SISYPHUS

IN LOVE
JULIAN DE MEDEIROS
EDITED BY JENALINE PYLE
 © Jenaline&Julian
Written by Julian de Medeiros, edited by Jenaline Pyle

www.patreon.com/jenalineandjulian

Books in this series:

1. The Hermeneutic Temptation

2. The Vanishing Mediator
3. Where Nothing is Lacking
4. The Useless Precaution
5. Sisyphus in Love
 Sisyphus in Love is based on 10 lectures delivered on
Instagram and YouTube between July 2022 and October
2022.

This book was made possible by contributions to our

learning community from patrons like you. Thank you!
 PROLOGUE

This is a book about love. Or rather, a book about everything

other than love, as a way to understand what love is. Love is
at the root of our loftiest philosophical queries and the core
of our music, cinema, literature and ideology. We’ve all
experienced it and yet struggle to make sense of it. But
precisely what makes it so common should also propel us to
investigate it further. The idea of love opens a door to new
engagements with theory and philosophy, which otherwise
might seem seem obscure or complicated.

This book seeks not only to ask what love is, but also to
unlock insights into the work of Žižek, Hegel, and Lacan. It
builds upon ideas developed in previous books, so some ideas
may be familiar or new iterations of previously-covered
ground. It is my intention and hope that by taking love
seriously, we can better understand our own love and pursue
the wisdom of love, inasmuch as philosophy can be
considered the love of wisdom.
 CHAPTER 1
LOVE AS DISASTER

“Love is a disaster”
-Slavoj Žižek

Falling in love isn’t always convenient. Instead of falling head

over heels in love, perhaps the wisest thing to do is simply
turn around and head in the other direction. And yet rather
than being a mere commonplace about the seductive
corruption of love, we should see this as the very essence of
love. It does change you. True love hurts because it eliminates
the person you once were. This is the classical image of love,
that you are living your peaceful life, full of routines and
independence, when you are struck by cupids bow. Suddenly,
the things that once brought you joy, now no longer seem
quite as rewarding. Now, you want to share everything with
your partner, do everything with them.

This love is not convenient, it is a struggle and sometimes a

rude awakening. It is often an unwelcome disturbance that
shatters our seeming tranquility and wellbeing within the
existing order how we’ve come to accept them. This is why,
for Žižek, you can't have love without the fall.

In many languages, this is how we refer to finding love, we

say “to fall in love.” Falling is something best to be avoided,
though it undeniably changes our perspective. For Žižek this
isn’t just an idiom, it’s a whole metaphysical, political, even
religious framework by which we experience subjectivity.

Perhaps one of the strangest things about falling in love is

that someone who was once a stranger, becomes an intimate
part of your life, in a sense even knowing you better than you
know yourself. For Lacan, this process by which the stranger
becomes the lover is the sublime. Lacan's technical definition
for the sublime is the object elevated to the level of the thing
and this is quite abstract, but let’s see how it applies to falling
in love. Lacan’s sublime is the process by which we take
something which is seemingly ordinary (the object) and we
elevate it into a seemingly metaphysical premise of “the
thing.” We can see how this applies to a relationship, when
you’re in love, someone who is just an ordinary person, a
stranger suddenly becomes elevated to “partner” and takes
on new significance, aspiration and meaning. To see this,
think about the first time you even contemplated falling in
love, the object of your desire, your crush, a stranger, is
elevated to the level of the sublime thing.

If the fall into love is this sublime madness by which you

elevate the object to the level of the thing, then vice versa a
sustained relationship is a de-sublimating process. In
technical terms, in a relationship the ideal that you have of
someone becomes de-sublimated and now you know them
for who they are. This is precisely what love is, once you see
love as the transition from sublimation as infatuation to love
as de-sublimation, love is realizing that the truth of the other
person lies within your exchange. In other words, the love
that you share comes not through the fall but rather what
happens after the fall, when you both get up together. Here
we can recall that Žižek’s argument that what matters more
than the revolution is what happens after the revolution. In
the same sense, love requires work, one has to fall over and
over again.

Love may be blind but lovers are not. In this sense, love may
render you blind, you fall into love, and yet when you're a
lover, when you're in a relationship, you know precisely who
the other person is, perhaps even better than they know
themselves. The process of being in love as opposed to the
process of falling in love is a process of de-sublimation in
philosophical terms. If the sublime for Lacan is how the
object is elevated to the level of the thing, then we see how in
love, the stranger who becomes a lover is mirrored by de-
sublimation, the process by which the person who was your
ideal now becomes your object. (I should clarify that I mean
object in the philosophical sense, not that you should treat
someone like a tool or an inanimate thing.)

The mechanism at work in love therefore resembles the

Hegelian night of the world. We fall into the madness of love,
and therein reveal to ourselves the true madness of the life
we once lived. In this sense, love also follows the logic of the
so-called ‘negation of negation’. Love negates our sense of
self, we become subject to another, and yet in so doing we
become properly subject. Lacan already pointed out the
ambiguity of the term ‘subject’, that it is both passive and
active. To love, as the Christian expression goes, is therefore
to become subject to one another. This is also why the
contemporary emphasis on ‘authenticity’ reveals itself once
again to be a symptomatic response to alienation. We fear
this fall, this loss in subjectivity. Instead, we try to regulate
and streamline falling in love, the better by which to neuter it
of its properly transformative potential.

For Žižek, love without the fall isn't just a critique of modern
romance, but a critique of how our society promotes
romanticism in a superficial sense, building into a bigger
critique about the nature of love and its relationship to
ideology. Žižek makes a slightly provocative argument, he
says that our society has become more promiscuous and yet
at the exact point that we've become more promiscuous,
more ready to be sexually engaged with other people, it's at
that exact point that we've become more afraid of love. This
is a particularly telling paradox, that the more liberated we
are when it comes to sexual expression, the more repressed
we are when it comes to romantic expression.

Importantly, he's not saying that sex is not romantic, it's not a
binary where love is idealized as being sexless, this would be
perverse. This is like what the Catholic Church does by
penalizing sexuality by essentially arguing that “real love” is
only in service to procreation, that's actually rendering love
into an animalistic act (or the biological insistence that
animal reproduction is only about procreation). What the
Catholic Church fears is the metaphysical element of sex itself
(whether sexual relationships or sexual identity). This is
another way of saying that when you have sex, you don't
need the church. Suddenly, you have access to the sublime, to
the metaphysical, that you are in touch with God. This is also
why sex can be an addiction, it's like the ultimate act of self-
negation and this lies at the heart of most addiction. This
isn’t just a vulgar moralization of the idea of addiction as an
inability to say no. Rather, addiction is about saying what I
crave the most is a temporary moment of not being and
within that not-being, to find the bliss of my own existence,
but we’ll get to that with the idea of the Freudian death
drive.

The danger, as the German romantics knew already, was

therefore to resist love by loving life itself. Melancholia, the
pleasurable pain of unrequited or lost love, thereby presents
itself as a fetishistic attachment to that which has been lost.
Here we identify the psychoanalytic definition of melancholy
as being in love with one’s own suffering.

This is the romantic melancholic who’s picking the petals off

flowers saying: “He loves me, he loves me not”. A certain
similarity can be found here to Hamlet’s neurotic
questioning: “To be or not to be”. In both cases, the question
can only be forced through a subjective embrace, a
Kierkegaardian leap of faith. Love, like being, forces the
individual to act, or to perish in hysterical questioning, the
paralysis of indecision. And yet it is so tempting to not act
upon one’s love. After all, if the love goes unrequited, then
one has lost even the hope of it. This is the hysterical
question within psychoanalysis for Lacan, namely not “who
are you?” but “what do I mean to you?”
This is also why the infatuation stage of a relationship can be
toxic, because it's about you, it’s still a very self-centered
experience. There is a fundamental difference between falling
in love and having a crush. If a crush is fundamentally about
you, your own self-discovery, love is the realization that you
have a hole in your heart that you didn't know that you could
feel so strongly, I think that's why love is like love is an
education. Falling in love, especially for the first time, it's a
revelation as to the intensity of emotion, everything is
amplified and intensified and here everything still has to do
with your own experience of it, you're experiencing the world
more vividly, like you've tapped into this thing that previously
seemed to be barred from you. It's also why first love and
especially unrequited love can be all-consuming, it's
exhausting to feel that much all the time.

The initial stage of Lacan’s sublime has it that a relationship

is akin to the object elevated to the level of the sublime, the
thing which consumes you, which is so exhausting it takes a
lot of energy to be so in love all the time. One of the aspects
of the de-sublimation that occurs when you're in a long
lasting relationship is precisely that it gets easier, it's less
strenuous, it's less intoxicating and yet precisely therefore it
is deeper. It is no longer consuming you, in that sense. If love
is a candle that you burn on both ends, it flares up and
there's a lot of energy that is consumed in it. The line from
the playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal is that he who suffers
from everything is the person who enjoys everything. If love
presents itself to you as a kind of suffering, as a kind of
madness, this is a kind of loss of self and reason, this is the
infatuation stage obviously.
The reason I'm mentioning this is that if this is what we fear
and yet if this is also the thing that gives us meaning, that we
love, this is precisely what we lose when we only have
encounters for sex.

Žižek’s argument is that the more liberal we become about

sexual exchange, the more repressed we are about romantic
experience. In a sense, we make ourselves more vulnerable
by wanting someone on not just a physical level, because it
means that you're ceding some level of control. In other
words, it's no longer just about your enjoyment. This is the
key insight for Žižek, that one of the imperatives in modern
society is “have fun!” No matter what you do, make sure that
you're having fun, make sure to put yourself and your
enjoyment first. In a sense this is fine, but the increasing
individualization of life makes it fundamentally more difficult
to allow ourselves to experience love as a fall, because if
you're falling in love it means that you're falling into the
other, you're falling into a kind of abyss in which the very
individualizing features of your own life suddenly become
questionable. The more individualized society becomes, the
more dangerous actually falling in love appears to us.

It isn’t my intention to moralize here and suggest that

promiscuity is the root of social ills, it’s important to learn
about yourself and have these experiences, but what makes
them rich is the risk of the fall. Of course, love could shatter
your enjoyment and it it's important to note here that when
Žižek makes this argument he's not against dating culture.
Part of his argument is a response to social conservatives who
look at online dating and hookup culture and criticize it for
being fake. Žižek’s response is that all social posturing is fake,
in a sense, all social posturing is us presenting how we want
to be seen. Anytime you engage with somebody else there's a
fantasy frame, even on the most obvious, literal sense when
you talk to somebody like you could be talking to your
teacher, you know that beneath them being a teacher, they're
real human beings, which means they do gross things like
sweat or go to the bathroom, it’s crass and vulgar but it
sustains life. For Žižek, we have to imbue life with fantasy,
the idea of authentic connection with others without fantasy
is itself a kind of fantasy. When you engage with another
person even at the most basic level, you have to engage in
fantasy, you have to treat them as if they weren't a real
person because being a real person is almost too horrifically
vulgar.

Žižek concurs with the Freudian insight, like the Janelle

Monáe song, everything is about sex except sex which is
about something else. This is precisely the problem with sex
completely devoid of fantasy, whether you call it romance or
seduction. If sex is just a biological reality, it’s not alluring, it
loses its appeal and the spontaneity of it disappears.

The paradox is that having sex necessitates the infusion of

fantasy that allows you to continue interacting on the level of
biological reality. This is an idea that Žižek takes from Lacan,
that you can't access reality without fantasy. In other words,
it isn’t that reality is separate from fantasy. Instead, it’s that
reality is only accessible through fantasy. As soon as you
distill something to its core truth, its pure reality, everything
disintegrates.
It’s impossible to live in a world of pure reality. This is the
horror for people who suddenly develop a tick where they
can no longer swallow food it's because they've realized just
the horrible mundane reality that when you swallow food
and it goes down here and it ends up in your stomach, it's
like you become too self-aware. When you eat you have to
have fantasize, “oh this tastes good, this is wonderful, this is
a beautiful restaurant, or you've cooked this nice meal for
me. We imbue reality with fantasy because otherwise we
cannot deal or access reality as such okay I want to take a
step back for a moment so Žižek says that the more
promiscuous we become the harder it is to actually fall in
love. If love is that which disrupts us, then the very idea of
promiscuity and the idea of an endless array of partners,
optimized through online dating, we risk commodifying and
de-valuing the vulnerability and risk which are components
of love, you risk losing the metaphysical fall into love. This is
also why I oppose the idea of category “types” because it can
be a barrier to love. By listing specific attributes demanded
from a partner and using that as a list to winnow down
candidates, this isn’t really how love functions.

To be in love makes you see that your partner is a category

unto themselves, your type is simply that person. This is what
Žižek calls the retroactive contingency of a relationship. In
this sense, love is when a person who was a stranger
suddenly appears as if they were made and put on this earth
for you. Of course it isn't true, there isn't such a thing as a
perfect soul-mate you are destined to be with, but it can feel
that way. In a sense when you’re in love, it seems as though
your life was leading up to this moment, that's the retroactive
effect of love. This is what Hegel calls the contingency of
necessity and the necessity of contingency. It is the process by
which a seemingly accidental occurrence, namely meeting a
stranger who then becomes your one, retroactively appears to
you as a necessary sequence of events. Vice versa, and this is
the more Hegelian dialectical point, the metaphysical point
that necessity can only ever emerge through this retroactive
appearance of contingency. In other words, that it's not the
accidental versus the fated, it's that fate is always the
embrace of the accidental.

Perhaps we are all like Sisyphus, pushing that fateful boulder

up the mountain, our task never completed, always starting
over again. And if the central lesson of love is that one has to
fall in love over and over again, preferably with the same
person, then maybe, as Camus famously wrote, we must
imagine Sisyphus happy. It is in this precise sense that we
should interpret Slavoj Žižek’s argument that love is a
disaster.

