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“Get perfect love without suffering!”
This is the slogan for the French dating site Meetic back in 2009, and the philosopher Alain Badiou expressed his unease in an interview titled In Praise of Love:
“I am convinced that love cannot be a gift given on the basis of a complete lack of risk.”
For him, the risk-free approach to love is just like American war propaganda, advertising “smart” bombs and “zero dead” wars.
What is the risk of love in Badiou’s view then? What must we give up to truly love? Radical love, for him, starts with an encounter that triggers an event. This event is no small feat because it alters how we relate to reality on a metaphysical level.
When we’re truly in love after the radical encounter, we’ll no longer view the world from the point of view of “One”. Instead, everything will be filtered through what Badiou called “Two-Scene”, which is also the construction of a new way of looking at life shared by the two subjects.
But as sweet as “sharing a world” sounds, embracing the event is not risk-free. On some level, it calls for the death of the solitary consciousness. We risk losing ourselves. This idea usually causes deep anxiety and fear in us, but if we’re honest, it still carries a dangerous and seductive glow.
Byung-Chul Han attributed this dangerous glow of love to Eros. This region of erotics is full of dark uncertainties, yet it also injects great passion into our lives. And for Han, if we’re too wrapped up in safety and refuse the moment of rupturing into the “Two-Scene”, our romantic relationships will simply devolve into
“a mechanical and spatial side-by-side.”
The other person turns into a complimentary accessory that fails to animate us, and the negation of pain turns
“Love [into] consumption, which reifies the other into a sex object, [and it] does not hurt.”
Therefore, truly transformative love presupposes pain, attachment and on some level, the death of the self. But this death is temporary since there’ll always be a return to a purified self that marks great love. The trick here is to ride the wave and place faith in our partners, trusting that love will one day elevate us into different people, gazing into a different world.
As the Italian poet Marsilio Ficino had it:
“When you love me… and as I love you.. I recover myself, lost in the first place by my own neglect of myself, in you, who preserve me.”
Loved the quotes you picked for this short entry!
Using technical terms like "an encounter that triggers an event" sounds so mechanical I couldn't help but smile. Sounds a lot like dungeons and dragons to me 😁
This idea usually causes deep anxiety and fear in us.
Help me.