In a previous post I began developing an object-oriented account of love. Building on this, we can ask, what is the ontological and philosophical significance of love? I wish I could take credit in answering this question, but my thoughts here are deeply influenced by Badiou. Despite the heteronormativity of his account of love, I do believe his theory of love is among the finest aspects of his thought. It will be recalled that for Badiou there are four conditions of philosophy: a doctrine of science or the matheme, a doctrine of politics, a doctrine of art, and a doctrine of love. Badiou’s aim– one which I share –is to think that present of the present. He wishes to think that which is most vital, most true, in the present. What are those truths, Badiou asks, that characterize the present of the present, the eternity of the present? What bit of the eternal and the universal do we manage to grasp in our present? Such is Badiou’s project.
For Badiou the aim is to think the compossibility of truths in these four domains. Compossibility is among the most profound concepts we inherit from Leibniz. In Leibniz’s thought “compossibility” refers to the way in which entities an events in the world hold or cohere together. For example, the world in which Nero did not persecute the Christians is incompossible with the world in which I exist. Had Nero not persecuted the Christians, a series of other historical events would have not taken place that led to my existence. These events include the presence and absence of particular human beings, the form that culture subsequently took, the way the environment was influenced over the course of this history, etc., etc., etc. In short, my existence is “compossible” with the world in which Nero persecuted the Christians. Had Nero not done this it’s unlikely that Christianity would have become the dominant religion in the West and I would not exist as the peculiar critter that I am. Would my parents have even been brought together without this history?
read on!
So it is with Leibniz’s conception of compossibility. In Badiou, the four domains– art, love, math/science, and politics –are to be thought in their coherence. The question is “what basic truth of being do they think or render available?” How are we to think the interrelation of these four conditions together in a present that is eternal and universal? Thus, for Badiou, the point is not so much to tell us what love or politics is– though he teaches us a great deal about these things too –but rather, the role of the philosopher is to think the manner in which these four domains disclose being in the present. What are they teaching us that is radically new? A doctrine of love teaches us not only, perhaps, what love is, but also about the very nature of being and truth.
From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, love seems to teach us two things: On the one hand, love is one of those relations of non-relation that teaches us the truth of withdrawal. Lovers, paradoxically, always withdraw from one another. In this respect, love, beyond all of its narcissistic illusions, teaches us primarily about withdrawal. In love the Two precisely are not alienated reflections of one another. Some will be familiar with he idea of alienated reflection from psychology under the title of “depersonalization”. In a state of depersonalization the person is no longer able to recognize themselves in their own image. I see an image in the mirror, but I don’t recognize it as my image. The diagnosis of depersonalization is the elementary matrix of much contemporary critical theory. What critical theory strives to teach us is to recognize our own alienated image in cultural artifacts and texts. It teaches us the lesson of depersonalization at the heart of culture: what we took to be natural and a property of things themselves is actually a depersonalized alienation of our own agency.
Yet in love things are different. The difference between love and fetishistic infatuation is that the latter encounters only its own depersonalized image, whereas the former encounters the withdrawal of the beloved. In a state of fetishistic infatuation I relate to the other only as a narcissistic reflection of myself. I am infatuated with the other because they reflect back to me myself in the light that I would like to be seen. By contrast, in love I encounter the difference between world and earth. I discover the fact that both me and my beloved share the same earth but inhabit different worlds or divergent series. As a consequence, I encounter the limits of my own world. Love, we might say, is “enantiomorphic’. It is an encounter with heterogeneous topologies that are neither complementary nor superimposible on one another. Lovers thus encounter each other as withdrawn. Insofar as their worlds are divergent, insofar as they are incompossible, the two opens on to the inassimable, non-consumable, beyond of narcissism. They enter into a relation of non-relation, into the absolute difference Lacan speaks of at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where this very divergence and difference becomes a creative spark that sustains the relation. The two become explorers of alien worlds without conquest on an earth. Instead there is an entanglement of withdrawn worlds, always barely sensed yet never grasped or comprehended, that becomes its own perpetual motion machine. Here the aphorism that all communication is miscommunication reaches its fruition. No wonder lovers delight in nonsense.
