical signs and overt, measured behaviors. Of consequence for our purposes is the idea that brains are open to energy and information but not to meaning. Meaning, claims Freeman, is created by neuroactivity in the sensory cortices and shapes meaningful patterns of muscle contractions in the brain stem. Thus intentionality and intentional structure, whose physical and chemical signs are measured by neurobiologists, is mediated by neuroactivity and not mind (SB 39). It is important for us to differentiate various approaches to understanding the brain and the mind without necessarily rejecting any of them. Neurobiologists, for example, produce and utilize differential equations representing or modeling neuroactivity, while psychologists describe patterns of behavior (measuring the words and motions of bodies), leading to the concept of mind as the structure of behavior, and intentionality, with its unity, wholeness, and intent, as the process by which the mind is constructed (SB 39–40). Unlike Hume, who slips into an explanation of love as an emotion caused by another person, thus as natural and necessary, Freeman is clear that the description of regular relations between brains and mind is not due to causal connections (SB 40). It is by reintroducing a complex understanding of intentionality— one that also exceeds the anemic aboutness of analytic philosophy—that Freeman wishes to articulate the extent to which love is embedded in volition, since “people seek to arrange conditions so that it [love] might be facilitated or avoided” (SB 8, 18). Phenomenology and Intentionality

Freeman cites the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty for several key concepts, beginning with Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of aspect dualism, the Spinozist idea that mind and body are two aspects of one substance, a position that has been adopted by Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp among others in the fields of neuroscience and neurophysiology. In his critique of causality Merleau-Ponty focuses on distinguishing between mechanical actions and what he calls structure. Mechanical actions are those for which the cause and effect can be decomposed into real elements with a unidirectional, one-to-one correspondence. Structure can be described as the qualitatively varying global response of an organism to qualitatively varying stimuli that occasion but do not cause the response because the reaction depends on a relation of meaning intrinsic to the situation.6 In other words, rather than isolated interior and exterior milieus that are causally linked The Phenomenological Experience of Love

(the shared position of dual aspect monism and empiricism), the organism and the world are correlative and participate in a single structure. This implies that what is often simply called “life” is already also consciousness of life (TSB 161–62). To articulate the structure of the interplay of the organism and the phenomenal field, Merleau-Ponty introduces the concept of “form,” which refers to a configuration whereby the sensory value of each element is determined by its function in the whole and varies with it (TSB 168). Every action undertaken modifies the field where it occurs and establishes lines of force within which action unfolds and alters the phenomenal field (TSB 169). This terminology might have been adopted from Kurt Koffka, who in 1940 theorized that there is a continuous field of energy between objects and human perception (SB 33). Although this idea was experimentally proven untenable, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the idea of relationship between organism and milieu continues to be effective. He asks, what if consciousness is not simply a mostly passive milieu that receives its organization from outside through the action of material, sociological, or physiological causality? If this is the case, it appears that certain structures are, in some manner, prefigured in consciousness—otherwise, any objects associated with them would be mere sensations disengaged from human meaning (TSB 169). Language would be merely sound; use-objects would be merely sensory phenomena; other people would be curiously integrated motions, gestures, and sounds but nothing more. This implies that the sensible existence of the perceived world around us is not enough to give it a privileged importance. It implies that we are conscious of objects being used and taking them up to use them, conscious of actions being taken and taking them ourselves, of words being spoken and speaking them ourselves, all of which allows us to discover or to consciously constitute the intention(s) in which they are involved, the meaning of their use (TSB 170). The significative intention coming from another can be quite minimal—a vocal inflection, a mouth with upturned corners, are indications of an “indecomposable structure,” which is not, however, an a priori judgment or a representation of some mental content (TSB 171). This makes sense if it is the case that we perceive a world of discontinuous regions in the same way that we experience different types of acts of consciousness: “Desire could be related to the object desired, will to the object willed, fear to the object feared. . . . [There could also be] a sort of blind recognition of the object desired by the desire, and of the good by the will” (TSB 172). Even quite confused sensory assemblages, such as the sense of something amiss, some The Neuroscience of Love

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vaguely perceived expectation before entering a room or excitement in the tone of a voice, can be clearly identified as the basis of human intentions (TSB 173). Why is this the case? It is because the relations between consciousness and the world are not unidirectional, not an associatively causal encounter between objects, sensations, cognitions, and actions. There is “a network of significative intentions,” more or less clear, lived rather than known (TSB 173). Representing, willing, desiring, and loving are each animated, brought to life by an intention (TSB 173). An infant’s perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, is an emotional intentionality, an emotional contact with the infant’s centers of interest in its milieu (TSB 176). But is this not the case for adult humans as much as for infants? Might this not be the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s reformulation of the Freudian “erotic infrastructure” and relevant for thinking about the nature of love? Freud’s theory of instincts makes love libidinal, the product of the life energy that is ultimately found to be in service to the more primitive death instinct’s demand to return all living things to the quiescence of the inorganic state. This implies that the development of love entails a fixation (cathexis) on external objects (people) whose transition from a parent to a more available and appropriate object is blocked. Freud seems to say that this failure of instinct to find the appropriate object is caused by traumatic incidents that block the instinct’s energy, prohibiting attainment of the next stage of emotional attachment (TSB 177–78). Even if it is the case that love originates with instinctual drives, wherever it succeeds, wherever love truly arises, Merleau-Ponty maintains that this is because “vital energies are no longer motor forces of behavior” (TSB 179). Instincts are operative only insofar as they have been integrated into a new whole where biology already refers to the collaboration of the entire organism, and instinctual behavior vanishes into a structure of behavior that is perceptual, intelligent, and emotional (TSB 181, 183). Let us try to see how such an intentionality might function by taking up the fictional account of Aomame and Tengo, the protagonists of Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84.7 Despite not having seen or had any contact with one another for twenty years, Aomame and Tengo mysteriously love each other. Returning by train from a visit to the guardian of a strange teenage girl whose book of apparent fiction he is rewriting for publication, Tengo is seated across from a neatly dressed mother and her little girl. As they leave the train, the girl looks at him deliberately, intentionally, and he sees in her eyes a strange light, a momentary gleam, a sort of signal meant for him, an appeal or a plea (1Q84 150). This evokes in him feeling for Aomame, who The Phenomenological Experience of Love

had been in his third- and fourth-grade classes. Tengo’s mother disappeared when he was very young and he was left in the care of his sullen father, a television fee collector. The girl’s parents belonged to a strict religious sect. The two would see each other on Sundays, when they were forced to accompany their parents either collecting fees or handing out religious pamphlets. In school the girl and Tengo spoke only once, when another student started berating her for a mistake in a science experiment. Tengo intervened and brought the girl to his group, explaining the experiment to her. After that their eyes met often but they never spoke again. This single incident, Tengo’s deliberate and decided intervention in a situation that was quite painful for Aomame, along with his great kindness to her, opens her heart and gives her the ability to love Tengo. One December day, when all the other students had gone, leaving only the two of them, Aomame purposefully strode across the room, straight toward Tengo, stood next to him and, looking up at him, took his hand in hers. She held his hand for a long time with a strong grip then dropped it and ran from the room (1Q84 152–53). Observing Aomame in class, Tengo realizes that she has strength of mind, an energy she usually hides, and he wants her to hold his hand again, but she does not, nor does she speak to him, nor even look at him (1Q84 358–59). This is the extent of their encounters until they are brought together by circumstances. Although the “vivid sensation” of the touch of Aomame’s hand fades, he never forgets the “intense shuddering of the heart” that her intentional act incites, nor does he experience this with any other girl, and he starts to think about her more and more. When Aomame disappears from his school Tengo is filled with regret, wishing that he had spoken to her, and he starts to think of her erotically until his life is filled with dating and sexual experiences with girls in college, yet he never finds what he is looking for in them. The intentional signification of Aomame’s act is never repeated. At the age of thirty, Tengo starts again to think more often of Aomame. He vividly recalls how she strode across the classroom toward him; he thinks about her crystal-clear eyes, her strong grip. These minimal significative signals are enough to keep alive the feeling in Tengo’s heart and the intention that lets him continue to love Aomame, even though he has not seen her in twenty years. He wonders if he would recognize her, but he feels that if he were to see her, he would “open up and tell her everything honestly,” because there is so much he wants to tell her (1Q84 360–61). But he also fears that she might have become someone quite ordinary and that he would lose “something precious that he had cherished all these years” (1Q84 362). That The Neuroscience of Love

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something is Tengo’s love for Aomame, for her firm grip and her crystalclear eyes. In the end he realizes that with her act “Aomame seemed to have taken part of him with her—part of his heart or body. And in its place, she had left part of her heart or body inside him in a matter of seconds” (1Q84 362). It is the book he is rewriting for the strange teenage girl, Fuka-Eri, seemingly part fantasy, part real, that is bringing them together. Aomame had left her family and their cult many years previously and become a fitness instructor and trainer. One of her clients, an aging woman referred to as “the Dowager,” hires Aomame to use her knowledge of physiology to anonymously end the lives of men who have sexually abused women. This work becomes dangerous when the Dowager asks her to perform this act on the head of a powerful cult, who is also Fuka-Eri’s father. This is what brings her together with Tengo. Preparing herself for this final act, Aomame thinks about Tengo. She thinks that even after she carries this out and goes into hiding, she will still have the memory of him and of his kindness toward her. She will still sense the touch of his hand and her own shuddering emotion as she took his hand twenty years before, and she is aware of her current desire to be in his arms (1Q84 373). She knows that this is what distinguishes her from others: “At my core, there is not nothing. . . . At my core there is love. I’ll go on loving that ten-year-old boy named Tengo forever—his strength, his intelligence, his kindness” (1Q84 374). Aomame also carries thoughts of the thirty-year-old Tengo, still strong, intelligent, and kind, but a grown man with a man’s sexuality. A man who could hold and kiss her, into whose warm eyes she could gaze. And although she thinks about what might happen to her when she kills the cult leader, she decides that it is nothing compared with the fact that Tengo exists in the world (1Q84 374). In the end, it is Aomame who finds Tengo. Aomame hears from the Dowager’s bodyguard that Tengo has been searching for her, which fills her heart with joy. Instructed to go to a children’s playground, Tengo climbs to the top of the slide. Sitting there with his eyes closed, he becomes aware of someone sitting beside him, holding his hand inside his leather jacket pocket. Aomame squeezes his hand and Tengo squeezes hers, and twenty years dissolve (1Q84 895–96). When Aomame tells Tengo to open his eyes, he looks at her and sees the same clear eyes, brimming with expression (1Q84 906). He feels the relative nature of time and knows that if even more time had passed since Aomame first took his hand, his heart would still be filled with the same joy, the same certainty. Strangely, even though he is not The Phenomenological Experience of Love

speaking at all, Aomame is listening and hears his thoughts. However, it is time for them to move on. Aomame’s situation is dangerous and they need to leave the world in which these events have taken place, which they do together (1Q84 908–9). Aomame knows that even if she were never to see Tengo again, she loves him. And Tengo does not find this love in anyone else. How are we to understand the intentionality that makes these feelings of love possible, that makes this love continue even without proximity, without the constant presence of the other, without any knowledge or awareness of one another’s qualities that would merely produce feelings of pleasure? Sensation, Perception, Intention

Perhaps we are now ready to return to the neuroscience of love. The question we are asking is, is this an effect of intentionality and, if so, what is the nature of these intentions? Phenomenologically, intentionality has been broadly defined as the idea that consciousness is directed to objects outside itself but always in a variety of modes. Freeman accepts this idea but specifies that intentionality refers not to consciousness but to the brain in action having the properties of unity (a state of integration by which a self distinguishes itself from nonself), wholeness (a bounded process by which a self actualizes its mature form through stages), and intent (a relation in which a self modifies itself into conformance with aspects of nonself, the process of taking in by stretching forth); and he defines an intentional structure as a living brain having the capacity to actualize these properties by purposive behavior (SB 18–19). How far we can take this idea that the brain has an intentional structure is central to this discussion. Dendrites bring information to the cells and generate electric current that axons transmit as a pulse frequency (SB 46–47). These stimulusresponse relations, the input-output relations of neuroactivity called serially forward relations, are simple to understand. What is difficult to understand are feedback operations in which the outputs of neurons provide internal inputs to sensory cortices. This is what is meant by nonlinear neural feedback (SB 45–46). In this model, brains are thermodynamically open systems that operate far from equilibrium with new supplies of energy from the liver and oxygen from the lungs, along with the continuous removal of waste heat and carbon dioxide through the veins. They are often close to thresholds, which means they are ready for sudden state transitions when sensory stimuli are sought and received. The Neuroscience of Love

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Neuroactivity arises in the developing brain whose structure or connectivity is shaped by its own activity. Freeman compares his analysis of neuroactivity and the “intentionality” that emerges from it to Michel Foucault’s 1976 analysis of power and the emergence of knowledge. Freeman postulates that Foucault’s analysis explicates a system whose rules neither predict nor explain but rather reflect “what we encounter as we move conceptually from the local neural network and its clearly defined properties out to the limits of its utility, multiply the network to infinity, and then awaken into a new local network, in which the infinities of components are collapsed into the emergent elements at the next higher hierarchical level” (SB 53). By contrast, I am making the claim that the intentional system is a structure much more like Merleau-Ponty’s than Foucault’s. Many complications remain on both the micro and macro levels, but for our greatly simplified purposes we want to ask about what is called the interface between brains and the world. Tracing a stimulus into the receptor layer, to the cerebral cortex triggering a destabilization of the entire sensory cortex, there is an explosive jump from one spatial pattern of activity to a new one. The pattern expresses the nature of the class of stimulus, but it also expresses the meaning of this activity for the subject rather than for the event itself (SB 66). Evidence for this lies in the recognition that the ability to search for something that is rapidly changing in a context of uncontrolled and uncontrollable backgrounds has never been mechanically duplicated. Of course, however far removed it seems to be, the question we are pursuing is the extent to which love is intentional. For Freeman, intentional behavior begins with visual, auditory, somatic, taste, and olfactory inputs that are integrated in the hippocampus, meaning that multimodal sensory convergence occurs first, then there is integration over time and, lastly, location in space (SB 74–75). The hippocampus arranges the output, not the input. No doubt this is related to the idea that bodies move through the world constructing knowledge of space and time, combining messages sent to muscles with changes in receptor activity that follows from this (SB 77). Together, the hypothalamus, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the limbic cortex, and their subcortical components constitute what is referred to as the limbic system (limbus means belt in Latin).8 Overall the limbic system receives input from the moving body’s sensory cortices and shapes autonomic (involuntary or visceral) and endocrine (glandular) support systems (SB 78). Freeman thus claims that the limbic system sets goals, initiates movements, coalesces temporal sequences of multimodal sensory input, and provides orientation to the spatial environment (SB 81). Freeman The Phenomenological Experience of Love

acknowledges that his account seems to neglect the neocortical systems surrounding the cerebrum, their thalamic gateways and brain stem controls, in favor of the limbic system because he understands the structure of behavior to be related to the genesis of purpose in the limbic system (SB 87). Behavior appears as movement directed toward the world, initially in the search for nutrition, which has to be predicted, searched for, and found. This calls for what is called a cognitive map, a mind structure for orientation in time and space constructed by brains through their directed actions into the world (SB 92). Intentionality and Love