Sisyphus is happy not because he has changed his fate but

because he has embraced his fate. Through the subjective
acceptance of his fate he has made it his own, he has become
the master of his fate, not because he's defied it but because
he's embraced it. This is how we get to Badiou, the French
philosopher who describes falling in love as an Event, or as a
truth process. For Badiou, an Event is something that
happens to you externally and yet appears to contain the
truth about yourself. This seems abstract, but consider how
you feel when you are moved by a piece of music or art or
literature and then realize that the artist is a complete
stranger, they may have long since passed away, yet you feel
like their work has unlocked something about your true self.
This is the pivotal scene in Pixar’s masterpiece Ratatouille, in
which the austere food critic is transported back to his
childhood by a dish. He has this Proustian moment of the tea
and madeleine which transports him to his childhood. There’s
something about taste and especially smell which has the
capacity to transport us, it is something external but seems to
reveal something about yourself that even you had forgotten.
This is Badiou's notion of the Event and why he calls it a
truth process, something external which seems to reveal
something internal. We’ll explore this idea in greater depth in
the next chapter.

Žižek takes this argument about the truth event and applies it
to Christianity. He argues that the idea of Christ is someone
who appears to come from the outside, as the Son of God is
precisely the one who unlocks the truth of humanity, that the
core of the Christian faith is now within the community of
the faithful themselves. This is a twist on Hegel’s idea that
love is a metaphor for philosophy itself. Hegel doesn't mean
that if only we loved everybody the world would be a better
place or something like this. Instead, Hegel means that the
process of love (negation of negation) is actually a metaphor
for the entirety of philosophy and the unfolding of what he
calls human spirit itself. For Hegel, Christ's death on the cross
isn’t the death of Christ, but rather the death of the God of
the beyond. It's another way of saying that in the crucifixion
we don't have the death of Christ, we have the death of the
idea of a transcendental deity. Until the crucifixion, we are
stuck within this relatively binary Platonic metaphysical
structure by which there is the God of power up in the sky
and the world of mortal, finite beings. The whole goal of
religion in this dynamic is to ascend to the heavens, to
achieve that state of being by which you have transcended
earth. But with Christianity, when God sends Christ to earth,
he de-sublimates himself on behalf of people. This is why the
crucial moment is when Christ asks “Father, why have you
forsaken me?” For a brief moment, God stops believing in
Himself. It is the moment in which God de-sublimates on
behalf of the other, the other of the human community on
earth.

This is for Hegel metaphoric for what happens in love. The

fall into love is for Hegel the exact same process of God de-
sublimating through the crucifixion on behalf of the human
community into the holy spirit. The trinity reveals this third
excessive thing that emerges. The holy spirit is therefore for
Hegel synonymous with the process of what happens when
you fall in love, namely two people meet and you de-
sublimate. By emptying yourself out on behalf of the other,
into this stranger and through that process a third thing is
born. Remember, we started this series with the idea of the
Brechtian third thing, a couple shares a third thing and that's
what sustains them. In Christianity, this third thing is the holy
spirit. In love, it's the awakening of two people who have
suddenly become one it's a dialectical process of the negation
of negation, which is why Hegel relates the idea of Christ on
the cross to the idea of falling in love. Linking these ideas
helps illuminate the metaphysical proposition about the
manner in which the truth is unlocked precisely through a
de-sublimating process. In a technical sense, it explains the
transition from Platonic metaphysics towards Hegelian post-
metaphysics. The Platonic metaphysical framework is the
world of the allegory of the cave in which you have the world
of truth outside and the world of appearance within, Plato
insists that we have to seek the world of truth outside the
world of the cave. For Hegel the post-metaphysical stance is
now no longer about transcending to a higher state of being,
now it's actually about de-sublimating in fact that
sublimation. De-sublimation, rather than being opposites,
become part and parcel of the same unfolding, they're two
sides of the same coin.

Here we arrive at chiasm, which is a rhetorical structure of

abxba. Think of President Kennedy’s famous line, “ask not
what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for
your country.” Even for the sophists, chiastic structures were
important rhetorical forms, but here I want to make a bigger
argument. What Hegel is essentially arguing is that the
metaphysical argument apropos Plato isn't that it's a one
directional movement (i.e. a to b), it's not from the cave to
the world outside the cave. Instead, it's precisely the fall itself
that creates the essence, it's de-sublimation that is the core
and the truth of the sublimating process. Sublimation is no
longer “how do I go from being down here towards up here?”
it's not arising into the transcendental of the pre-Christian
theology. Instead, the transcendental exists precisely within
the fall itself. This is the ontological argument that Žižek is
making when he makes an argument about love. The
ontological position that Žižek appropriates from Hegel is
precisely that essence doesn't lie beyond appearance but
essence only emerges within the fall into appearance itself. In
the same manner that love is a truth process. The person you
are doesn't emerge when you aspire to a higher form of being
in love, but rather it's when you fall into love. Žižek is
arguing that transcendence occurs under its supposed
opposite, namely that it is the fall itself that generates the
thing through which you rise.

Let’s take a step back and revisit Hegel’s philosophical

problem that Kant already proposed. The Kantian turn refers
to Kant’s response to the classic philosophical proposition
about the world of objects and the world of appearance.
Beginning with Plato and the allegory of the cave, the
division between essence and appearance was fixed. This is
also why Plato rejects art, he says that art is a copy of a copy.
For Plato, searching for truth in the copy of a copy would
lead away from transcendence. Kant’s response is to ask what
the conditions are for actually transcending. This is why
Kant’s most famous work, The Critique of Pure Reason is, in a
sense a paradoxical formulation. If the “pure” (i.e. essence)
which lies beyond the transcendental is the opposite of
reason (i.e. perception or appearance), which is the Cartesian
subject of “I think, therefore I am”, Kant is questioning
whether they can ever be separate. If reason is precisely
bound to the world of appearances, then vice versa, purity,
the ideal, would have to be a sublimation of reason onto a
higher plane. Kant’s critique of pure reason is something so
radical in the trajectory of philosophy, he’s investigating the
conditions through which the ideal could ever be reached,
which, for Kant, has to be reason. After all, you are because
you think, you conceptualize the world. There’s a deeper
paradox here, which is that the very idea of leaving the cave,
the very idea of essence is itself a concept. I’m vastly
oversimplifying here, but for Kant, if transcendence is
supposed to be that which goes beyond mortal life and
perception, but has to be conceptualized, then it can it really
be pure? Isn’t it already vulgarized through the fall into
reason?

But for Hegel this isn’t enough. It’s actually his criticism of
Kant, in a very ironic way, he says that Kant is the ultimate
disruptor of the metaphysical divide. Hegel says that he can't
develop the fondness for things in themselves because Kant,
who had unlocked something so important he didn't even
realize it, was still in love with the idea of the ideal or the
divine. Kant was so committed to the idea that you could
transcend the world of appearance and achieve the world of
essence. Hegel simply makes the much more obvious but also
necessary radical conclusion, which is to respond to Kant’s
idea (that essence isn't beyond the world of appearance, that
essence is not trapped within objects) to ask if essence
emerges only in the fall. In other words, what if the de-
sublimation into the world of appearance is exactly how
essence is made manifest. Now we're back at the Hegelian
argument, I propose, on the crucifixion. What dies is not the
body of Christ, but rather the idea of the transcendental deity,
akin to Kant’s conceptualization. What dies is not the body of
things, objects in the world, what dies is precisely the idea of
objects of the beyond. To Hegel, this is where Kant can’t see
the implications of his own argument. What Kant perceives as
a barrier, namely reason (reason being the paradoxical
barrier to the unlocking of transcendental truth) is in fact a
door. Essence emerges only in the fall into appearance itself.
This is the central lesson of Hegelian speculative idealism, the
transition from transcendental, Kantian idealism (which is
about ascending into the ideal) towards Hegelian speculative
idealism (which is about the fall the fall into the ideal)
This brings us back to the relationship between the ideal and
love. In a sense, the fall into love is a metaphor for Žižek
about this Kantian turn, from transcendental idealism to
speculative idealism. What makes this so distinctively Žižek's
own is that he's using something universal and relatable
about the human experience, namely falling in love, and he's
relating it to a metaphysical proposition, which is that
essence doesn't lie beyond appearance, essence lies only
within appearance itself. In the same manner that when you
fall in love you fall into the other and thereby unlock your
own truth. To return to Badiou, we have a metaphysical
proposition. If love is a truth process, then this means not
only that through something seemingly external you have
unlocked the truth about you, it also means that the truth
doesn't exist outside, the truth isn’t an external truth. Rather,
the truth emerges precisely when the external unlocks the
internal. It’s a metaphysical proposition that Badiou is
making that is very similar to Žižek but there are some key
differences between them, namely that Žižek is a Lacanian
but Badiou isn’t. This means that for Žižek, this inner split
(loving the lack in the other as if it were your own) comes
from within. For Badiou this inner split is external, it comes
from without, it is a so-called ‘Truth-Event’. But we can talk
more about Badiou in the following chapter.
 CHAPTER 2
LOVE AS TRUTH-EVENT

“You must see with eyes unclouded by hate”

-Hayao Miyazaki

There are many theories of love, but my favorite comes from

the Japanese animator and director Hayao Miyazaki, creator
of films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away and
Princess Mononoke.

Miyazaki defines love as a fateful encounter with somebody

who disrupts and challenges the way you see the world. And
yet crucially this encounter doesn’t have to entail romantic
love. It can also be a revelatory experience, a new way of
seeing the world. Or, as Miyazaki puts it, to see the world
“with eyes unclouded by hate.”

This idea of Love as an encounter, or what the French

philosopher Alain Badiou would call an Event, is a key part of
the philosophy of love, and helps explain why, as we saw in
the previous chapter, Slavoj Žižek refers to love as a disaster.

Žižek argues that love is not just like plucking petals off a
flower and asking whether or not she loves me, it’s not a
narcissistic attachment. Instead it's almost the exact other
way around, it's saying, “I was fine and suddenly I had this
flash, this encounter and my life was no longer the same.”

Hayao Miyazaki has made a similar argument about his

approach to animation. Rather than following the traditional
plot structure, where the hero has to rescue the princess, and
earning her affection in so doing, Miyazaki says that all of his
films feature an encounter with someone so radically
different that it completely changes ones sense of self. Love,
for Miyazaki, is never about conquest or competition, but
about seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, like
being reborn in someone’s else’s arms. This can be completely
detached from romantic love. There doesn’t have to be a kiss
at the end.

This is what’s so stunningly depicted in Miyazaki’s Princess

Mononoke, where the protagonist Ashitaka encounters her for
the first time wiping blood off her lip after feasting with
wolves. In that moment, their eyes lock and it’s a moment
that is so earth-shatteringly, life-changingly disruptive that
the entire narrative structure of the movie itself — good
versus evil — becomes dislodged.

Miyazaki has said that for him what constitutes tension in a

plot is therefore not whether good can triumph over evil, but
whether good can triumph over itself. In an essay on the film,
he writes: We must learn to see the evil within good, and the
good within evil.

However, before we confuse this with a liberal gesture about

the relativity of evil (“even Hitler was a vegetarian”), we
should emphasize the idea of seeing ‘evil within good’. This,
perhaps, is the most succinct formulation of revolution: that
what appears as the absolute good suddenly presents itself as
by definition thereby as disavowed evil. Let us not forget that
the illegitimate claims to Empire where always presented as
the ‘White Man’s Burden’ to bring enlightenment and
civilization to the supposedly less civilized world. Here we
can see a good example of how the good which believes itself
to be absolutely good, is in fact quite often indistinguishable
from evil. In fact, the philosopher Hegel would have argued
that evil strictly speaking doesn’t exist, save for the good
which believes itself to be absolute. Rather than a binary
between good and evil, we are faced with one and the same
thing. The very insistence on a fight between good and evil
thereby reveals itself as evil.

This is where Miyazaki's theory of love is actually very close

to Hegel's theory of evil. For Hegel, the definition of evil is
someone who believes themselves to be fighting on behalf of
the Absolute Good. This suspicion of universalized love
(doing something for the greater good) is therefore key to
understanding Hegel’s suspicion of any affirmation of a priori
universality. In fact this was what made him turn against his
fellow German romantics, who he mocked in the Preface to
the Phenomenology of Spirit as being thinkers who thought all
cows were black at night. One of the keys to understanding
Hegel is thereby that he always insists that the universal
cannot ever be fully posited without succumbing to its own
adverse particular, or what Hegel refered to as the ‘genus’
and the ‘species’.
Miyazaki’s films often use this encounter as a kind of turning
point in the story. Crucially, it’s not necessarily that they are
experiencing love at first sight. Rather, it's that everything
else that they see suddenly appears to be different. It’s this
radical shift, not infatuation, not a narcissistic attachment to
the idea of what life might be like if you were with that
person; instead it’s specifically about acknowledging
encountering somebody who is so other that now I have
become an other to myself. It's an alienating experience of
love, which is why I think that Miyazaki's theory of love is
quite interesting. We usually think of love as a matter in
which we become more true to ourselves, that we explore the
depths of our own feelings more intimately because of love.
Miyazaki posits almost the exact opposite, he says that love
begins as a disruptive force, as a seemingly alienated and
alienating encounter that throws you into this kind of abyss
of somebody else's consciousness. The curiosity and the
titillation that you experience, wanting to explore the world
through their eyes means that you no longer see the world in
the same manner as before.

Plato says that love is like a song that somebody else sings
which only you can hear, and I find this very comforting. For
Plato, if you are in a situation of unrequited love (in which
you love someone but they don't love you back) then it
simply means that they weren't ready for your song. This idea
that we exude a kind of core within our being — call it a
song, call it essence, call it the common spiritual connection
that all human beings share, call it pheromones — that we
send these signals out to the world and that they can be
reciprocated. I find that quite beautiful but at the same time,
like anything beautiful, there's a dangerous core underneath
the idea that the signal that you're sending might also be a
lure, that you are drawing someone into the trap of love.

So falling in love entails risk but also this kind of wound, you
can't simply go on as you were before, pretending like you're
not in love, like you haven't had this encounter that triggers
love in you. In a sense, love demands a subjective act of will
of you, stepping into this breach and saying “I want to know
what the world is like with you, I want to see the world
through your eyes.”

There’s a fascinating example of falling in love from Anna

Karenina, but it’s not in the story, it’s about the novel itself.
Evidently Tolstoy was working on a story and wrote Anna
Karenina as a side character, but from the moment she enters
the story, Tolstoy says, he was in love with her. He fell so in
love with her, his idea of the story was so completely
upended by her, he knew that the novel had to revolve
around her. I think that this is a fascinating instance of how
love happens, Tolstoy has an idea of what the story is about
but a character arrives, and though it’s a character of his own
making, he is so captivated by her, his idea of her and the
story is completely overturned. In a sense, the novel
happened to him, it was a revelation that came to him
through the act of writing itself. What better metaphor could
there be for love than a process of revelation through the act
of stepping into the subjective breach, which is your own
creative consciousness? So love is something that happens to
you, but it also requires a certain subjective embrace of that
which is happening to you — it's not like you're forced to love
somebody. You can fall in love or have a crush and you can
put it aside, you can put it into a mental drawer and say this
is not happening right now.