Love thus first teaches withdrawal insofar as it is an encounter with the inassimable. The work of love is the work of withdrawal or the forging of a relation with non-relation. Love is betrayed wherever it becomes consumptive, wherever it seeks to assimilate to the mirror. Love affirms itself when it proceeds as an encounter with the withdrawn, with the other, that can never quite fit within one’s own topology. And if love is ontologically important, then it is because in this encounter with the withdrawn it opens us to the withdrawal of all things from one another. Do not lovers begin to delight in the thingliness of things, in their sheer thingness or withdrawn alterity, oddly refusing to treat things as objects (in a vernacular distinct from that of OOO) or as that which can no longer be assimilated to a positing consciousness? No, lovers, in their own odd heteroverse, come to celebrate the sheer facticity of things like botanical gardens, no longer requiring them to be, mean, or be useful for anything. In this respect, all love is queer, for there is no complementary of the two– the whole force of the Two is their non-complementarity –nor generic sexuality. No, there is only this odd differential libido they build together with snippets of the world, politics, their history, their aesthetic encounters, their ethics, the foreignness of their bodies to one another, and on and on.
This truth of withdrawal is also the truth of the heteroverse. In discovering the twoness of the Two, the fundamental incommensurability of the Two, the Two also discover the inexistence of every totality. The discovery of the fundamental heterogeneity of world, earth, and worlds, the two discover that there are no totalities. There is no whole, no totality, that would bring everything harmoniously together. No, the Two discover the queer being of being composed of fractured relations of non-relation, where that non-relationality of the relation becomes the very impetus of their bond. It is this that leads to the second teaching of love.
Love teaches the independence of things from their relations. Badiou speaks of the endless fascination we have with love stories in plays, novels, and modern cinema. What is it that fascinates us so with these love stories? We are fascinated, I believe, with the manner in which lovers seem to escape the gravitational constraint of all their relations. Romeo and Juliet escape, for a time, the constraints of their family relations and the vicious feud between their families. Their relation of non-relation gives them the power to escape these material relations. In Punch Drunk Love the characters of Sandler and Watson escape their constraining family relations and neuroses. Likewise, in The Secretary Gyllanhaal escapes the reproduction of her family’s dysfunction upon her body, while Spader escapes his solipsistic fear of women. The queer couple takes on all of society to be together, alienating themselves form family relations, military positions, social sanctions, refusing to compromise on this relation of non-relation. The academic couple with distant positions live in solitude and loneliness for much of the year yet reconfigure their entire life to affirm their relation of non-relation. And then, of course, there are the failed lovers that continue to affirm the Two for the remainder of their lives despite the fact that their series have ceased to resonate. These would be the amorous celibates.
The Two are profoundly inventive in a way that exceeds all ecological and social relations save their queer relation of non-relation. Together, through their incompossible worlds, they invent something new together, departing from their ecological social and natural fixity to affirm this resonant relation of non-relation. What is thus discerned in love is the power to break with relation, to produce something other, different, and new, or to affirm the relation of non-relation for its own sake. Love is a space of mad, unreasonable parings that no one outside the relation of non-relation ever understands and that those dancing within the relation of non-relation fail to understand.
Larval Subjects . 
May 24, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Levi,
Ah, well, with all this reading of Leibniz it’s no wonder that you ascribe some sort of teleological agency to nature, and for that matter, the entire non-human universe. Certainly I would presume that the heteroverse of compossibilities that you would accept would probably be godless. But I don’t see how you derive the impossibility of a totality from Leibniz or even Leibniz as interpreted by Badiou, unless you’re following Deleuze’s old arguments against totality via the “body without organs.” For as Leibniz says in his “Confession of a Philosopher”:
A totality can account for all possible worlds, including the compossible ones which might actualize. A totality is simply something essentially homogeneous which leaves nothing out. The windowless monads of Leibniz are supposedly each substances, although behind them there is this Supreme Substance that is God. Any incommensurable difference between the various monad substances is eliminated, too, by the fact that the possibilities available to each monad reflect the totality of possibilities that will and won’t actualize.
As undialectical as he is, I infinitely (haha) prefer Spinoza’s definition of “substance” and his collapsing of the category of possibility with the category of actuality. Although he divides the “attributes” of substance or God into the old Cartesian split of res extensa and res cogitans, he is a substance monist through and through. Also, for the pre-Kantian metaphysicians, he is the philosopher of the totality par excellance. He describes a substantially homogeneous whole, in which the totality of the modes of God proceed immanently from geometric, efficient logic of causa sui.
So I’m kind of unclear how you proceed from the compossibility of the potential universes (there are an infinite number of possible ones, but only one actual universe) to a heteroverse that denies totality. The category of “totality” has received poor treatment of late, despite Zizek’s attempt to rehabilitate it. Even Zizek misconstrues Adorno’s opposition to the totality as a denial of the totality. But since Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs, the totality of things has had a dignity that no simple dismissal can get rid of. For with them, unlike the pre-Kantian metaphysicians Spinoza and Leibniz, the totality can be substantially homogeneous and yet include an entire range of internal contradictions, each of which is determinately negative of the other. Hegel concludes that the whole is the true, and so all of the internal contradictions that result in the Absolute affirms the rationality of the present, of the real. For Marx, of course, these internal contradictions linger, and serve to explain the present, but also the passage into a totally new society, purged of all contradictions.
