The Metaphysical Case for Love
Love has to be rescued from the love-industrial complex
The following is the third of my tripartite essay series on love, why it matters and the dire need for love’s reinvention. You can read part two here. This is the most philosophically dense piece in the series, so brace yourself.
Our culture endlessly speaks of dating, yet rarely of love. Partly, the reason is the death of sincerity and our overall apathy towards life expected in a culture void of metaphysical foundations. Most of us live innocuously; as the saying goes, we approach life by “not touching it with a ten-foot pole.” Ours is the time of nomadism. We’re cosmic couch surfers; seldom do we commit to anything or anyone, be it a political struggle, one’s family or a passionate romance. We’d prefer “my freedom” over being bothered by the messiness of an engaged and all-consuming life—but as Marxists understood, the freedom we speak of is a pseudo-freedom to sell our labour, succumb to the demands of the market economy and be a consumer, that is, the freedom to be a slave to capitalism1.
Love also is difficult to speak of because it only makes sense in retrospect. Doesn’t Søren Kierkegaard’s best-known saying, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,”2 apply the most to love? There, perhaps, isn’t anything more unfathomable than love. Falling in love is a bizarre experience because it always hits you by surprise; thus, it’s aptly called a “fall” in English (or “tomber amoureux” in French). You may be casually dating someone for a while, and suddenly, you realise you’re in love. And afterwards, you attempt to rationalise and retrospectively give meaning to your fall. Yet the point of love is that despite it appearing to be pre-destined, the fall always comes first; it’s fully contingent and unplanned. Therefore, within eros, romance has no technical strategy. The secret of love is that there’s no secret. Such is why Slavoj Žižek says the modern dating approach is flawed:
“The problem with online dating is that it automatically involves an aspect of self-commodification or self-manipulation. When you date online, you must present yourself in a certain way, putting forward certain qualities. You focus on your idea of how other people should perceive you. But that’s not how love functions, even at a very simple level. The English term is ‘endearing foibles’ - an elementary ingredient in love. You cannot ever fall in love with the perfect person. There must be some tiny small disturbing element, and it is only through noticing this element that you say, ‘But in spite of that imperfection, I love him or her.’”
So self-help books, dating, and relationship coaches are useless in attempting to make romance a tactical game, epitomised in the ‘self-commodification’ done by users of dating apps. If all of poetry, literature and cinema has shown us one thing since time immemorial, authentic love has no recipe to be conveniently followed. Does this mean speaking of love is futile? No. Because as Peter Rollins writes with a twist on the famous Wittgensteinian proposition3, “That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.” (How (Not) to Speak of God, p. xii) Love, not unlike God, is inexhaustible; therefore, it ought to be spoken of for eternity.
Now more than ever, philosophers, poets and artists must tackle the subject of love. It shouldn’t be left to be exploited by capitalism and violated by its actors of the love-industrial complex, e.g., dating coaches and apps, pop psychology and self-help books, relationship podcasts, pickup artists, etc. Albert Camus famously wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. [...] If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living.” (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, p. 1) Coincidently—since it’s been a predominant reason for people committing suicide—love, too, ought to be placed in the position of suicide as a philosophical question. Camus continues, “Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon.” (Ibid., p. 2) Similarly, love, in our times, is dealt with psychologically and scientifically through neuroscience, neuropsychology, sociology etc. And this mechanisation of love is to our own peril.