This brings us to Alain Badiou’s idea that love is a truth

Event. By this, he means that love is something that happens
to you and reveals a kind of truth to you, it is what he calls a
'truth procedure’. This functions on two levels, on the one
hand it's a truth procedure because it really reveals a truth
about you. What I mean by this can be seen if you think
about how you learn more about yourself in the process of
falling in love with yourself. In a sense, falling in love is a
vehicle of becoming more transparent to yourself, you’re
seeing yourself reflected back to you through the eyes of your
lover. In other words, falling in love is a truth event because
it essentially suggests an encounter with yourself through the
other. This may sound like a kind of narcissistic attachment,
so I should point out that the inverse is true, that love is not
only how you reveal yourself to you, love is also how the
world reveals itself to you. This is a key distinction when
you're in love, it's not that you're blind it's that you're bound.
This means that through the process of being bound to
somebody else's point of view, having an attachment and an
ethical commitment to them, you start seeing the world in a
different way. The paradox of love is precisely that you start
becoming your own true self, more you than you were before,
precisely by joining somebody else. This allows you to see the
world in the radically new way that Miyazaki portrays. For
Badiou, what makes love a truth event is not only that it
happens to you, but that it requires a subjective act of
stepping into that gap — saying “I will enact a minimal
amount of my will to see what this yields” — that's the
uncertainty of love.
There’s an interesting paradox entailed with seduction. If
seduction is, let’s say, successful, it retroactively appears to
you as if no seduction was needed. This is the famous line
“You had me at ‘hello.’” Actually, you can’t have someone at
hello, that would be like a spell, purely manipulative.
Instead, if two people are compatible and are in a
relationship, it retroactively appears to you as if you were
always meant to be. This particular manner in which a purely
contingent event, namely your encounter with somebody
else, retroactively appears to you as a necessity, namely as
your fate or destiny. That's precisely what Badiou calls “the
encounter” or “the truth event of love" — it's the process by
which something completely accidental, retroactively turns
out to feel as if it was meant to be. It's the very process of
“successfully” seducing someone, in a sense convincing them
to be with you by means of not convincing them, by means of
allowing them to intuit that they would like to be with you.

This is similar to a concept Žižek calls retroactive causality,

which is also a key component of Hegelian metaphysics. Once
again, we can use love as a convenient metaphor. It’s the idea
that when you are in a relationship with somebody, it's very
hard to imagine not having met that person, for the very
reason that you have entered a different subjective point of
view. In other words, now that you see the world differently,
you simply are no longer the person you were before.
Returning to the Platonic idea, that love is a song that only
the other person can hear, something similar happens when it
comes to loss of love. There's a beautiful scene that starts the
novel by Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood, the protagonist
hears a Beatles song on the airplane and it sends him right
back to his original love and sets the story in motion. It's a
kind of Proustian moment, a contingent encounter with a
fragment of a memory prompting the story. For Proust’s
narrator of In Search of Lost Time it’s the smell of a madeleine
dipped in tea, for Murakami’s narrator, the Beatles song takes
the narrator back to another time, another self.

That's what love does, love brackets off your experience into
this new chapter of your life in which you see and experience
everything differently. If you've gone through the painful
process of living and losing love, it means you're going
through the painful process of having to become someone
new, that you have multiple other selves that are buried
within you that can be recalled and that's precisely the
process of melancholy. Melancholy isn't just holding on to
your own pain, it's realizing that within you there are
elements and nuggets of pain that have been buried that can
come out and be triggered. This is because when you're in
love, not only do you change but everything around you
changes, everything becomes imbued with a new weight, a
new meaning, and new importance. This shift in perspective
doesn’t just come from romantic love, think of the contingent
aspects of friendship, shared interests, hobbies, even a line
from a movie the makes you laugh, how it becomes an in-
joke. After all, what else is a relationship if not a cosmic in-
joke that you share with the other person, a kind of intimacy
and understanding that only makes sense between the two of
you, a kind of code, a shared language that allows you to
communicate as if you were one soul. Naturally, this is what
makes a breakup so painful, the rupturing of that unity and
trying to constitute a new identity beyond that convergence
you had, the moment of blissful dualism.
Similarly, there is a very particular paradox entailed in falling
in love, it is something which requires subjective courage. As
Miyazaki said, it's an encounter with another self and another
possible version of yourself. Yet to undergo this
transformation and risk the possibility of being refused, the
possibility of landing in a situation of unrequited love is itself
a very dangerous thing to do. In a sense, you’re messing with
the most precious thing to you, your subjective experience of
the world. Love requires courage, which is another way of
saying that love requires trust because trust is nothing other
than courage rendered absolute. In other words, the process
of saying “I trust you.” This is the key transition point from
the encounter to love, like the first step Jasmine takes onto
Aladdin’s magic carpet, it's precisely risking tones own
vulnerability that demands courage. Paradoxically we find
our strongest subjective self precisely in the experience of
allowing ourselves to fall into the arms of somebody else, to
say, “I believe that I can become my fullest, true self by falling
together with you.’'

This is what makes a long-term “happy” relationship,

according to Simone de Beauvoir. She said that equality
within love is the highest feat. This doesn't mean that you're
doing the same thing, equality here doesn't mean that you
have a rota on which you cook on Mondays and your partner
cooks on Tuesdays, equality and love is the equality of
enabling each other. This is, after all, the role that love has to
play within the communist manifesto: the idea that what
benefits one should benefit all, that the preconditions for
ones success should not be at the cost of the other’s failure,
but contribute to a mutual elevation. Once again, one can see
how love is a revolutionary project. It is impossible to sustain
the individualizing tendencies and incentive structures within
capitalism, when one realizes that the best way to revive is to
give. Love is bringing out the best in somebody else by means
of realizing that it also brings out the best in you.

What’s funny here is that there's also a political angle here

because this is essentially the Marxist take on love, the idea
that you should live in a society where the things that you do
elevate everybody else and vice versa. In other words, your
gains shouldn't come at the cost of somebody else's loss,
that's not what a relationship should be. In a relationship
there's no such thing as winning an argument, even if you
think you’ve won an argument, you've lost because you've
undermined that fundamental unitary equality. In a
relationship you can only win if your partner is also winning,
you can only advance if your partner benefits as well. Simone
de Beauvoir, who certainly in her own life and her
relationship with Sartre didn't necessarily have this
experience which is why she has such delicate insight into it,
she was able to recognize that a sign of mature love as Eric
Fromm put it, or for her a sign of authentic love is precisely
the sign of reciprocity within love, saying that love can be a
vehicle for the emancipation of the self on the precondition
that it is also the emancipation of the other, your partner.
That's also precisely the mirror of love and how love can
reveal you to yourself. When you see yourself reflected back
to you through the eyes of your partner and that is a loving
gaze, it is easier to love yourself.
Because if you think that the other person completes you,
then you've misunderstood the fundamental goal and
purpose of a relationship. It isn’t for the other person to
complete you, but for the other person to accept you. If you
have accepted yourself, then you can say I am not going to
change for you, I want to change with you. There's a
fundamental difference between saying “I will change myself
for you” versus "I am willing to undergo the process of
change with you” because that's what love is, it's a subjective
experience of undergoing mutual change. Within the
Schopenhauerian attitude, we think that we know the most
about ourselves when we're by ourselves, but the opposite is
true. We only learn about ourselves when we have the
courage to come across others, who will then learn and teach
us about ourselves in a manner that we could not. Love is an
encounter with ourselves through another.

There’s a great line from the Austrian writer, Karl Kraus, he

says, “I try not to meddle in my own business” and that's
exactly what love is here. In other words, you're no longer
meddling in your own business, you're meddling in your
shared business. Hannah Arendt has a great line about this,
that the beauty about love is that when two people are in
love they don't need the rest of the world, they become a
world unto themselves, there's that kind of reciprocity, of
navel gazing that happens when you're in love, where
suddenly the world doesn't seem to matter all that much.

From darker perspective, this is exactly why Freud, who

believes that the couple was uncanny, like conjoined twins,
an unnaturally occurring constellation. For Freud, the idea of
the couple, people who start looking alike, dressing alike,
saying the same things, and finishing each other's
sandwiches, as it were. This is precisely what Freud cautions
about, the couple as a kind of enclosed, narcissistic, self-
contained unity that only flatters itself. But this is precisely
what Hannah Arendt perceives a so pleasurable, that a very
clear sign of love is that you don't need to be with other
people, you are a world unto yourself, you feel like you could
talk forever, you feel like you could exchange ideas together,
and laugh together, that's what it means to be in love. So
what both Freud and Arendt recognize is the love creates this
insular experience by which you suddenly realize that you
are a world that unto yourself. Yet it's precisely not narcissism
because you are finding that enjoyment and satisfaction by
falling into the embrace of the other person.

This is Erich Fromm’s distinction between mature and

immature love. For Fromm, immature love elevates them to
this ideal, and functions more like a crush. Falling in love
with an ideal version of someone is a fiction, this is precisely
what a crush is and the safety of a crush. But if you think you
love who someone might be, or you imagine them to be, then
you're bound to be disappointed. Confusing mature love with
immature love, believing it's love rather than a crush, then
you're asking them to complete you, without actually having
an insight into who they are. In other words, it means you
don't have an insight into who you are because if love is an
act of revelation. This encounter allows you to see yourself as
other, by which in a weird, paradoxical, dialectical way, you
reveal yourself in your own truth, which brings us back to
what Badiou called the truth event. It is precisely the
ultimate illusion and fundamental mistake to go into a
relationship thinking that the other person is complete and
that you are lacking. Nothing could be less true, it is only
when you know your own completeness that you can go
through the crucible of love, by which you give that which
you do not have to someone who does not want it. I
introduced this idea last week, giving what you do not have,
is your lack or your experience of yourself as other in the
eyes of the other's completeness. You refract it back upon you
and you find yourself seen through their eyes.

Let’s get back to the idea of finding love, and in particular,

flirting. Flirting can be disorienting for people, because it
seems like its inducing love but then they question whether
they feel loved or enjoying attention. This can be difficult to
figure out, because if somebody flirts with you, then you
presume that they're interested but you might also wonder if
you’re being manipulated. This is a kind of double-bind that
we can very easily fall into, that has to do with a very human
sensibility, which is that we all think that we don't want to be
fooled and yet secretly we want to be fooled. Magicians know
this perfectly well, that people are in the audience want to be
fooled, the audience is there because they want to believe,
they're already primed. Nevertheless, they hold on to their
own, let's say, reluctance or skepticism. Something similar
happens when someone is flirting with you, your wariness
increases, you try to guard yourself against being susceptible
to flirting. And at the same time, being flattered and attended
to, is enjoyable, I think a lot of people identify within
themselves that one of their weaknesses is that they will
simply fall in love with anybody who flirts with them.
Of course this raises an impossible problem, which is if you're
not allowing yourself to fall in love with anybody who flirts
with you, how do you fall in love? Is love simply supposed to
hit you like a thunderbolt out of the sky? So often we end up
chasing people who aren't flirting with us because we think,
“well, if flirtation is manipulative and I don't want to fall in
love with someone who flirts with me, then I'm going to fall
in love with someone who doesn't flirt with me.” This means
you end up falling in love with somebody, not because they
want you, but because you think that they are the object that
you cannot have. In other words, you still have a fetishistic
attachment to that person because you simply think this
person is out of your reach, thereby you love them. In a
sense, this may be how so many people end up in this weird
friend-zone, you end up wanting someone more, precisely
because they're not flirting with you and so you start reading
too much into every interaction.

Of course this indeterminacy is itself what flirtation is,

because true flirting isn't “playing the game.” True flirting is
the accidental touch, true flirting is the uncertainty of a
gesture, we were walking together and suddenly our hands
touched, is this meaningful or not? Flirtation is flirtation
precisely because it is indeterminate and it is asking for that
subjective act of will walking into the breach. There's always
a moment within any process of falling in love in which you
have to make the active choice to fall into love. This is one of
those fundamental misconceptions that people have about
love, that it simply happens to you. To some extent that's
true, we fall in love, we are wounded by love. But at the
same time, there's a subjective decision, an act that is
required, you step into the breach, acknowledge the potential
of the glance or the gesture. Of course this is dangerous
because as soon as you've subjectively chosen to act, whether
it's to seduce someone or to spend time with them or to talk
with them or whatever, you've already put your finger on the
scale of love. In other words, you've already admitted that
love is something that isn't just gonna happen to you, but
that you have to make happen. As soon as you decide that
you have to make love happen, then you start wondering to
yourself whether it’s real. In this process of doubt you start
internalizing the question of whether or not your love is real.

This transition, from abstract love, which is like what a crush

is, without stakes, to actual love, actualized love is crucial. A
crush is the idea of love without requiring the subjective act
of stepping into the breach of love, this is also why you can
have an encounter with somebody, but if you elevate it to the
level of the crush then you've not learned anything about
yourself because the crush isn't about learning about who you
are, a crush is about learning everything about who the other
person is. This is what makes a crush, not just safe, but in
fact requires a distance. This isn’t always evident but is
something the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wrote about, the
fetishistic disavowal. In this sense, a crush, rather than being
the way to get to the object of your desire, is in fact the very
barrier. In other words, having a crush distances you from
actually being with that person, whether you think you don’t
have a chance, you don’t want to risk rejection or failure, a
crush allows you to hold onto your idea of what that person
is like. The crush in this way functions as a fetishistic
attachment to the idea of who your crush is so that you never
have to be confronted with the reality of who they are now.
Having a crush isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in some
instances it can be helpful, it gives you security to explore the
depths of your feelings. Steven Fry wrote about this, that all
first love is unrequited because it always starts as a crush.
First love is a seemingly impossible infatuation with an ideal
that you cannot reach, whether it's someone in a musical
group, whether it's someone on tv, whether it's even like a
fictional character like in a book or an anime. All love starts
like this, even Tolstoy's infatuation with Anna Karenina, it
wasn't love, it was a crush, he basically developed a massive
crush on his own character, writing an entire book as an ode
to her. So this is a kind of fruitful crush, something that you
control, you don't have to subjectively fall into it, you don't
see yourself as your own other through the process of a
crush. A crush is a situation where you actually accumulate a
lot of information and knowledge about the other person, but
you preserve the fantasy that you are the one who is in need
of completing by the other. As soon as you're in a
relationship, you realize that it's the exact other way around,
when you're in a relationship, you realize that you are in fact
the one who already was complete but now you have to learn
to see yourself through the eyes of somebody else. In a sense,
that's what love is, it's the illumination of your own
subjectivity from a different angle, under a different light
because what could be more bright than a relationship that
illuminates you from all these angles that you've never seen
before.