May 24, 2011 at 5:47 pm
As a self-selecting amorous celibate currently seeking a quick and decisive terminus to her taxon, I turn to Spinoza’s Foundations of a Moral Life for words of praise and thanks to Levi for these ardent posts on Love. The philosopher writes:
“Self-satisfaction is indeed the highest thing for which we can hope, for, no one endeavors to preserve his being for the sake of any end. Again, because this self-satisfaction is more and more nourished and strengthened by praise, and, on the contrary more and more disturbed by blame, therefore we are principally led by glory, and can scarcely endure life with disgrace.”
I offer this amendment: “…therefore we are gloriously led in principle.”
May 24, 2011 at 6:04 pm
Ross,
I don’t attribute any teleology to nature, quite the contrary.
May 24, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Ross,
I only discuss Leibniz here to introduce the concepts of compossibility and incompossibility, not because I advocate his metaphysics. I’ve written quite a bit here on why there are no totalities or wholes. I draw these arguments largely from Badiou’s set theoretical meditations. You also seem to miss the whole point here about Love. The point is not that love demonstrates that wholes or totalities don’t exist. It’s that love brings us before the experience of the non-existence of wholes or totalities. A demonstration is something entirely different.
May 24, 2011 at 6:15 pm
I’ve been quite explicit that there’s no such thing as natural teleologies vis a vis the theological tradition. The claim that nonhumans are agents or actants in no way suggests that they act for the sake of ends or purposes. As I’ve argued repeatedly on this blog, I believe that acting for the sake of ends and purposes is extremely rare and requires specific conditions. In my view, even the vast majority of human actions can’t be characterized as teleological and people can go throughout their entire life without ever managing to act for the sake of an end.
May 24, 2011 at 6:27 pm
I think you must be misinterpreting the argument of this post, which is partially my fault as I use rather sloppy argument:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/more-on-the-domestication-of-humans/
I had hoped the references to Darwinian theory would have made my point clear. There is no teleology in evolution processes or directedness toward a goal in how these processes unfold. It’s a matter of chance, randomness, and natural selection. I am fully on board with that. Nonetheless, we do get the beginnings of a sort of intentionality in these processes in much the same way that a thermostat has features of intentionality in regulating air temperature in a room. That’s all. Any teleology that does emerge in the world is, for me, an effect of other processes, not a cause in its own right. The claim that pencil and paper are actors in a social assemblage is not the claim that they act for the sake of a purpose or goal (how could they?), but only the claim that they introduce substantial differences into the world and our actions that don’t simply result from us. That’s all.
For a sketch of my account of how goal directed activity emerges you might consult this post:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/freedom-evolves-deleuzes-transcendental-aesthetics/
You’ll note that I attempt to give an account of how goal directed activity emerges or evolves as an effect of certain developmental processes. I don’t treat it as a fixed or “natural” feature of these objects. I would ask that you please not attribute the absurd thesis that all objects have goals or ends to me. We can argue over the semantics of whether or not it’s appropriate to call entities that don’t have goals or ends “actants”, but I categorically am not suggesting that things like rocks or scissors have ends of their own.
May 24, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Levi,
All right, I’ve reread your post on “More on The Domestication of Humans.” I think my confusion was founded in your insistence upon a combination “unconscious teleologies” in nonhuman animals and human animals, as in the recent post on actants where you suggest that cows “intentionally” (yet unconsciously) domesticated us just as we “intentionally” (and probably more consciously) domesticated them.
I question the idea of a teleology without rational consciousness, an active understanding between means and ends. For if things merely appear to act purposively, but clearly do so in an unconscious fashion, the underlying reason that caused those things to attain the result that they did is not a causa finalis but a causa efficiens. Or, to use Kant’s language, you cannot ascribe purposivity or teleology to non-moral (natural) objects through the use of theoretical reason, but you can ascribe them an apparent purposivity in an act of reflective judgment (the second half of the Third Critique).
And I guess this brings me to my final point of contention. I have no problem with the notion of nonhuman agents or “actants,” performing actions with various competency. But then again, I can’t imagine that any materialist (even those who you deem “crypto-idealist”) would contend otherwise. For neither Marx nor the French materialists of the 18th century (Gassendi, Diderot, or de la Mettrie) would dispute the idea that nature is not simply dead matter, and all would agree that this matter is animated and effective due to a number of natural forces and processes. That these forces and processes “act,” albeit in a dumb, unconscious fashion, is not a controversial point.