A case in point is when psychologist Dr Shannon Curry testified in the spectacle of the Depp v. Heard trial: notwithstanding her necessary role in evaluating the parties for legal and judicial proceedings, she seemingly played the role of a high priestess for the general public, where her truths are absolute, especially in matters of romance and love. Of course, neither Curry nor anyone else explicitly states this, but what matters for critical analysis is what is NOT said over what is formally proclaimed. Society tacitly accepts what public-facing psychologists like Curry (or, more politically, Jordan Peterson) says to be truths about being as such—that is, ontology, the study of the fundamental nature of reality. The psychologisation of existence is distinctly manifest in our times. So when a psychologist makes claims on love (or politics), for instance, we subliminally accept these as metaphysical truths, i.e., when Curry was a guest on Lex Fridman’s podcast, she went on to describe falling in love as being “high on heroin” due to the “chemicals pumping in your brain” since she does NOT stipulate her statements with “this is only a neuropsychological view”4 we implicitly take her views to be absolute and boil down love to be a neuroscience of sorts; there’s no room for the unknown, and no further speculations are allowed or worse are considered a waste of time if they don’t serve the aforementioned love-industrial complex.
It was Fyodor Dostoyevsky who critically delineated the phenomena of “psychologising” the human condition best. In The Brothers Karamazov, during Dmitri Karamazov’s trial after being accused of patricide for murdering his father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov’s defendant, Dmitri’s attorney Fetyukovitch, says he was forewarned in St Petersburg, “that I should encounter here as my opponent a deep and most subtle psychologist, who has by this quality long acquired by merit an especial reputation in our still young juridical world.” (p. 927) and continues sardonically, “But profound as psychology is, it’s a knife that cuts both ways.” (Ibid.) In other words, psychology allows us to interpret the same facts in different ways or in a way that suits our pre-held beliefs; ergo, we should be wary of treating the discipline as a whole form of truth because it too, like all human practices, is placed within an ideological structure. During Dostoevsky’s time, forensic psychology was a discipline in nascent forms, and he had a great interest in how it was practised in the Russian courts5; if he were alive today, he’d have similar comments about the Depp v. Heard trial. He wouldn’t find fault with science or the practice of psychology; in fact, he’d laud the findings of psychoanalysis. (Nota Bene. Dostoevsky heavily influenced Sigmund Freud with his theories.) Yet he would be critical of ego-psychology, today’s prevalent form practised in the Western world. And being the romantic Dostoevsky is, he’d find the desire to reduce the human condition to an essence within the bounds of any academic discipline asinine. The point being is yes, love is a psychological phenomenon, but it is that and much more.
To love in all its beauty and terror is the epitome of human existence, so if there’s one thing philosophy needs to tackle, it’s what love entails. All the rest—whether or not Artificial General Intelligence is possible, whether capitalism or socialism is the viable system for our times—comes afterwards. ‘What is love?’ is the question worth asking till the end of time.
Love Is Pouring from an Empty Cup
We live in an ‘Achievement society.’ To paraphrase Peter Rollins qua Byung-Chul Han: today’s religion is that of pure positivity. Contrary to the psychoanalytic insight, society tells us (wrongly) we’re NOT castrated subjects6. The insistence is we have no lack or symbolic debt—and if we do, we must immediately rectify this error via self-help, therapy, psychedelics, etc. The moral imperative is we MUST be whole, complete, fulfilled etc. So we are told we can and MUST have everything and be our ‘best selves.’ No wonder then we’re in productivity and life-hack mania where one is trying to be an entrepreneur of the self—in that vein - isn’t the modern rise of Stoicism and New Age pseudo-spirituality unsurprising? It’s the perfect ideological supplement7 for the worship of the self. And yet phantasmatic egoism inevitably leads to one being a good subservient consumer partaking in the web of ideology. Since the religious dogma of postmodern culture is the commandment to be happy, the tyranny of happiness—or the tyranny of self-love in New Ageism—is the ideal commodity today with all its “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” (Karl Marx, Das Kapital, p. 163)