Freeman’s basic argument has been that his study of neuroactivity patterns allows him to infer that they are the physical basis for thoughts and meanings. In addition, he holds that these patterns “act back onto” the structure of intentionality (SB 111). Throughout his discussion, Freeman has been and remains careful not to render this complex relation in simple causal terms.9 Nevertheless, it seems that ultimately if “thought is a process by which neuroactivity creates meaning, modifies intentional structure, and constructs representations of meaning,” then what Merleau-Ponty calls perception, or even physiology, is, for Freeman, thought (SB 136). This appears to be the case because awareness of experience apart from its physical sources is merely a property of consciousness. Thus lovers are like patients who have been put under by anesthesiology (SB 136). The patients, who are more or less unconscious, have to be asked if they felt anything, as do the lovers, too. That is, the lovers are no different than an unconscious person. Apparently their gestures, facial and bodily expressions, their words and actions do not signify anything to each other; they have to ask. Neurophysiological studies of intentionality on the level of physiology lead Freeman to disallow what appears to be a key component of the love shared by Aomame and Tengo. What he does not allow is the possibility that Aomame understands Tengo’s thoughts and that Tengo understands Aomame’s. Referring to the novelist Umberto Eco, Freeman agrees with Eco that the meanings readers find in Eco’s texts are not the ones Eco himself intends, so there is no understanding of Eco’s work by anyone else. He agrees with Derrida that reading is perceptual and writing motoric, therefore there is no identity between them and, really, no crossover. But additionally, since reading modifies the intentional structure of the neuroactivity of thought, every rereading induces a new meaning in even the same The Neuroscience of Love

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reader, resulting in Lacan’s sliding signifier (SB 108–9). But Freeman takes it further. A text, poem, or novel has no meaning at all. Brains localize their percepts as events in the world and not in their sensory receptors “so readers who are experiencing the construction of meanings naturally assign the meanings to the texts and not to their own minds” (SB 108). For Freeman, when person A writes a philosophy paper, she creates an external representation of her internal thoughts and meanings, which is read by person B, who creates their own meaning, their own internal representation. Each brain is individually self-organized, with its own patterns and frames of reference. Knowledge arrives from the brain’s cumulative constructions induced by its sensory milieu, unique to each individual in the common environment (SB 105–6). What this implies, according to Freeman, is that from the beginning, in the womb, the development of every intentional structure is unique. It grows from its unique genetically determined groundwork by grasping for sensory input from within and outside its own body (SB 120). On this basis we would distinguish internal representations, thoughts that are meaningful, and external representations, which are informational but have no meaning. From this point of view, the worst thing that can happen to lovers is that they understand one another on the level of language. For if Freeman is correct, what has really happened in this instance is that their meanings have become information, thus objective, public, fixed, reproducible, delimited, and reified (SB 106). There would be nothing intimate and unique in their exchanges. Être-au-monde

Nevertheless, although Freeman may be alert to the difficulties of understanding another and sharing meaning, as well as to the banalities of language, his solipsism remains unwarranted for several reasons. Freeman’s solipsism appears to arise from a failure to appreciate his own experimental findings. He tells us that a remarkable property of perception is that sensory inputs are localized to points in the cognitive map that express the relation of the perceiver to an inferred distant source of the input, instead of their being localized in receptors receiving stimuli. Nevertheless, this localization occurs because it is based on the prior action of the perceiver into the world and is a basis for planning and for future action (SB 81). Yet, when we arrive at the question of assigning meaning, not to our brains but to things in the world, he forgets that we are fundamentally être-au-monde, beings at the world, and that the perceiver acts in the world and not in her brain. The Phenomenological Experience of Love

Freeman does not slip into the empiricist position of making the brain a passive receptor of stimuli. It is not; it is completely intentional in all its aspects. But he does seem to reinstate isolated interior and exterior milieus, which, because they are emergent and complex, cannot be causally linked: but does this imply that they are not linked at all? Introducing the concept of structure allows Merleau-Ponty to theorize that the organism and the world are correlative and participate in a single structure, but Freeman drops this for solipsism. What are the implications of this for love? It seems that if we were to accept Freeman’s argument, Aomame and Tengo’s love is possible, but its future is tenuous, perhaps even doomed. Freeman has provided excellent evidence for his claim that neuroactivity patterns provide the physical basis for thoughts and meanings. That Aomame and Tengo “fell in love” over a single encounter can be accounted for neurophysiologically as a conversion experience. Research into militant religious, political, and social groups has revealed that their practices often produce in participants a tenacity that indicates a profound alteration in intentional structure resulting in the forcing of conversions onto unwilling individuals at the hands of harsh regimes. Both Aomame and Tengo were subject to such harsh regimes. Just as alcoholics who have hit bottom may experience a sense of intense illumination and transformation to new beliefs and behaviors that groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous make use of, so Aomame and Tengo, who both suffered from their parents’ lives, may well have hit bottom and at that moment were able to connect emotionally and not to forget each other for twenty years (SB 126). Furthermore, since Aomame becomes pregnant with Tengo’s child, there is some guarantee that human pair bondings, the release of oxytocin and vasopressin, will keep them together for approximately two to four years after the child is born (SB 123). But Freeman is equally clear about the time to “fall out of love,” when aggression will be directed at the partner. He notes that only the biological mechanism of socialization akin to hazing will prevent the abrupt dissolution of biological intentional structures by making participants fall into line with social norms (SB 126–27). For Merleau-Ponty, the variables on which behavior depends are not found in stimuli taken as events in the physical world, but in relations that are not contained in the physical world. This is because there is a difference between the physical event as it is for itself and the situation for the organism (TSB 129). Merleau-Ponty would agree with Freeman that the reactions of organisms are not built up out of basic elementary movements but have an internal unity, a “kinetic melody” gifted with meaning, but the The Neuroscience of Love

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implications of this discovery go beyond Freeman’s solipsism. If it is the case that behavior involves three fields—a physical field of forces (matter or quantity following laws), a physiological field (life or order establishing norms), and a mental field (mind or value creating signification)—then does not the notion of “form” permit a new solution, integrating these three? What happens in each field is influenced by what happens in the others; each local effect depends on its function, value, and significance in the whole (TSB 131). Within the physiological field any behavior that is not preferred will be judged difficult or unacceptable not because it requires more energy, but because it is not suited to the task in which the organism is engaged (TSB 146–47). Intentions depend on the total activity of the organism in its milieu. Preferred behavior permits the most exact spatial designations, the finest sensory discriminations, according to their lived significance (TSB 148). This is how we distinguish physiological reactions such as turning away from a loud noise or a bright light, yawning, or sneezing, from precise, consciously selected movements, such as when Aomame walks across the empty classroom and takes Tengo’s hand. The latter movement takes possession of the world while the former belongs to those movements that express abandonment and passivity, an organism that is not master of its milieu. When Tengo turns to Aomame and pulls her into his group in school, his intention is addressed to the milieu. It turns out to be not any action whatever, but his action, his intention, even though given the neurophysiology of the situation, many other things could have occurred, or nothing at all (TSB 151). It is true that each organism is unique, each one the sum of physical and chemical actions, a continuous sequence of phenomena, an ideal unity whereby the characteristics of each unique being would be only the macroscopic result of a multitude of elementary microscopic actions of physical systems with autochthonous meanings (TSB 151, 153, 154). But when Tengo becomes aware of someone sitting beside him at the top of the slide on the children’s playground, a hand slipped deliberately inside the pocket of his leather jacket, right away he remembers her hand, because in twenty years he had never forgotten the intentional nature of that feeling. In that time, Aomame’s hand had touched many things, as had his own, but he feels it immediately as her hand (1Q84 895). Her hand grasping his and his hand grasping hers is an intentional structure, the condition of the possibility of recognition, an immanent signification, a preferred behavior of two bodies, centers of action radiating over a milieu in both the physical and the The Phenomenological Experience of Love

moral sense (TSB 157). They each think the same words without expressing it aloud, “It was such a long time” (1Q84 907). Far from being cut off from Tengo in her own solipsistic world, Aomame hears everything that goes on in Tengo’s heart, and so they must move on, away from this place which is dangerous for her. Aomame leads Tengo to what she believes is the only escape for them. She tells him that she once almost gave up her life for his, so now she must lead him away from the danger, reversing the path by which she entered the world she calls 1Q84. Aomame leads the way up a metal ladder like a staircase that deposits them on the edge of Metropolitan Expressway No. 3. Too drained to move, a prayer from her childhood flows out like a “conditioned reflex,” but each individual word has no meaning for her, and the phrases have become mere sounds. It seems that there is no intentional structure in the prayer, only the habituated memory of the words (1Q84 921). And this strikes an important chord in her because it means to her that she never lost herself to the religious cult of her parents, to the meaningless words, to the dangers of 1Q84. Together at last in the safety of a hotel room, on a floor high above the expressway, Aomame speaks: “I’ve been lonely for so long. And I’ve been hurt so deeply. If only I could have met you again a long time ago.” But Tengo tells Aomame, “We needed that much time . . . to understand how lonely we really were” (1Q84 923–24). For Freeman, this sense of another person is something like ESP (extrasensory perception), which he defines as when what he calls a presence is hypothesized to be a transmitting brain elsewhere in space-time sending signals to a receiving brain. It is not entirely improbable, but persons reporting these experiences find them most convincing when they are associated with life-threatening or highly emotional events. Still, such abilities would imply a radical change in the conception of causality, space, and time that Freeman is utilizing (SB 156–57). However, it is not our claim here that Aomame and Tengo’s feelings of love are a form of ESP, but instead that they enact the power of intention within the overall structure of behavior. This is, of course, not only the structure of our physiological capacities but also the structure of the human order. Human acts such as speech, work, and choosing clothing are not meant as an adaptation, an extension of an organ, and an artificial skin, respectively (TSB 163). To the extent that each of these acts performed by humans are symbolic, they are themselves significations (TSB 122). Language, work, or clothing without intent would be natural objects. Why speak poetically rather than in the most efficient manner possible? Why write novels as The Neuroscience of Love

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Tengo does rather than merely reporting? Why take care to clothe oneself in one style or another? And why love this particular person rather than anyone whomever? Would Aomame continue to love Tengo if he had responded negatively when she walked across the classroom and took his hand? Both the action and the response must be intentional, must signify. It seems that to engage in an action with another human being—as Aomame engages with Tengo, and he with her when they join hands and flee—is only possible insofar as they each have embraced the intention each directs to the other, an intention that is actualized in the love for each other that they have maintained for twenty years. notes 1. Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. 1, Plato to Luther (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 2. Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. 2, Courtly and Romantic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 3. Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. 3, The Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 29–30. 4. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1968), xx. Hereafter parenthetically cited as THN. 5. Walter J. Freeman, Societies of Brains: A Study in the Neuroscience of Love and Hate (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 23. Hereafter parenthetically cited as SB. Hume refers a number of times to motive or motives, defining them as “internal moral qualities” where actions are the external signs of such internal moral qualities (THN 477). Freeman studied physics and mathematics at MIT as well as philosophy and medicine before turning to neurophysiology. He became a professor at UC Berkeley in 1959.

The Phenomenological Experience of Love

6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 160–61. Hereafter parenthetically cited as TSB. 7. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Hereafter parenthetically cited as 1Q84. 8. Rand S. Swensen, “Review of Clinical and Functional Neuroscience,” Dartmouth Medical School, 2006, http://www. dartmouth.edu/~rswenson/NeuroSci/ chapter_9.html. 9. A similar position is articulated by Evan Thompson in his book Mind in Life; however, as Thompson’s account addresses other types of philosophical questions and does so more simplistically, for our purposes it is preferable to remain with the more straightforward neuroscience. See Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).

