Swayves of Love

A delineation of love into three streams:

i) Love as Amatory Crisis of Predilection

Herein, love is a predilection based on love of a singularity or particularity, a preference of a distinct one: I love this person, his face, his voice, his laughter, and none others.  Elaborated upon by Kristeva in Tales of Love where it is a subjective crisis which remakes boundaries of ipseity and threatens self-containment, where an ideal-image of an Other is idealized, fetishized and symbolic effort is spent in an attempted merging with the subjectivity of the other.

ii) Love as Sharing Impossibility (Micrology)

Drawing on Nancy's mini-lecture on "Love and Community," love is giving what one does not have: 

"[T]o give something that doesn’t belong to the realm of give–able things, neither that nor to give myself [which] means that love consists in giving something which is nothing. Nothing has to do with what is not a thing, not at all a thing — then what is not a thing, what is not an object? If you want, this is a subject. But this doesn’t really mean to give the subject, as the subject would be once again some thing that I would be. Love consists in my giving from me what is not mine in any sense of a possible possession of mine, not even my person. So to love means to give what is behind or beyond any subject, any self. It is precisely a giving of nothing, a giving of the fact that I cannot possess myself. [...] To give is to give up [...] To love is to share the impossibility of being a self."

 

iii) Love as Command of the Commune (Macrology)

Love of the community, in the community, 'loving thy neighbour' and a 'love' which extends to unknown others of the 'community' we have to live with (and not the individualistic loves of (i) and (ii) above).  Community is never simply geographical, but is some sort of being with; there is a community of Christians, of Edmontonians, of gay men, etc.  In dealing with the question of 'We', Nancy configures a collective version of his 'love as sharing impossibility' where the community shares the impossibility of common being.  The community is a being-in-common without common being. The crux is the "with" of "being-with" others which offers proximity (a closeness creating 'community') and distance where that distance is "precisely the distance of the impossibility to come together in a common being," to have a common substance.  Instead, community love is sharing the "with", sharing the no-thing (no substance, no property) in common, sharing just the being-in-common, the nothing, the space in-between.