I haven’t posted much on my LA blog lately, but as my defense is tomorrow and I’m preparing my presentation for it I’ve gone back over some theory and I wrote a couple of brainstorms on love. A lot of it is poetically driven but I’ll tailor it later:
Love
Love is subjective: it involves emotions and feelings resonating within individuals. Love requires a “loving subject” and a “loved object”, correlaries of one another. The loving subject recognizes the presence of the other, the presence of the other as not the self, and is intrigued, experiences desire. Irigaray and the notion of love as submitting the other (the ”te” in “je t’aime” is a direct object not an indirect one) rather than travelling back and forth from subject to other and back again. The subject of love, the loving subject, is he or she who is the “I” of the love experience. All lovers are loving subjects and loved objects. Both simultaneously if they are lucky. The poet in-love, besides a loving subject is also a discursive subject. He is the romantic hero, the lyrical speaker, the I of the poem. He is the axis around which revolves the cycle. He orchestrates the loving affects of himself and the other (Deleuze and Guattari again Romanticism is the voice of the earth) He is in a position of power. Neruda’s “yo” is never the voice of the people, it is always the voice of “Neruda as the voice of the people”. Gioconda Belli on the other hand seems to have a more permeable “yo”. It is a “yo” that sees, touches, tastes and experiences the other joyfully while imposing very little on it.
Love is communitarian: Every love experience requires an “other” (Garcia article) even narcissism requires a mirrored reflection of the self upon which to project feelings. Love is an arrow nocked and pointing away from the self. The other is indispensible, even as she is sublimated into the emotional storm of the love experience. Love is the way in which the self opens to another and the way in which it establishes a territory (Deleuze and Guattari, ‘s description of the Sonata as a call and answer). Love involves the progressive construction of a territory, (the subject, couple, the family, the community, the nation. In heterosexual couples this can become a direct single-lineation. In other types of couplings this lineation can bypass the genetic element of family creation into community through other pathways. Catholicism tries to clean up the lines so that love becomes integrated at every level of the life-cycle, comb the lines straight and smooth like a little girl’s hair. All babies are born to parents who love each other and are born out of that love, they expand that love within the family outward to the community, then the nation, then the kingdom of God) Cardenal sees the revolutionary nation as love’s territory.
Loving the nation: What is the loved object in patriotism?. Is it a real object or an imaginary one (Anderson) is it an intangible object or a fluid one? Is the loved object always fluid in the mind of the loving subject? It varies as in marriage when one spouse surprises another by pulling out a sudden new or previously unknown element of her personality) the human being is itself a fluid thing, developing new characteristics in response to a fluid reality and dropping old ones like a snake sheds its skin. What does it mean to love one’s nation in this way? What does one specifically love about one’s nation?
Revolutionary discourse is informed at every level by love. But what is the loved object in revolutionary discourse? The revolution itself? Revolution is merely a transition not a fixed thing, though it may also be a territory. There are no permanent revolutions, a revolution involves a change from one system to another, from one form of government to another. The potential new nation that will be created? Revolution then would conceive itself as the courtship between the revolutionary and the new nation?
Love is discursive: Love is articulated in language through utterance, is injected into social discourse through the medium of poetry. Deleuze and the creation of a territory, the bird repeats its song to establish its territory. Love as an enormous discursive territory, Songbirds in isolation piece together their own songs from songs of others, so lovers (and poets) piece together a territory of discourse from fragments of social discourse (Barthes: “syntactic arias” Deleuze and Guattari’s construction of milieus from fragments of other milieus ). In the film “Il postino” Mario uses fragments of Pablo Neruda’s poetry to express his love to Beatriz. So do lovers speak to each other in the fragments they retrieve from love’s discursive territory, the only difference between Mario and other lovers is that Mario draws his fragments from one source (Neruda) while most lovers draw theirs from multiple deterritorialized sources. These arias not only shape the way in which loving subject and love object communicate with one another, they serve to shape the affect in the mind of the loving subject (Barthes again) (return to the subjective:….perhaps we might see this as a love-cycle: subject-community-discourse-subject)