Between you and me: On Love, Ethics and Poetics
“The poem is the realized love of desire that has remained desire” (René Char)
My interest in the question of love, examining philosophically and psychoanalytically what it means to love another person, initially grew out of an experience of interruption and shock – a sense of having no choice but to submit to a profound loss which radically put into question my relationship with myself as well as the one I loved.
Coincidentally, at that time, I was taking a course on Freud called ‘Love and its Vicissitudes’, and another in which we were reading the works of Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade and Pauline Réage. Needless to say, the question concerning the nature of human relationships and the powerful bonds of love and hate, around which these relations are seemingly organised, were deeply inscribed in my mind. I wanted to try and begin to understand what are the psychosocial mechanisms that inadvertently shape our modes of relationality today, and fuelling my inquiry throughout this time was the wish to learn more about the psychic and social origins of love.
It was at this point in my studies that my reading of Emmanuel Levinas, arguably one of the greatest ethical thinkers of the 20th century, assumed a new light. I was captivated by his unique thoughts on the ethical encounter and happy to have finally discovered a philosopher who was passionately devoted to an exploration of the non or pre-conceptual dimensions of human existence, so often neglected in classical philosophy. The visceral language with which Levinas articulates our primordial relation to the other person is extraordinary and in my mind it seemed to resonate with a poetic sensibility that I find in literature and art. By drawing attention to the absolute otherness of human relationships – that is to say, the paradoxical mode in which they signify outside the realm of conceptualisation – Levinas opened up for me an entirely new way of thinking about the nature of relations which appear to resist knowledge. As such, his writings seemed to offer an exciting opportunity to discuss human relations in view of their poetic qualities, in other words, to speak of love as a drama of relationality.
Love, that strange and seductive word and most elusive phenomena to have preoccupied and inspired mankind. Depletion and fulfilment, fear and fascination all dwell within the same conflict-ridden space, where feelings of tenderness and passion are often mixed with hate; ecstasy borders on agony and idealisation can harbour aggression. We are beguiled and bemused by the power it holds over our being, drawn toward its delights and darkness. Whenever we try to unravel the reality of a loving experience we notice how the singular logic of love slips through the psychic web of cognition and confronts us with a mystery. Faced with the attempt to examine what is perhaps the most ambiguous question of all – the nature of human love – we find ourselves pushed to the very limits of rational thought.
However we choose to think of love, be it as a cocktail of chemical reactions in the brain, the expression of divine benevolence or an obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, the question as to why we love, whom we love, how we love and fail to love, never quite translates into quantitative terms. Indeed, as so many poems brilliantly testify, nothing is ever clear-cut in the realm of love.
Rather than trying to provide an answer to the question of what is love, I would like to focus our attention onto the ethical significance of the ambiguity engendered by the experience of love. Perhaps there is something unique about the ambiguous nature of love as such – the pull toward life and creativity and the concomitant force toward its contradictory components, destruction and death, that makes ethics possible in the first place. In which case, we can begin to see how some of the social and economic mechanisms in today’s culture, such as the tendency to privilege understanding and identity at the cost of ambiguity, might deplete the poetic condition required for ethical love.
Under the present authority of scientific and technological progress, many aspects of contemporary life are crafted to be shared by the public eye, leaving little scope for question or the chance to venture into unknown space. To quote Jean Baudrillard in The Agony of Power (2010), we are sacrificing ‘this symbolic reserve of incompleteness in favour of a totalization of life through technology and a depletion of all desire’. The dominance of measurable research and evidence based practice is widespread, even within the humanities. And despite that issues of privacy in our age of technology have received ample media attention, there has minimal consideration of the ontological assumptions upon which these popular debates are founded. Are we in the process of concealing that which defies the laws of rational understanding and control, namely the mysteries of love itself?