13 Love Is Blind Jacques Derrida dawne mccance

At one point in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s “documentary” film Derrida, Ziering Kofman asks Jacques Derrida to speak about love. “About what?” he asks incredulously. “Love,” she responds. “Love?” he repeats. “Love,” she answers again. “I have nothing to say about love,” Derrida retorts. “At least pose a question. I can’t examine ‘love’ just like that. You need to pose a question. I’m not capable of talking in generalities about love. I’m not capable . . . ”1 Yet Derrida did write about love, albeit without ascribing to generalities concerning it or anything else. With love, and in every case, as Nicholas Royle suggests in his essay on the Dick and Ziering Kofman film, Derrida’s writing inevitably “involves thinking about ghostliness, about how things are haunted—by difference, by otherness.”2 For Derrida, who questioned the entire history (of idein, eidos, idea) that relates seeing to knowing, such otherness is finally unknowable, unpresentable; for all things under the sun, difference cannot be made to shine with transparent lucidity. Surely not love, which does not see (seize) the other with a penetrating gaze. Rather, as the saying goes, “love is blind.” Or so I will suggest in what follows, where, hoping to avoid generalities, I take up Derrida’s reading of some of the Western tradition’s canonical love stories.3 It is interesting and I think important that while, in each

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love story he approaches, Derrida adopts a different form, he never writes about love from a position of philosophical detachment and never seeks to make its secret visible. As befits the subject matter of this essay, my attempt will be to eschew such detachment myself. And in line with Nicholas Royle’s contention, I will try to make the case that “deconstruction is not only about acknowledging difference. It is also about being open to being altered in one’s encounter with difference. And it is about making a difference, changing the ways we think and what we think, altering the world.”4 A Family Affair

I do not remember as far back as the earliest photo in which my father appears with me. Having been promoted to the rank of sublieutenant in the Royal Canadian Navy, he has returned home briefly, perhaps in part to see his second child, the infant whose birth he missed. Tall and handsome in his navy uniform, he is holding my older sister. Standing beside him, my mother cradles an infant in her arms—I must be two or three months old. My beautiful mother is thin and, as she would later tell me, seriously depressed. Amid the uncertainties of war, with my father gone, it is no wonder that she wanted to give birth to a boy, a child who would inherit my father’s name, Donald. They would call him Don, son of Donald. My name is my father’s. As I grew up, I thought about this often, listening many times to the story of how my parents chose my name, or listening to my grandfather MacDonald tell me about the great Clan Donald, descended from Donald of Islay, whose successors, each in turn, bore the Gaelic surname Mac Dhomhnuill, “the son of Donald.” I could conclude only that for my father, Don MacDonald, and in this continuum of sons of Dhomhnuill, I, Dawne MacDonald, came as something of a gap. A homonym: repetition without identity. For a girl who desperately wants to please her father, who loves him beyond what she can understand love to be—a girl who has not yet read Jacques Derrida—this sense of a failed identity (interval, joint of spacing) can be very painful. It surely marked my youth, before dad’s sons came along, and reinforced by the abjection of the female in the strict Catholicism in which I was convent-schooled, it tracked me through adolescence. Only years later, as an adult and parent myself—looking out the window of a transatlantic jet as it descended into Glasgow and catching my first glimpse of a landscape that I had long since determined to resist—did I begin to understand that the journey, whatever it is, cannot be a return to the father, who does not double himself in a daughter any more than in a son. Love Stories

Yet it is father-to-son filiation that dominates, indeed structures, one of Western philosophy’s most powerful and enduring love stories.5 Derrida reads this story with meticulous detail in the left column of Glas where the family, he writes, is the “one thread” on which he draws in approaching G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy: “It is the law of the family: of Hegel’s family, of the family in Hegel, of the concept family according to Hegel.”6 Drawing on this thread constitutes something of an unraveling, for Glas is laid out in two rotating columns (the left given to the philosophy of Hegel, the right to the poetry of Jean Genet) that are cut open in places by tattoos or “judas pockets,” allowing the contents of each column to spill into the other and onto the middle of the page, and affording Derrida with fissures into which he can insert “bits and pieces” of other texts (e.g., quotations, etymologies, excerpts from letters, including those of Hegel). Safe to say, Glas does not conform to the academic standards of either a philosophical or a literary text. Indeed, according to Derrida, the book “is neither philosophy nor poetry, but a reciprocal contamination of the one by the other, from which neither can emerge intact.”7 It is important to note that this “reciprocal contamination” opens Hegel’s canonical account of love to the differences, including sexual differences, that it assimilates. Not incidentally, Derrida takes the columnar form of Glas from the philosophical father himself, specifically from Hegel’s chapter on “Independent or Symbolic Architecture” in his Aesthetics, which describes the cult of the phallus that, primarily in India, involved worship of nature, specifically of nature’s “productive energy of procreation,” often “represented and sanctified in the shape of the animal generative organs, i.e., the phallus or the lingam.”8 With the phallic columns of India, Hegel locates us in the East, in what he calls the “Orient,” where, he writes, providing colonialist discourse with the conceptual support it needs, Spirit has just begun its journey of return to itself, its progressive spiraling upward to the family—the rational family, the speculative family, in which true love can only be found. Spirit’s journey, following a solar course, begins in the East, Hegel points out in The Philosophy of History: “The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning.”9 In this East-to-West progression, the “Orient” represents “the childhood of History” where advancement to “subjective freedom”10 remains undeveloped, and where love cannot yet be found. For although in the phallic columns of India the plant gives way to animal life, to “animal generative organs,”11 this sexual propagation, outside the rational family, is devoid of love. Referring to the Encyclopedia, Derrida notes that for Hegel, “There is Love Is Blind

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no love nor family in physical or biological nature. Logos, reason, freedom are love’s milieu” (G 12a). Still, India does represent an advance beyond China, Hegel maintains, again in a colonialist mode, for in China, which is altogether lacking in genuine subjectivity, the family is not a spiritual institution at all but a derivation of the state based solely on strict regulation, duty, and law, externally imposed by the emperor.12 Indeed, in China, where “everything is external,” no inherent morality is found, “no immanent rationality through which human beings might have internal value and dignity,” only “an indeterminable dependence on everything external, the highest and most contingent kind of superstition. The Chinese are the most superstitious people of the world.”13 At least India recognizes the subjective element, albeit “only as an Idealism of the imagination, without distinct conceptions,” only where Absolute Being is presented “as in the ecstatic state of a dreaming condition” (PH 139). In India, with its pantheism “of Imagination, not of Thought,” sensuous matter is not actually liberated by Spirit, but only “expanded into the immeasurable and undefined, and the Divine is thereby made bizarre, confused, and ridiculous” (PH 141). The same can be said for family. In India, the speculative family cannot be found: Hegel refers to polygamy; wives burning themselves after the death of their husbands or following the death of a child, with the husbands indifferent as they have more wives at home; women, perhaps twenty at once, leaping to their death in the holy water of the Ganges; five hundred men at a time throwing themselves down during a religious festival, to be crushed to pieces by a vehicle carrying an image of Vishnu; mothers tossing their children into the Ganges; an entire seashore “already strewed with the bodies of persons” who have immolated themselves (PH 146–50). In short, in India, in its family, Hegel finds only “annihilation—the abandonment of all reason, morality and subjectivity” in favor of “a boundlessly wild imagination” (PH 167). In the East, in short, Hegel finds no rational family, and thus no love. Yet, as Derrida suggests, Hegel’s family is already in place, as it were, from the start of his grand narrative, before the family-as-family arrives. For his “propositions are structural” (G 125a). That is, the family, the oikos, economy of the house, is the structure of the Hegelian dialectical passage itself: “The Aufhebung, the economic law of absolute reappropriation of the absolute loss, is a family concept” (G 133a). The “copulative” structure of the family is already at work, then, in the passage from plants (and flowers) to the animal. “Flower religion is not even a moment or station,” Derrida notes. “It all but exhausts itself in a passage (Übergehen), a disappearing movement, the Love Stories

effluvium floating above a procession, the march from innocence to guilt” (G 2a). In the passage from plant to animal, the flower, prefiguring the role of woman in the rational family, mediates the movement of sun (spirit) from the plant into the animal, a movement through which the flower, the middle term, disappears. For Derrida, and the point is crucial to his reading of this grand narrative of love, every Hegelian passage (Übergehen: über = over, across + gehen = go) works this way, puts the family’s structure back in place, reinstates the two opposing laws to which the sexes belong, and crosses the middle—the woman, the mother, the other—out. This “family structure” informs Hegel’s treatment of the earthly family itself, the kind of family that he finds in Germany although not in the East, a family for which love “is an essential predicate” (G 10a). In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel approaches this family as a determinate moment, as the first moment of Sittlichkeit, ethical life, the moment where freedom, beyond the abstract formulation that he says it has in the philosophy of Kant, begins to work through the institutions of the world, the family among them. Hegel’s discussion here is all about dialectical passages. The family, the first of Sittlichkeit’s three moments (family, civil society, state), is in turn a syllogism comprising three moments: marriage, property, education of children. Since Sittlichkeit itself is the third moment of another syllogism (abstract right, morality [Moralität], Sittlichkeit), the family, as the first stage of Sittlichkeit, mediates the passage from abstract to actual freedom. And because the family is a moment of Sittlichkeit, though its first and most natural one, it belongs to ethical life, and must be recognized as an institution of freedom. Hegel wants us to think of marriage this way: while the family’s first and most natural moment, marriage belongs to the rational and ethical life of Sittlichkeit, not merely to sexual or animal nature. Marriage enables the leap to be made from animal to human nature, for it produces children who will go on to become free rational selves. Education, the third and final stage of the family, the moment that brings the family circle to a close, enables this passage into free rational subjectivity, citizenship and Sittlichkeit’s highest moment, the nation-state. By constituting the nation, education extends the family beyond the confines of the hearth into the higher stages of Sittlichkeit, into rational citizenship and the ethical life of the people (Volksgeist), and finally, through death, into the universality of Spirit.14 Hegelian marriage, the family’s first moment, brings together two opposites, a man and woman, the latter occupying the underside of the opposition precisely because she is an underground creature, a figure of darkness, Love Is Blind

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of the unconsciousness, of “the economy of the dead, the law of the oikos (tomb)” (G 142a). Her law “hides itself, does not offer itself in this openingmanifestation (Offenbarkeit) that produces man” (G 142a); her law is “nocturnal and more natural than the law of universality, just as the family is more natural than the city” (G 142a). On the contrary, for Hegel, Derrida observes, man’s law “is the law of day(light) because it is known, public, visible, universal; human law rules, not the family, but the city, government, war, and it is made by man (vir)” (G 142a). To the man belong consciousness and the ongoing life of the people-spirit. Marriage joins these opposites in a relieving union where the wife, drawn up into the light by her husband’s seed, falls back and disappears in the movement that sets his spirit free in a son: “The union of opposites, of man and woman, has the form of a syllogistic copulation” (G 170a). The family’s “copulative” structure, and with it Hegel’s opposition of the sexes, is put in place again with the transition to higher education, a family relief which, in bringing the family circle to a close, accomplishes the family’s end (the loss of itself as nature, the regaining of itself as spirit). Through education, “a constituting/deconstituting process of the family, an Aufhebung by which the family accomplishes itself, raises itself in destroying itself or falling (to the tomb) as family” (G 13a), the son goes on beyond the family, while the daughter remains behind—as remains to be consumed. Impotent to raise herself beyond the most natural moment of Sittlichkeit, incapable of passing into universality herself, the daughter appears only to disappear. Like the flower in her “passivity and impotence,”15 and like her mother, the daughter serves as a disappearing middle: each time the family circle closes, the daughter is crossed out. Even if she were to bear her father’s name, love would require the daughter to prepare for her role as a wife, to tend to the toilette of the dead, to busy herself around the man’s burial place: to mourn him, shroud and bury his corpse, engrave his tomb, preserve his archive, ensure his monumentalization. By so caring for the dead man, the woman, in Derrida’s words, “prevents the corpse from returning to nature. In embalming it, in shrouding it, in enclosing it in bands of material, of language, and of writing, in putting up the stele, this operation raises the corpse to the universality of spirit” (G 144a). This is a love story. Essential to Derrida’s reading of this story is his elucidation of the “family structure” that repeats itself with each passage of spirit through history, with each closing of a syllogistic circle: “The whole system repeats itself in the family” (G 20a). Hegel’s familial schema is at once sexist (based on a Love Stories

male/female opposition), racist (he finds no true family in the “Orient,” in China, India, or Egypt), and speciesist (there can be neither love nor family, he says, in the animal world). It limits family, and so love, to a heterosexual union—one that, in this account of filiation father-to-son, is productive of male offspring: “A father without a son is not a father” (G 31a). In higher education, as in the hearth, the father returns to himself in the son: “The relieving education interiorizes the father” (G 133a). Needless to say, then, by opening Hegel’s love story to the others it would exclude or assimilate, Derrida’s Glas alters the ways we think about the “family” and “love” that are bequeathed to us by the tradition we inherit, and calls us to make a difference in the way these terms are theorized and practiced. Insofar as, for Derrida, from the start, Hegel’s interiorizing of the father structures his entire system of circles, his “spiral chaining of the circle of circles” (G 245a), in which with each passage the father returns to himself through the son and a middle again disappears, it is difficult to dismiss an early text such as “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” as atypical in its assimilation of an impotent middle, in this case “the Jew.” Alice Ormiston, for one, takes just this position, suggesting that “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” written in 1798–99, represents only an early phase in the great philosopher’s oeuvre. Hegel’s “most extensive consideration of love,”16 the text is a brutal diatribe against “the Jew.” Viewing the text as a “transitional piece,” Ormiston chooses to set aside its “hostile and troubling remarks about the Jews” and, citing Emil Fackenheim, she argues that “Hegel’s real philosophical point about the Jews regards the otherness of the divine in their religion”—as if, in time, Judaism itself actually became more Christian, “a competitor with the divine-human unity”17 that Hegel so values in Christianity, the religion of spirit. For Derrida, however, approaching Hegel’s philosophy overall through its familial, “copulative” structure of passage, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” positions Judaism as yet another disappearing middle in the passage to Christianity. In this text, Hegel moves from Noah through Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, in order to make the case that, since they endeavored “to trample and slay everything holy in human nature,” the fate of the Jewish people “can arouse horror alone.”18 He juxtaposes the Jewish and the Greek floods, for example, and, in Derrida’s words, finds that “the Greek flood has more affinity than the Jew with the spirit of Christianity: reconciliation, love, and the founding of a family” (G 40a). Abraham, in turn, cuts himself off from the bonds of communal life and love, forsakes his fatherland, and opposes himself to the whole world.19 He “wanted not to love, wanted to be free by Love Is Blind

