Slavoj Zizek is insane. He is also brilliant. In the short clip from the documentary “Zizek!” Zizek contends that love is evil. Love is about excluding one thing to focus on another. A part of me wants to say, right on Zizzy! but then another part wants to say, wtf, mate?!
Love is exclusionary. We shift our focus to the object or subject of our affection and in so doing we necessarily exclude other objects and subjects from our gaze. Is this a violent act? Is it evil, as zizzy suggests? I think not. Can it lead to evil? Without a doubt.
There are two ideas at play here:
1. Love is necessarily exclusionary
2. By loving one thing more than an other, we do violence to that other.
I agree with zizzy on the first note, but I have to disagree with the second. To love is not a difficult thing. We experience the pangs of love everyday. We are continually disappointed by the actions of others which suggests that we expect certain things from the actions of others. We expect the world to be a kind and caring place. If we didn’t, there would be no disappointments. We are always prepared to love but the more we experience the world, the less we expect love and the less disappointed we allow ourselves to become. When we develop intimate relationships, though, we allow ourselves to openly express our love for the other and therefore, we open ourselves up to greater disappointment. While I may not be invested in the love I am able to have for everyday people, I can be invested in humanity and that means that I must be capable and ready to love another if that is what the situation calls for. Those who claim to love everyone are stupid hippies. We need to be able to refuse to love someone while at the same time acknowledge our capability and our capacity to love everyone. It is only by trying to love everyone that we actually do violence to others.
When I tell someone that I am in love with them, this is not a random act. It comes from an intimate knowledge of the other person and a willingness to struggle with this person. To love is to commit oneself to a course of action or to a person. If we make that choice erroneously, i.e. to love someone who you are not compatible with, we do violence to that person and to ourselves. Without an emotional, physical, or spiritual passion for another you find yourself performing a sisyphean task. It is a struggle to force the relationship to a point to which it can never go. So, yes, I prevent myself from loving a various strata of the population, but this has nothing to do with excluding them. It has to do with me not committing violence against them by not trying to develop a relationship when the situation clearly does not call for the relationship. If we are to love, we must fully understand the nature of the relationship we are entering into so as not to commit violence against our partner. This demands openly and honestly denying your love to some lest we do evil to those people and to our self.
I love you Ari.
Y’know, I think he’s saying that the violence of love is not that the rest of the world doesn’t get your love, but rather that loving someone is an eruption. We are expanded, blown-apart and opened in this focusing on another such that we are fundamentally unhinged from where we were prior to coming into love with that someone.
He hates the idea that we can just love the world and it’s all “a Coke and a smile” because this is a masking of love; a covering-over of the terrifying reality that love must entail: Yes, I will die, but so will the one I love, and heaven-help-us it could be that I die before my loved one and my loved one will have to live through the traumatic losing of their loved one.
In this sense love is Evil because it is the opposite of a dominant Western historical understanding that what is Good is perfection on an abstract plane and the reality we live is a muddling of this perfection. Love is accidental and in this way perfect. The perfection that unravels the (Christian Neo-)Platonic Perfection. Eve loved Adam but their love is called “Man’s Fall from Grace.”
On a separate note: this is the second or third time now when my thinking about the week’s theme has already been picked-up on by the group and now I must scramble-up a new angle. I think that’s awesome!
They run one of the most inconsiderate organizations close to.
I calculate tons of number gathering for these types of games because I think that history can show us what may happen in the future. As you may or may not know it may be hard to decipher the winning team in professional football. This is the main reason why I consider using statistics for basketball.