As a way of approaching these questions I will begin by briefly examining some of Levinas’ central ideas. Against the traditional philosophical doctrines, he advances the radical claim that our ethical relationship with another person is asymmetrical and non-reciprocal. What Levinas means by this is that when I encounter another person, I enter into a relationship with a living human being who is irreconcilably different from me and unable to be subsumed under universal concepts. The other person, be it my friend, loved one, a stranger or my worst enemy, cannot be resolved into images or ideas, and is irreducible to consciousness. In Levinas’ words, as soon as I enter into a ‘face-to-face situation’ with this other person, ‘I am for the other in a relationship of deaconship: I am in service of the other.’
For Levinas then, the ethical is never simply a matter of experiencing values or adhering to a specific set of moral codes and prescriptions. Quite the contrary, my responsibility toward the other ‘slips into me’ before I even have the chance or choice to consider it. Responsibility is unconditional and ‘The moment one is generous in hopes of reciprocity, that relation no longer involves generosity but the commercial relation, the exchange of good behaviour’. In other words, as soon as I freely consent to a decision – consciously assume an ethical stance toward the other – I have already distanced myself from that person by assuming a position of authority (for instance, trying to judge if the person is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or whether or not to help him or her).
Ultimately, what Levinas seems to be suggesting here is that from the comforting site of self-consciousness, we are always capable of taking command of the situation as best suits our own interests and needs. He explains that in favour of self-possession and control, mastery has therefore always been privileged at the cost of our unconditional ethical responsibility. But unlike the self-contained Kantian agent who stays ‘free from any bond with what remains present to it’, in the ethical relationship, my sense of identity as a coherent and unified subject is destabilized and I lose the self-assured stance that keeps me at a secure distance from the other – not too close but not too far. For Levinas, the face-to-face relationship with another person is ethical insofar as it forces us to escape the self and approach the unknowable other in their infinite distance and difference.
Bearing these thoughts in mind, I would like to shed light on the work of another extraordinary writer and thinker, Maurice Blanchot. In The Work of Fire (1949), he writes the following: ‘we feel and sometimes regret that poetry, far from reconciling the elements of language, puts infinity between them, to the point where we have to believe that the words it uses have no meaning whatsoever, and the meaning it aims for remains beyond all words.’ In this passage, Blanchot articulates beautifully how poetry exposes us to an experience which cannot be grasped by reason, and before which I lose all my powers to comprehend, categorize and own the world in thought. Within the space of poetry, the gap between word and meaning remains open, and things are transformed into what cannot be grasped. As if by magic, the world described in the poem is disclosed precisely by not being entirely unveiled.
Whereas the speech of everyday language aims to achieve clarity and certainty, the writing of poetry is juxtaposed, defamiliarized, reinvented and split, disrupting the straight line from word to meaning. In poetry, as Blanchot points out, language ceases to function merely as a means of communication through which we take control over our existence and acquire knowledge. As a matter of fact, by depriving me of my ability to master things in thought, poetry instead obliges me to confront an experience which cannot be synthesized and therefore does not belong to me. Poetry opens us to the mystery of the other.
‘Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry’ . According to Theodor W. Adorno, the Age of Enlightenment initiated a conceptual rationale wherein the processes of rationalization and abstraction were held to be the ultimate means of establishing truth and liberating man from fear of the unknown. Today, while the economic and technological powers strengthen their stronghold across the neoliberal world, it seems that many of these Enlightenment ideals continue to dominate large parts of modern thought, fuelling a monolithic adherence to classical notions of truth, love and autonomy.
When Levinas declared that ‘escape is the need to get out of oneself’, he was no doubt pointing toward the ethical relationship. In his early but seminal book, On Escape (1935), he writes that ‘Escaping is the quest for the marvelous, which is liable to break up the somnolence of our bourgeois existence’. His urgent emphasis on the intrinsically asymmetrical nature of the ethical relationship alerts us to the existing dangers in our pursuit of unity and understanding. The desperate attempt to achieve communion and communication in all aspects of contemporary life, including the political, cultural and social, invariably ends up suppressing the multiplicity of existence and violently reducing the otherness of our fellow human beings.
