Love is dead, long live love!
written by Mark Seymour
When talking about love we find very quickly that it’s a futile endeavour at its core. In the same way that we can never know another’s mind with certainty, similarly we cannot know another’s love, and as much is the case in the philosophy of love.
So how should we proceed? Do we just concede and go get forklift certified or something more productive? No! We should take this inherent futility and redefine the function of the philosophy of love to avoid this. Where we might have been concerned with the question of what love is, we should instead seek to redefine love so that we can get a better understanding of the subject. If we are able to redefine love, we will be better able to address it.
Love Needs Reinventing
This line of thought regarding redefining love is one of the key aspects of philosopher Alain Badiou’s “In Praise of Love”, a conversation between Badiou and Le Monde contributor and journalist, Nicolas Truong. Badiou draws inspiration from poet Arthur Rimbaud. In his poem A Season in Hell, Rimbaud wrote “As we know, love needs re-inventing”. Now, as a side note, Rimbaud is perhaps not such a good role model or guide for love as he was famously shot by one of his lovers. Nonetheless he did us a good turn with the idea of love being in a defunct state, something that didn’t fulfil the function he ascribed to love, and so was in need for re-inventing.
This is all nice, but how do we reinvent love? Badiou’s answer is to add the “fall” back into falling in love. The modern machinations of love don’t have the necessary risk to facilitate authentic love. In dating apps, we see the extreme of this lack of risk: love is so passive and bland that it is commercialized, the idea that you can casually find love just by swiping on profiles is dominant, and modern lovers finds themselves in a cacophony of gimmicky pick-up lines and bedroom speedruns, inauthentic and heavily curated pictures, and trivial and impersonal bios.
Before dating apps, you would have to find love in bars, parties, or through mutual friends. The risk was that you were potentially entering into a social situation where you were unsure of the other’s desire. You were taking a risk by bridging a gap which might not be reciprocated- but more importantly than this risk, you were engaging authentically, you were face to face with another instead of being hidden behind a screen from the comfort of your toilet or wherever you scroll through dating apps. Another layer to this risk is the risk of love coming to fruition. Badiou suggests that love is a “truth-procedure”. That is to say, in his own words
“[love] is an experience whereby a certain kind of truth is constructed. This truth is simply the truth about Two, the truth that derives from difference as such. ”
When Two Become One
So, when we talk of love as philosophers, we are talking about the process of truth-making that arises from the perspectives of two different people synthesising, as opposed to the individual’s outlook on the world. When we are in love, we are alone together with the other, and we experience the world as more than just ourselves.
A helpful analogy from nature is to look at how anglerfish reproduce. The female is far larger than the male, and so nature, in its crazy problem-solving way, has made it so that the male will fuse with the female, transfer the sperm, and then assimilate into being a part of the female. This is, to a lesser extent, what we do when we are in a loving relationship: our truth-making outlook on the world fuses into one vessel whereby we view the world with two pairs of eyes.
We are of course separate entities, we both have pairs of eyes, but we use them in unison to navigate our way through the world. If I am a fan of the countryside, and my partner is a fan of the city, then we need to navigate and synthesise that split- my truth is that the countryside is the best place to live, my partner’s truth is that the city is the best place to live, and in this difference, we find a new truth about the best place to live, which incorporates both views.
Perhaps our new truth is that a built-up area with easy access to nature is the best. This process of truth-making through difference is a very difficult thing to do, as it might feel like a defeat or a concession. And yet, to be successful in our love, we need to commit to enduring it. For Badiou, enduring this process is of the utmost importance. As a society, we are so obsessed with the topic of love that we give it the spotlight in all of our creative outlets. Given that, it would be a shame to not seize upon the lighting-in-a-bottle moment of finding love. Badiou suggests that we almost have a duty to humanity to engage with love and to not turn away from it.
I would personally go even further than Badiou does here, and suggest that engagement with love is a duty, that is to say something which is compelled upon us; it is the driving force of meaning-making in all of our lives. It’s not simply the case that we find meaning in our own love, we also find endless inspiration from other’s love. We are moved by Romeo and Juliet, we follow celebrity relationship gossip like hawks, we feel unstoppable in the presence of love, and we feel destitute in the absence of it. We are animals built for love, and to deprive ourselves and others of this human need is an injustice.