There are two additional aspects of the encounter which are

relevant to examine the philosophy of love. One is the
paradox that the manner in which you encounter love is
precisely by not trying to encounter it. I try not to give advice
to people, but I do think that the key to falling in love is to
not go looking for love. That can seem painful and
contradictory because we all know that if we don't look for
what we want, we'll never get it. Nobody is going to give me
a milkshake just because I want one, you can't manifest love
by sitting at home imagining Prince Charming and then
Prince Charming shows up. Being ready for love requires two
things. First, it requires being confident that you don't need
love. This seems counter intuitive, but it’s the idea of this
chapter, as soon as you are confident that you don't need
love, it means that you are ready for love. Now, it’s important
to distinguish that from acting in defiance of love. Some
people confuse this, they become arrogant and say “well I'm
so afraid of not finding love that I'm going to pretend like
love is something that I don't need, love is like a condiment
to life that I have rejected I'm not going to mess with it, I
don't want to get sticky fingers.” Other people might say that
they despise love, that it’s terrible and see that as a strength.

Of course love does entail a kind of vulnerability but it also

confers its own strength and it’s this transition we’re talking
about. One way to think about it is to consider the weakness
of holding onto your sense of self so firmly that you can’t risk
allowing it to fall into the grasp of somebody else. Remember,
love requires courage because love requires trust and what
else is trust than relinquishing some of your autonomy, your
power and giving it to your partner to do with it as they
please. Of course there’s a risk that they abuse this power but
giving it freely is very important.
We can also think about this from a theological perspective.
In Christianity, the whole point of being free is learning to be
subject to somebody else. This is the Christian idea of love,
agape; it’s not just unconditional love, it's not just saying you
should turn the other cheek. Instead, it's specifically saying
that there's a paradoxical, retroactive process of love, by
which the very unfreedom you experience in love (by saying
“I am now not just my own self, I'm someone who's bonded
to you”) makes you more free, liberates you. The paradox of
love is that it’s precisely by limiting yourself by becoming
subject to somebody else, that you find your own freedom
and experience yourself as an autonomous being. This isn’t to
say that you can’t be free without love, but rather that once
you no longer need love, it means that you can find the
courage to subject yourself to someone else. By making
yourself subject to a higher goal, of freedom.

For Badiou love is a disclosure, it's a disclosure of a truth

event, by which he means it's a disclosure of a truth about
you and a truth about the other person which, when brought
together, reveals itself to you as a disclosure about the world
itself. This is also why love is blind but not lovers, love
happens to you as though in a blinding flash in which
suddenly everything appears differently to you but you as a
lover are not blind, you start seeing the world differently, you
start inhabiting your life world in a manner that is elevated,
inflamed, more attuned and sensitive. This is why, when
we’re in love, songs sound different, food tastes different, we
become a raw nerve to the world. Love is precisely that
process of saying "I can actually be subject to the world to the
fullest extent of what it means to experience human
emotion.”
This is the first aspect of love as an event, the precondition
for falling in love, not needing it. This is a painful realization,
love isn't about finding someone who will complete you, love
is about some finding someone who will accept you. The
problem is that if you're looking for someone who will
complete you, it means you haven't accepted yourself and so
you idolize the other person. Once you accept yourself, you're
ready to be accepted by somebody else.

The second part is the idea of reciprocity, because you can't

actually be capable of loving somebody and accepting them if
you are still assuming that they have to be perfect. Nobody
wants to be in love with an ideal because it’s an impossible
standard.

If the whole point of a relationship is consolidating a kind of

originating passion into a long lasting commitment, you can't
have a long lasting commitment to an ideal, you would
simply become like this perverted fundamentalist who says
“everything I do is for you.” Instead, you have to say
“everything I do is for us” — as soon as you realize that it's
not you versus me, that it's “us” — you have a different
perspective on who you are by means of being with that
other person. This brings us back to Freud’s idea that the
scariest thing is a couple, two people who start thinking as
one, they start acting as one person, their motivations and
their goals and ambitions start to align. As Hannah Arendt
said, there's something very powerful in this partnership,
something that actually nurtures what the experience of life
is.
One of the fundamental difficulties of being alive, especially
when you're alone, is that life is simply the succession of one
thing after another. Time and your temporal experience
becomes simply going through the motions, looking for
satisfaction. This has its appeal, I saw a great clip of a guy
talking about how he resented falling in love, it hindered his
productivity and that’s exactly the point! True love is not a
productivity enhancer, love is revolutionary in that it will
suddenly shatter the incentive structure that you had before,
by which what you thought was important suddenly reveals
itself as having been simply a coping mechanism to get to
through the daily grind and love suddenly makes that seem
not so important. So love is in a sense, threatening because it
will disrupt your previous worldview, your worldview now
becomes a shared worldview, now you want to enjoy things
together and you enjoy them more together. This is what
makes breakups so painful, the most mundane things like
eating a meal, take on a new significance in the relationship,
then revert to insignificance when you’re single, but in a
sense, you remember the potential of how meaningful these
things can be. Whether it’s watching something, or places
you’d go, or particular music, what was once a celebration
has now become a kind of tombstone to your relationship, a
marker of that which you have lost. And it’s something you
have to mourn, that you carry within you.

Love can be characterized as an encounter, but it’s also a

temporal disruption. I think this is why Miyazaki uses love as
a staging device for a narrative shift. Miyazaki’s animation
style is in contrast to most anime, which distorts time. This is
because it’s generally easier and cheaper to animate time
distortion because it requires less animation. For example, an
episode might take place with characters appearing to run
towards each other but never reaching them, or a pitcher
throwing a baseball and while the ball is in the air, the
episode has flashbacks and dramatic exposition. The whole
point of anime is to distort and tease out time to retain your
attention.

Miyazaki has a very different theory of time and objective in

animation, he says that time is something very subjective,
time isn't just happening to you, time is about how you step
into your own life. One of the things that Miyazaki does is
that when he stages love, it’s not like the coming together of
two souls who were predestined to meet, but instead as a
disruptive encounter with someone who's so fundamentally
alien to you, that now you become alien to yourself. Doing
so, he’s making a temporal claim, time stops when you fall in
love and if time stops, then it means you have to figure out
how to get the clock ticking again. Getting the clock ticking
together is something that you do together because in the
same way that a clock has two hands, once you find that out
that you have combined yourself with the other person, now
time starts making sense. The encounter is a moment of
paralysis, it's a moment of radical disruption, it's not a
comfortable thing to fall in love. This is why love wounds us
before we've even been wounded by the other.

This is an idea that Žižek returns to frequently, referencing

Wagner’s Die Wunde heilt nur der Speer der Sie Schlug (from
Parsifal: the wound can only be healed by the spear that
smote it). For Hegel, this is the idea of the contingency of
necessity, the idea being that the wound can only be closed
by that which created it. In other words, the very thing that
pierced you, that took you out of the revelry which you
thought was your daily life, your daily grind, suddenly is
radically opened up and comes gushing out — it's painful and
disruptive. Yet the only thing that can stop the bleeding is
the very thing that caused it, which means you have to suture
the wound by walking into that gap, that breach, which is
love. Of course you could be hurt, even more hurt, perhaps.

This returns us to Baidou’s idea of love as a truth event. Love

is something that appears to you as a wound, as a radical
disruption into the very core of your being and it demands of
you that you step into that gap and you find your own
subjective self by risking it all. Falling in love isn’t just about
the world being brighter and more beautiful and makes you
want to go out and eat hamburgers, it’s not McDonald’s
slogan “I’m lovin’ it” — rather, love is not “lovin’ it.” Suddenly
the things that you used to enjoy take on a whole new
meaning, may no longer be as enjoyable or as comfortable.
Yet it’s precisely that particular moment of complete
disruption of what you thought was your equilibrium, which
is the precondition to stepping into a higher form of
consciousness, which is the whole point of love. This is why
Badiou elevates the idea of love to a very principle of
revelation of truth as such. If truth is the metaphysical ideal,
the essence, the pure form, the light outside of Plato’s cave,
then love is a vehicle of finding that truth, of stepping outside
of your own shell and being able to look at yourself from an
impossible distance, which is the distance of somebody else's
love and affection for you. Of course that's terrifying, of
course it's scary and it requires courage and trust because it
means that you have to acknowledge that your truth may not
actually be with you a priori. In other words, that finding and
identifying who you really are may actually require,
paradoxically, a complete dismantling of who you thought
you were. It's that productive process of dismantling yourself
on behalf of the other together with somebody else and
creating a life that is more than just one plus one.

Love is a revelatory process by which you realize that the true

secret was that there is no secret, that love is something that
reveals itself to you as its own secret, as something that
creates a gap within the logic structure and the incentive
structure that you experience on a day-to-day basis. Love
demands that you step into it and that's precisely how you
raise love from not just the subjective experience but to the
metaphysical idea of agape, of unconditional love.
Unconditional love isn't saying “I love you no matter what” —
that would be ridiculous, that would idealize the other
person, this is the idea of the crush, an abstraction of who
someone is. In a sense, all love is falling in love with a
fictional character, but it’s not a character of your
imagination, but rather who you might become with them.
Agape is not unconditional love because they could do
anything and you’d still love them, it's unconditional love
because it's detached from the instrument of the incentive
structure, the conditionality by which you had ordered the
logic of your pre-existing life. When you enter into that void
it means that you are entering into a revolutionary space.
Revolution is never just saying “I'm going to fight against
something,” a revolution creates the gap from which an
imminence of a new imagination can emerge. That new
imagination, that which is not as of yet new but will become
an inevitable fate, what Žižek calls the retroactive
contingency of the necessity of love, that is the emancipatory
revolutionary potential of love as the absolute. Love as
revolution in miniature.
 CHAPTER 3
LOVE AS LACK (IN THE OTHER)

“You are never more defenseless in the face of suffering

than when you are in love”
-Sigmund Freud

According to the Lacanian definition of psychoanalysis,

successful analysis first introduces hysteria into the psychotic
subject, then culminates in the patient’s identification with
their own symptom. The most concise definition of successful
psychoanalytic treatment, is therefore to identify with one’s
symptom, rather than seeking to remove it. This is why Žižek
embraces the Lacanian imperative: ‘Enjoy your Symptom!’

With regards to love, I think it’s important to lay out once

more the basic coordinates of the Lacanian argument (for
more on this, see my previous ebook, titled The Useless
Precaution). Lacan maintains that there is always a gap
between the absolute and the particular, between the
Symbolic order, sustained by the Big Other (the Big ‘Autre’)
and the little other, the ‘objet petit a’. The Big Other is
symbolically necessary towards sustaining the Subject’s
fantasy-attachment to the object-cause of desire. Note that
for Lacan, our attachment to the object is therefore not one of
desire, but of an underlying fear, namely that we will stop
desiring. This is also why Lacan argues that anxiety is always
tells the truth. ‘Truth’ here being code for ‘the real’, namely
the underlying arbitrariness of the subject’s libidinal
investment in the mutual poles of the big and the little other.
Should one of these collapse, then the subject succumbs to
neurosis. An example that Žižek uses comes from the
television series ‘Sex and the City’. When Samantha, the most
promiscuous of the protagonists, is told by a sexual partner
that she can say anything, because he enjoys dirty-talk, she
says “I want to F*ck you in the ass”. The man immediately
stops performing, asking “why would you say that?”
Samantha replies: “I thought I could say anything?” This is
the ‘real’, the declaration that ‘everything can be said’ always
rests on one indivisible remainder, something which cannot
be said. This is the real.

And this is also how one should interpret the true impact of
the Lacanian notion that one cannot ever truly be alone with
one’s lover. One always is also in the presence of fantasy.
Again, this is one of the pitfalls of the idea of authenticity.
Strictly speaking, if we reduce sexual activity to sheer
biological determinism there is nothing authentic or romantic
about it. The ‘true’ authentic core of the sexual encounter
emerges precisely when one shares the same fundamental
coordinates of fantasy. This is also how one can make the
leap back to the Lacanian/Hegelian link that Žižek makes
between the argument that the ultimate fantasy is that one
could act authentically beyond fantasy; or what Lacan calls
‘the fundamental fantasy’. As Hegel already argues, ‘Paradise’
exists only in the subjective consciousness of the fallen
subject. Žižek’s innovation is then simply to take this
Lacanian insight and link it back to a metaphysical
proposition about Plato’s allegory of the cave. What if the
ultimate fantasy is thereby that one could exist the cave? For
Žižek, we always remain stuck within ideology, which is
therefore simply the politicization of the Lacanian theory of
fantasy. Once one realizes that Žižek appropriates
psychoanalytic terminology into the critique of ideology, his
arguments become easier to interpret in their proper context.

Now we can begin to see why Sisyphus is in love with his

symptom. Let’s start with Camus’s line that Sisyphus is happy.
The legend of Sisyphus is that he is eternally rolling the
boulder up the hill and as soon as he gets near the peak, the
boulder comes crashing down. So Sisyphus is stuck in a
perpetual loop by which he is doing something monotonous
and painful. He is undergoing this struggle every single day
and his struggle is associated with fruitless monotony, yet
Camus counters that Sisyphus is happy, why?

