“As we know, love needs re-inventing.” Arthur Rimbaud
An excerpt:
PHILOSOPHERS AND LOVE
You borrow from Rimbaud the phrase “Love needs re-inventing” and draw on numerous poets and writers as you develop your own conception of love. But first we should perhaps ask questions of other philosophers. You have been impressed by the fact that so few have shown a serious interest in love, and when they have, you usually disagree with them. Why?
The relationship between philosophers and love is certainly far from straightforward. Aude Lancelin and Marie Lemonnier’s Philosophers and Love from Socrates to Simone de Beauvoir shows that very clearly. The book has added interest in that it combines an examination of the philosophers’ thinking and their lives without dumbing down. In that sense, it is almost unprecedented. The book shows how philosophy oscillates between two extremes when it comes to love, even though there are also intermediate points of view. On the one hand, there is “antilove” philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer being the prime representative of that tendency. He is well known for writing that he will never forgive women for experiencing a passion for love, thus making it possible to perpetuate a human species that was in fact worthless! He is one extreme. At the other, you find philosophers who transform love into one of the highest levels of subjective experience. That is the case with Sören Kierkegaard, for example. For Kierkegaard there are three levels of existence. At the aesthetic level, the experience of love is one of vain seduction and repetition. The selfishness of pleasure and the very selfishness of that selfishness drive individuals on, the archetype being Mozart’s Don Juan. At the ethical level, love is genuine and demonstrates its own seriousness. It is an eternal commitment, turned towards the absolute, something Kierkegaard himself experienced in his long courtship of the young Régine. The ethical level can lead the way to the highest level, the religious level, if the absolute value of the commitment is endorsed by marriage. Marriage is thus conceived not as a strengthening of the social bond against the perils of wayward love, but as the institution that channels genuine love towards its fundamental destination. The final transfiguration of love becomes possible when “the Ego plunges through its own transparency to meet the power that has created it”: that is, when, thanks to the experience of love, the Ego roots itself in its divine source. Love then moves beyond seduction and, through the serious mediation of marriage, becomes a way to accede to the super-human. As you can see, philosophy struggles with huge tension. On the one hand, love seen as a natural extravagance of sex arouses a kind of rational suspicion. Conversely, we see an apology for love that borders on religious epiphany. Christianity hovers in the background, a religion of love after all. And the tension is almost unbearable. Thus, when Kierkegaard was finally unable to contemplate the idea of marrying Régine, he broke with her. In the end, he represented the aesthete seducer of the first level, lived then ethical promise of the second and failed to make the transition, via the real-life seriousness of marriage, to the third level. Nonetheless, he visited the whole gamut of forms of philosophical reflection on love.
Does your own interest in this question go back to the initial move made by Plato who turns love into one of the ways of approaching the Idea?
Plato is quite precise in what he says about love: a seed of universality resides in the impulse towards love. The experience of love is an impulse towards something that he calls the Idea. Thus, even when I am merely admiring a beautiful body, whether I like it or not, I am in movement towards the idea of Beauty. I think – in quite different terms, naturally – along the same lines, namely that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process. In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit.
One of the great theorisers of love, according to you, Jacques Lacan, also engaged in dialogue with Plato and concluded, “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” What did he mean?
His is a very interesting thesis, derived from a moralist, sceptical perspective, but one that leads to the contrary conclusion. Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcissistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship. Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the ediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex. In fact, Lacan also engages in philosophical ambiguities in relation to love. The idea that “love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship” can indeed be interpreted in two ways. The first and most obvious is that love is what the imagination employs to fill the emptiness created by sex. It is quite true, after all, that sex, however splendid it is and certainly can be, ends in a kind of emptiness. That is really why it is subject to the law of repetition: one must start time and time again. Every day, when one is young! Then love comes to be the idea that something exists in this void, that lovers are linked by something else apart from this relationship that doesn’t exist. When I was a very young man, I was very struck, almost disgusted, by a passage in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, where she describes, how, after having sex, the man feels the woman’s body is flat and flabby and the woman feels in parallel that the m an’s body, apart from his erect member, is generally unattractive, if not slightly ridiculous. Theatrical farce or vaudeville makes us laugh with a constant usage of similar thoughts. Man’s desire is the desire of the comic, big-bellied, impotent Phallus, and the toothless hag with sagging breasts is the future that awaits all beauty. Loving tenderness, when you fall asleep in the other’s arms, is like Noah’s cloak cast over these unpleasant considerations. But Lacan also thinks quite the opposite, that love reaches out towards the ontological. While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock… love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus disrupted and re-fashioned.
What you are really saying is that there are very contradictory philosophical interpretations when it comes to love?
Principally three. First, there is the romantic interpretation that focuses on the ecstasy of the encounter. Secondly, what we referred briefly to when discussing the Meetic dating agency, the interpretation based on a commercial or legalistic perspective, which argues that love must in the end be a contract. A contract between two free individuals who would presumably declare that they love each other, though they never forget the necessary equality of the relationship, the system of mutual benefits, etc. Finally, there is the sceptical interpretation that turns love into an illusion. My own philosophical view is attempting to say that love cannot be reduced to any of these approximations and is a quest for truth. What kind of truth? you will ask. I mean truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be. It is the project, naturally including sexual desire in all its facets, including the birth of a child, but also a thousand other things, in fact, anything from the moment our lives are challenged by the perspective of difference.
Given that love, according to you, is a manner of experiencing the world on the basis of difference, why don’t you share the view o f the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, namely that the person in love experiences in the person he or she loves not “a quality that is different from any other, but the very quality of difference”? Why don’t you accept that love is an experience of the other?
I think that it is essential to grasp that the construction of the world on the basis of difference is quite distinct from the experience of difference. Levinas’s vision starts from the irreducible experience of the face of the other, an epiphany that is grounded in God as “the Almighty Other”. The experience of otherness is central, because it is the foundation stone of ethics. In a great religious tradition, love also becomes an ethical sentiment par excellence. In my view, there is nothing particularly “ethical” about love as such. I really don’t like all these theological ruminations inspired by love, even though I know they have made a great impact on history. I can only see the ultimate revenge of One over Two. I believe there really is an encounter with the other, but an encounter is not an experience, it is an event that remains quite opaque and only finds reality in its multiple resonances within the real world. Nor can I see love as an experience of “communion”, namely, an experience in which I forget myself on behalf of the other, that is a model in this world of what will finally lead me to the Almighty Other. At the end of Faust, Goethe was already asserting that “the eternal feminine takes us Above”. I’m sorry, but I find such statements rather obscene. Love doesn’t take me “above” or indeed “below”. It is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity. Here, I am opposing “construction” to “experience”. When I lean on the shoulder of the woman I love, and can see, let’s say, the peace of twilight over a mountain landscape, gold-green fields, the shadow of trees, black-nosed sheep motionless behind hedges and the sun about to disappear behind craggy peaks, and know – not from the expression on her face, but from within the world as it is – that the woman I love is seeing the same world, and that this convergence is part of the world and that love constitutes precisely, at that very moment, the paradox of an identical difference, then love exists, and promises to continue to exist. The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze. Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world. The birth of a child, if born from within love, is yet another example of this possibility.
Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong
Translated by Peter Bush