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not loving.”20 Derrida’s reading emphasizes “the Abrahamic cut”: first of all as symbolizing for Hegel the Jewish family, which constitutes itself in isolation and so serves as a simulacrum of castration; second, as circumcision, a cut that enacts a kind of castration; and finally, as castration itself, “the Jew” incapable of becoming a father (G 41a). Derrida’s reading of Hegel here merits more extensive study than I can give it in this chapter—study that, among other things, would take up John P. Leavey Jr.’s title question, “What does apotropocalyptic translate in love?”21 Put too briefly, in Derrida’s words, “Abraham could love nothing. His heart was cut off from all (sein von allem sich absonderndes Gemüt)—a ‘circumcised heart’” (G 44a). And, recalling the stone phallus (both the Medusa legend and the phallic columns of India), “The Jew is a stone heart. He is insensible. Now feeling, sensing (Epfinden), has been determined as the hearth, the living unity of being as family. There is no true family where feeling has let itself be anesthetized, cut, denied or petrified: no true Jewish family, and first of all because no relation of familiarity was possible between the Jew and his God” (G 47a). Hence, the necessary passage from Judaism to Christianity, and to Jesus, whom Hegel regards as the real founder of the family. As Derrida demonstrates, Christianity’s Holy Family provides Hegel with an overarching model for his familial schema: because Christianity is a religion of the family, where God becomes father and where a trinitarian structure of father-to-son, return-to-self, is established, Hegel privileges it as the religion of spirit. Christianity makes of spirit’s return journey through history an absolute Holy Family scene—something that Judaism, a kind of Kantianism where God remains abstract, does not become a father, could never do. Hegel interprets the passage from Judaism to Christianity (as from Kant’s philosophy to his own) as a passage to the family, “as the advent of love, in other words, of the family as the relief of formal and abstract morality (Moralität) (in that respect Kantianism is, structurally, a Judaism)” (G 33a– 34a). Family love is not perfected, of course, until the Last Supper, when in communion, “the third term disappears, is properly consum(mat)ed. The sign is gulped down” (G 66a). In part, and by way of making a difference, Derrida’s “deconstructive” reading in Glas calls attention to such reifications as “the animal,” “the woman,” “the Egyptian,” “the Indian,” and “the Jew,” through which Hegel would assimilate (cross out) those he does not recognize as having the power, the potency, he associates with Spirit, the spiritual male, and love. One of Derrida’s reading strategies is to demonstrate that the logic of inclusion/ exclusion to which these reifications belong is one that always fails. Glas is Love Stories

haunted, then, by differences that do not disappear. While in Hegel’s family history both the woman and the East figure as a middle that gets gulped down, in Glas the middle remains and cannot be consumed. Resisting the upward sweep of the concept, Hegel’s ultimate passage to Sa (savoir absolu), Derrida foregrounds, in radical ways, the materiality and supplementarity of language, of the sensible sign itself: he grafts words onto one another, slices them open to release multiple signifieds that cannot be gathered, and throws his own name into a game of “agrammatical non-sense.”22 He countersigns Hegel’s monumental philosophy by undertaking women’s work: in pulling on the family thread in the left column, he falls in with the delirious women—in the East—whom Hegel describes in his Aesthetics, women who participated in Dionysiac fertility rituals by pulling on the thread of a huge phallus, “a crowd of frenzied females (als ein Haufen schwärmender Weiber), the unleashed (ungebändigte) delirium of nature” (G 234a). Derrida sides with the rebellious sister Antigone, with Hegel’s sister Christiane, with the homosexual poet Genet, who took on his mother’s name, and not the least, with Hegel’s illegitimate son Ludwig Fischer: all cast-offs who remain in Glas to thwart Hegel’s circular philosophy-pedagogy (G 15ai). Of Love and Shadows

Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins is a 1993 translation of a 1990 French text (Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines) that was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title held at the Louvre in Paris between October 26, 1990, and January 21, 1991. The exhibition was organized by Derrida on the invitation of the Louvre curators, as the first in a series of exhibitions to be put together, largely from the Louvre collection, by well-known thinkers, nonspecialists in the domain of art, who were given full authority to choose the theme of, and works to be included in, each exhibition.23 No doubt, an invitation to participate in the series came as a challenge to the guest curators—Derrida said he was both honored and intimidated by it (M 36). The series was intended to challenge art historians and specialists, to whom it would provide an opportunity to look beyond their field, to see art from other perspectives, and to have their own sight enriched by what the organizers called “another gaze.”24 Asked to open onlookers’ eyes to other ways of seeing, Derrida chose blindness as the theme for his exhibition. The book includes seventy-one images (the exhibition catalog displayed forty-four), drawings, and paintings—many of them works of “great art” done by the likes of Coypel, Love Is Blind

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Caravaggio, and Rembrandt—of blindness, of the blind, mostly blind men— “blind men, notice, since the illustrious blind of our culture are almost always men,” Derrida writes just a few pages into the book, “as if women perhaps saw to it never to risk their sight” (M 36). The question of inheritance is already at stake in this observation, as it is in Derrida’s reading of Hegel in Glas, the question of how difference and sexual difference are encoded in the Western tradition’s grand narratives, here its “great paradigmatic narratives of blindness” that are, too, “dominated by the filiation father/son” (M 5–6n1). With sexual difference comes questions of family, writing, faith, testament, memory, death, mourning—and not the least, love—and Memoirs of the Blind, as much as Glas, is a book about love. While Hegel finds the great figures of Jewish antiquity to be stone hearts, cut off from light and incapable of love, Derrida turns in Memoirs to biblical, particularly Hebrew Bible, narratives of blindness (to the stories of Eli, Isaac, Tobit, and Jacob, “all these old blind men of the Old Testament”) (M 21) as profound stories about love. Derrida considers the images of blindness he selected for Memoirs to be, as he puts it, self-portraits, in the sense that, and as his “first hypothesis” in the book, drawing, painting, writing, indeed any kind of graphing, “is blind” (M 2). In other words, and this applies to each of us, “one writes without seeing” (M 3). Thus, in these portraits, Derrida sees his own blindness and that of every painter or writer. He notes, for example, that in the instant when one turns to the page or the canvas and begins to trace in pencil or paint, one no longer holds the model (object, idea) in sight, which means that the graphie belongs not so much to perception as to memory, to an “unconscious” that can never be made fully present. More than this, at the origin of the graphic (or psychic) imprint, the trace (trait) has already withdrawn and can never be brought into visibility or consciousness. “Even if drawing is, as they say, mimetic, that is, reproductive, figurative, representative, even if the model is presently facing the artist, the trait must proceed in the night. It escapes the field of vision. Not only because it is not yet visible, but because it does not belong to the realm of the spectacle, of spectacular objectivity,” Derrida explains. “The heterogeneity between the thing drawn and the drawing trait remains abyssal.” Furthermore, “this heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility” (M 45). Writing (drawing, painting, etc.) from the memory of what remains structurally in the dark, we are all, then, in the position of Butades, the woman whose love story “relates the origin of graphic representations to the absence or invisibility of the model,” her beloved (M 49). Love Stories

Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, tells the story of this young Corinthian woman who, not incidentally and without recourse to dual sexual difference, was given her father’s name. Upon learning that her lover was to leave her, Butades traced the shadow of his face on a lamp-lit wall. Legend has it that once Butades had inscribed her lover’s silhouette, the maiden’s father, a potter from Sicyon, no doubt in a gesture of love for his grieving daughter, used clay to make a sculpture, something of a death mask, from the outline she had traced. Two paintings of this love story—Butades; or, The Origin of Drawing by Joseph-Benoît Suvée (1791) and Butades Tracing the Portrait of Her Shepherd; or, The Origin of Painting by Jean-Baptiste Regnault (1785)—are among the seventy-one images included in Derrida’s Memoirs. In both of the Butades paintings, Derrida notes, a skiagraphia or shadow writing “inaugurates an art of blindness” (M 51). For in the act of tracing his silhouette, Butades does not see her lover: he is turned away from her in the Suvée painting, her back turned to him in the Regnault, “as if seeing were forbidden in order to draw, as if one drew only on the condition of not seeing, as if the drawing were a declaration of love destined for or suited to the invisibility of the other” (M 49). Her hand sometimes guided by Cupid in the Regnault, “Butades writes, and thus already loves in nostalgia” (M 51). It is as if love does not belong to the capture of an all-knowing sight, as if it has less to do with a Hegelian “raising” (assimilating) of the other than with reaching out blindly to his or her irreducible and incalculable difference. As in the case of Butades, it is the eye’s movement, the “blink” or the “wink,” the moment of blindness, that—interrupting the Western tradition’s conflation of sight (voir) with power (pouvoir) and possession (avoir)—allows a love story to happen. The blink, the movement in which presence gives way to memory, is what “ensures sight its breath” (M 32). In Derrida’s Memoirs, love remains a family affair—as it is in the story of Butades, and as it is in the father-son love story that is recounted in the Book of Tobit. This deuterocanonical text narrates the tale of an old man, husband of Anna and father of Tobias, who liked to bury the dead of his community (Derrida recalls that his father liked to do this, too, and did so for decades in Algiers), and who continued to do so secretly, even when his actions put his own life at risk. After burying a man who was strangled and cast out in the marketplace, Tobit was blinded at night by the dung of sparrows living in the courtyard wall against which he slept. Tobit’s sight was later restored by Tobias, who, acting on instructions from the angel Raphael, rubbed fish gall in his father’s eyes. Reflecting on this story and on four drawings of it—Jacopo Ligozzi’s Tobias and the Angel, and three drawings of Love Is Blind

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Tobias Healing His Father’s Blindness, one by Pietro Bianchi, one after Peter Paul Rubens, and another attributed to Rembrandt—Derrida dwells on it as involving a scene of the hands: those of Tobit, giving thanks, not only for seeing, but for seeing his son; the hands of Tobias, guided in the act of restoring sight, by the words of Raphael; and Raphael, in turn, the invisible angel become visible only to turn away from himself and point to an other, his God, gesturing, as it were, to a “law beyond sight” (M 29). Not only in the Tobit story but also in these narratives overall, “the mise en scène of the blind is always inscribed in a theatre or theory of the hands” (M 26). This “theory” relates hands to receiving from, or gesturing to, the other, never to grasping. For instance, in Antoine Coypel’s Study of the Blind, drawn in black, red, and white chalk, the hand “feels its way, it gropes, it caresses as much as it inscribes, trusting in the memory of signs and supplementing sight” (M 3). “One must,” in these works, Derrida ventures, “always recall the other hand or the hand of the other” (M 9). And so it is with eyes, which are not associated in these stories with a rational I/eye, with ideational light or pure visibility. Rather, as in the paintings and drawings of the Tobit story (by Rembrandt, Pietro Bianchi, and after Rubens), the artists are concerned more with “observing the law beyond sight” (M 29) than with “representational fidelity” (M 30) to the details of the Book of Tobit. “What guides the graphic point, the quill, pencil, or scalpel is the respectful observance of a commandment, the acknowledgement before knowledge, the gratitude of the receiving before seeing, the blessing before the knowing” (M 29–30). In the drawing after Rubens, and also in the one attributed to Rembrandt, Raphael remains on the edge, Derrida remarks, almost in the margin of the drawing, “withdrawn [en retrait]” (M 26), the artists acknowledging, as it were, a trace that precedes knowing and cannot be made visible. In these love stories, which have less to do with perception than with memory-as-mourning, eyes also shed tears—Tobit weeping over the body of one of his outcast people before burying the corpse. And if in the Butades story, as we can imagine, the maiden shed tears at the prospect of losing her beloved, her “tears or veiled eyes” (M 24) would reveal that love precludes clear sight. Indeed, Derrida proposes, tears shed for another, for a beloved, might indicate the real “essence of the eye.” At least as far as love is concerned, “deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep” (M 126). And so it is also with voices, with the polylogue that constitutes Derrida’s Memoirs, as with the “infinitely echoing discourse” (M 15) that reverberates for him from the texts of the Western tradition. Two of the images in this Love Stories

book are of Cigoli’s Narcissus who, in another version of Hegel’s circular return-to-self, is blinded to the other by his own auto-affection. Derrida suggests in Rogues25 that Echo’s response to Narcissus is more than a reiteration: “She says in an inaugural fashion, she declares her love, and calls for the first time, all the while repeating the ‘Come’ of Narcissus, all the while echoing narcissistic words” (M xii). Derrida hears a difference in the words Echo seems to reproduce, hears another voice, the voice of the other: “She overflows with love, her love overflows the call of Narcissus” (M xii). The point is that a love story inevitably involves a “dissymmetrical correspondence, unequal, as always, to the equality of one to the other” (M xii). The famous scene in the Echo-Narcissus story “turns around a call to come [à venir]” and in love, as elsewhere, “one does not see coming what remains to come,” one does not grasp in advance the “correspondence to come” (M xii). notes 1. Dick Kirby and Amy Ziering Kofman, Screenplay and Essays on the Film Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2005), 79–81. 2. Nicholas Royle, “Blind Cinema,” in ibid., 12. 3. I have written elsewhere about Derrida’s reading of some of these canonical texts, albeit under themes other than love. See, in particular, Medusa’s Ear: University Foundings from Kant to Chora L (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), on Derrida’s reading of Hegel in Glas; and Sleights of Hand: Derrida Writing (Vernon, BC: Kalamalka Press, 2008), on his Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 4. Royle, “Blind Cinema,” 13. 5. Had I more pages to give to this chapter, I would approach three additional Derrida texts that have everything to do with love: one is On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), and another is The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), particularly the pages in which Derrida reads the fort/ da game in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. On love in Freud’s text, and

on Derrida’s reading of it, David Krell’s “Pulling Strings Wins No Wisdom,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 44, no. 3 (2011): 15–42, is incomparable. The third text I would approach is Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), where Derrida asks how and why, in the Western tradition since Aristotle, the concepts of friendship and love belong to a (fraternal) discourse that limits both to an economy of seeing (recognizing) the same (oneself) in an other. 6. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 4a. Hereafter parenthetically cited as G. 7. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other: An Interview with Richard Kearney,” in Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 123. 8. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975), 641. 9. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 103. 10. Ibid., 104–5. 11. Hegel, Aesthetics, 641.