These natural processes, operating according to their own set of laws and dynamics, can certainly influence human society in all sorts of ways. No one would deny that. And none of the materialists you dismissed as “crypto-idealists” would have ever entertained the belief that nature simply waited around passively for humanity to inscribe meaning on them. In fact, many of the productive and technical innovations of society were achieved through humanity’s calculation and instrumentalization of these active tendencies of nature. For example, some of the first large scale machines, windmills, operated through the impulsion of its wooden limbs by the activity of the wind.
May 24, 2011 at 9:55 pm
[…] a recent response to one of my posts, Ross writes: Ah, well, with all this reading of Leibniz it’s no wonder that […]
May 24, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Ross,
It takes an odd sort of materialist to evoke Kant in defense of ones claims! First, let me repeat, I do not attribute teleology to these processes. Second, I ask you to look carefully at yourself, your life, and how you yourself do things and then reflect carefully on this paragraph you wrote:
Perhaps I am just not a rational or moral being, but where, in all of our experience, do we ever encounter anything that resembles what you describe here? Where do we ever encounter this “active understanding between means and ends”, this “rational consciousness”, etc? When I set out to write something that decision is animated by a vague idea of what I’d like to write, but the process itself is riddled with all sorts of contingencies and forking paths such that I never know what I wanted to write until I write it. When I am in the midst of a situation demanding a moral response, I can’t recall ever having formulated something like the categorical imperative or having given some step by step analysis of how means are to be fitted to ends. Do I have values and aims? Sure, I suppose. Yet many of these are the result of a life of experience, a cultivation of a sort of sensibility, and are never anywhere clearly or rationally formulated by me. I can, through an act of self-analysis, enter into second-order observation of myself and attempt to become conscious of these values, to render them more precise, to abandon some of them, etc., but values and goals certainly don’t seem to originate in this way. What you describe here seems like a set of fictions wildly at odds with how our cognition actually works.
No, it’s not a controversial point, but that’s not the issue. The question is not whether it’s controversial, but whether this point actually makes it into ones theorizing. There are wide swaths of theory where such things scarcely make it into ones theorizing and where this simple point is not taken seriously.
This is where you go wrong:
First, the truth of a position is in how that position enacts itself in its development. One can insist up and down that they are materialists, yet if, in their analysis of the world, they’re perpetually returning to concepts, meaning, ideology, etc., as the prime movers, they are crypto-idealists. This is a very simple style of Hegelian argument I’m deploying here. Take Hegel’s Phenomenology. What is he constantly exploring? The manner in which the position says one thing of itself, yet ends up doing something very different in its deployment. The consciousness of sense-certainty says the “this”, the singular individual, is the ground of experience, but in its doing it only articulates abstractions or universals. The crypto-idealist says he’s a materiality, yet he only ever evokes concepts, meanings, ideologies, intentions, human purposes, etc., in his analysis of the world.
Second, and more importantly, it’s simply not true that the creation of something like the windmill is merely the result of human calculations and instrumentalization. That’s part of the story, but far from the whole story. In working with the wood, the sails, the gears, etc., the designers are forced to modify their design in all sorts of ways that were not intended by them. This is what I referred to as “endological” dynamics of technological development in my earlier post on fitness landscapes. Second, and more importantly, the question isn’t simply what the designers intended when designing the windmill. The more interesting question is how human lives and society are substantially modified as a result of the existence of windmills once they came into being. These changes in society were not intended by the designers and builders of windmills. They were not there in the original aim. In this instance, the Dutch become the actees of windmills with the windmills functioning as the actants. So long as you focus on human intentions and aims your analysis will entirely miss how the windmills function as an actant in the Dutch context, substantially modifying the fabric of their society, introducing new forms of social relations, new aims, new problems, etc., etc., etc.
May 25, 2011 at 1:32 am
I don’t see how Marx or I could possibly miss “how the windmills function as an actant” in society. The means or forces of production (windmills are means of production) transform society’s productive capacity, introducing new roles in the social division of labor.
May 25, 2011 at 1:36 am
I’m impressed Ross. That’s quiteman extension of the concept of production beyond the way in which you’ve so far been using. Returning to the Hegelian argument, I would say this is what Marx says production is, but it certainly isn’t how he actually analyzes production except in rare instances. Up to this point you’ve sounded like a Biblical scholar talking about Adam in the garden with your humancentric theorizing. Of course sadly, in making your argument, you do so theologically, referring to Marx as a divine figure that “couldn’t have possibly missed this”.
