The Dialectic of Eros

I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.

I’ve been reading various theorists on love, including Han, Zizek, hooks, Lacan, Badiou, Nussbaum, and others. But all fail to satisfy me in my quest to find some framework that makes sense of and draws insight from my own experiences, where I pursued love so recklessly that I literally almost died in the process.

This morning, I chatted with ChatGPT about these various thinkers and their theories on love to try to come up with some idea I wanted to share today, from just one thinker. But instead of sharing any one theory, I feel the urge to come up with a new framework, one that isn’t borrowed from someone else, but instead represents my own thinking and my own experience of love. This is the work of my life, perhaps only because I feel that if I don’t turn this into philosophical truth then I’ve wasted a lot of time (and created a lot of destruction) through my quest for eros.

Here’s poem from Rumi that will serve as the source of the epigraph of my book, and, to me, sums up my own approach to pursuing love:

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong,
consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.

Having died of self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.

In this poem, I find what I think about love: that it can provide a kind of dialectical force in a life, where you start as yourself, you meet the Other, and you become something new, via Aufhebung (sublation). Hegelian sublation involves simultaneously canceling and preserving something, lifting it to a higher level of existence or understanding within the dialectical process. A self who underwent sublation via love would be at once negated but also still herself, preserved through contradiction at a higher level.¹

What I remembered from my studies of Hegel is the idea that you start with a thesis, you move to the opposite—the antithesis—, and then you get to a synthesis. But this isn’t exactly what Hegel proposed. “Synthesis” is the term later commentators such as Fichte used. Hegel’s sublation is apparently messier. It keeps something essential from both of the prior stages, cancels what doesn’t work, and produces something qualitatively different.

In pursuing love in the form of eros, you don’t always get sublation, I think. Sometimes it leaves only ruin. Sometimes it leaves just a wound that does not heal. This, in fact, is what Lacan (and Žižek after him) might say: love is not about perfect synthesis or sublation — it sometimes creates a wound that never closes. That’s the wager. You might get a new version of yourself. You might just leave a trail of destruction in your wake (as perhaps I did when I wagered that moving in with one boyfriend was a good idea, thinking we were going to be something better together).

Here’s what ChatGPT proposed as a summary of what it and I discussed:

Love is a wager.
Not reason, not profit, not the tidy exchange of two balanced halves. Love is reckless: it risks dissolution, it risks ruin, it risks the undoing of the self who dares it. To love is to gamble without guarantee — to place oneself in the hands of an Other who cannot complete us, but who can undo us and thereby make us otherwise. Love consumes; it is unabashed in its excess. It does not calculate outcomes. It wagers everything for the chance of transformation. And even when it destroys, its truth lies in the risk itself — that only by wagering the self can we discover what it means to live beyond the bounds of reason.

There are many ideas in this I’d like to dig into including:

The “tidy exchange of two balanced halves” — I’ve seen many people including myself seek a balanced transactional exchange in love, and I haven’t seen it work well if both people expect that it will be balanced.
If you don’t pursue love with recklessness you are not going to get the dialectic of love. You might get a decent, practical relationship though. It’s the recklessness that allows you to negate yourself, truly experience the Other, and undergo annihilation to make room for the new version of yourself.
Love consumes — parts of your life and yourself will be consumed in the process. They will be destroyed and disappeared.
It does not calculate outcomes — “should I have an affair that may destroy my marriage with 30% likelihood?” That’s not a calculation someone who falls in love with someone outside their marriage is going to make.
What you are wagering is not just the form of your life as it exists now but your very self. You are putting your self on the line for love. You may go up in flames.

ChatGPT also proposed a “credo” to go with this summary:

Love is a wager that risks ruin without profit, consuming us so we may become otherwise.

But ultimately I did profit from moving in with that boyfriend, because what sublated out of it was indeed a new version of myself, one which lived alone and owned her own large golf course house, had her own painting studio, and, importantly, realized that her art was not only about herself, but was about other people too. That was a hard lesson to learn, even though it might seem obvious or perhaps even trivial.

So perhaps love is a wager and you know you will be changed, but in ways that you don’t expect. In that way it’s not a regular bet where you know the possible outcomes (I bet in this blackjack game and either I’m going to win some money or lose some).

Maybe it’s not a bet or wager at all?

I like better than the “love is a wager” concept the idea of love (specifically the eros kind of love) as a dialectic, so I might pursue that: eros moves, negates, and reconstitutes:

The dialectic of love is the movement of eros through contradiction. It begins in the rush of union, the reckless certainty that desire can complete what is lacking. Yet every union carries its own undoing: betrayal, excess, or the simple impossibility of fusing two into one. Love therefore negates itself, exposing the fracture at its core. But from this negation, a transformation becomes possible—not a return to the old self, nor a perfect reconciliation, but the chance of becoming otherwise. Love creates and consumes, wounds and remakes; its truth lies not in resolution but in the restless passage between joy and loss, possession and absence, ruin and renewal.

And here’s an aphoristic version:

To love is to enter a dialectic where joy and ruin are inseparable.

I think this even starts to make a framework for my marriage itself; it contained the seeds of its own ruin and its power to change the people involved from the start.

I see here this might provide a title for a self-portrait I’m working on, which is myself but sort of better, via a color palette that is striking and, I think, appealing. It could be titled Sublation or Aufhebung. ↩︎

Day 105 of 1000: The dialectic of eros