By turning up side down some of our most established views of ethics and subjectivity, Levinas illuminates how the value of love lies in its negativity. I quote, ‘the very value of love is the impossibility of reducing the other to myself, of coinciding into sameness’. The truth is, he argues, that ever since Plato, through to Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, love has traditionally alluded to the desire for serene union and fusion. As a result, non-coincidence and difference have come to symbolise undesirable states of deficiency or lack that we try to avoid. Think of the vast culture of online matchmaking and dating apps today; how it implicitly ensures as little a risk as possible of rejection or discrepancy of interests between two individuals.
The question is, how do we love another person without intruding upon his or her differences in a society where we are deemed to embrace a relentless chase after individual autonomy, recognition and stability? Levinas encourages us to see that man’s relationship with the other is better as difference than as unity. For those of us who seek love as a perfect union and reconciliation, the other will never be anything but limit and menace, a threat to the stability of self. Unfortunately, in a world where every demand is met by a different option or consumer product, the creative nature of lack is often disregarded and the self-sacrificing or shattering moment in loving relationships is forgotten.
Much like the best of poets, Levinas shows us that permanent desire and non-fulfilment are integral characteristics of human love. In the face-to-face encounter with another human being, and in poetry, we enter into a relation with the other that interrupts the dialectical movement of signification and exceeds reason. For Levinas it is the lack of certainty in the ethical encounter – and Blanchot adds to this the poetic encounter – that awakens our desire for what cannot be satisfied and concerns us in such a way that neither self-interest nor personal need is involved. Responsibility is dangerous; but it is also adventure. As Levinas affirms in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1978), ‘the proximity of the neighbour in its trauma does not only strike up against me, but exalts and elevates me, and in the literal sense of the term, inspires me’.
My personal story of loss and sadness opened me up to the simple but profound truth that ethical love, as opposed to the state of being in love, depends on the renunciation of our primitive wish for reconciliation and fusion (as psychoanalyst Michael Balint would say, the wish to be loved and desired exclusively by the other without having to respond the other’s unique demands). Having been the object of a young man’ idealised love, I finally realised that to deny your beloved the opportunity of withstanding and surviving the unavoidable moments of hate and destruction in human relationships, is the same as to deprive them of a personal subjectivity and block their entry into a reality in which they too learn to accept the other as a similar but fundamentally other human subject. In truth, by hiding any signs of disappointment and suppressing his own demands upon my behaviour, both of us – the fearless princess and her loyal prince – remained caught within the aggressive patterns of a primitive love in which we were unable to tolerate the periods of contradiction, uncertainty and loss. Strange as it may sound, by virtue of my being thrust unwillingly into an utterly new and hurtful reality by the one I loved, at last I was given the chance to mourn the painful loss of my childish omnipotence. Only then did the other person to whom I now felt endlessly responsible, become real, that is, both loved and hated.
Levinas taught me that loss and suffering are basic conditions of responsibility and our openness toward the other. This is not to say that love is pure selflessness or giving, as Levinas at times would seem to believe, but nor is it the complete satisfaction or harmony that is commonly assumed today. Love signifies a relation between two individuals, which involves a poetic movement of impossible fusion and constant tension within and between the self and other. Through overcoming periods of loss we learn responsibility and the humility of accepting disappointment, that is to say, to respect the other’s individual existence and allow the one we love a mutual space of freedom in which to create and contain the paradoxical drama of love.
This essay was published in May 2014 for The ADC*E Essay Series – Issue 1. It was designed and curated by Folch Studio on the occasion of the 1st European Creativity Festival and produced thanks to Arjowiggings Creative Papers. Illustrations by Ángela Palacios.
Parts of this essay were written for my paper ‘The Birth of the Ethical Subject’ which I presented at The Society for Existential Analysis Conference ‘Love and Hate’ in December 2013.