From an existentialist/absurdist perspective (characterized

here by Camus) Sisyphus is happy because he has embraced
his fate. During the repetitive, unending process of rolling the
boulder up the hill, at a certain point Sisyphus makes the
active choice of free will. To say, rather than being the object
which is pushing the boulder up the hill and rather than
being the passive agent of destiny (namely of this terrible
situation that has happened to him) instead to invert it, to
become the active agent of his own destiny. What's key here
is that Sisyphus isn't trying to leave the mountain or stop
rolling the boulder. Instead it's simply a perspective shift,
what Žižek would call a parallax shift. In other words, the
very situation that appears to burden him, becomes the
precondition or the backdrop for the assertion of his own
agency, Sisyphus embraces the struggle. He finds happiness
within the absurdity of his own situation, namely the
realization that freedom doesn't come a priori. Freedom isn't
what you begin with, freedom is what you strive for, it’s
where you end up. There’s another great line from Sartre
about this, that freedom isn’t being able to do anything, it's
what you do with what others have done to you. This is the
idea that freedom is reactive.

From a traditional philosophical perspective what the

existentialist (and even the absurdists) are doing is
something very radical. For an idealist like Shelling, the
German romantic, freedom is absolute, it comes from nature
and is our natural condition. It is the world which makes us
less free and we have to escape the world which has bound
us, we have to become active agents of our freedom. For the
existentialists it's totally the opposite, which is to say freedom
doesn't exist naturally (as Kant would put it, in and of itself).

Instead, freedom only exists for itself, freedom emerges

precisely in what appears to be the opposite of freedom. Just
as in the same manner that strength isn't what you start with
and is worn down by weakness. In the same manner in which
strength emerges precisely by means of fighting weakness,
the same thing happens with freedom. It's not that you are
born free to begin with and you become gradually less free,
it's precisely that the things that make you unfree force you
to assert your freedom, that your own agency, your
independent manifestation and will is precisely reactive to all
the matters in which you are unfree from all which has been
done to you. This means that freedom finds itself in a weird
paradoxical dialectical position, which is that it emerges
always through the thing that is supposed to be its own
container.

This is how one should also interpret Žižek’s Hegelian

critique of freedom. He argues that the most radically free act
almost always occurs as if one was forced to. For example,
what if someone were to pass out on the street and you were
the only person to run over and help while everybody else
walked by? And let’s say that you were interviewed later and
asked “Why did you do it when nobody else would?”. The
answer would like be: “Well, I had to, precisely because
nobody else would!”

Here we see a truly subjective act. Not “I can do anything”,

but “I had no choice but to act.” True individual agency is
when one is faced with an opportunity that presents itself
suddenly as an absolute duty. Hence also the Kantian maxim:
Du kannst denn duo sollst! (you can because you must).

Similar to love, which presents itself as an inevitability, one’s

‘authentic’ action thereby emerges precisely within the
decision to act as if compelled by external forces. It is not
innate or a priori. Freedom emerges retroactively as a
contingent necessity.

As we will see in the final chapter, here ‘essence’ or authentic

freedom/agency emerges as an indivisible remainder, as
something which cannot be properly be reconciled within the
binary poles of free/unfree. thing and suggest that the third
thing is this idea of freedom. In psychoanalytic terms, we
have here what is known as ‘the death drive’, the seemingly
impossible dialectic by which subjectivity emerges only in its
seeming inner negation.

When explaining the death drive, it’s important to clarify that

it doesn’t mean the realization that we are all moving
towards death or the morbid fascination we have with
mortality, nor is it that life is an antagonism where we seek to
compete with others and dominate them. Instead, it’s the
particular paradox (or dialectic) by which you feel most alive
at the exact moment that you are doing something that
appears to defy your life. For example, when you hike up a
mountain, it’s not because you will die if you don’t, it won’t
feed or sustain you, but rather it's a kind of connection you
feel to the world, you’ve made yourself so small, you’re
experiencing the repetition of step-by-step and you loose your
sense of what you’re doing and it’s a very connected moment.
T

This is also why the French euphemism for an orgasm is la

petite morte, a little death, because it’s precisely the moment
when you’ve lost control of your body, you don’t feel like a
person and yet you feel more alive than ever. This dialectical
process, which is the process of finding yourself within what
appears to be an absolute negation (namely de-sublimation)
is at the heart of the death drive. One of the key concepts
that Freud and Lacan relate to the death drive is the idea of
repetition compulsion or Wiederholungszwang. Repetition
compulsion is a continuation of the paradox of the death
drive, the more you repeat something, the more you do
something over and over again, the more alive you feel. This
is part of what makes playing sports so enjoyable, think about
hitting a tennis ball over and over or shooting a basketball,
you loose track of time, your thoughts, even yourself. In a
sense, this is the Socratic idea that philosophy is to be as
dead as possible in your lifetime. Whether it’s playing a video
game or a sport or music or having sex, this is what it means
to be as dead as possible within your lifetime.

This is a beautiful paradox about how we access essence

precisely within the process of negation and de-sublimation
on behalf of our own subjectivity, that we become subject to
something and thereby we feel that we are subject. This is
even the paradox within the word “subject” itself. Lacan is
aware of this, that to be a subject, to be a person, is precisely
to be subject to this, whether it’s climbing a mountain or
having sex, you become subject to something external and
the process of de-subjectivization is precisely the manner in
which the subject unfolds. So we're back to the metaphysical
argument that essence isn't the opposite of appearance, that
essence emerges within the fall into appearance itself.
Hopefully now you see how Socrates is making a similar
argument, he just doesn't recognize the consequences of it. If
in order to be alive, is simultaneously to be as dead as
possible within your life, then there is no other way to access
life except through its perceived opposite.

Here, we're back at the Lacanian idea that you can't access
reality except through fantasy, in the same manner that you
can't access life except through a kind of living death. This
constant dialectical movement is two sides of the same coin
unraveling, this is essence itself and what it means to be
alive. Hence, why when Žižek makes the argument that you
can't have love without the fall, he's not just saying that we're
commodifying human experience, he's not just saying that
we're an increasingly individualized society in which we fear
the fall, in which we don't want to risk everything on behalf
of love. He's also making a metaphysical argument and a
Lacanian argument about the idea that the truth doesn't lie
beyond the veil, truth lies within the veil itself.

Essence emerges in the fall into appearance itself. This is the

metaphysical claim that Hegel makes, which transforms the
history of Western thought, leading eventually the Marxist
theory of revolution, which is analogous to the experience of
love, namely that love is the retroactive effect of the so-called
contingency of necessity by which you realize that the
necessity of the person being your one, the stranger has
become your most intimate connection, that you have
become subject to one another — it's dialectical .

And, for those unfamiliar with the idea, the Heglian

conception of the dialectic is simply the process by which the
true nature of something emerges precisely through its
seeming negation with its one opposite. In the Hegelian idea
of the unity of opposites, two things that appear to be the
opposite can emerge as being the key to unlocking each
other's inner truth. This is the dialectical fall into love, which
is precisely what unlocks the subject. It's a metaphor for the
metaphysical project that Žižek continues from Plato to Kant
to Hegel. Finally, this is why Lacan is for Žižek always a
philosopher first and a psychoanalyst second, because the
Lacanian argument, that you can't access reality except
through fantasy, is the exact same argument that Lacan
makes apropos the Parrhasiosian veil. In other words, the
truth doesn't lie beyond the veil, the truth lies within the veil
itself. In the same manner that the rise into love lies not
beyond the fall but it lies within the fall itself. The dialectical
proposition, which is key to the Hegelian dialectic and
metaphysics, is precisely to unlock this idea of the fall being
the rise, that essence emerges only through the fall into
appearance itself.

The classic idea of philosophy is that it is the love of wisdom,

that's what it literally means. But now we can see how you
could also argue that the word philosophy is itself dialectical,
that the be a true lover of wisdom one has to also understand
the wisdom of love. That displacement is at the heart of the
subject’s true location.

Lacan has a joke (but also a serious argument) about the so-
called Cartesian Subject, where he takes Descarte’s well-
known maxim: “I think therefore I am” and turns it into, “I
think where I am not and I am not where I think.” Similar to
the Christian dialectic of absence and presence (God is
present in his absence), we have here a radical dislocating of
the transcendental proposition. The subject cannot know
himself, but only learn to love his symptom. A symptom
which is connect to the reputation compulsion, to the so-
called ‘death-drive’. And one should here see the death-drive
at work also in love.

Hannah Arendt has an interesting take on this, she says one

of the clear signs that you are in love is that even if you are at
a party with the other person, all you want to do is you want
to go home and be with that person. In her words, you desire
a world unto yourself, the world has shrunk down to just the
two of you and you don’t need anyone else, you become dead
to the world. This is something that resonates in the work of
a poet I’ve quoted before, Rilke. He writes that a sign of clear
love is two people who guard each other's solitude, in a sense
you become corpses together.

This theme is given musical form in Wagner's Tristan und

Isolde. Once Tristan drinks the love potion and falls for Isolde,
he no longer cares about any earthly glory. In one of the great
unacknowledged comical moments of Wagnerian Opera,
Tristan listens to his best friend who asks whether he still
cares about his heritage, his pride, his family. And in that
instant we hear the horns of the King, which are played like
the silliest melody. All the ideological attachment to the
trappings of power, have fallen away now that Tristan is in
love. The speeches and trumpets which once were so key to
his persona now reveal themselves as empty and farcical.

Hence why the key moment in the opera, when the poison
chalice is replaced with a love-potion, is strictly speaking one
and the same. Tristan dies twice. First by falling in love, then
by physically succumbing to his wounds. This ‘LoveDeath’ in
characteristically Wagnerian fashion is therefore both
resurrection and damnation.

True love is therefore a kind of symbolic. A passing of the

person you once were. Like the pope who has to pass through
the room of tears before he appears to the public, one sheds
one’s skin in becoming the object of the other’s affection. In
this sense to become an idolized subject is to be a martyr to
love. The pope does not get to love one person, he has to
endure being loved by all. If you think about it, this is a very
tragic proposition. One that embodies and symbolizes the
Christian proposition of the passage from universal love into
individual becoming. Every true love represents a little death
— the two of you are perfectly content, you have died to the
world.

Think about when you have a friend who suddenly seems to

vanish, they're not hanging out with you, maybe they're not
responding to your messages and so you're worried about
them because you think maybe they're depressed. The truth
could be the exact opposite, it could be that they've found
love and are perfectly, blissfully content. So in this sense, love
is like a little death, not only do you die to yourself, not only
does the person who you thought you were die, but it's also
that as a couple you are dead to the world, at least for a little
while. There's a kind of blissful fall into this locked-in
subjectivity in which two people experience the world as one.
In this moment you are perfectly happy, you feel in sync with
the world precisely because you are now out of sync with it
and you are out of sync with it, in a kind of lockstep with the
other person.

Once again we can return to the Hegelian insight that what

dies on the cross is not Christ, but the idea of the
transcendental deity, of a universal essence, a God in the Sky.
The transition from the Old to the New Testament is thereby
the evolution of a metaphysical proposition and its
corresponding worldview. Whereas the God of the Old
testament appears remote and inaccessible, and humans
yearn to be reunited with the universal substance of
animalistic life in Eden, the God of the New Testament has
been radically desublimated. The kingdom of God is no
longer “up there”, but lives within the human community.
Thereby human agency and freedom achieve its true nature
in this “fallen” state. Humans are now forced to be free. The
Event has already taken place, all that is left now is to choose
to act upon it. The transcendental deity is emptied of his
formal content. But, as Lacan quipped, the existentialists had
acted too soon in declaring the death of God. God is dead,
but who had told God? If God loved us like his own son, then
Christ truly loved the lack in the Other (“to die for our sins”).
Likewise, to “love God” after the cruxifixction is to love the
lack in the “Big Other.” To love each other is therefore to love
the lack in the other.

This is how we can interpret the New Testament idea that

although Christ is gone he can be found wherever there is
love (Matthew 18:20). Hegel merged these theological and
philosophical approaches in his theory of speculative
idealism. For him, Spirit (which is another word for love) and
that the manner in which love functions is a vehicle for how
everything in the world functions. For Hegel, everything is
about love, God cannot stay isolated up in his castle, he
subjectivizes himself by becoming God incarnate, the idea of
Jesus Christ, who then succumbs to human hatred, to pain
and suffering, loss and loneliness, dying on the cross. The
foundation of Christianity, Christ dying for our sins means is
that God is not going to do it for you. After the death of
Christ, human beings are fundamentally alone. The point for
Hegel is twofold: God isn't just sending an emissary, Christ
isn’t just a messenger of God. Instead, God is becoming
subject to humans through Christ. It’s one of the most radical
inversions in religion, the idea that the almighty, the
representative of the absolute would not only come down
from heaven but would subjectivize themselves so completely
as to be annihilated by the other. In a sense, you could see it
as God has a love relationship with humanity and human
beings hurt God by crucifying Christ. But this is precisely for
Hegel the second point, which is that God only truly becomes
God, or the absolute, by means of falling into subjective
selfhood.

This creates a mirroring effect whereby particular, finite

mortal human beings suddenly find a God-like universal
substance amongst themselves within the idea of love. So
love is that which both elevates you and causes a kind of fall,
a kind of a fall into a spiritual abyss of true selfhood found in
the other and yet the elevation into a metaphysical plane
where you feel more alive than ever before. This is the
gyration between the highest and the lowest, between the
sacred and the profane that we find only within the
experience of love. There’s a great scene portraying this in a
show from Paulo Sorrentino, The Young Pope and the Pope is
played by Jude Law, and he says he doesn’t want congregants
who like the church, but great love stories. What he means by
this is a very radical thing, the tagline for the show is “his
religion is revolution.” This is in complete contrast to the idea
of love as a commercialized sentiment, whether it’s “lovin’”
McDonalds or the sentimentality of Valentine’s Day, this is all
safe because if everything is love, then nothing is love — love
could be a sandwich or sending a message of what makes the
world go ‘round. Once you universalize love to that degree
love becomes sentimentality, this is why the idea of love is
used to sell things, it's sentimental.