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12. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. M. Sibree (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 116–23. Hereafter parenthetically cited as PH. 13. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 249. 14. See Hegel, Elements of a Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 199–220. 15. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 420. 16. Alice Ormiston, “‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’: Towards a Reconsideration of the Role of Love in Hegel,” Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique 35, no. 3 (2002): 499. 17. Ibid., 506n15. 18. G. W. F. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” in On Christianity: Early Theological Writings by

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Friedrich Hegel, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1984), 205. 19. Ibid., 183–87. 20. Ibid., 185. 21. John P. Leavey, Jr. “Destinerrance: The Apotropocalyptics of Translation,” in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 33–43. 22. Gregory Ulmer, “Sounding the Unconscious,” in John P. Leavey Jr. Glassary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 35b. 23. See “Translators’ Preface,” in Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, vii. Hereafter parenthetically cited as M. 24. As quoted in ibid., vii. 25. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

14 The Babies in Trees alphonso lingis

We go to nature—to the town park, to the woods out of town, in the summer to the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies. Phalanxes of trees stand guard in zones of nature. In trees we see the power of life, transforming inert minerals into enduring, ascending, ordering forms. A sequoia, one individual life converting rock and rain into up to six thousand tons of life (the biggest animals, blue whales, weigh up to 176 tons). The power of life creating so many distinctive forms (biologists estimate one hundred thousand species of trees). We wonder at the nature of life in trees and obscurely sense that that life has kinship with the life in us. To walk the forest is to walk into the past. Our primate ancestors lived in trees. Trees were their food, their protection, their homes; trees lifted them from the earth toward the free spaces where sunlight rebounds. Descending from the trees, the human primates stood erect, holding onto trees, then taking on the upright posture of trees. Harmony and tranquility dwell in forests. The ordered architecture of trees, where each branch, in its own place, serves the whole, gives us the vision of order and justice, which we extend into human society and into bodies of thought. In trees that endure years of drought and storms we see

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dignity. Maintaining dignity, we stand for honesty, for righteousness, we stand tall. Katherine and I went to Tana Toraja, a region of high mountains in the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. We walked under clumps of giant bamboo, their hollow canes rubbing and resonating with one another, the rambling tentacles of oaks and chestnuts in the fog, conifer pikes and spires on the wobbly crests and the canyon walls. Life is the will to power, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. The will to power is a will for more power, he declared. Power exists in being exercised on another force or complex of forces. We cannot perceive our powers by looking inward, G. W. F. Hegel said; power is observable only in its effects. We acknowledge a faculty of intelligence in us when we find that others judge us to have intended and planned our acts; we distinguish our feelings when others identify what they see as indignation, fear, arrogance, or resentment; we recognize that we are free when others praise or blame our moves and maneuvers. A master sees his mastery on the obsequious eyes and groveling bodies of the slave; a slave sees his servitude in the armed force and orders of the master. All human actions, Hegel reported, aim to impress the conceptions and will of the agent on the outside, so that he may discover Love Stories

and grasp himself. All actions with others aim to impress one’s conceptions and will on them. A lover exposes himself and parades before the beloved, seeking to see his accomplishments, thoughts, values, fantasies, and whims prized and retained by the beloved. A parent seeks to find his or her judgments, values, culture, traits of his or her own body imprinted on the child. Power is also locked in an agon with death. With the things we see we envision the possibilities in things. But everything possible is possibly impossible. The order we seek to impose on things may collapse; the conception and will that we seek to imprint on things may be engulfed in their materiality. A slippery step on a staircase, a frayed electrical wire, a microbe can put an end to our life. All the possibilities we see in things may, somewhere, anywhere, at some indeterminate moment, abruptly become impossible, and the things now hovering about us in the present have no future. The image of ourselves and the will we seek to impose on sentient beings can be countered by their will and power to overthrow our power and destroy us. The blows struck by others, the harsh edges of things wound us, we suffer. In suffering one feels the growing inability to launch initiatives, to turn from oneself to the outside environment; one finds oneself unable to leave oneself or to back up behind one’s corporeal materiality, one finds oneself mired in oneself. Suffering contains a premonition of our death in the sense of becoming impotent, passive, prostrate—materialization, becoming a corpse. A corpse is a locus of decomposition, pollution, a passive locus of violence that spreads, contaminates. The power in life that seeks to imprint the order one has conceived on the outside seeks to fortify one’s environment against death. And it seeks to give one’s transient conceptions and will the inert endurance of things. The power in love that attaches to one person and seeks to imprint on the substance and life of that person one’s thoughts, values, beliefs, and fantasies seeks to make them endure beyond one’s present life and beyond one’s possible, inevitable, death. The power that seeks to imprint one’s values, culture, judgments, the traits of one’s own body on a child aims to see one’s life recommence in the child. We do not perceive our own life by looking inward, Hegel declares. But we do feel the reality of our life; we feel it in inner exhilaration. When we are in love we feel intensely alive. Life surges and affirms itself, elated, joyous. We feel our heart beating, our sensibility is intensified, our perception becomes more penetrating, our comprehension spirals, new energies The Babies in Trees

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surge, our emotional powers become available for new and long encounters. Life reigns, dismisses cautions, and disdains obstacles; love is audacious, reckless. Love comes over us; it is not a maneuver of our decision or will. It is a force of nature in us. We see love in nature, in lifelong pairs of bald eagles in the sky and of beavers in the forest streams, a dove disconsolate upon the death of its life partner, an elephant that grieves the loss of its child. We understand our love to be akin to theirs. In our emotions that attach us to one person, love perceives and affirms love everywhere. We awaken and a world of alien beings is arrayed before our eyes. What is most unlike ourselves captivates us, an antelope bounding across the savannah, an albatross gliding over the stormy ocean, a moth emerging from its chrysalis, an octopus changing its colors in the coral reef, mists clothing the sequoias, a rainbow caught in dewdrops on a flowering tree. At a glance we see that each of the members of our species looks different from us, and when they speak and keep silent we see their thoughts and intentions diverge from ours. We contemplate our lover, his or her body unlike any other, each day his or her dreams and whims surprise us. Month after month we watch our child grow, seeing not the person we had imagined, a person such as the world has never seen. Exhilaration surges in surprise, an encounter with the unanticipated; joy is made of surprise and exhilaration. Love attaches to a singular being. We go into a forest whose fractal immensities efface its outer limits, its passing forms, stroking us lightly, putting no claims on us. Our mind tires of recalling the names and classifications taxonomists have put on them, stops the stringing up of relationships and causalities, lets go of purposes. Our gaze drifts among beings, seeing them as they are, as they exist on their own. Our consciousness becomes a space where branches zigzag, arcs of light glint in the green, shadows pass without disturbing anything, unseen birds trill, insects drone and whisper. We move in step with the march of the trees across the hill; our bodies volumes where flows of air and blood and nutrients surge and subside in sync with the buoyant breezes and the pulse of sunbeams and shadows. We drift into nature, our self-programmed, selfmotivating individuality dies in nature, into nature. In our attachment to an individual person we are exposed to the pulsation and impulses in the substance of another’s body in our arms. Our impassioned body denudes itself, loses its upright and purposive posture, Love Stories

we lose sight of our position in the layout of the instrumental and social environment. Our sense of ourselves, our self-respect shaped in fulfilling a function in the machinic and economic environment, our dignity maintained in multiple confrontations, collaborations, and demands dissolve; the ego loses its focus as center of evaluations, decisions, and initiatives. Our emotions, our impulses, are freed of responsibility. Our lips loosen, soften, glisten with moisture, lose the train of sentences; our throats issue babble, giggling, moans, and sighs. As our bodies become orgasmic, legs and thighs roll and rest, our hands and fingers wander in repetitive and aimless caresses, allowing themselves to be stroked and crushed. The sighs and moans of another body pulse in us, the spasms of pleasure and torment of another rumble across our cheeks, our bellies, our thighs, our loins. Our bodies tighten, grope and grapple, collapse, melt, gelatinize, run. In our assent to loss of position and posture, oblivious of what is past and what is to come, there is assent to death. We understand, we obscurely anticipate double lovers’ suicide. Life is the will to power, Friedrich Nietzsche declared. But power cares for someone or something weaker than oneself. Wolf spiders wrap their eggs in web blankets and carry them on their bodies, then carry the hatchlings until they grow big enough to look for food themselves. Ostriches, hummingbirds, jaguars, field mice protect and nourish their offspring. We find in our bodies the power to engender and grow another body within ourselves. We find in our foresight, our nervous circuitry, and our musculature power to care for beings weaker than ourselves. We care for puppies, colts, baby birds fallen from their nests. We care for fish tanks, ferns, and orchids in our apartments, trees about our homes. We see flowering plants and nimble field animals crushed by storms, the children of people and of deer dead, and we retain them with our sobs and tears. For Sigmund Freud love for one’s child is love for a part of oneself. It is rather love for a power in oneself—the power to engender a new being, who exists on his or her own, and grows into his or her own identity. Relatives say she has her mother’s eyes, or her father’s smile, but we see in those eyes, that smile the individuality of a new and secret life, the child’s own. We care for those we love, we love those we care for. Care involves perception of the frailty, vulnerability, mortality of the beloved. It perceives the ineluctable death that tracks all that lives. We bend all our powers to postpone that death. Love is more than the foresight and active initiatives that constitute care. It is attachment of our core being to another. It is affection, The Babies in Trees

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receiving the tremors of alien life in oneself. We do not experience each other as equals; our embrace covers one field of strengths, frailties, vulnerabilities. The love I want recognized is the commitment to be there for you, care for you. Death is closest at the moment of birth. The power in life is nowhere more crushed than in mothers whose whole body nourished and protected an infant when the infant is stillborn or dies in infancy. Love Stories

Over centuries the Toraja people have carved the flanks of mountains into terraces for wet rice cultivation. We admired their houses that stand high on wooden piles, built without nails or screws, solely by tongue-andgroove construction. The outer walls are richly ornamented with incised black, red, yellow, and white carvings. The massive roofs are of multilayered split bamboo and shaped in soaring arcs like harps whose invisible strings are fingered by the winds. We read that their culture elaborated an intricate cosmology and the Aluk To Dolo (Way of the ancestors) prescribed complex rituals for birth and life—rambu tuka (smoke rising), the ascending smoke ceremonies— and for death rambu solo (smoke descending). Although today most have adopted Christianity, the ancient beliefs and rituals still govern their civil organization, agricultural and economic practices, and ceremonies. The most elaborate and most important ceremonies are funerals. The weeks we were there we attended four funerals. The ceremony is often held weeks, months, or years after the death so that the deceased’s family can raise the funds needed. Around a grassy central arena they build ceremonial funeral structures, shelters for audiences, and lodging for visitors. The funeral ceremonies usually last four days; sometimes, we were told, they last ten days. We saw that for the Toraja the death is not only the loss of a loved member of the community, a loss of the material contributions he or she made to the community, but also the sacrifice of great resources by the family for the funeral. Hundreds of people had come, some, we learned, from other islands and other countries. People from each community arrived at the ceremonial arena in procession, clad in their finest clothing. With them were groups trained to perform chants and dances. They brought pigs and water buffalo to be sacrificed. Meat from the sacrificed animals will be distributed to the guests. We were told that every community with which this community would have ancestral, marital, economic, or political relations came to the funeral. We understood that the death is a trauma not only for the family and friends, but also in the multiple communities bound in various kinds of cooperation and exchange with the family—as though the incomprehensible, insupportable fatality of death that strikes an individual life strikes the community and all the communities bound to it with understanding and collaboration. The funeral does not reverse the death that struck the individual, but it does aim to restore the fissure suffered by the extended community. The communities bring great numbers of pigs and buffalos; the bonds of support are affirmed and renewed. The family binds itself to return offerings of pigs and The Babies in Trees

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buffalo in the coming deaths and funerals that will occur in their communities. The solemn assemblage of communities and exchange of gifts reinstate and affirm their solidarity. But the funeral also affirms that the individual person is not totally lost. We visited the granite cliffs where graves are bored in the rock, sometimes at great heights. In wooden balconies set on the cliffs there were carved wooden statues of the dead; the newer ones depicted individuals with great realism. We were told that they guard the dead and protect the living. Several older people told us that the funerals today are as elaborate and draw as many communities together as a generation ago. The modernizers in the government have not succeeded in teaching the Toraja to instead devote all this labor and all these resources into productive enterprises. (The water buffalo are here not, as everywhere in Asia, used for plowing the fields or hauling carts, but are raised only to be sacrificed in funerals). All these communities that come to restore and reaffirm their connections with one another have been traumatized by the death, by their failure to unremittingly care for that person. The great rituals of this culture do not depict a cosmos of powerful deities. They affirm the continuing love for the dead. Speech is naturally truthful; we spontaneously say what we see. We know and say rightly what we intend, for it was already with words that we distinguished paths, implements, obstacles, and goals in the environment. We can find ourselves attached to a home, a landscape, a seaside without before, or ever, having put it in words; we can love without words. But when we love someone we need the words. The pleasures and anxieties of friendship, companionship, curiosity, amusement abruptly precipitates into something else when one day we say, “I love him/her.” The words integrate and intensify all these inner feelings and images and crystallize them; they become luminous. In formulating the words I impress them on myself—and they impress identity on me; the love is everywhere in me, inseparable from me. The words extend a future of thoughts, experiences, and deeds before me; they are a commitment. A commitment more intense and comprehensive than the words with which I commit myself to practical plans. The words “I love him/her” are completed in becoming “I love you.” The inward emotional complex in me cannot be observed by you; it is proclaimed. The words are a gift; one knows one’s love is a good. The words become a commitment to you, a commitment to produce thoughts, emotions, initiatives addressed to you. Addressed to a you whose thoughts, Love Stories

attachments, and dreams are invisible to me and may be contrary to what I divine and desire. Someone’s words “I love you,” said to me, stop me on my path; I am imperatively required to respond with words that, however unanticipated they are and unprepared I am, commit me. When I respond, “I love you,” I vertiginously sense that I commit myself to a fateful future swarming with risks, omens, and marvels. The words are not simply true or false like a statement of fact but sincere or insincere as a commitment. In being repeated they may become more sincere and strongly committed. Their sincerity generates truth, a will to report truthfully to my beloved what I see and think and long for and dream about. Our commitment to work with others on a project or a job commits us to be truthful with them about our skills and deficiencies, our accomplishment and difficulties. But in our interactions with coworkers, neighbors, even friends and parents, embellishing, aggrandizing, avoiding issues, declining to answer, dissimulating, equivocating, prevaricating, white lies fill out our conversations, constitute the very skill of conversation. Men have language, Voltaire said, in order to conceal their thoughts. But the words “I love you” extend a field where truth and falsity are decisive and consequential. We may lie about events and possibilities, and also about our own desires and judgments, because we feel that the beloved is not ready to face the truth, or because we do not want to hurt him or her. And the words “I love you” may be or may become insincere. False pledges and commitments people make to us in the industrial, economic, financial, and political sphere may have damaging and destructive effects on us. But uncertainty as to the sincerity of the words “I love you” or discovery of their falsity devastate us inwardly. We are wary of abandoning ourselves to the surgings of love; we fear love. We sense that we are never so vulnerable, so easily and deeply hurt as when we are in love. We fear for ourselves, but we also sense the vulnerability, the mortality of the beloved. We fear for the beloved. In love we are attached to a singular life and to a vast beyond and future that opens before that life. We are attached to this tiny infant, just as he or she is now, but also to the destiny he or she will pursue in the dimly divined future. We are attached to the sensible and sensitive substance fully and singularly present before our eyes and in our arms and at the same time to the distant and absent. The Babies in Trees

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Photo by Alphonso Lingis

With his or her voice someone takes a stand apart from us and addresses us across that distance. This contact with the reality of someone as an agency that appeals to us and orders us can be quite separated from the perceivable presence of him or her. A voice uttered at a distance can penetrate to the core of our identity. A child may be ordered by the voice of a parent when that parent is no longer there; an adult may hear that voice when the parent is no longer alive, may hear, too, the parents of that parent. What in Love Stories

an earlier, evolutionist anthropology was dubbed “animism” expresses the recognition—that is ours, too—that voices appealing to us and ordering us may be the voices of the absent and the dead and voices of other species. The voices of the dead order us and appeal to us often more forcefully than the voices of the living about us. The voice of our father or our grandfather invalidates the lecherous suggestions of our peers and the opportunist maxims of our boss. The voice of our grandfather makes us listen still to the cries of the peregrine, the drumming of the ruffed grouse, the voices of the pines and of the aspens in the evening breeze. The dead also torment us. When our mother or our child dies, we are tormented by all the responses that we failed to murmur. In his or her voice coming to us, although our eyes do not see and our hands do not touch, the reality of the person is evident to us, existing as in another sphere, another dimension. When someone we love dies, he or she continues to signal to us. When our infant child dies, his or her person addresses us across untraversable distances. Pak Tandi led us through the forest. The late afternoon sun sent low shafts of light guiding us between the tree trunks and the canes of giant bamboo. We stopped before a huge tree whose trunk had a dozen patches of black palm fibers. Inside, he said, are the bodies of babies—of stillborn babies, and babies who die before their first milk tooth emerges. A baby without teeth cannot speak, cannot spread falsehood. The baby that dies is brought here immediately. The family bores a hole in the trunk of the tree and places the baby inside. The opening is closed with palm fibers; eventually the tree will grow over the opening and seal the baby inside itself. The tree that is chosen, a Tarra tree, has white milk sap (latex), which flows when the hole is cut in it and surrounds the baby with nourishment, the vital milk that the mother is unable to give it. And the tree takes nourishment from the body and soul of the baby. The love of the parents continues in the tree. The tree continues its ascent to the skies. When it is time for the mother tree to let them go, the babies, unable to crawl or walk, are wafted by the wind, ascend to papua— the separated, sacred dimension.