Amidst such an ideological edifice, it’s common to hear the colloquialism, “You cannot pour from an empty cup,” regarding relationships, romantic or otherwise. Within the context of love, this apparently means you won’t have the necessary vitality to do the work of love and care for another person if you don’t take care of yourself first. Of course, like all uncritical preconceptions, there’s an element of truth to this notion; for a relationship to last, the two people involved must have a certain level of time and energy to do the work of love. But having said that, such a pragmatic view firstly misses the nature of an authentic love event: it’s not something one could perfectly plan for because “it is something without precedent, something that emerges as if from nothing, but is nonetheless imminent and urgent.” And more radically, “Love is giving what you don’t have.” (Transference: the Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VIII, p. 34) For Lacan, the essence of love is accepting a lack8 in the other (your partner) because the other will (to paraphrase Dr Grace Tarpey) recognise their lack and give it to you while you give yours to them. Such is why you cannot love the perfect person. Nor can you be the perfect person for another. Love is found precisely in the lack of two castrated people, which they see in each other. And (at times, traumatically), they see their own lack reflected through their lover. So the aforementioned “work of love” integral to any relationship lies in working through this lack with each other. To reiterate - ‘traumatic’ is the apt term to describe working through each other’s lack because it goes beyond narcissistic love—“the desire to be desired” (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis), the most common kind—into confronting the Real9 of you and your partner, which most people fail to do; ergo, needing help from a third party like a psychotherapist or some relationships ending altogether. But true love invariably “moves from love in terms of a narcissistic image” (Dr Tarpey, Lacan’s Psychoanalytic Way of Love). The ‘narcissistic image’ is where love is an image that substantialises one’s ego-ideal, that is, one wants to be loved, and the lover is placed in the position of the ideal-ego10. In moving from unilateral solipsistic love, the lovers encounter the Real: “Beyond the narcissistic relationship towards the love object Lacan later in his work shows that we need to encounter the Real, the traumatic object in the subject. Thus, true love aims at the kernel of the Real.” (Ibid.)
Those who say they need to “pour into their cup” and take care of themselves first (that is, trying to fill their unfillable lack) are hiding their egotism11 behind the ostensible care they have for their partner. For instance, when the bourgeois businessman justifies his desire to become wealthy, he usually says, “I’m doing it for my family.” And yet the more money he makes, the more his desires grow, i.e. he wants a bigger house, better car, etc., or simply more money for the sake of it as he ultimately desires the object a12. Instead of living below his means, “the family” becomes the masquerade (and, at its worst, the scapegoat) for his financial pursuits. Camus says it best:
“A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.” (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, p. 99)
In Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, when Walter White (Bryan Cranston) discovers his cancer and starts committing crimes—from building a drug empire to the numerous murders he carries out—he justifies his acts by repeatedly stating he’s doing it for his family. But towards the end of the show, he finally confesses to his estranged wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) the truth we, the viewer, already know, saying, “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it.” The usual take on the series is [1] the political commentary of the failing American healthcare system that leads a man with cancer to sell meth to pay for his treatment and [2] how it depicts the descent of Walt from an ostensibly harmless high-school chemistry teacher to a ruthless drug kingpin. But a psychoanalytical analysis reveals that contrary to the view that a show like Breaking Bad could only be made in America (as most other countries have universal healthcare), Walt was already the man that let Jane (Krysten Ritter), Jesse’s (Aaron Paul) girlfriend, die by overdosing on heroin from the beginning; he was already the criminal we thought he became by sheer circumstance. Walt had missed out on an opportunity to become wealthy by selling his financial interest early on in Gray Matter Technologies, a company he co-founded with Elliott Schwartz (Adam Godley). At the time, he also dated his lab assistant, Gretchen Schwartz (Jessica Hecht), who Elliott later married and made a fortune off Walt’s research. So his life was subsumed by the envy of his lost jouissance13, along with his repressed resentment towards Elliott and Gretchen. The fact that he refused any help from the Gretchens when they offered to fully pay for his treatment further highlights that his cancer and the quest to ensure his family’s financial security were the masquerade used for him to regain his lost jouissance via transgressions. The point is the transgressions; his crimes were not a means to an end.