This is what makes the Christian message of love is so

radical, and Hegel observes, which is synonymous to the
enlightenment of the Buddhist monk, experiencing highest
pleasure and the lowest pain in the moment of the unification
of the particular, subjective body with the idea of the
absolute. Žižek has made this argument as well, that the
message of Wagner’s Ring Cycle about the Norse Gods isn’t
actually pagan, it’s message is Christian. At the end of many
hours, the realm of the Gods falls, the heavens themselves
burn and flood there’s the question of what comes next in a
new world of possibility. When Christ says to his followers
that He can be found in the love between them, he means
that it won’t be up in heaven or elsewhere. Salvation is the
release of the human community from the idea that God will
do it for you, that the answer is up there, that life is painful
but you will be released once you've let go of your mortal
coil. The message of the New Testament is exactly the
opposite, ie don't expect heaven to solve it for you, don't
expect God to release you. Instead, you have to do it yourself
on earth, which is the mirroring process, Chiasmic if you will,
by which God desublimates in the body of Christ in order to
materialize as love, the idea of the holy trinity, the idea of
agape so that human beings can find, the universal, the
absolute, the spiritual connection of loving this lack in each
other.
 CHAPTER 4
LOVE AS THE INDIVISIBLE REMAINDER

“Love is not domination, but cultivation”

-Goethe

For Goethe, the only way to know a great work of art is to

have seen it evolve. The same holds true for love. To know it,
you have to experience how it changes over time. In a way, a
relationship seems to be antithetical to change, a relationship
is a commitment, you’ve decided to stick it out with a
particular person. But actually, the sign of a great relationship
is to have a love that has evolved. It’s the evolution of love
which we call a relationship and it's precisely great love that
is often the result of this kind of relationship. This is why
Goethe calls love an act of cultivation, rather than
domination. And yet what does this cultivation entail, and
how can we relate it back to the Hegelian/Žižekian/Lacanian
theory of love?

The German poet Bertold Brecht has an interesting theory

about how to stay in love, which he calls ‘the third thing’.

Becht’s line about the third thing comes from his poem The
Mother. The question for Brecht is how love is sustained over
time, which is not easy. Brecht argues that love requires a
‘third thing’ or ‘Die dritte Sache’. His insight is that love or
passion or instinct are not enough, that love has to be
cultivated by a third thing. For Brecht, the only way to
sustain love is to find the third thing, which is different in
every relationship. For some it is creating a home or a shared
project or business or children or creative partnership. Brecht
isn’t making a cynical judgement about love, he’s not saying
that love isn’t real and you have to find something real to
pretend that love is real. He’s also not saying that the third
thing is a replacement of love, he's not saying people who
have children no longer love each other but they stay
together for the child. Instead Brecht is making a much more
metaphysical argument, specifically a dialectical argument
that love functions as an indivisible remainder, something
which cannot be proven or materialized. Think of the
Shakespeare sonnet in which he writes that he is so in love
that he couldn’t possible put it into words. This is the
indivisible, sublime, element of love. That it’s content is
always overdetermined by its impossibility. As we saw before,
this is why Lacan deemed the question “Do you love me” to
be the most dangerous question. Even if one could find an
answer, would this prove anything?

In antiquity there were two categories of love. On the one

hand there was love as Eros, romantic love, potentially even
sexual love. And on the other hand Agape, which is the Greek
word for unconditional love, also referred to as universal
love.
The literary theorist Terry Eagleton has an interesting take on
the idea of universal love. He argues that Agape shouldn’t just
be interpreted as unconditional love, but as political love. In
so doing, he is essentially linking Agape (or the idea of
universal, Christian love) to the idea of solidarity. This is not
just the love of one’s neighbor (recall the Freudian
characterization of the neighbor as the monstrous Other, or
the Kierkegaardian imperative to hate one’s neighbor as one
hates oneself), but rather the fact that love, connects us to
the world. This is the Christian notion of grace, that attention
equals affections, and that when we dedicate ourselves to
something it becomes by definition beautiful to us.

Still, these notions of love can easily be made into boiler-

plate affirmations and received wisdom. Therefore it’s
important to insist that the universal dimension of love is
never something which can be know directly. As Žižek argues,
it is impossible to love humanity. Every tendency towards the
universalization of love quickly leads to its opposite, hatred.

Furthermore, to universalize love has an interesting tension

with its opposite, hate. This is an idea already from theology,
particularly Augustine and St Paul. If love and hate relate to
each other, this means that love is the absence of hate, but
hate can also be a kind of intensified love. Chesterton writes
about this, that the soldier who fights the enemy doesn't hate
the enemy, he fights for what he loves. This was a key
sequence in one of the Star wars movie, Rose tells Finn that
he has to fight for what he loves, not against what he hates.
Yet the problem here is the metaphysical problem. If what
you hate is over-determined by that which you love, then
love and hate are like conjoined twins. In this sense, it’s not
that I hate something because I hate it, rather, I hate
something because I’m trying to defend what I love. This is
why love becomes a powerful motivator for hate, as soon as
something is perceived as a threat to what you love, whether
it’s your family or friends or way of living, or your country,
then the idea of defending what you love becomes a way of
fighting what you hate. So there's a dangerous relationship
between the idea of love and hate. This is why it’s crucial to
return to the idea of good and evil, that good is not to act
naturally, but rather to reject evil and evil is what comes to
you naturally, in your primordial or innate state. There’s a
great quip about this, the idea of being a good person means
that you don't resist the urge to do good. I love that because
we usually think about resisting the urge to do evil. But it’s
really the other way around, we constantly experience the
urge to do good and yet most of us choose not to, most of us
think “I could do something good and yet what's in it for me?
why would I do it?” Thereby doing good presents itself
precisely as an unnatural, irrational act, that we have an
instinct for good and yet unless we choose to actually realize
that which is good, we end up in evil. Evil isn't something
that you are innately, rather evil is precisely refusing the
instinct to do good and thereby what emerges as natural is
precisely the weakness of not being able to live up to your
better self, of rejecting your responsibility to others in favor
of yourself. We’re back at the paradox of subjectivity.

This paradox of subjectivity is an important one for Lacan.

Lacan is aware of this, he points out that the word “subject”
also means being subject to. This subjectivity is a paradox
that emerges only within “I am subject to you/I know who I
am because I am subject to others.” Sartre articulated this
problem of subjectivity when he said that “hell is other
people.” He didn’t mean that he was an introvert or that he
resented the people around him. Rather, the way we
understand ourselves is through those around us, our
subjectivity, our self-identity is shaped by those around us
and this subjectivity is inescapable. This is a response to a
philosophical premise going all the way back to Plato but
popularized by the Cartesian cogito, “I think therefore I am.”
This is identity with the self, the idea of the self-transparent
subject, the subject who knows himself. The ultimate
knowledge, as Plato already said “I know that I do not know
anything” the ultimate knowledge is that there is no identity
without the other, that identity is itself a retroactive illusion
predicated on non-identity. Rather than your identity being
primordial and innate, it's that identity is a marker of
difference, identity is something that emerges too late, after
the fact. What is universal is thereby not identity as such but
precisely difference. Hence also the Lacanian psychoanalytic
maxim that the only universal is difference itself. This is a key
idea for structuralist thinkers, that difference (the fall into
concrete particularity) separates us from others is thereby
precisely the universal which creates the retroactive illusion
of pure identity. The idea of natural identity is symptomatic
to the fall into unnatural life, it's not a return to a priori
natural identity. The idea of identity as natural emerges
precisely within the universality of difference. Perhaps the
most technical but also simple definition of identity is thereby
non-identity. It’s not that identity or non-identity is an
inherent characteristic, rather it is its own sublime, the very
idea of identity is the idea that I am non-identical to others,
the difference is what is universal. What is important here is
that the very idea that you would love everything and
everybody, the idea of an abstract universal that you could
have love for is an impossibility.
Here we see an (unexpected) kind of convergence between
Žižek and existentialist critiques of ideology (like Sartrean
bad faith). For Žižek what appears to you as universal is
actually a false universal. Within the Marxist critique, false
universality that what appears as universal to some people is
still a privileged position. For example, the idea of tolerance,
for people or a society to consider themselves tolerant
suggests that there is an enlightened position from which you
can tolerate others. For anyone who has lived as part of a
minority group or a diaspora will recognize the patronizing
effect of living in a tolerant society because it already creates
a power imbalance. Tolerance is predicated on the idea that
you've decided that your worldview is universal, that other
people are outside your worldview and that you have taken
on the enlightened position of tolerating them. Within the
idea of tolerance, there's always an implicit power play to
suggest that the dominant member benevolently tolerates
someone else. In a Marxist critique of the idea of the false
universal, what appears to you as universal, the neutral
horizon of values (i.e. tolerance) is itself predicated on a
power imbalance, on the idea that you have determined that
this is the neutral arbiter of what can be tolerated. This
Marxist critique, the false universal, is related to the Hegelian
idea of abstract versus concrete universality. Remember, in
the traditional metaphysical tradition, the abstract universal
is true and the particular concrete universal is false. Hegel
inverts this, for him the idea of abstract universality is a false
universal, that is over determined by the particular reality
that you live in. In other words, not only is there no a priori
abstract universal, it's in the concrete universal that we
retroactively find the abstract universal. In Lacanian
psychoanalytic terms essence or truth is thereby
symptomatic, precisely to its perceived opposite.

This brings us to my earlier argument of Hegel’s famous

aphorism about his metaphysics, that substance is subject, we
can see it in terms of a vanishing mediator. Abstract
universality (or essence, truth, ideal form) is a vanishing
mediator for concrete universality (for the particular).
However, in traditionally Hegelian fashion, this is a dialectic
relationship. After all, if it is that the abstract falls into the
concrete and yet retroactively we realize that there was no
abstract to fall into, the concrete a priori, then vice versa, the
concrete universal is a vanishing mediator for the abstract
Universal. We’re really getting to the very technical heart of
this, because we’re not dismissing the concrete universal, but
rather suggesting it’s a necessary step and in its necessity, it
becomes unnecessary. Remember, in the traditional
metaphysical divide between substance and subject, Hegel
not only says that substance emerges in subjectivity, he also
says that subjectivity only emerges within substance. In other
words, we have an X movement, we have a dialectical
chiasmic movement where we go A B X B A (in the shape of a
Z). A to B is substance to subject, but B to A is subject to
substance. Subjectivity emerges on neither axis, but instead
lies within the irreconcilable ‘X’, or the indivisible remainder,
that which cannot be re-integrated, that which remains
forever out of joint, a missing link. Within Lacanian
psychoanalysis the name for this ‘X” is subjectivity.

For Lacan, psychoanalysis would only be successful in a

world in which there was no need for psychoanalysis. This
sounds like a bit of rhetorical sophistry but what Lacan has in
mind here is the same thing at Oscar Wilde. Just as charity
requires poverty, psychoanalytic treatment requires, let’s say,
disfunction. For Lacan, treatment shouldn’t be about
alleviating the problems for patients, it should be about
eliminating the necessity of the patient seeking treatment in
the first place, at which point psychoanalysis is eliminated.
So when Lacan says that psychoanalysis would only be truly
successful in a world that didn't need psychoanalysis, he's
saying that the definition of success for the psychoanalysis
psychoanalyst is precisely that he is no longer needed, that
there is no necessity for psychoanalysis to exist. At the exact
point at which psychoanalysis would be successful, it would
simply fade away and cease to exist.

This idea has a similar structure to Marx’s argument that

religion is the opium of the people. I bring up this idea
because it’s often misunderstood as either being a kind of
atheistic, anti-religion take Marx has. But he’s not being a
combative atheist. Rather, Marx is advocating for a kind of
world in which religion is no longer necessary. This is an
interesting argument because many modern atheist
arguments, as much as they’re not Marxists, they’ll still side
with Marx using this line that religion is the opium of the
people to make the argument that religion has somehow
fooled people, made them adits. Instead, Marx empathized
with people who sought religion because an alienated life in
capitalist society didn’t have escape, the only legitimate,
authentic form of escape was religion. Rather than judging
religion, he’s judging society which necessitates religion.

To put it in psychoanalytic terms, for Marx, religion is

symptomatic, it emerges precisely from the contradictions
and the pain of living in a capitalist society. Marx isn’t
advocating the eradication of religion, he’s suggesting that
religion could become unnecessary by eradicating capitalism
and making life less alienated. In other words, there will no
longer be a necessity for religion as a balm upon the wound
of what it means to be alive as a worker. What at first appears
to be an invective against religion, casting judgement on poor
people who have faith in God, is a much more empathetic
sentiment that religion is precisely comforting and soothing
and that it makes perfect sense that people would be
religious and that religion provides a genuine source of
comfort. This is the Utopian goal that Marx has, that people
would no longer require this comfort and perhaps religion
might hold another meaning, but this is the trajectory from
Wilde to Marx to Lacan, following the same form. If the point
of a cure is that it's no longer needed, once the disease has
passed away, whether charity is no longer needed if there is
no poverty, if psychoanalysis is no longer be needed once we
no longer have people in need of psychoanalytic treatment,
that religion will no longer be needed once we have Marxist
Communist Revolution. Of course all three of these are
unrealistic, I have no doubt about this — creating a world
without poverty, even in the most egalitarian society is
distinctly unlikely, creating a world in which people do not
experience the mental strain of existence is impossible and I
think a world in which there is no religion is very unlikely. Yet
the principle of the argument is that the thing that is sold as
the cure has to pass away at the moment of its own success,
it is a vanishing mediator.

The idea of a vanishing mediator is something I’ve discussed

in a previous series but I’ll reintroduce the idea here. We can
say that the vanishing mediator is something that disappears
at the exact moment of becoming universal. The phrase
comes from Frederic Jameson, a literary theorist and he uses
it for the transition from Protestantism to Capitalism. This is
something Max Weber famously wrote about in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism but with a slightly
different argument. Jameson’s point is that the moment when
the Protestant work ethic became universalized into the
“spirit of capitalism,” societies seem to become secular. It's at
the exact moment that the Protestant work ethic became
universal and embraced by everybody, that people ceased to
identify as Protestant and society became much more secular.
For Jameson, this is the vanishing mediator, something which
achieves universality and yet in its universal manifestation,
appears to fade away. Žižek applies this notion of the
vanishing mediator to the lineage of Western philosophy. He
argues that Kant is a kind of vanishing mediator for Hegel. In
previous classes I’ve pointed out that Hegel’s speculative
idealism couldn't exist without Kant's problem of the so-
called Copernican turn, by which we place emphasis on the
subjective particular (ie mind or reason) over and above the
idea of abstract universality (or essence). For Žižek, this is a
process by which Kant seems to fade away into its exact
opposite, namely Hegel. In other words, for Žižek, Kant and
Kantian Transcendence idealism is the vanishing mediator for
a Hegelian speculative idealism and what comes afterwards,
which is post-metaphysics. This is a technical explanation and
we don’t really need that right now, I just want to point out
the premise of the vanishing mediator and how it’s used.

