I love therefore I am
Harry Potter tells us that the mantra that saves mankind is “love”. Indeed, the more human society is on the brink of disintegration, the more insurmountable obstacles exist between human beings, or the colder the weather, the more we can’t help but go back to the most basic and truthful levels to draw energy – for example, Love.
The history of love is almost as long as the history of mankind. Love is easy to talk about because we always grew up on a certain love tradition. Love is difficult to talk about, because how can the love of ancient Greece, the love in the free market economy, and the love that is the unique “individual symbol” of each person, can be generalized?
Today’s single reading selects 12 paragraphs from Professor Wang Min’an’s new book “On Eros”, looks at the development and deformation of the concept of “love” in different periods and different texts, and peeks into love and other things from a certain slice Relationship. Even as perceptions of love change, and love has its own highs and lows, the possibility of love itself is always with us; it is the most basic comfort in winter.
“On Eros” (excerpt)
Author: Wang Min’an
01
The love of the body is the beginning of the most elementary level of love, and every step of love is the abandonment of the love of the body. However, this does not mean confronting the love of the body with the love of truth. They are infinitely far away, but not incompatible. Love starts from the body.
The movie Camille Claudel
02
If love is completely autonomous, and if love itself is completely derived from the actual choice of man, then the sudden drop, experience and loss of love also becomes a matter of autonomy. Once love operates within its own innerness, it flattens out the transcendent side of the divine and becomes completely confined within human nature. Love is so autonomous that its goal is divorced from the outer frame of sociality, even from marriage and childbirth, its goal is love. In the love stories of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, the topic of fertility and marriage is hardly ever touched upon. They live alone in absolute love experience, in non-marital and non-fertile love. Fertility and love are not related. Petrarch has no children with the one he loves, but he has with the person he doesn’t love. Likewise, Dante only gets married when he doesn’t love, and he only has children with the person he doesn’t love. As such, love is not the means and medium to eternity. The meaning of love lies in the experience of love itself. The meaning of life is also in the experience of love itself. In a sense, love becomes the essence of human nature. The special essence of man is love, and man exists because of love, because he loves other people, and love exists horizontally away from God and his neighbors who are divorced from the divine love.
The movie Mervyn Calla
03
Love ripens poetry, or, to be precise, sonnets. At the same time, this literary style presents all kinds of experiences of love in a comprehensive, profound and unrelenting manner. This is the mutual reinforcement of love and literature. It can be said that lovelorn gave birth to modern poetry, and literature is the first compensation and comfort for lost love.
04
Here we can find Boccaccio’s attitude towards eros: eros is a human instinct, the instinct of life, it is natural, it is inherent in the human body. It is the energy of the body itself. As long as there is a body, or in other words, as long as there is life, there is lust. It is an eternal impulse, it cannot be purged, it cannot be veiled, it cannot be suppressed, it cannot be admonished. Whether it is the suppression of God, the suppression of space, the suppression of reason or the suppression of language. It will not be silent, it will emerge violently and spontaneously. This is the erotic desire inherent in human nature itself. In this sense, Boccaccio is a naive Freudian. This love of the son is the origin and essence of life. This erotic desire is what Freud later called libidinal.
The movie “Turkish Carnival”
05
Spinoza’s understanding of emotion and love actually opens up the fluid side of love. The characteristic of love is not that it has an unchanging essence, but that its essence is just changeable, a process of change of force. Love, beginning here with Spinoza, is divorced from an eternal appeal. Love no longer aims for eternity and immutability. Love is precisely fickle. The dead love is precisely the misunderstanding of love, the deprivation and suppression of love, and there is no so-called ideal love and eternal love. As Montaigne said, when you love someone, you think that one day you will hate him; when you hate someone, you think that one day you will love him. Love is only an emotional pleasure, but a changeable pleasure, a multiplicity of pleasure, and a pleasure that can disappear at any time.