Accordingly, the obsessive businessman is no different to Walt. The content of his jouissance may not be as violent and transgressive as Walt’s, but the form is similar. So he ought to admit that he’s relentlessly expanding his business for himself because he also is pursuing what Walt did, the unattainable object a. Yet only in love is the truth of one’s desires confronted as we give our lover the proverbial empty cup (the aforementioned lack). And in this traumatic act, we discover that in love, we have nothing to give because (to paraphrase Alain Badiou) love hangs on nothing.
Love is a Truth Procedure
Do we know what we want? We don’t. Even if we think we do, they don’t spontaneously appear ex nihilo, but society and culture tell us what to want. You’re bombarded with the demands to have goals, dreams, ambitions, etc. and are sold superficial solutions to get them, but the problem never was how to get what you wanted but WHAT TO WANT in the first place. How, then, can we ever authentically be in love? It’s only through accepting our inauthenticity as individuals. If one partakes in the act of loving, it has to be approached from a place of lostness and mystery. Love starts with acknowledging the alienation of two lovers, not only from each other but even from themselves. Such is why a relationship is never in the past but lies in the infinite presence of loving in the here and now; love is an event that brings eternity into one’s immediate life.
Although bringing eternity into the immediate doesn’t mean one is in aeterno modo [the view from God], that is, being omniscient and knowing what to do in a precise moment because, in the finite life, every decision will create regret. Yet, we have no choice but to choose, as indecision is the worst of all decisions. Kierkegaard (of course) knew this best:
“If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom. It isn’t just in single moments that I view everything aeterno modo, as Spinoza says; I am constantly aeterno modo. Many people think that’s what they are too when, having done the one or the other, they combine or mediate these opposites. But this is a misunderstanding, for the true eternity lies not behind either/or but ahead of it. So their eternity will also be in a painful succession of moments in time, since they will have the double regret to live on.” (Either/Or, p. 55)
But Kierkegaardians would know he wrote the above words from the point of view of the aesthete: the man who lives purely for the aesthetic titillations of music, intellect, seduction, drama, and beauty. The aesthetes’ deepest fear is FOMO. For instance, boredom is a curse for such a man, it makes him confront the emptiness of his life and the meaninglessness of the fleeting moments, so he would do all he could to flee it; he writes:
“People of experience maintain that it is very sensible to start from a principle. I grant them that and start with the principle that all men are boring. [...] For if my principle is true, to slacken or increase one’s impetus one need only consider with more or less moderation how ruinous boredom is for man; and if one wants to risk doing injury to the locomotive itself by pressing the speed to the maximum, one need only say to oneself: ‘Boredom is a root of all evil.’ Strange that boredom, so still and static, should have such power to set things in motion. The effect that boredom exercises is altogether magical, except that it is not one of attraction but of repulsion.” (Ibid., p. 227)
In aesthetic life, every choice, particularly in matters of love and romance, is inevitably a missed opportunity causing regret. For the aesthete, each choice is negation to all the other options. To make a choice is inevitably to miss out on what every other choice would’ve offered. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) from Mad Men is the typical aesthete in action. He loves his wife yet struggles to be monogamous, as committing to one person doesn’t align with his life of pursuing the immediate object—in Don’s case, women. Don’s life lies purely in the pursuit, and in fact, getting what he wants is his worst nightmare. Perhaps that’s why he says, “What is happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness.” (Mad Men: S. 5, E. 12 - “Commissions and Fees”)
In Kierkegaard’s dialectical work, Either/Or, the advice by Judge Vilhelm (the fictional author of the second text - “Or”) to Don would be to live by the principles of the ethical life, that is, a life of duty. He’d argue that one could find aesthetic value within the ethical life of the universal—practically, this would entail living by the standards of social morality of one’s society and culture, i.e. the typical bourgeois values of marriage, neighbourliness, civic-mindedness, patriotism, etc. But one shouldn’t read the progression from the aesthetic life to the ethical as a linear, chronologically straightforward graduation through different stages of life. Such a reading diminishes Kierkegaard’s existential theories to mere lifestyle choices like which outfit you pick to wear before heading to work every morning; it implies you could have your cake and eat it too, where you could enjoy the aesthetic life while benefitting from the ethical life seamlessly shifting between the two without any contradictions and obstacles. The Kierkegaardian stages of life have to be understood dialectically. This, effectively, means the contradictions and inherent paradoxes have to be subsumed (or sublated) into the stage; namely, the person living ethically has to embrace what the aesthete points out in “Either” about regret, uncertainty, boredom, etc., which are INDISPUTABLY accurate human realities. So the ethical person choosing to marry has to acknowledge that by his choice, he’s leaving room for regret and simply abiding by the social norms of his day and being a good “dutiful” husband doesn’t guarantee a life free of regret, and the other realities the aesthete delineates—to be a dialectician is to be pessimistic when one should be optimistic and vice versa. But the ethical person doesn’t do this and finds false comfort in his ethical life. And here’s where Kierkegaard introduces the religious stage, the only stage that forges a path for love.
