Monogamy as unlimited intimacy: putting humanism on the line
What is otherwise a rather lovely song, is also a glimpse into affective politics and sociality. Powerful, pacing through riffs and opening up on the vast landscape of some latin american country, the Killers are on it, contemplating that time “when you were young” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff0oWESdmH0).
Monogamy is of course a value, highly treasured by many. It is also, as I want to argue, a form of unlimited intimacy, designed to yield the absolute, reverbating humanism’s central tenets: sociality through an evocation of what makes us human, effectuating the protection of one person against the many (only consider the statement of the lovers, conceptualizing themselves as being against the entire world - love in humanism is bellicistic, just like humanism itself, the epistemic framework, modulating the many affects that stem from it. Critiquing humanism hence also means to interrogate its affective politics, and conversely, to critique love means to put humanism on the line.
In humanism, only lovers are left alive, or so is generally being argued. Everything else may perish, but love upon invokation, can override anything: the narrative of 20th century Europe as opposing the terrible regime of forced marriages bears the brunt when it comes to the reificiation of love as integral to sociality: today, we may be who we wish to be and thus we love whom we wish to. The emerging paradox of the individual (being divided, yet single) aligns with love as affect, recalibrating the virtual and replacing the earlier adventus temporality of pre-modern times with a teleological temporality that necessitates new socialities in order to grapple the unbelievable: contingency, the collapse of totality. Thus, love now assumes a very delicate form: to serve and protect those who are willing to accept the new affective regimes from the onslaught of acceleration. Reminiscent of Plato’s old fable of the human as having been two beings at once in their nascent stage, marriage functions as the key catalyst in achieving love as sociality, indeed as our lord and saviour from the ruptures of the virtual. Humanism’s aspiration of a body politic is solidified, congealing with fear and dread. Monogamy is key here, since it allows for stable partnerships (or so is generally believed).
“The miracle of life is that we may observe stasis at all”
Stasis thus refigures and strongly opposes movement as the general phenomenon of life. Those who dare to deviate from the static symbolic, are punished: it is perfectly fine to extinguish those who cheat (whatever that is supposed to mean), for deviating from the protection that monogamy grants from the bogeyman contingency. An entire continent opts against the virtual, pleading for the contingent, turning it into the valid macrostructural referent of their form of life. Witnessing the iconoclash of the nineteenth century, perhaps this is only understandable. Strong people cried many a time back then; the 19th century, epoch of the larmenters.
Now, that we can observe the fall of humanism, it’s time to devise new emotions, to rediscover affects deemed problematic. I will opt for mourners. “Only mourners left alive” is the creed of the new aggregations that persist after humanism. For only if we cherish what is lost, acknowledge its vital character in subjectivity, only then we will be able to do away with monogamy.
Once again, the fetishized epistemes from the elsewhere of communication were right, and once again, modernity was wrong.