The movie “Boyfriend”
06
The tragedy of love lies in the inability of the lover to love out of his former relationship, to love alone from a pre-existing community, to love as an absolutely innocent individual.
Movie “In the Mood for Love”
07
In a sense, a person who is not loved, or who has never been loved, who has not bathed in love, who has not received a response of true love, is one who has never been truly acknowledged. , that is, a person who has not received the final, absolute, and highest recognition, and can also be said to be a person who has never experienced the highest dignity. There are all kinds of recognition, there is the recognition of love, and there is the recognition of power, but the recognition of love is the highest recognition. If we say that politics is to arrange and organize people to live together, then the politics of love should be the ultimate politics created, and a politics that inspires love is a politics of mutual recognition of the realization of human nature.
The movie “Lost”
08
For Hegel, love is fundamentally the elimination of the difference between two people, the complete union of two people without the uniqueness of each other. Love is the union of two. Mutual recognition is impossible if there are differences or disagreements. As far as the beginning of man is concerned, there are differences between people, so recognition can only be compulsive, only through war, the winner of the war forces the loser to recognize him. And Hegel also has an ideal love, a non-compulsive love of acknowledgment. Hegel combined his philosophy with ideal love. His so-called “sublation” is to deny a certain part of his past, and obtain some new affirmation through this negation. Love is first and foremost conditioned on the denial of oneself.
The movie “House in Rome”
09
What Badiou said about love leads to the exact opposite of Aristophanes Hegel, which is not a union of two, but a division of two. This kind of love between two people establishes a new life that is different from the previous one. This is the life of “two”, which is the explosion and break of the previous single life. It is in this sense that we can understand love as a fractured event that takes place in the self. Love as an event is rupture, love as an event completely changes you. But when the event of love happens, when the rupture happens, when the violent shock begins to shake you and tear you apart, you have to hold on to the love bravely, and have a clear narrative and determination of this love, that is to say , you have to stand up as the subject of love, to narrate and claim the love event at the moment as your truth, to be loyal to this love event, to be loyal to this truth, and to be a loyal subject of love. In the event of love, subject, fidelity, and truth are all essential, the whole procedure of love, and the general procedure of events.
This life of love is, in fact, the smallest of public life. Badiou believes that such a life is the communist life, that life is the smallest communist life, and that love realizes the smallest communism. In this communism, love allows itself to live forever, and the subject of love allows itself to live with dignity as a human being.
The movie “Passion”
10
Roland Barthes explains why he writes. To write is to be loved, to obtain the love of a stranger, to seek the love of a stranger in a far away, totally unknown place.
The movie “Face”
11
That is to say, love exists a priori like a grammatical pattern, and people fall in love according to this love pattern, imagine love, learn love, and practice love. It’s not just individuals who learn and practice this model, but society as a whole follows this love template: “There are people who would never be lovers if they hadn’t heard people talk about love. “
12
Just as people are more and more willing to make choices according to the market, people are beginning to train and learn about love and marriage within the framework of the free market. People draw economic calculations into their love codes. The peculiarity of capitalism, Marx said, is the transformation of labor power into a commodity, and the law of love in capitalism is the transformation of the individual’s body into a commodity. People have various criteria to calculate their price: age, body, image, occupation, material wealth, and the unique charm of the whole person, these are the weights exchanged in the love market. Unsurprisingly, the market has also opened up a new space for love to negotiate face-to-face. On the Internet, TV, and even in some specific real public spaces, countless people are wandering and choosing in this love market space, they are looking for a suitable companion product. Once the deal cannot be made, people would rather stay in their own space and become an independent individual. In this space, behind every personal free choice of love and marriage, every maverick and unexpected choice, every seemingly socially explosive love choice, stands behind it a carefully calculated market exchange grid. grid. Love, there is no more risk, love is everywhere, but love is nowhere.
Movie “Nights of Kabylia”
(Excerpted from “On Eros,”
(Provided by Nanjing University Press, Watchmen)
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