I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Paris is plastered with posters for the Meetic internet dating-site, whose ads I find really disturbing. I could mention a number of slogans its hype uses. The first misappropriates the title of Marivaux’s play, The Game of Love and Chance, “Get love without chance!” And then another says: “Be in love without falling in love!” No raptures, right? Then: “Get perfect love without suffering!” And all thanks to the Meetic dating-site… that offers into the bargain — and the notion takes my breath away — “coaching in love”. So they supply you with a trainer who will prepare you to face the test.
I believe this hype reflects a safety-first concept of “love”. It is love comprehensively insured against all risks: you will have love, but will have assessed the prospective relationship so thoroughly, will have selected your partner so carefully by searching online — by obtaining, of course, a photo, details of his or her tastes, date of birth, horoscope sign, etc. — and putting it all in the mix you can tell yourself: “This is a risk-free option!”
Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love
Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is a French philosopher who has rejected the linguistic relativism typical of postwar French thought and instead sought to revive the idea of universalism and truth. He has been described as a Platonic communist, as he has argued for a return of communism as a political force.
Badiou’s In Praise of Love, a transcript of an onstage philosophical dialogue between Badiou and a journalist, critiques modern society’s commodification of love. He argues for love as a radical, transformative event that creates a new shared reality between two individuals. In this way, his work aligns with my work on recklessness in romance, and in love.
Badiou wrote the foreword to Byung-Chul Han’s The Agony of Eros (2012), which argues that our narcissistic society is eliminating the possibility of having genuine encounters with the Other, and thus destroying the possibility of love.
His work seems to prefigure Han’s, as he says in In Praise of Love that love leads us to an experience of alterity:
In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual flavours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference.
So not only does it allow us to experience what is different from ourselves in the world, it’s also a way out of self-interest.
I felt love as a way out of self interest last night. Ray has a surgical procedure scheduled for early November, and I felt such a surge last night of wanting to help, and be there for him as he recovers. It surprised me, because when my last boyfriend had a surgical procedure and asked for my help, I refused. I don’t know why exactly I refused. It’s embarrassing to admit that I did that. But that boyfriend and I didn’t have the same kind of love for one another that Ray and I do.
Ray gives to me freely, without ever treating our interactions as transactional exchanges. I think this is the first such relationship I’ve been in–though my eighteen-year marriage definitely had aspects of that as well. But I recall that my ex-husband and I became mired in our own selfish needs, and as well overwhelmed by the needs of our three children and our demanding careers. So I don’t think that relationship approached Badiou’s ideal so much as the one I’m in now.
Badiou argues against three contradictory philosophical interpretations of love
- The romantic interpretation, focusing on the ecstasy of the encounter
- The interpretation of love based on a commercial or transactional perspective, which says that love is a contract between two free individuals who are always aware of the necessary equality of the relationship with its system of mutual benefits
- The skeptical interpretation that says love is only an illusion.
He suggests, alternatively, that love “cannot be reduced to any of these approximations and is a quest for truth.”
What kind of truth does he mean? He says:
I mean truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity?
And:
[Love] is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentred point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity.
Here’s Badiou’s example of constructing the world from a decentered point of view, from the point of view of two:
When I lean on the shoulder of the woman I love, and can see, let’s say, the peace of twilight over a mountain landscape, gold-green fields, the shadow of trees, black-nosed sheep motionless behind hedges and the sun about to disappear behind craggy peaks, and know — not from the expression on her face, but from within the world as it is — that the woman I love is seeing the same world, and that this convergence is part of the world and that love constitutes precisely, at that very moment, the paradox of an identical difference, then love exists, and promises to continue to exist. The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze. Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world.
I think Ray and I felt something like that at the Hatch green chili stand last night. It was lightly raining, and the sky was grey. Federal was busy with heavy commute traffic, but it was like we had walked into another world when we entered the tent with its laundry baskets full of chilies of differing heats, and other produce and items for sale. Two people staffed the tent, an older man with bad teeth and a great smile, and someone to roast the chilies in a big drum. While we waited for our chilies to be ready, I read about getting their peels off after thawing them. We picked out a jar of green chili salsa to take with us. We were each at the chili stand individually, but also there knowing the other was experiencing it too.
I don’t know how many years Ray has gone and bought Hatch green chilies at stands when they show up in Denver in the fall, but it was something I learned about him close to the first time we met. He told me how he likes to make his own green chili, with pork, and of course the Hatch chilies he would buy every October and put away in his freezer for later use. He told me about how he once accidentally made a chicken soup so hot his friends could hardly eat it.
After we bought the chilies, we drove to King Soopers and I picked up ingredients to make nachos: tortilla chips, ground beef (we agree on 80/20 over 93/7), a packet of taco seasoning mix, avocados and cilantro for guac. At my house I made the nachos while he investigated my gas fireplace, which wasn’t lighting. It felt to me like the birth of the world that Badiou describes: not just an experience but a joint construction. My house was cold, as I haven’t turned the heat on yet though it dipped into the 40s yesterday. But broiling the nachos and being together warmed us up.
We ate the nachos, together having figured out what to do next to get the fireplace to light, and Ray asked why supermarket salsa couldn’t taste so good as the jar of salsa we picked up at the chili stand. I was wondering the same thing. We drank a Harvey & Harriet Paso Robles red blend. The avocados were perfectly ripe for the guacamole, and its smooth richness complemented the roasted chili salsa, the salty browned chips, and the melted cheese (of which there wasn’t enough!)
It was world construction at its most delicious, and most soulful.
Badiou says, “Love is not simply the experience of the other. It is the construction of a world from the point of view of two.”