If the vanishing mediator is something which achieves its true

form in its perceived opposite and disappears, now we start
to see how we have a metaphysical argument that relates
back to love and the idea of abstract versus concrete
universality. After all, the Hegelian position is that abstract
universality finds its own opposite and its truth within the
concrete universal. In other words, that the supposed fall into
the concrete particular thereby manifests essence, it is not a
priori but through the fall itself. For us, then, the ideal of love
as a universal concept doesn't exist outside the particular
reality of falling in love (it isn’t a pre-existing concept).
Rather, it finds its true nature in the falling in love and the
act of love itself. Hopefully it is more clear how, for a thinker
like Hegel, this idea of love as an abstract and as a concrete
becomes metaphoric for all existence — what it means to be
alive, what it means to be a particular subject, what it means
to be part of the universal experience of life on Earth — it is
something that can only be experienced through your
particular self. It’s a cliche to say that you are unique, but
what is philosophically rich about this idea is that it is
through the process of falling in love, finding somebody who
is not you, yet makes you feel like you have found your true
self, who has unlocked your inner truth and requires
someone who is radically different from you, who is unique
in their own self, makes you feel like you’ve tapped your
authentic self. This process of differentiation whereby your
own identity with yourself appears to emerge retroactively
through the fall into subjectivity (being subject to someone
else) and thereby emerging as a true subject. This is the
paradox in the problem of love, which is for Hegel thereby
precisely a metaphysical problem. The problem is how we go
from the abstract to the concrete. For Hegel, the abstract is
revealed precisely within the concrete, that's the
metaphysical proposition.
This is precisely what makes love so difficult to talk about,
we can’t put our finger exactly on what it is and what it
means. Lacan had a similar insight. He said that the most
dangerous question in a relationship is “Do you (really) love
me?” As soon as you ask this, you trap someone into
answering yes, which doesn’t really reassure you, because
maybe they’re only trying to reassure you, you’ve put them
on the spot and so you loose trust in each other. This is the
bind of wanting to feel loved and worrying about not being
loved. The other trap is of course asking them to prove their
love, which is an inherently impotent, impossible gesture. As
soon as you have to quantify love, you start losing the quality
of love. As soon as you start having to list somebody's lovable
features, you've already abstracted what that love is, because
you don't just love people for the good things about them,
often we love things in people that drive us kind of crazy.

There’s a great portrayal of this in perhaps one of the best

romantic comedies of all time, written by Nora Ephron, When
Harry met Sally. When Harry declares his love to Sally, he
tells her all these things that drive him crazy and annoy him
about her. But this is precisely the sign of his love, it’s not
about these amazing things that she does that make her more
attractive than other people. She has the perfect response, of
course, which is to just keep repeating “I hate you” and then
they kiss. It’s a beautiful scene and this is what makes Nora
Ephron’s films so brilliant is the insight into love, because of
course Sally doesn’t hate Harry, she hates having to love him,
she hates that love has happened to her.
Returning to Brecht, particularly his suspicion of
sentimentality, the overwhelming outpouring of love — “oh I
love you so much, I love you to the end of the world, you’re
the most beautiful person who's ever existed” and then the
kiss, this bombastic, cinematic embrace. This is hollow for
me, perhaps it’s what people wish love would look like, it's
what children have been taught to think love is, whether it's
the hero rescuing the princess and kissing at the end of the
movie. Love is a lot more like saying “You do all these things
that drive me crazy and somehow I shouldn't love you but I
do" and then the other person responding “I hate you, I hate
you, I hate you, which is why I love you.” This is also the
Dutch expression Ik haat van je which simultaneously means
“I love you” and “I hate you.”

It’s important to emphasize that this isn’t to excuse or justify

toxic relationships. We shouldn’t punish people we’re in a
relationship with, love isn’t punishment. Sartre had a
typically twisted view on love, (which is unsurprising
considering his own relationship with Simone de Beauvoir).
He said that the definition of true love is that two people can
torture each other like nobody else; that love is inherently
about conflict and that lovers have sharper weapons in that
conflict. Of course, there's some truth to that, being in love is
vulnerable, you’re exposing yourself. This is why we might
even hate falling in love, even in love, there’s always the
potential for pain and it only grows with love.

The German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote: Geliebt wirst

Du einzig, wo Du schwach Dich zeigen darfst, ohne Stärke zu
provozieren, which translates to “you are only loved when
you can show weakness without provoking strength.” In
other words, when you're in love, you can show yourself to
be vulnerable, you don't have to show yourself at your best,
you can show yourself at your worst, you can basically tell
your partner about your fears without fearing them. For
Adorno, to really be in love means that you can express
yourself in a vulnerable manner, you don't have to wear a
mask or hide behind a facade and the other person shouldn't
judge you for your flaws, they shouldn't punish you. Love is
the process by which you can be more human, you can be
more fully true to yourself precisely by means of being
vulnerable to somebody else.

This is precisely why the potential for pain or suffering

increases with love and there are of course different types of
pain in love. Stephen Fry, the British essayist and actor, has
suggested that perhaps the most valuable lesson in life about
love had been not unrequited love, but rather unrequited
love within a relationship. In other words, the kind of one-
sided love or unbalanced love between partners. The anxiety
goes back to Lacan’s dangerous question, “do you really love
me?” Asking that assumes that they love you in the same way
that you love them. Perhaps one of the most important
lessons about love is that people love differently. Sometimes
people worry whether they love more than they are loved,
yet love is not a competition, love is repetition. To love
someone without being loved, unrequited love, is of course
still painful.

This is the difference between Verliebtheit, the feeling of

falling in love, and Liebe, a love that persists, that stands the
test of time. As Sartre already wrote, sometimes the only
thing that makes a relationship fail is precisely that two
people love one another. In a similar, and uncharacteristically
positive sentiment, Nietzsche writes that what makes most
unions fail is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship. Then
again, we ought to keep in mind that Nietzsche may have
well had a darker motive: to imply that his friend Salomé, to
whom he proposed in marriage and who turned him down,
was therefore no longer his friend.

The implication is that we can interpret the Brechtian third

thing in at least two ways. Either as a fairly common-sense
piece of normative advice, that to sustain a relationship
beyond the originating spark one has to add fuel to the fire.
In other words that love requires, as Goethe already said,
cultivation. It requires work. As Thomas Mann, the self-
professed ‘magician (Zauberer) wrote, life is a ‘Kunststück’ not
a ‘Kunstwerk”. Life is a trick, not a work of art.

But the second, more interesting interpretation, is to see this

‘third thing’ as a metaphysical proposition. Arguably the most
important part of Hegel’s logic, is when he argues that the
dialectical movement should be counted as including four,
not three steps. It is an irony oft-observed amongst
philosophy majors that the idea of the famous thesis-
antithesis-synthesis is attributed to Hegel, who in fact had
dedicated the majority of his mature works to arguing against
this Fichtean triad.

A close reading of Žižek, Hegel, and Lacan would imply that

this ‘indivisible remainder’ is in fact a key component of
dialectical materialism. Let us consider Engels’ famous ‘three
laws of the dialectic’: (1) The transition from quantity into
quality and vice versa; (2) the negation of negation; and (3)
the unity of opposites. Here we can see how it requires
dialectical materialism (which Žižek reads through the lens of
Lacanian psychoanalysis) to understand the Hegelian ‘third
thing’ in its political and Marxist dimension.
The key for understanding the Hegelian dialectic is that there
is no a priori starting point for the unfolding of essence
versus appearance. Namely that one does not start with the
Absolute, but the absolute is made manifest within its own
fall. As confusing as this may sound, Hegel’s ontology is
thereby that in which the fall retroactively generates that
from which it has fallen. Hegel’s critics of course dismissed
this as reckless obscurantism, but Hegel believed that it could
be taught to schoolchildren (note: he infamously tried and
failed to set up a school to do so). The Hegelian insight is
that one has to stop thinking in linear terms. The Absolute
cannot be equated with the beginning, as much as it cannot
be considered the destination. Substance and Subject are
dialectically mediated, like two sides of the same coin.

This means that would appear as the ‘third’ moment of the

dialectical synthesis (which Hegel referred to as Absolute
Knowing, in reference to Kant’s critique of conditions for pure
Reason), is thereby also ‘always already’ (that favored
expression of Hegelians) the fourth. Namely, that by arriving
at the ‘end’, one had simply given rise to what thereby
appeared as the beginning. The first and the fourth are
identical, the second and the third movements being merely
intertwined negations of the tautological overlap of one and
four. Hence why I have advocated that instead of thinking in
numerical terms, one simply adopt a Chiastic structure
(ABXBA) in which A represents Substance/essence and B
Subject/appearance. This means that the third thing is
indivisible. It is the self-relating negativity immanent to the
dialectical interrelation between A and B, which, in the
transition from concrete to abstract, reveal the unity of
opposites.

First, it should be apparent that the first law of the dialectic is

already chiastic. The example used in antiquity for the
transition from quantity to quality (and vice versa) is that of
a grain of sand. When sufficient grains are added to each
other, they eventually form a pile. However, no-one knows
exactly how many grains it takes to become a pile. In other
words, the transition from quantity (number of grains) to
quality (a pile) is seemingly abstract, it cannot be properly
counted. It is a third thing, an indivisible remainder.
Something which has the sublime properties of demarcating
an impossible demarcation. Another example: How many
hairs does a man have to lose before he bis considered bald?

Likewise, the negation of negation implies that this

movement is never a priori. The grain of sand is thereby
always already determined in relation to ‘sand’. Therefore
this materialization of quality into quantity simply serves to
solve a problem of what would otherwise appear to be
infinite regress? At what point does a grain succumb to dust?,
etc. Therefore the negation of negation implies that there is
no substantial ‘reality’ to either the quantitivate or the
qualitative. They are already overdetermined by the other
category. Their existence lies within negation, rather being a
solid from which negation takes away.

Finally, the unity of opposites therefore presents the logical

inference of the previous two laws of the dialectic. If the
transition from quantity to quality is dialectical and chiastic,
and if this means that their identity is therefore insubstantial,
then their ‘true’ identity must lie within he unity of opposites.
Namely within their indivisibility, that which cannot be
divided. In other words, the essence appears only within the
fall. The three laws of the dialectic should therefore be
counted as four. Recall the famous quote from Fight Club:
The first rule of fight club is that we do not talk about fight
club. The First rule of the dialectic is that there is no non-
dialectizable substance. As the theorist Frederic Jameson
argues in The Valences of the Dialectic, for the dialectic to be
truly dialectical would require that even the non or ‘un’
dialectical substance be subsumed within it. That there is
nothing which escapes it. This is how one should interpret
the old Marxist adage about ‘false universality’. Every
universal is necessarily split from within. The ideological
operation is always to suggest that it is not.

The final chapter will therefore conclude on a political note,

and argue against the dangers of universalized love, i.e. the
‘love of humanity’.
 CHAPTER 5
CONCLUSION: LOVE AS A FALSE
UNIVERSAL

“Some hate humanity, but I love humanity so much”

-Elon Musk

Žižek warns that the universalization of love, or the ‘love of

humanity’ is the primary feature of the idea of love in
capitalism. Likewise, slogans such as McDonalds, “I’m lovin’
it”, should make us think carefully about what exactly is
meant by this ‘it’. Moreover, he cautions that love in this guise
of a false universal (‘everything is love’) neutralizes the
radical emancipatory potential of love.

Let’s take as an example the recent acquisition of the social

media platform Twitter. When Elon Musk, the richest man in
the world, purchased the platform for 44 billion USD, he
announced that he had done so out of love for humanity.

This kind of universalized love is central to the capitalist

ethic. Think about billionaire philanthropists who want to
make the world a better place whilst contributing to the very
perpetuation of the social problems they claim to want to
prevent.

As Oscar Wilde already argued, secretly the philanthropists

don’t want to eliminate poverty, because it would also
eliminate philanthropy. In the same manner, we can say that
Elon Musk doesn’t want to eliminate what makes Twitter
toxic, because without it he would eliminate what made him
so successful on the platform.

Here we can refer to Marx’s often misunderstood notion that

the working class is the only class that seeks to eliminate
itself. After all, the goal is not to move up the ladder, but to
eliminate the class system. Without class, no working class.
Therefore the aim of revolutionary consciousness is to create
a world in which there is no necessity for the working class to
exist.

As long as you sell the idea of self-advancement, the so-called

‘secrets’ of the rich, then people will never realize that the
true secret is precisely that such texts serve to prevent the
more radical insight, that the rich do not have to exist. This is
where one might be reminded of the Hegelian insight that
‘the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets to the Egyptians
themselves’. Or, to relate it to the Christian revolution of
Christ on the cross, that the scandalous ‘secret’ of the New
Testament is precisely that there is no secret, that Christ on
the cross spells the end of the transcendental logic within the
Christian metaphysical proposition. That Christ in his “love
for humanity” becomes the vanishing mediator for the de-
sublimation of the idea of a transcendental deity.
When Marx wrote that all you have to lose are your chains,
he therefore meant that the trick of capitalism is that it
makes us love our chains. We come to think of our own
exploitation as fundamental to our self-expression. Self-love
is therefore presented as the ultimate goal, which becomes
directly tied to one’s ability to commodify such expression. To
be alive in a capitalist society is to be in love with one’s own
oppression-as-expression.This is the fundamental innovation
of the so-called gig-economy, which includes the creator-
economy: to have outsourced exploitation to the individual.
Why be exploited by a boss if you could be happier exploiting
yourself?

It is against this horizon that the universal “love of humanity”

becomes a key part of the ideological reification of
capitalism. The commodification of life is presented as the
democratization of access. Now anyone can be free. Free to
sell their labour. The latest developments in this field point
towards the acceleration of such practices. Content creation,
now the dominant mode of cultural expression, is a form of
free labour for tech companies like Twitter. Elon Musk, in his
professed love of humanity, simply means that he loves the
infinitely renewable resource of human energy and attention
that can be mined for profit.

With love like this, who needs hatred?”