The Babies in Trees

245

Contributors sophie bourgault is Associate Professor

at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada. Her current research interests gravitate around the ethics of care, feminist political theory, and French Enlightenment thought. In addition to book chapters on Plato and on Simone Weil, her publications include articles published in Symposium; Theory and Event; Journal of Aesthetic Education; Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies; Les Cahiers Simone Weil; and Dissensus. She is also the co-editor of A Companion to Enlightenment Historiography (2013). antonio calcagno works on Renaissance philosophy, contemporary European philosophy, and social and political thought. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at King’s University College at Western University, Canada, where he serves as the CoDirector of the Centre for Advanced Research in European Philosophy. He is the author of Lived Experience from the Inside Out: The Social and Political Philosophy of Edith Stein (2014); Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and Their

Time (2007); The Philosophy of Edith Stein (2007); and Giordano Bruno and the Logic of Coincidence: Unity and Multiplicity in the Philosophical Thought of Giordano Bruno (1998). john caruana is Associate Professor of

Philosophy and the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. He has published in the area of Continental philosophy of religion, in particular on the work of Levinas. He is also interested in the philosophy of film. He has published essays on the work of Bruno Dumont, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Abbas Kiarostami, and Eric Rohmer. He is currently coediting a book that explores the philosophical currents of post-secular cinema, in particular the films of Terrence Malick and Lars von Trier. diane enns is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, Canada. She is the author of The Violence of Victimhood (2012) and Speaking of Freedom: Philosophy, Politics, and the Struggle for Liberation (2007), and has published articles on a range of moral and

248

political issues. She has recently completed a book of personal essays on love and is currently working on the theme of community and violence.

Dangerous Emotions (1999); Trust (2003); Body Modifications: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture (2005); The First Person Singular (2007); and Violence and Splendor (2011).

christina m. gschwandtner teaches

christian lotz is Professor of

Continental philosophy of religion at Fordham University. She is the author of Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (2007); Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy (2012); Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion (2014); and various articles on related topics. She has also translated Jean-Luc Marion’s The Visible and the Revealed (2008) and On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions (2007); Michel Henry’s Words of Christ (2012); and is in the process of translating Marion’s Le croire pour le voir and La rigueur des choses. marguerite la caze is Associate

Philosophy at Michigan State University. He is the author of The Art of Gerhard Richter: Hermeneutics, Images, Meaning (2015); The Capitalist Schema: Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction (2014); Christian Lotz zu Karl Marx: Das Maschinenfragment (2014); From Affectivity to Subjectivity: Revisiting Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology (2008); and Vom Leib zum Selbst: Kritische Analysen zu Husserl und Heidegger (2005). Lotz has co-edited several volumes and published numerous articles on various topics and philosophers in European philosophy. His current research interests are in critical theory, Marxism, aesthetics, and contemporary European political philosophy.

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland. Her publications include Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics (2013); The Analytic Imaginary (2002); Integrity and the Fragile Self, with Damian Cox and Michael Levine (2003); and articles on the work of Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray, Immanuel Kant, Michèle Le Dœuff, JeanPaul Sartre, and Iris Marion Young.

todd may is Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities at Clemson University. He is the author of thirteen books of philosophy, including A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe (2015) and Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction (2015). His previous writings focused on the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière.

alphonso lingis is Professor Emeritus

dawne mccance is a University of

of Philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University. He has published Excesses: Eros and Culture (1984); Libido: The French Existential Theories (1985); Phenomenological Explanations (1986); Deathbound Subjectivity (1989); The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (1994); Abuses (1994); Foreign Bodies (1994); Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (1995); The Imperative (1998);

Manitoba Distinguished Professor and the editor of Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. She teaches and writes in the areas of Continental philosophy, ethics, and critical animal studies. Her books include Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction (2010); Sleights of Hand: Derrida Writing (2008); Derrida on Religion: Thinker of Differance (2009); Medusa’s Ear: University

Contributors

Foundings from Kant to Chora L (2004); and Posts: Re Addressing the Ethical (1996).

numerous articles on the philosophy of religion, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas.

dorothea olkowski is Professor and

Chair of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Director of the Cognitive Studies Program, and former Director of Women’s Studies. She is the author/editor of ten books, including Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn (2012); The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible) (2007); and Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (1999), and over one hundred articles, including essays, book reviews, encyclopedia articles, translations of her work, and collaborations with artists.

fiona utley is a Senior Lecturer at the University of New England, Australia, and a researcher affiliated with its School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences. Her research, publications, and international conference presentations have explored phenomenological perspectives on identity, trauma, and embodiment. She is currently working on a book manuscript on a phenomenology of trust grounded in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. mélanie walton , Assistant Professor

felix ó murchadha is Professor of

Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A former Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of A Phenomenology of Christian Life: Glory and Night (2013) and The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger (2013). He also edited a collection titled Violence, Victims, Justifications: Philosophical Approaches (2006) and has published

of Philosophy at Belmont University in Nashville, works primarily on questions of lived experience and the expression of meaning that serve to link medieval and contemporary Continental philosophy, as evidenced in her recent book Expressing the Inexpressible in Lyotard and PseudoDionysius: Bearing Witness as Spiritual Exercise (2013).

Contributors

249

Index a

absolute evil, 189–90, 199 n. 6 absolutism, 82 Adams, John, 159 administrative problems, 160 adolescence, 57 l’adonné, 65 Aesthetics (Hegel), 223, 229 affect, 186–87 affliction, 155–56 agape, 54–55 appetite yielding to, 7, 114 eros and, 67, 69–70, 74, 77, 86–87, 91, 94–96 kenotic love as, 6, 78 love’s conditions and, 85–87, 91, 94–96 agency, 44, 158, 244 aging, 28–29 ambiguity, 189 amputation, 31–32 anxiety, 113 n. 25 Aomame (fictional character), 208–11, 213, 215–18 apatheia, 82, 94 apologetics, 66 Apology (Plato), 113 n. 19 appetite, 7, 114 Arendt, Hannah. See also The Human Condition on attention, 162–65



Augustine and, 7–8, 38–39, 114–18, 120–26 on compassion, 9, 150–55, 159–61 Crises of the Republic, 163 desire in life of mind and, 7, 114–27 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 151, 163 on friendship, 162–65 on Greek literature and philosophy, 118–22 inter-esse of, 115, 118, 121 The Life of the Mind, 114, 117–25, 154–55 on love and politics, 9, 118, 149–65 Love and Saint Augustine, 7, 114 Nazis and, 122, 151, 163, 199 n. 8 phenomenology of, 153–54, 158 On Revolution, 9, 150–52, 159 on Roman philosophy, 120–21 on thinking, willing, and judging, 117–23, 126 “Thoughts on Lessing,” 156, 164 Tronto on, 166 n. 28 Weil read by, 165 n. 5 against welfare state, 9, 151, 162–63 Aristotle, 124 Armstrong, John, 182, 184 n. 4 artist’s gaze, 169–74 atheism, 52, 54–56 attention, 97 n. 22, 157–58, 162–65 Au commencement était l’amour (In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith) (Kristeva), 52

252

Augustine (saint) Arendt and, 7–8, 38–39, 114–18, 120–26 The Confession of Augustine and, 7, 99, 104–8, 111 Confessions, 104–8, 116, 124–25 eros and, 104–8, 111 love and, 4, 7–8, 32, 34, 93, 124 Marion’s analysis of, 71, 79 n. 9 on transcendence, 116–17 volo ut sis and, 4, 32, 34, 38–43 authentic love, 3, 34–36, 40–41, 196–97 authentic passion, 195–96 auto-affectivity, 82, 85, 90, 97 n. 13 autonomy of self, 4, 6, 19, 34–37, 44, 54, 92, 96 vulnerability and, 36–37

b

babies, buried in trees, 12, 243–45 Badiou, Alain, 2 analogies of, 147 n. 21 on hate, 146 In Praise of Love, 149 social-material theory and, 8–9, 132, 137, 142, 145–46, 147 n. 21, 148 n. 25 Barthes, Roland, 113 n. 25 Bataille, Georges, 48, 112 n. 14 beauty, love’s conditions and, 92–96 Beauvoir, Simone de. See also “An Eye for an Eye” affect and, 186–87 The Ethics of Ambiguity, 189–90, 192–93, 195–96 on evil, 188–90, 199 n. 6 Force of Circumstance, 200 n. 15 on hate, 10–11, 186–99 on impossible reciprocity in, 187, 190–95 on love, 10–11, 35–36, 38, 41–42, 186–99 “Must We Burn Sade?,” 198 Nazis and, 186–88, 190, 192–93, 200 n. 15 on possible reciprocity, 187, 195–99 on punishment, 186–87, 190–94, 196, 198, 200 n. 12 “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” 196, 199 n. 10, 200 n. 13 Index



The Second Sex, 10, 186–87, 190, 195–97 on vengefulness, 10, 187–90 “The Woman in Love,” 35 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 191–92 Being and Time (Heidegger), 73 Being Given (Marion), 64 belief idealization as, 46–47 as trust, 52–55 Beyond Romance (Dillon), 2 Billy Budd (fictional character), 152–53 birth death and, 240 of subject, 46–52 blind, love as, 221, 229–33 blood relation, 204–5 Book of Tobit, 231–32 Bornemark, Jonna, 2 Brasillach, Robert, 187, 194, 200 nn. 15–16 Brecht, Bertolt, 147 Brudholm, Thomas, 199 n. 6 bureaucracy, 160, 162–65 Butades, 230–32

c

capacity for hate, 83–84 love’s conditions and, 92–96 capitalism, in social-material theory, 132, 139–42 capital punishment, 193–94 caritas (charity) in Christian narrative, 102 desire resting in, 116 eros over, 7, 108–11 Lyotard on, 7, 98–111, 112 n. 13 Cashinahua Indians, 101 The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), 57 causality, 206 Cavarero, Adriana, 170, 178–79 centralization, 162 charity. See caritas China, 224 Chrétien, Jean-Louis L’effroi du beau, 66 L’intelligence du feu, 67 on kenotic love, 66–67, 71–72, 75–78 Le regard de l’amour, 67, 71 The Unforgettable and Unhoped For, 72

Christ, 71, 228 Christianity. See also Augustine Hegel on, 227–28 idealization in, 47 love and, 4, 33, 39, 63, 66–76, 79 n. 9, 86, 90–91, 93–94, 99–104, 145 marriage in, 69, 73–74 narratives of, 100–104, 110 subject and, 55 Trinity in, 80 n. 29, 91 Cicero, 120–21 Cixous, Hélène, 37, 170, 179 classes, existence of, 139–40 closed system, 101–2 codependency, 35–36, 41 commodity form, 136, 139–41 Commonwealth (Hardt and Negri), 143 communism, 147 n. 15 Communist Credo (Hess), 145 compassion Arendt on, 9, 150–55, 159–61 needy bodies and, 159–61 in politics and love, 9, 149–55 Weil on, 150–51, 155–61 conatus essendi, 83, 85 La condition ouvrière (Weil), 165 n. 5 conditions, of love agape and, 85–87, 91, 94–96 beauty and, 92–96 being in love, 86–93 capacity and, 92–96 eros and, 82–85 passion and, 81–82, 84, 90, 96, 96 n. 2 philosophical practice and, 81–96 self and, 81–96 unconditionality and, 83, 87, 91 vulnerability, 92–96 The Confession of Augustine (Lyotard), 7, 99, 104–8, 111 Confessions (Augustine), 104–8, 116, 124–25 Continental philosophy perspectives on love, 2–3, 11, 63–78 of religion, 63–78 Corinthians, 33, 55, 86 coupling deflagration and, 178–81 habituation and, 181–84 Courtine-Denamy, Sylvie, 161 Crises of the Republic (Arendt), 163 crisis, in subject, 47, 55–59

