Some thoughts about the liberation of love and sex
A friend recently send me a video from Slavoj Žižek where he evolves the thesis that love in the meaning of Eros, of passion, erotic love is perceived as a "catastrophy" by claiming the in love falling totally. However, in the following I am a bit lost and I think he would need more (speaking) time to evolve his hypothesis without gaps - still there are many interesting new ideas branching. A big issue is that he starts to talk about sex and opens up a new topic but missing the connection and partly mixes it up - talking about love and then sex, which might be on purpose but in my opinion couldn't hold. For whoever interested there is a much upranked comment currently in second place giving a summary of what he might have wanted to say.
So, I cannot comment fully on Slavojs hypotheses but that's also not the aim of this spontaneous text. It's about a passage from Philipp Roths "The human stain", a very strong scene which I remembered as in it Coleman Silk questions the separation of love and sex. This is in particular strong as love was and is often perceived separated from sex or if connected love comes first, then the sex (maybe even solely after marriage) with the ultimate substitution of sex by "making love". Opposite to this, Coleman Silks thesis puts sex in the first place - not ultimatively as it is still formulated as a question but more is not necessary. It is enough to open up a space, it has not to be the ultimate solely truth. And I like this as in the end we are biologic species put under a biologic regimen, a regimen of the body, a regimen of what we are. Therefore, there is nothing to put on top, no thought out of which love or sexual behaviour is formed. It is reverse formed by our bodies and the bodies are formed by evolution. An important aspect of this is the transfer of genetic information to the next generation, the survial of the species. Sexual desire and sexual thoughts are a realm formed by this force, and they are a forcefull realm.
However, this doesn't speak against sex as "making love", a layer on top of it beyond a simple transfer of information (is it simple? Actually, I think it is not - to transfer genetic information is without anything prior given something quite complex). Sex and any kind of physical contact can be used to exchange emotions and feelings between each other, strengthening the bonding.
And there is another layer in Roths text. There is the abolition of a "natural order" of things to happen or a "natural connection" of love and sex. There is first sex. But then - opposite to a theory of sex being separated from love, which is hold through the book in form of the affair between Faunia Farley and Coleman Silk for quite a long time, in fact still hold up by Faunia within that same scene (with the ambiguity that she knows that he falls in love by this pointing towards her maybe also wanting it somehow) - there is love. By Faunia dancing, reviving a memory of another girl in Coleman, a girl called Steena which used to dance for him after he picked her up and an affair evolved also imprinted with a strong personal bonding (and in fact, this can be read in parallel too as Coleman thriving, "feeling young" again, this thesis being enforced by Faunias characterisation of him as being a "schoolboy"), another dimension of this character is introduced, who is mainly perceived as a sexual one, a woman having something in her making her different within the sexual dimension, and Coleman is the first one seeing it:
"He's never seen me dance like this, he's never heard me talk like this. Been so long since I talked like this, I'd have thought I'd forgotten how. So very long in hiding. Nobody's heard me talk like this.
The hawks and the crows sometimes in the woods, but otherwise no one. This is not the usual way I entertain men. This is the most reckless I have ever been. Imagine."
There are so many dimensions in this text, which makes it beyond a fine language to great literature. In example, there is the dimension of Faunia as a tragic and strong figure, the dimension of the trauma being sexually abused as a child. Many layers making this essay to long. But I want to shortly pick this up, as it shows the perspective of being sexualised as a woman besides the destructives elements of sexuality: Faunia evolves into a woman and evolving into a woman is simply evolving into fuckability, a "pussy on legs" (which is not a quote but a figure, or a changed figure of "a body surrounding a pussy", which is now a quote in fact). And Coleman sees something else. He sees a woman dancing, a woman teaching him - the professor, a woman with a lot of life in her, so "easy" to fall in love with.
And this is what they do: After the affair, against all attempts of Faunia against love, maybe even against emotion themselves, perhaps enforced or founded in her traumas of abuse and loss, Faunia will fall in love too. Coleman wants her to stay for breakfast but she drives out, drives to a raven on a mountain in a hut where animals are kept, a raven she likes to talk to. She escapes the offer and tries to find back to herself, to order her thoughts. But then she drives back, drives to Coleman - oppossing Slavojs passion for "love as betrayal" based on John le Carrés "A perfect spy". Love doesn't has to be betrayed but to be embraced (still, love might require betrayal in other situations - or betrayal of Faunias values she tried to keep up until almost the end like the value of never falling in love or her view on love).
Faunia is a very strong character, surviving rape, abuse and life itself including the death of her children what she even might could have prevented if not having sex with a man that time. She also escapes her husband, a vietnam veteran, who violently abuses her and in the end kills her and Coleman by letting the car of them drift off the highway.
Which I write in the end as he is the opposite of Faunia - his trauma eats him alive and he never surpasses it. He turns away from life while Faunia survives and tries to live somehow letting things get the past - not in a easy way but with all the hardship connected with it. Still, with finding love again returning to an even easier or somehow easier form of living. Her former husband Lester instead doesn't have this strength and furthermore doesn't have the strength to let others live. He puts himself in his own centre, puts himself in the centre of the world justified by his trauma becoming a dark hole.