Love doesn’t start from a place of absolute truth; it doesn’t lie in the certainty of serving any universal good—even if it does, it’s a fortuitous by-product. Love has no socio-metaphysical scaffoldings the ethical person can stand on and say, “Look! I’m getting married for the greater good of society and living by good bourgeois values.” So when truly in love, we inevitably move to the Kierkegaardian religious stage even if we aren’t aware of our existential shift—in fact, you know you’re there only in retrospect. And being in the religious stage involves facing the absurd14. Of course, none of this means love cannot serve the ethical and aesthetic, but these become secondary concerns when two lovers see the groundlessness of their relationship. The absurdity of love is why Badiou writes, “Beneath itself, it exists; beyond itself, it inexists. It can always be said that it is an almost-nothing of the state, or that it is a quasi-everything of the situation. If one determines its concept, the famous ‘so we are nothing, let’s be everything’ [nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout] touches upon this point. In the last resort it means: let’s be faithful to the event that we are.” (Being and Event, p. 235-236)
In our so-called permissive times to be in love, commit to a person and foster a relationship, all the while knowing the nothingness love’s suspended by, is a revolutionary act. Although this nothingness isn’t an abstract entity, rather, to paraphrase Žižek, “a positively charged void.” (Žižek!, 2005) It’s something that’s wholly experienced existentially, not merely cerebrally. Love doesn’t lie on neutral grounds; it always begins with the contradictions and paradoxes of this Žižekian void. Hence it’s properly absurd because to love is to confront these realities, recognise there isn’t a framework or a meta-love-language to work through inevitable conflicts and not shun away by hiding behind a universalist ethic, i.e. marriage, polyamory, etc. And the love event15 is revolutionary because “Firstly, love involves a separation or disjuncture based on the simple difference between two people and their infinite subjectivities. This disjuncture is, in most cases, sexual difference. When that isn’t the case, love still ensures that two figures, two different interpretive instances are set in opposition. In other words, love contains an initial element that separates, dislocates and differentiates. You have Two. Love involves Two.” (Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love, p. 27-28) We see this datum most strikingly in literature and cinema. Romeo and Juliet is the archetypal story of our culture: in a balcony scene, Juliet says, “Deny thy father and refuse thy name, Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.” (L. 34-36, A. 2, S. 2) Such lines portray the transgressive nature of love because of the inherent difference involved in it—a family feud in the case of Romeo and Juliet. And it’s an event because it subverts social norms, traditions, unspoken rules and hierarchies for better or worse; love is “something that doesn’t enter into the immediate order of things. [...] After all, love takes place in the world. It is an event that can’t be predicted or calculated in terms of the world’s laws.” (Ibid., p. 28-31)
Such is why love can only last if treated as a truth procedure. It’s a project that sublates every paradox, contradiction and absurdity for “a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two.” (Ibid., p. 29) The truth of love doesn’t negate the two lovers involved; it’s a truth that sits both within and without each person. Indeed Kierkegaard’s aesthete would be quite disappointed with the nature of lasting love because (to paraphrase Žižek) while the pursuit is fun, seducing is exhilarating, and passionate sex is beautiful, love begins the next day when the two lovers have to patiently build a new life together if they chose to fully assume the fall16. It’s here the project of love begins as they construct a new truth with daily habits, simple gestures and conversations, e.g. who’s doing the dishes, delegating chores, planning date night, making a cup of coffee for your partner, etc. So love that lasts is modest, which is why its mundanity cannot be portrayed in Hollywood movies, but that makes