Emotions, of course, have been discussed throughout the ages and in all ages and yet have remained obscure and if in an earlier age the emotions had political relevance even if only as the undoing of reason, modernity has seen the study of political emotions practically disappear. This is nowhere as clear as it is in the discourse of love that is all present, important and encompassing and yet completely obscure politically. This is evident in the always suspect apolitical nature of the practical discourse of love that can be found in all aspects of culture from Oprah to the self-help books such as Hendrix’s venerable “Getting the Love you need”.
The double nature of this discourse is most likely a feature common to many areas in most areas of knowledge that are now divided into specialized and popular. Yet Love isn’t quantum physics and as the lives of many will attest, fluent Lacanian has not made a single wielder better at love, though he may have helped many others, as have shamans, Rabbis and all walks of helpers throughout the ages. The forked nature of this discourse has a philosophical edge, such as Plato’s or Badiou’s “what is Love” or Irigaray’s “I Love to You”, and a practical edge such as the immensely popular imago approach. What is odd is that the two do not really meet, popular discussion of love are based on a Freudian understanding of the subject and yet make the specialists squirm. While the specialists are capable of understanding the practical approach and are helped by it in therapy, the rest have really no use for the philosophical discussion if not in manners that are based on utilitarian readings. The fate of Aristophanes’ supremely ironic figure of the androgynous in the Symposium provides a wonderful example.
How do we account for the nature of this discussion of love is what I would like to examine by looking at love as a supremely political emotion. In fact I would like to side with the language of human beings that refuse to treat love analytically. Where some philosophy and psychology tackle the issue by dividing love into different types, especially the romantic versus others, humanity seems to not want to separate the different kinds of love. Though we might qualify the kind of love we are talking about, we still seem hardly inclined to not use the exact same word to describe an emotion that according to some thinkers would be endlessly different. Love is what we use when we are talking of our significant other, our children, parents, friends, god and ultimately country. In siding with the way “people” talk about love, I suggest that they know what they are talking about when they are talking about love.
What is evident is that love is a figure of the self, or perhaps a certain configuration of the self that is at the heart, so to speak, of human sociability. It will not be exaggerated to say that it is the basic manner in which we relate to each other. As such it also at the heart of political discourse and feeling, not only as what defines of politics in form of the distinction between friend and foe, but as what binds the family unit into the socializing unit that it is. In fact what love is, is not a thing but a mechanism that transforms deliberate coercive power into a private matter, a space of ultimate freedom, irrational and imponderable. The unaccountability of love is precisely what makes it the most effective tool of social coercion, endowing us with unlimited freedom as we do the bidding of society and the state.
urisco 