Cupid’s Arrow
To build on the idea of love as duty, let’s look at the other side of the coin, namely at the work of philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who calls love an act of violence. The thinking here is that love is suddenly stricken upon the individual, and they are forced to act on this love. In the same way that Cupid shooting us with his arrows is a violent act, Zizek sees love as stealing us away from ourselves. Going back to Badiou’s idea of love as a “truth-procedure”, Zizek’s outlook is that he would rather just have his pair of eyes to see the world with. Of course, this pessimistic outlook should be taken with a grain of salt, as Zizek still engages in love despite his outlook. If he was a loner like Schopenhauer we would take him more at face value- but I’ve yet to see him with a poodle. Despite the pessimism, Zizek’s view isn’t far from reality.
We don’t get to pick who we fall in love with, and we often fall in love with the wrong people. It might make complete sense to marry the businesswoman who will bankroll my PhD in philosophy, but if I fall in love with someone who has £16 to their name then tough luck Mark, you’re self-funding. I don’t get a say in my love, and so when I am confronted with it, it can come across as an authoritarian dictation, a violence against myself.
At the same time, Badiou would optimistically affirm Plato’s position that when we fall in love, we see something of the form of beauty in the other, and that is why we love them. Being struck with love is a positive thing because it gives us clarity of the form of beauty, and we can work towards appreciating that further. Even the Zizekian view gets enveloped by this idea- if Cupid shoots you and this ruins your plans, those plans were never more important than the acquisition and appreciation of the form of beauty. So, finding yourself in love is always a better position to be in than to be alone with yourself.
The Monumental Force of Love
This tension between the desirable life for one’s own sake, and the “truth about Two” life you have with a lover has been seen since ancient Greece. Hesiod, for example, believed that women were generally “bad for men”, here’s an interesting excerpt from one of his poems:
“A bad [wife] makes you shiver with cold; a greedy wife roasts you alive with no help from a roaring blaze, and tough though you be brings you to a raw old age”. Hesiod does however also claim that “No prize is greater than a worthy wife”
What we find here in Hesiod is arguably misogynistic, but it functions to show the Ancient Greek perspective of marriage, which is that it’s a big risk to take for a big reward. Do you stay single and content in your own company or do you take the risk to attain the greatest of prizes? Andreas Capellanus, a Middle Ages chaplain who is best known for writing “De Amore” (About Love), suggests that the word “amore” derives from the word “amus” which means hook- here’s a quote: “He who is in love is captured in the chains of desire and wishes to capture someone else with his hook.” Chains and hooks might appeal to some lovers, but Capellanus was a man of God and intended this as a perverse representation of lust disguised as love. He does go on to talk more charitably of love, where he says:
“O what a wonderful thing is love, which makes a man shine with so many virtues and teaches everyone, no matter who he is, so many good traits of character!”
Now why am I telling you all this? There’s a tension here, sure, love’s a big gamble and so on, but what’s more interesting is to see how love has been viewed as such a monumental force, and juxtapose this to how it is fleeting in today’s society.
We can no longer see tragic lovers such as Goethe’s Werther who, in response to unrequited love, shoots himself in the head. Our society has to artificially manufacture such endings (for example, we see a similar death for closure in Titanic with Jack drowning, for their love would not have survived otherwise). Though this trend towards life after love seems to be a positive one, in the Titanic example we see that Rose moves on and lives her life, cherishing the love that remained permanently in an idyllic stasis through Jack’s death, creating no end to the ‘honeymoon’ phase, I think it brings with it its own problems. Love is taken off its pedestal and loses some of its mystique, and so things like dating apps and pornography are allowed to flourish in the space left by a deflated conception of love. Going back to Badiou, we need to re-invent love to reclaim this lost space.
So where does this leave us? Well, we can’t love for free, there’s risk and danger involved and we should acknowledge and accept this fact of life. Our modern society is so consumed by the artificial pre-packaged “love” that is so easily available that we’ve disregarded the real struggle and reward that authentic love brings.
Suggestions for further reading:
Bruce Fink, Lacan On Love (Malden: Polity Press, 2016)