May 25, 2011 at 3:16 am
Levi,
I wasn’t saying so theologically. I was saying that neither he nor I could have possibly missed it. And I’m not sure where you’re referring to that he “rarely” analyzes production in such terms. Technical and organizational revolutions in production (the windmill would constitute a technical innovation in production, harnessing the “actancy” or whatever of the wind) obviously are a major factor in the more general revolutionizing of society. And I suppose that humans actively harness the natural “actancy” of coal by shoveling it into the burning pit engine and boiling water to create steam. Going over the fine points of this process is fairly pointless, though, when it can just be subsumed under the general heading of “technical innovation.” And this, plus improved social organization in the division of labor, is the whole impetus behind relative surplus-value. It’s a good 300 pages of volume 1.
May 25, 2011 at 3:24 am
Ross,
I think you miss the point. A theology arises not from positing the supernatural, but when one argues in such a way that a certain term or figure takes on a particular functional role in a thought assemblage akin to god. This is how you argue with respect to capital and Marx. These are your names of God.
May 25, 2011 at 4:12 am
Levi,
I know that’s what you were talking about, but obviously I don’t consider Marx infallible. He failed to predict the rise of monopoly capitalism and its political correlate of imperialism, but he nevertheless identified the fundamental logic of the capitalist social formation, its core. He was also incorrect about the “inevitable” pauperization of the masses, and was wrong to assume that the class struggle would continue to heighten in exact proportion to the advancement of industrial society. Obviously, organized labor has become largely depoliticized since reaching its zenith about eighty or ninety years ago.
May 25, 2011 at 10:27 am
“The difference between love and fetishistic infatuation is that the latter encounters only its own depersonalized image, whereas the former encounters the withdrawal of the beloved.” — Thanks Levi, exactly right.
I should point out that your encounters with Mr. Ross here are interesting in regards to withdrawal and nonsense.
I will say that your post is shy of acknowledging the significant ways that lovers strive to become one. Isn’t the pageantry of Union made poignant by the realization of withdrawal and Twoism?
The mythogenesis of Union is compelling and also tinged with heartbreak. We all know real life love stories where sudden death of a Beloved leads to the sudden death of the Lover. Perhaps living on the earth without the Lover/Beloved (resolver-of-nonsense) induces a severe case of depersonalization? Perhaps the death of one’s Beloved induces all the long-forgotten symptoms of early-onset neurosis so feared by the early Adolescent?
When Nietzsche declared the death of God in the marketplace, he pointed at those innocent bystanders and said “YOU killed Him!” There could no longer be such a Lover, or such a Beloved. If God cannot withdrawal from Man for lack of actual existence, who exactly is the object of Man’s affection?
For Nietzsche, Man must awaken to this call beyond God. Instead of Man the amorous celibate, Nietzsche hikes the mountains all day seeking the wisdom of true affection. Unfortunately he gets syphillis and calls himself God — which was a stupid thing to do.
…Alas, my thoughts ever stray…
May 25, 2011 at 12:09 pm
Plus, you only addressed the part of my post where I wrote that “I wasn’t saying so theologically.” You thereby failed to address the rest of the comment, in which I challenged your claim that Marx ignores the contribution of nature:
Even broader climatological events can significantly impact the yield of human production, particularly, say, in agriculture. This was especially important in the past, before we had invented a number of agricultural synthetics and biologically-modified organisms (BMOs), and thus added more stability to the amount of food regardless of the variance of the weather. But meteorological forces continue to play a large part in the agricultural process. A series of early and extremely severe winters will obviously have a lot to do with how much is eventually produced.
Basically, I’d say that your whole argument about the “crypto-idealist” materialists who ignore or “fail” to account for the agency of nonhuman processes is based on a strawman caricature of Marx and other materialists (even the mechanico-physicalist French of the eighteenth century). A large part of production will always involve the reshaping of natural materials, which very well might exert a force or vitality of its own in resisting its instrumentalization by labor. Another large part of production will always involve the harnessing of natural powers in the manufacturing of goods. Raw materials have all sorts of potential activity that can be profitably channeled and released through manipulation and so on; petrol and coal are just a few good examples of this.
May 25, 2011 at 12:29 pm
Ross,
I addressed your thesis earlier in the context of some remarks about windmills. I think Marx occassionally does a fair job on the issues I’m talking about, but the Frankfurt school theorists do not.
June 10, 2011 at 6:57 pm
[…] own ‘world’ (in the sense elaborated in Levi’s quite beautiful posts here and here), each entangled in the mesh. The entanglement of these two objects is not merely an affair that […]
September 3, 2011 at 11:16 pm
organizational theory…
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