Slavoj Žižek argues that the fundamental principle of

capitalist participation is the promise of surplus enjoyment.
After all, a key part of the logic of capitalist reification is that
the remedy is presented in the form of intensification. Are
you on a diet? Buy more supplements! Is social media making
you feel alienated? Why not join ‘BeReal’!? In this sense, the
problem is simply sustained but disavowed in its perceived
opposite form. For Marx, this is the central function of
ideology. It never serves to directly promote an overt political
function, but masks the disavowed antagonism within that
which it supposedly solves. The key insight here is that the
universal is always false, broken from within by its own
disavowed antagonism. The example that Marx uses is how
money was supposed to be the great equalizer. A coin from a
King was just as valuable as a coin from a peasant,
undermining the need for either kings or peasants. Here
equality of access became the ideological placeholder for
inequality of opportunity. Marx’s argument is that what
should have liberated mankind from bondage, namely the
free exchange of commodities, in fact commodified the social
relations themselves. This is what Marx famously deemed the
commodity fetish.

Whilst critical economists have focused on the commodity, it

has been left to psychoanalysts to explore the idea of the
fetish. For Lacan, building upon Freud, the fetish is that
which disavows or masks the repressed content. In the same
way that the universal love of humanity masks a deeply
dehumanizing worldview, the fetish is that which persists as
its perceived opposite. The most common example is that of
displaced grief. A man who loses his wife, instead becomes
fetishistically attached to his pet hamster. The hamster has
not simply replaced the wife, but allowed the man’s grief to
be obscured. One of the central insights of psychoanalysis is
that there must always be a return of the repressed. The
hamster will die someday. For Marx, the name of the return
of the repressed is simply revolution. Not the mere struggle
against the existing order, but manner in which the limit to
capitalism emerges from within: what Marx calls ‘class
consciousness’. The crucial point is therefore that whilst
resistance against capitalism can itself be easily commodified,
the limit to capitalism lies within its own functioning. What
makes capitalism unique, and why Marx admired it
sufficiently to dedicate so much thought to it, is that it stages
a perpetual pseudo-revolution to keep things the way they
are. The poison pill is presented to you as a remedy.

To understand the role of surplus enjoyment in late-stage

capitalism, one can take the examples of so-called ‘ethical
consumption' or greenwashing. We're perpetually doing
something that we know is, in some way, contributing to the
problem, whether its climate change or habitat destruction or
economic exploitation, yet we assuage our conscience
precisely by justifying that at least a part of our consumptive
practice is going into a good thing, there's a selfless
component to consumption. Perhaps this is also why the most
capitalist mode of consumption today is precisely ethical
consumption. Ethical consumption doesn't just sell you a
product, it sells you the dream of a better world and, most
importantly, a dream of a better you. This is something that
Schopenhauer already wrote about, Schopenhauer said that
the easiest way to sell something to somebody is to simply
sell them themselves.

This isn’t just a cynical take, obviously fighting poverty or

climate destruction is a worthwhile goal, and yet how to fight
against these pseudo-solutions which sustain the problem?
For the French existentialists, mauvaise foi, or false
consciousness, was the idea that our incentive structures
were misaligned with the things that make us happy and
fulfilled. There are many things we think we ought to be
doing that don’t really achieve very much at all. In the hunt
for followers, status, personal enrichment, and other vanity
metrics, we simply create limitless surplus value for the
corporations and that provide the platforms for such
participation, and the institutions that create the ideological
stimuli to sustain the underlying rationale that makes these
things appear desirable. Lacan famously argued that whilst
enjoyment may be the goal of life, the true aim is to sustain
enjoyment as long as possible. That the secret of desire, is
that we do not desire things, but that we desire to keep on
desiring. Therefore objects-of-desire represent also the fear of
being satisfied.

This means that the ideal object of consumption is that which

promises more pleasure beyond the end of pleasure itself.
This ghostly, desublimated form of enjoyment nevertheless
every once in a while haunts us, like Marx’s famous ‘specter’,
which for Lacan takes on the form of the real. Every once in a
while the ‘real’ comes shining through in such manufactured
desire. Recall, for example, how the rapper Snoop Dogg
launched his first brand of cereal (Snoop Loopz), with the
slogan “now with more marshmallows!”. Online commenters
quickly pointed out that, the ‘more’ in ‘more marshmallows’
was farcical, since it was the first such release. This ‘more’
lies at the heart of surplus enjoyment. The consumer society,
now with 50% more enjoyment!

This seemingly superfluous, non-substantiated surplus, that

derives its content purely from its own formal excess, is key
to understanding Žižek’s critique of love and ideology. In
characterizing the exploitation under capitalism, Marx
famously described its participants as naive, stating “for they
know not what they do”. Žižek’s counterpoint has been to
state that in late-stage capitalism, we all know exactly what
we’re doing, and the harmful impact it has, and yet we
continue to do it. In fact, and this is the key point, that
perhaps this knowledge is itself a kind of surplus-enjoyment.

To return to the commodity fetish, the idea that a commodity

is imbued with socially constructed meaning — a pair of
Nikes isn’t just something to wear on your feet, they’re
imbued with socially constructed meaning through
advertising, athletic sponsorship, even political significance.
But Marx already realized that even “seeing” through the
commodity fetish didn’t undermine the capitalist system
which perpetuated it, but rather propelled the system
forward. That the more we see through it, the more we
succumb to it. Think about how during the pandemic
everyone stocked up on toilet-paper even though there was
no shortage. Everyone simply assumed that everyone else
would act as if there was a shortage, thereby creating an
actual shortage. Here we have the perfect example of the
Hegelian distinction between concrete and abstract
universality. The abstract awareness that there was no
shortage, created the perfect conditions by which such a
shortage become concrete. This is the often neglected aspect
of false consciousness. It is not simply normatively wrong. In
a deeply strange way, it is right. After all, if one had not
hoarded toilet paper in those first few weeks, then one very
well may have faced a crisis.
One of the painful realizations about being subject to the
consumer society is that we all know better and yet we do it
anyway. For Žižek, it's no longer “for they know not what
they do,” it's that everybody knows precisely what they are
doing and yet they still continue to do it. This means that we
all create this kind of inner hole in ourselves; that is, we
know that we're living our best life, we're trying to survive,
we're trying to keep our head above water, and yet there's a
nagging awareness because we're all more well informed
than we ever have been, aware that this way of living is not
sustainable. It's precisely to paper over that gap that we are
sold the idea of finding love, whether it's “I'm lovin’ it” at
McDonald's or Hollywood’s idea of romantic love or finding
your “true” self through travel or your “true” love online,
there are so many different ways in which the idea of love is
put back on us as both a universal aspiration and an
individual responsibility.

This leads to what Marx called alienation, that we're more

and more alienated not only from ourselves but from each
other. And what is alienation, if not the exact opposite of
love? Alienation is the sense of detachment, whether from
the rest of the world or those around you or even from
yourself. What happens in society is that we become
increasingly alienated, precisely because we all think that
we're chasing love or we're chasing affection or we're chasing
self-fulfillment. It's precisely this which allows us to not
undergo the private revolution, which is love, engaged as we
are in the pseudo-revolution of ‘loving ourselves’ sold to us by
corporations. The ideological force of universalized love
thereby masks a deeply dehumanizing tendency.
This is where ‘self-love’ in its performative dimension
presents itself as the ideal commodity. The brand of you,
loving yourself, for the gaze of the Other. Lacan was never
more right than when he said that we are simply the gaze
personified. And if you fail to sufficiently present as happy,
then this too has a simple remedy: “love yourself”, by
purchasing products from those who perform it better than
you. Thereby what ought to be a central premise of
wellbeing, namely that one learns to love oneself, becomes
presented as its evil twin. Convince enough people that you
love yourself, and they will send you their ‘love’ in the form
of monetary support.

The curation of the self is thereby the contemporary version

of what Althusser referred to as ‘interpellation’. We recognize
our ‘true selves’ in the performance of authenticity for others.
If we fail to do so, we are told that we are lacking in self-love
and thereby unworthy of societal renumeration. By providing
free labour in the form of content, we have simply
outsourced the policing to ourselves. Of course someone like
Musk loves humanity, (but hates workers), because how
better to create a free and seemingly endless workforce, who
all labour to find their true selves online, creating and
sharing ‘self-love’ in an endless stream of surplus enjoyment
which leads directly to surplus value on behalf of the
corporations that provide the platforms for such self-
expression.

To fully understand Žižek’s theory of love, one must also

understand why he calls Hegel the greatest philosopher of
love. According to Žižek Hegel uses love as a metaphor to
make a metaphysical argument about essence versus
appearance. Hegel famously ushered in the so-called post-
metaphysical stance in philosophy, which is a key part of why
Žižek can argue that Lacan (the anti-philosopher par
excellence) contains the key to a philosophical renewal.
Hegel undermines the transcendental logic of Kantian
idealism and German romanticism, by strongly arguing
agains the existence of an a priori absolute. Instead, what
defines the absolute is precisely that it is split from within.
That essence emerges only within the fall from essence itself.
Love therefore, in its unique capacity of being by definition a
particular experience that yet contains within it what is
arguably the most universal substance of life, presents itself
as the perfect metaphor for Hegel’s famously difficult
aphorism: substance as subject.

This brings us back to the foundational idea of metaphysics

going back to Plato’s allegory of the cave. For Hegel, it is
about the relationship between the universal (or truth) and
the particular (or how truth appears to us). Inside the cave is
the world of shadows, the world of appearance, the world of
the particular. Outside the cave is the world of pure form,
universal truth and essence. For some philosophers, like
Plato, this means that the task of the philosopher is to exit
the cave and to convince the others to leave as well. This is
the key ethical imperative within transcendental idealism.
Kant is the first to formally investigate a kind of paradox
here, but a fruitful one. How can this escape present itself to
us? What are the conditions for such ‘pure reason’ to exist?
And whilst Kant stretches the idea of the Cartesian cogito to
its utmost limit with the so-called antinomies, he remains
loyal the transcendental binary set out by Plato long ago. We
cannot know objects-in-themselves. The human mind, reason,
is itself the barrier, itself the cave.

Hegel, in responding to Kant (and Fichte) sets the precedent

for what thinkers like Ranciere would later call a singular-
universal, a universal that only manifests through the
particular. That the particular, rather than a fall from the
absolute, is itself the agent of the unfolding of its own
internal limits. Here we can see clearly why it takes a Marxist
conception of Hegel to avoid labeling Hegel a mystical
solipsist. For Hegel the absolute is precisely overdetermined
by its incompleteness, or what Lacan would call lack. It is in
this very sense that the structuralist insight, that the only
universal is difference, is employed by thinkers such as Žižek
to argue that Hegel is the philosopher of love. After wall,
what could be more universal than the ultimate act of
differentiation: falling in love.

I want to emphasize that Hegel is a Christian thinker, but in a

very particular way. He’s not interested in how everyone can
get along and love each other. In fact, this is something that
both Hegel and Žižek have in common, that they say that
universal love is the exact opposite of love. This may seem
surprising, even un-Christian, but what they mean is that by
loving everyone, the notion of love loses its meaning. Of
course it's good to treat people in a loving manner but at the
same time, they see love as individualistic, almost painfully
so, think about how selfish we can be in love. Of course you
want them to be independent and have their own friends and
career but there’s also a selfish component that can morph
into jealousy if you feel like there’s an imbalance in their
attention. Plato makes this point, that love turns you into a
crazy person, that vices come into being through love, not
just jealousy but even sloth or gluttony.

Hegel's idea, his metaphor of love is a metaphysical argument

as well. If love stands for the universal and the individual
experience stands for the particular, then how do they relate?
Hegel insists this is dialectical, which isn’t a surprising
answer if you’re even a little familiar with Hegel. But what
does he mean by this? This idea comes from Plato whose
method of philosophy was through discourse between
speakers, this is the dialectics where speakers with different
views collectively reach a more enlightened conclusion.

Hegel takes this idea and completely radicalizes it, he

suggests that it’s not about the debate to reach a higher
viewpoint. Instead, for Hegel, dialectic is a kind of figuration
or metaphor for the entire unfolding of the universe as such.
Namely, that the two things that are in debate or conflict with
each other aren't two people with the opposing viewpoints.
Hegel asks what if rather than being opposed, these forces
are themselves incomplete and constantly moving around
each other, reading to each other, trying to complete each
other but unable to, but through their mutual
incompleteness, we reach a higher form a spirit.

This is incredibly abstract but a very powerful idea for

philosophy. Hegel is using the Christian idea of Agape as
universal love and plugging it into the metaphysical edifice of
Plato, in which we have the idea of exiting the cave and
entering the world of truth. For Hegel you don't exit the cave
into the world of truth, instead the world of truth illuminates
the cave, this is for Hegel, the idea of the New Testament.
The message of the New Testament isn’t that you enter
heaven to be with God and to become like God. Instead, it’s
that God is amongst you when you love each other.

For Hegel, love isn't supposed to complete you. It’s not as

though you’re exiting the cave into a blissful state of
universal love. Instead, it’s the idea that love enters you and
disrupts you. There’s a Kafka quote here, “love is a knife that
I twist within myself,” this discombobulating experience is
not only how love actualizes itself, but dialectically. This
dialectical process is how I actualize myself in this impossible
unity between my particular subject accessing the universal,
which can only be made manifest through its fall into
subjective particular finite selfhood, this is where we find the
dialectic. Hegel's idea of the dialectic of love combines a
Christian argument about Agape (universal love) with a
metaphysical argument about Plato's allegory of the cave.

If for Plato, there is only the inside of the cave (world of

appearance) and the outside (world of essence), for Hegel,
essence and appearance are what make each other
meaningful. So love isn't this thing that's like a goal that you
have to find beyond the cave. Rather, love will come to you
and it will disrupt you and actualize itself through you in the
world. More than that, it’s how you actualize yourself in the
world.

This is what makes love a metaphor for the metaphysical

argument about the interrelationship between essence and
appearance, which for Hegel is dialectical between the
universal substance of truth, love, Agape and individual,
particular, objective reality, which is precisely the world of
appearance. For Hegel, the world of appearance and the
world of truth are not separated but dialectically intertwined.
Love therefore stands not as a new-age a priori substance of
life, but precisely as the internal limit or gap within the
absolute itself. Love as radical subjectivity within which the
absolute is sublimated.

These are the components necessary to understand Žižek’s

idea that love is a disaster. It has been the stated goal of this
book to return the idea of love to its rightful place as both a
revolutionary and a philosophical project.

Now, more than ever, true love remains the aim of the
committed revolutionary. In order fight for love, one must
therefore begin by examining how universalized love always
stages a pseudo-revolution, a revolution in name only. One
that seemingly presents change only so as to keep everything
the same.