Crozier, Lorna, 4, 40–42 cupiditas (greedy desires), 114, 116

d

Damasio, Antonio, 206 d’Ans, André-Marcel, 100–104 death. See also mortality birth and, 240 love stories and, 12, 237–45 de Botton, Alain, 33, 41 decentralization, 162 deflagration, 172, 174, 178–81 depth, phenomenological experience and, 169–74, 176–82, 184 Derrida, Jacques Glas, 223, 227–30 Hegel and, 223–30, 233 love stories and, 11–12, 221–33, 233 n. 5 Memoirs of the Blind, 229–33 otherness and, 221 on reading and writing, 213 Rogues, 233 Descartes, René, 64–65, 79 n. 5, 97 n. 7 desideratum, 114, 116 desire. See also eros as appetite, 7, 114 in caritas, 116 greedy, 114, 116 Henry on, 126 in life of mind, 7, 114–27 love as, 8, 115–17 as obligation, 95 in thinking, willing, and judging, 117–23, 126 detachment, 26 Dick, Kirby, 221 Dieu, la chair, et l’autre (Falque), 69 differend defined, 99 eros and, 108–9 God as, 105 Lyotard on, 7, 99–105, 108–9, 112 n. 7 The Differend (Lyotard), 99, 101 Dillon, M. C., 2 disembodiment, 87 Diskurs, 109 divine love of God, 4, 8, 33, 40–41, 66–74, 76–77, 80 n. 28, 90–91, 101, 104–8, 115–17 Index

253

romantic love and, 72, 76, 80 n. 29 as unconditional, 91 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 152–53 Durkheim, Émile, 48 dynamic permeability, 27, 30

e 254

Echo-Narcissus story, 233 Eco, Umberto, 213 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 136–37 L’effroi du beau (Chrétien), 66 ego-ideal, 50 Eichmann, Adolf, 122, 165 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt), 151, 163 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 225 emotions affect as, 186–87 love as, 11, 32–33, 39–40, 43 person-focused, 20, 24 empathy, 38, 149–50 empiricist foundation, in neuroscience of love, 202–3, 215 Encyclopedia (Hegel), 223–24 Engels, Friedrich, 131, 133–35, 144 Epictetus, 96 n. 2, 97 n. 5 equality, 162 eros agape and, 67, 69–70, 74, 77, 86–87, 91, 94–96 Augustine and, 104–8, 111 over caritas, 7, 108–11 defined, 108 differend and, 108–9 kenotic love and, 6, 63–67, 69–71, 74, 77–78 as lack, 108–11, 113 n. 19 love’s conditions and, 82–85 Lyotard on, 7, 98–111 mania in, 125 erotic infrastructure, 208 eroticism reciprocity and, 196 religious, 104–8, 111, 112 n. 14 Eroticism (Bataille), 112 n. 14 The Erotic Phenomenon (Marion), 64–66, 70–71, 80 n. 26, 98 essentialism, social-material theory and, 131–33, 135, 139, 142–44 Index

ethical life (Sittlichkeit), 225 The Ethics of Ambiguity (Beauvoir), 189–90, 192–93, 195–96 être-au-monde, 215–16 Eucharist, 69, 107 event Lyotard and, 99–103, 106–10 surplus of meaning in, 99, 110 evil, 188–90, 199 n. 6 “Extraterrestrials Suffering for Want of Love” (Kristeva), 58 “Eye and Mind” (Merleau-Ponty), 169–71 “An Eye for an Eye” (Beauvoir) hate in, 10, 186–96, 198 vengefulness in, 10, 187–90 eyes, 232

f

faith God’s love and, 73 Kristeva on, 47, 52–56, 59 need for, 47, 54 Falque, Emmanuel Dieu, la chair, et l’autre, 69 kenotic love and, 63, 69, 71, 73–74, 76, 78, 80 n. 27 Les noces de l’agneau, 69 family funerals and, 240–45 love stories of, 222–30 structure, 225–27 Father, imaginary, 49, 51, 54, 59 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 132–36 filial love, 12, 222–30 fire, 67 Force of Circumstance (Beauvoir), 200 n. 15 foreign objects, 204 form, 207 Foucault, Michel, 212 Frankfurt, Harry, 2 Freeman, Walter J. on neuroscience and intentionality, 11, 205–6, 211–17 solipsism of, 214–16 French liberation, 186–88 French Revolution, 151–52, 159 Freud, Sigmund, 34–35, 184 n. 13, 208, 239 Kristeva and, 46, 48–52, 56 religion and, 52, 201 friendship

Arendt on, 162–65 intensity of, 23, 29 Marion on, 80 n. 32 mortality and, 29 philia, 9, 67, 163–64 respect and, 21 sharing in, 19, 23 Weil on, 162–65 funerals, 240–45 The Future of an Illusion (Singer), 201

g

gazes artists’, 169–74 crossing of, 65, 70 The German Ideology (Marx), 135 gift, love as, 4, 39–41, 43, 70–71, 101 givenness, 63–64, 71, 75, 79 n. 9 Glas (Derrida), 223, 227–30 God as differend, 105 immortality of, 67–68 love of, 4, 8, 33, 40–41, 66–74, 76–77, 80 n. 28, 90–91, 101, 104–8, 115–17 name of, 104 philosophical, 52 God without Being (Marion), 70 grand narratives, 100, 112 n. 8 Gravity and Grace (Weil), 164 greedy desires (cupiditas), 114, 116 Greek literature and philosophy, Arendt on, 118–22 Groundhog Day, 18, 24–30

h

habituation, coupling and, 181–84 Hardt, Michael Commonwealth, 143 social-material theory and, 132, 142–45, 147 n. 15 hate Badiou on, 146 Beauvoir on, 10–11, 186–99 capacity for, 83–84 Hume on, 203 impossible reciprocity of, 187, 190–95 moral, 199 n. 6 oppression and, 197 punishment and, 186–87, 190–94, 196, 198, 200 n. 12

vengefulness and, 10, 187–93 heart, 85 Hegel, G. W. F., 136, 236–37 Aesthetics, 223 Derrida and, 223–29, 233 Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 225 Encyclopedia, 223–24 Phenomenology, 133 The Philosophy of History, 223–24 “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” 227–28 Heidegger, Martin, 73 Helm, Bennett, 20, 24 Henry, Michel on desire, 126 I Am the Truth, 68, 80 n. 13 Incarnation, 80 n. 13 kenotic love and, 2, 63, 68–69, 71, 76–78, 80 n. 13 on transcendental affectivity, 97 n. 13 Words of Christ, 69 Hess, Moses, 145 heterosexual marriage, 77, 80 n. 27 Hillberg, Gary, 170, 176 “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes” (Rorty), 27 Holden Caulfield (fictional character), 57 Holy Family, 228 The Holy Family (Marx), 8, 132 hospitals, 31–32 The Human Condition (Arendt), 9, 117–18 against bureaucracy, 163 compassion and, 150, 153, 155, 160 “Human Personality” (Weil), 162 Hume, David, 218 n. 5 neuroscience and, 11, 202–6 on passion, 11, 202–3 Treatise of Human Nature, 202–5 humility, 71, 203 hunger, 159–61 Husserl, Edmund, 93, 97 n. 11

i

I Am the Truth (Henry), 68, 80 n. 13 idealization, 46–47, 50, 54, 58–59 identity narration and, 178 shared, 19–20, 23–24 thought based on, 133 Illouz, Eva, 142 Index

255

256

imaginary Father, 49, 51, 54, 59, 59 n. 3 immemorial, 173 immortality God’s, 67–68 Groundhog Day and, 18, 24–28 love’s limits and, 18, 24–27 quest for, 118–20 impossible reciprocity, 187, 190–95 Incarnation (Henry), 80 n. 13 India, 223–24 indifference, 84–85 Indonesia, 236 industry, 135 In Excess (Marion), 79 n. 8 infants, buried in trees, 12, 243–45 In Praise of Love (Badiou), 149 institution, 171, 173, 177, 183, 184 n. 13 L’intelligence du feu (Chrétien), 67 intensity of engagement, 23–24, 26–29 of friendship, 23, 29 of romantic love, 18–20, 22–24, 26–30 intentionality defined, 206 Merleau-Ponty and, 206–8, 212–13, 215 neuroscience and, 11, 201–18 in 1Q84, 11, 208–11, 213, 215–18 perception and, 203, 211–13 phenomenology and, 206–11 sensation and, 203, 211–13 intentional structure, 206, 211, 213–15 inter-esse, 115, 118, 121 interworld, 37 In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (Au commencement était l’amour) (Kristeva), 52 I-thou relationships, 134, 136, 138, 142 I will you to be (volo ut sis), 4, 32, 34, 38–43

j

jealousy, 173–74 Journal d’usine (Weil), 156 Judaism, 227–28 judging, desire in, 117–23, 126

k

Kant, Immanuel, 20–21, 92–93, 109, 136, 199 n. 8 kenotic love Index

as agape, 6, 78 centrality of, 64–70 Chrétien and, 66–67, 71–72, 75–78 in Continental philosophy of religion, 63–78 defined, 79 n. 2 eros and, 6, 63–67, 69–71, 74, 77–78 exclusivity of, 74–78 Falque and, 63, 69, 71, 73–74, 76, 78, 80 n. 27 Henry and, 2, 63, 68–69, 71, 76–78, 80 n. 13 Lacoste and, 63, 68, 71–73, 76–78 Marion and, 5–6, 63–71, 74–78, 79 nn. 8–9, 80 n. 26, 80 n. 32 nature of, 70–74 self-sacrifice in, 70–72, 74–75, 77–78 vulnerability and, 72, 75, 78 Kilby, Karen, 80 n. 29 Koffka, Kurt, 207 Kolodny, Niko, 22, 24 Kristeva, Julia on birth of subject, 46–52 “Extraterrestrials Suffering for Want of Love,” 58 on faith, 47, 52–55, 59 Freud and, 46, 48–52, 56 In the Beginning Was Love, 52 on love, 5, 46–59 on narcissism, 46, 50–51, 58 on nihilism, 47, 55–59

l

Lacan, Jacques, 48–50, 56, 214 Lacoste, Jean-Yves, 63, 68, 71–73, 76–78 language in love stories, 242–43 phenomenological experience and, 169–72, 174 Laval, Pierre, 200 n. 16 lesbian relationships, reciprocity in, 200 n. 18 Levinas, Emmanuel, 65–66 lex talionis, 190–91, 194, 200 n. 15 liberal idea of love, 4, 33, 41, 54 life imprisonment, 192–93 life of mind desire in, 7, 114–27 thinking, willing, and judging in, 117–23, 126

The Life of the Mind (Arendt), 114, 117–25, 154–55 limbic system, 212–13 limits, of love dynamic permeability and, 27, 30 identification of, 43–44 immortality and, 18, 24–27 mortality and, 4–5, 17–32, 37–38, 42 pathologies in, 34–36 self and, 36–39 suffering and, 31–32, 38 volo ut sis and, 4, 32, 34, 38–43 vulnerability and, 29, 32, 40–44 linear models, 205 liturgy, 72–73 love. See also specific topics Augustine and, 4, 7–8, 32, 34, 93, 124 authentic, 3, 34–36, 40–41, 196–97 Beauvoir on, 10–11, 35–36, 38, 41–42, 186–99 being in, 86–93, 201 as blind, 221, 229–33 Christianity and, 4, 33, 39, 63, 66–76, 79 n. 9, 86, 90–91, 93–94, 99–104, 145 Continental perspectives on, 2–3, 11, 63–78 defined, 18–24, 201–2 as desire, 115–17 dynamic permeability of, 27, 30 as emotion, 11, 32–33, 39–40, 43 as eternal, 4, 17 filial, 12, 222–30 as gift, 4, 39–41, 43, 70–71, 101 in hospitals, 31–32 ideal of, 33–34, 39, 41 Kristeva on, 5, 46–59 liberal idea of, 4, 33, 41, 54 mature, 33–34, 41, 182 Merleau-Ponty on, 9–11, 37–38, 169–74, 176–78, 180–83, 184 n. 13 narratives of, 7, 100–104 nature and, 12, 237–45 of neighbor, 71, 111, 116–17, 155, 157 object of, 87–95, 203 pathological, 34–36 philia, 9, 67, 163–64 philosophy neglecting, 1–2, 7, 64, 98 Plato on, 4, 21, 66, 86, 93–94, 108, 113 n. 19, 123



possible reciprocity of, 10, 187, 195–99 as principle of sensuality, 133–36 of qualities, 18–19, 30 n. 2 same-gendered, 78, 200 n. 18 self-harm and, 5, 47, 55–59 sober kinds of, 9, 151 as social relation, 8–9, 136–39 Socrates and, 82, 94, 108, 113 n. 19, 118–22, 125 subject and, 51–52 thinking about, 1–12 transcendence and, 5–8, 33, 39, 41, 93–94, 116–17 trust and, 9–10, 43, 68, 169–84 universal, 101–3, 140 vulnerability and, 4–5, 21–22, 24, 29, 32, 40–44, 72, 75, 78, 92–96, 171, 174–78, 243 Love and Saint Augustine (Arendt), 7, 114 “Love as a Moral Emotion” (Velleman), 20–21 “Love’s Bond” (Nozick), 19 love stories, 44, 174–75 blindness in, 221, 229–33 death and, 12, 237–45 Derrida and, 11–12, 221–33, 233 n. 5 filial love, 12, 222–30 infants buried in trees, 12, 243–45 language in, 242–43 shadows in, 229–33 Love’s Work (Rose), 41–42 Lyotard, Jean-François, 111 n. 5 on caritas, 7, 98–111, 112 n. 13 The Confession of Augustine, 7, 99, 104–8, 111 on differend, 7, 99–105, 108–9, 112 n. 7 The Differend, 99, 101 on eros, 7, 98–111 event and, 99–103, 106–10 phrase universe of, 112 n. 12 The Postmodern Condition, 101–2, 109 postmodernism of, 100–102, 109, 112 n. 8 purposiveness without purpose and, 109–10, 113 n. 22 “Why Desire?,” 109–10

Index

257

m

258

mania, 125 Marion, Jean-Luc, 2, 36 Augustine analyzed by, 71, 79 n. 9 Being Given, 64 Descartes and, 64–65, 79 n. 5 The Erotic Phenomenon, 64–66, 70–71, 80 n. 26, 98 In Excess, 79 n. 8 on friendship, 80 n. 32 God without Being, 70 kenotic love and, 5–6, 63–71, 74–78, 79 nn. 8–9, 80 n. 26, 80 n. 32 Other and, 65–66 Prolegomena to Charity, 65 The Visible and the Revealed, 79 n. 9 marriage banquet, 69 in Christianity, 69, 73–74 heterosexual, 77, 80 n. 27 Marx, Karl Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 136–37 Feuerbach and, 132–36 The German Ideology, 135 The Holy Family, 8, 132 social-material theory of love and, 8, 132–39, 143–45 Theses on Feuerbach, 133 Matthiessen, F. O., 41 mature love, 33–34, 41, 182 mechanical actions, 206 Meditations (Descartes), 64–65, 79 n. 5, 97 n. 7 Melville, Herman, 152–53 Memoirs of the Blind (Mémoires d’aveugle) (Derrida), 229–33 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice “Eye and Mind,” 169–71 intentionality and, 206–8, 212–13, 215 on love, 9–11, 37–38, 169–74, 176–78, 180–83, 184 n. 13 phenomenological experience and, 11, 169–74, 176–78, 180–83, 184 n. 13, 206–8, 212–13, 215 Phenomenology of Perception, 173 mind. See life of mind Mind in Life (Thompson), 218 n. 9 miyoi, 101 Index

modern bureaucratic age, 162–65 The Modern World (Singer), 201 Moffatt, Tracey, 170, 176 monasticism, 76–77, 80 n. 31 moral evidence, 202 moral hatred, 199 n. 6 morality, 20–21 Moreault, Francis, 127 n. 11 Morell, Michael, 149 Morgan, Anne, 199 n. 6 mortality friendship and, 29 Groundhog Day and, 18, 24–30 lesson of, 29–30 love’s limits and, 4–5, 17–32, 37–38, 42 nature, love and, 12, 237–45 romantic love and, 17–30 mother, subject emerging from, 48–49, 55, 57 motivation, 93 Murakami, Haruki, 11 “Must We Burn Sade?” (Beauvoir), 198 mystics, 67

n

names, 104, 179 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2 narcissism, 36–37, 40, 46, 50–51, 58 Narcissus, 46, 50–51, 58, 233 narratives Christian, 100–104, 110 grand, 100, 112 n. 8 identity and, 178 of love, 7, 100–104 Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 231 nature, love and, 12, 237–45 The Nature of Love (Singer), 201 Nazis Arendt and, 122, 151, 163, 199 n. 8 Beauvoir and, 186–88, 190, 192–93, 200 n. 15 The Need for Roots (Weil), 160–62 needy bodies, compassion and, 159–61 negative narcissism, 50 Negri, Antonio Commonwealth, 143 social-material theory and, 8–9, 132, 142–45 neighbor, love of, 71, 111, 116–17, 155, 157 Nelson, Deborah, 164

Neoplatonists, 4, 7–8 neural feedback, 211 neuroactivity, 206, 211–13 neuroscience, of love empiricist foundation and, 202–3, 215 être-au-monde and, 215–16 Freeman on, 11, 205–6, 211–17 Hume and, 11, 202–6 intentionality and, 11, 201–18 perception and, 203, 211–13 sensation and, 203, 211–13 Singer and, 11, 201–2 New Testament, 55 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 31, 150, 236, 239 nihilism, 47, 55–59 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 102 Les noces de l’agneau (Falque), 69 noetic activities, 140 nonlinear neural feedback, 211 Nozick, Robert, 19–20, 23–24 Nussbaum, Martha, 9, 149

o

object foreign, 204 of love, 87–95, 203 objectification, 91–92 obligation, 95, 160–61 Ó Murchadha, Felix, 39 1Q84 (Murakami), 11, 208–11, 213, 215–18 On Revolution (Arendt), 9, 150–52, 159 openness, 170–78, 180–81, 183 oppression, hate and, 197 Origen, 69 Ormiston, Alice, 227 Orwell, George, 102 Other Derrida and, 221 Marion and, 65–66 self and, 50–51, 95–96, 172, 180–81 turning toward, 95–96 outrages, 189

p

Pak Tandi, 245 Panksepp, Jaak, 206 paralogy, 109 parental love, 22–24, 77–78, 243–45 being in, 88–89 power of, 239

passion authentic, 195–96 Hume on, 11, 202–3 love’s conditions and, 81–82, 84, 90, 96, 96 n. 2 of mystics, 67 philosophical practice and, 81–96 self and, 6, 82 pathological love, 34–36 Paul (saint), 33, 55, 82, 86, 123 perception, intentionality and, 203, 211–13 person-focused emotions, 20, 24 Pétain, Henri Philippe, 200 n. 16 Phaedrus (Plato), 121, 125 phallus worship, 223 phenomena of revelation, 79 n. 9 phenomenological experience, of love, 2 Arendt and, 153–54, 158 artist’s gaze and, 169–74 coupling in, 178–84 deflagration and, 172, 174, 178–81 depth and, 169–74, 176–82, 184 habituation and, 181–84 intentionality and, 206–11 language and, 169–72, 174 Merleau-Ponty and, 11, 169–74, 176–78, 180–83, 184 n. 13, 206–8, 212–13, 215 openness and, 170–78, 180–81, 183 overview of, 9–11 reversibility and, 170–71, 173–74, 180, 182 trust and, 9–10, 169–84 vision and, 169–74, 176, 178–79 Phenomenology (Hegel), 133 Phenomenology of Eros (Bornemark and Schuback), 2 Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), 173 Phil Connors (fictional character), 24–26, 29–30 philia, 9, 67, 163–64 philosophical God, 52 philosophy. See also Continental philosophy Greek, 118–22 love neglected by, 1–2, 7, 64, 98 practice of, passion and, 81–96 Roman, 120–21 vulnerability and, 92 Index

259

260

The Philosophy of History (Hegel), 223–24 phrase universe, 112 n. 12 physical separation, 37 Plato Apology, 113 n. 19 on love, 4, 21, 66, 86, 93–94, 108, 113 n. 19, 123 Phaedrus, 121, 125 Symposium, 108, 113 n. 19, 119, 125 pleasure, 203–4 Pliny the Elder, 231 Plotinus, 67, 115 Poemen, Abba, 80 n. 30 politics, love and. See also social-material theory, of love Arendt on, 9, 118, 149–65 compassion in, 9, 149–55 overview of, 8–9 speechlessness in, 9, 151–53, 155–58 suffering in, 150, 152–53, 155–58, 161–62 Weil on, 9, 149–51, 154–65 welfare state and, 9, 151, 162–63 Porter, Elizabeth, 149 possible reciprocity, of love, 10, 187, 195–99 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard), 101–2, 109 postmodernism, 100–102, 109, 112 n. 8 power, 235–39 presence, 217 pride, 20, 203 Prolegomena to Charity (Marion), 65 Psalms, 108 psychoanalysis, 54, 58 punishment Beauvoir on, 186–87, 190–94, 196, 198, 200 n. 12 capital, 193–94 hate and, 186–87, 190–94, 196, 198, 200 n. 12 lex talionis, 190–91, 194, 200 n. 15 life imprisonment, 192–93 vengefulness and, 186–87, 190–94, 196, 198 purposiveness, without purpose, 109–10, 113 n. 22 “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (Beauvoir), 196, 199 n. 10, 200 n. 13

Index

Q

qualities, love of, 18–19, 30 n. 2

r

rational nature, 20–21, 139, 141 reading, 213–14 reciprocity impossible, of hate, 187, 190–95 in lesbian relationships, 200 n. 18 possible, of love, 10, 187, 195–99 Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression (Weil), 162 Le regard de l’amour (Chrétien), 67, 71 religion. See also Christianity; faith commodity form and, 140 Continental philosophy of, 63–78 Freud and, 52, 201 idealization in, 47 religious eroticism, 104–8, 111, 112 n. 14 reproduction, 132, 139–42, 147 respect, 21 revelation, phenomena of, 79 n. 9 revenge. See vengefulness reverence, 21 reversibility, 170–71, 173–74, 180, 182 Rogues (Derrida), 233 Roman philosophy, Arendt on, 120–21 romantic love authentic love and, 196–97 distinguishing of, 21–24, 27 divine love superimposed on, 72, 76, 80 n. 29 intensity of, 18–20, 22–24, 26–30 liberal paradigms, 4, 33, 41, 54 mortality and, 17–30 pathological, 34–36 sexual expression and, 21–22, 201 tending in, 24 Rorty, Amélie, 27, 30 Rose, Gillian, 41–42, 44 Royle, Nicholas, 221–22

s

sacred, 48 sadism, 198 Salinger, J. D., 57 same-gendered love, 78, 200 n. 18 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 36, 187–88, 191–92, 196 saturated phenomenon, 65–66, 71

Schuback, Marcia Sá Cavalcante, 2 science, 120, 202 Scott, Joanna Vecchiarelli, 115 Scotus, John Duns, 69 Secomb, Linnell, 170, 175–77, 181 The Second Sex (Beauvoir), 10, 186–87, 190, 195–97 self l’adonné, 65 ascetics of, 94 atheist, 56 autonomy of, 4, 6, 19, 34–37, 44, 54, 92, 96 desideratum identified with, 116 dialogue with, 119 limits of love and, 36–39 love’s conditions and, 81–96 Other and, 50–51, 95–96, 172, 180–81 passion and, 6, 82 sovereign, 4, 6, 34–36, 38, 41, 44 self-affectivity, 68–69, 78, 80 n. 13 self-harm love and, 5, 47, 55–59 statistics, 60 n. 12 self-realization, 138 self-responsibility, 81–82, 96 self-sacrifice, 70–72, 74–75, 77–78 Seneca, 120–21 sensation, intention and, 203, 211–13 sensory cortices, 206 sensuality, love as principle of, 133–36 serially forward relations, 211 sexual expression, romantic love and, 21–23, 201 shadows, in love stories, 229–33 shame, 20 shared identity, 19–20, 23–24 Singer, Irving, 2, 11, 33–34, 40, 201–2 Sittlichkeit (ethical life), 225 Skepticism. See Stoic-Skeptic inheritance sliding signifier, 214 Slote, Michael, 149 Small Beneath the Sky (Crozier), 40–42 sober love, 9, 151 Soble, Alan, 2 social-material theory, of love Badiou and, 8–9, 132, 137, 142, 145–46, 147 n. 21, 148 n. 25 capitalism in, 132, 139–42 classes in, 139, 141



commodity form in, 136, 139–41 Engels and, 131, 133–37, 144 essentialism and, 131–33, 135, 139, 142–44 Feuerbach and, 132–36 Hardt and, 132, 142–45, 147 n. 15 love as social relation in, 8–9, 136–39 Marx and, 8, 132–39, 143–45 Negri and, 8–9, 132, 142–45 rational character in, 139, 141 reproduction in, 132, 139–42, 147 Socrates Arendt on, 118–22 love and, 82, 94, 108, 113 n. 19, 118–22, 125 solipsism, 214–15 sovereign self, 4, 6, 34–36, 38, 41, 44 speechlessness, 9, 151–53, 155–58 Spinoza, Baruch, 83, 96 n. 4, 143, 145 “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate” (Hegel), 227–28 Stein, Edith, 126 Steinbock, Anthony, 176–77 Stoic-Skeptic inheritance, 6, 82, 84, 94, 96 subject birth of, 46–52 Christianity and, 55 continuum of, 47–48 crisis in, 47, 55–59 love and, 51–52 mother and, 48–49, 55, 57 Third and, 49–51, 54, 57 truth and, 53 suffering love’s limits and, 31–32, 38 in politics and love, 150, 152–53, 155–58, 161–62 symbolic order, 49, 53 Symposium (Plato), 108, 113 n. 19, 119, 125

t

Tana Toraja, 236, 240–45 Tarra tree, 245 Tengo (fictional character), 208–11, 213, 215–18 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 133 thinking desire in, 117–23, 126 identity based on, 133 about love, 1–12 Index

261

262

Third, subject and, 49–51, 54, 57 Thompson, Evan, 218 n. 9 “Thoughts on Lessing” (Arendt), 156, 164 Toraja people, 12, 240–45 Torchia, Joseph, 126 transcendence Augustine focusing on, 116–17 love and, 5–8, 33, 39, 41, 93–94, 116–17 transcendental affectivity, 97 n. 13 transcendentals, 93–94 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 202–5 trees, 12, 235–36, 243–45 Trinity, 80 n. 29, 91 Tristan and Isolde, 146, 148 n. 25 Tronto, Joan, 166 n. 28 trust artist’s gaze and, 169–74 belief as, 52–55 institution and, 171, 173, 177, 183, 184 n. 13 love and, 9–10, 43, 68, 169–84 phenomenological experience and, 9–10, 169–84 vulnerability and, 171, 174–79 truth, subject and, 53

u

unconditionality, 83, 87, 91 The Unforgettable and Unhoped (Chrétien), 72 universal love, 101–3, 140 Velleman, David, 20–22, 24 vengefulness Beauvoir on, 10, 187–90 hate and, 10, 187–93 punishment and, 186–87, 190–94, 196, 198 violence, 175–76, 199 n. 10, 200 n. 13, 203 The Visible and the Revealed (Marion), 79 n. 9

v

vision blindness and, 221, 229–33 phenomenological experience and, 169–74, 176, 178–79 volo ut sis (I will you to be), 4, 32, 34, 38–43 vulnerability autonomy and, 36–37 conditions and, 92–96 Index





of corporeality, 178 kenotic love and, 72, 75, 78 limits and, 29, 32, 40–44 love and, 4–5, 21–22, 24, 29, 32, 40–44, 72, 75, 78, 92–96, 171, 174–78, 243 philosophy and, 92 trust and, 171, 174–79 woundedness and, 72, 75, 85

w

Waiting for God (Weil), 162 Ward, Julie K., 200 n. 18 Weil, Simone, 97 n. 22 Arendt reading, 165 n. 5 on attention, 157–58, 162–65 on compassion, 150–51, 155–61 La condition ouvrière, 165 n. 5 on friendship, 162–65 Gravity and Grace, 164 “Human Personality,” 162 Journal d’usine, 156 on love and politics, 9, 149–51, 154–65 The Need for Roots, 160–62 Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression, 162 Tronto on, 166 n. 28 Waiting for God, 162 against welfare state, 9, 151, 162–63 welfare state, 9, 151, 162–63 “Why Desire?” (Lyotard), 109–10 will, 83–86, 96, 236, 239 Williams, Bernard, 28 willing, desire in, 117–23, 126 willingness, 44 “The Woman in Love” (Beauvoir), 35 Words of Christ (Henry), 69 woundedness, 72, 75, 85 writing, 213–14

z

Ziering Kofman, Amy, 221