it sublime. In that vein - when two people are deeply in love, sex isn’t the utmost priority for them; of course, not that lovers don’t have great sex, but their relationship does not live and die by the so-called “quality of sex,” which yet again the love-industrial complex commodifies and exploits. Isn’t this what makes love metaphysical and contradicts the evolutionary claims of naturalists? Those who say love is the mere facade for our species to reproduce cannot explain how love can exist independent of the sexual relationship. Isn’t love what de-naturalises us subjects? And here, love must be understood via the lens of Transcendental Materialism, which Adrian Johnston defines as “a thesis making possible the articulation of what could be called a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity, is that the choice between either a disembodied subject or an embodied self is a false dilemma. Cogito-like subjectivity ontogenetically emerges out of an originally corporeal condition as its anterior ground, although, once generated, this sort of subjectivity thereafter remains irreducible to its material sources. Hence, in terms of its overall contribution to the theoretical humanities, this project aims to open up pathways allowing for productive cooperation between, on the one hand, the plethora of investigations into the somatic constitution of the human individual (including cognitive science, neurology, and phenomenological embodiment theory) and, on the other hand, accounts of identity insisting upon a more-than-corporeal dimension (particularly as found in certain philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions). The combination of a reconsideration of the nature of the human body with a temporal-genetic model of emergent subjectivity (a model charting the immanent material genesis of the thereafter more-than-material transcendent) has the potential to shift fundamentally the terms of today’s ongoing debates over the relation between soma and psyche.” (Zizek’s Ontology, p. xxiii-xxiv) The truth procedure of love that’s irreducible to any physicalist explanation nor something spiritual or platonic and detached from our material reality is what makes it metaphysical.
Hegel and The Ontology of Love
“In the struggle between yourself and the world, you must side with the world.”
― Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, a. 52
Hegelians like Žižek & Todd McGowan claim Hegel was the foremost philosopher of love. Because he supposedly saw love being the ultimate metaphor for the unfolding Geist17, unlike Kantianism, love allowed Hegel’s system to incorporate contradiction. Hegel saw the concept18 itself works like an act of love. All of which are key tenets of his metaphysical system. But how? Any uninitiated19 studier of Hegel would see him as a narcissistic theoretician who believed all of human history culminates in his philosophy and, at his worst, as caricatured by the Popperian logical positivists an obscurantist totalitarian: “Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterises the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon.” (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 25) If one approaches Hegel from the teleologically historicist Left-Hegelian view, which predominated the 20th century (in the forms of Marxism, French Existentialism and, in opposition, Logical Positivism), Karl Popper’s sentiments are accurate (barring the totalitarian accusations: there is no evidence the Nazis used Hegel’s philosophy like they did Nietzsches’ for instance). But as Žižek states, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted Hegel; but the point is also to change him.” (The Plague of Fantasies, p. 122), which is what Žižekian-Hegellians are doing while remaining committed to Hegel’s emancipatory project.
Furthermore, apropos love and Christianity, Hegel is the paramount philosopher of contradiction: “The years since Hegel’s death have witnessed the spectacular failure of Left Hegelianism and the quiet disappearance of Right Hegelianism. The missteps of both camps have cleared the path for a new radical Hegel. Hegel is a radical not because he eschews the traditions passed down to him but because he takes them seriously. The philosophy of contradiction has its origin in the revolutionary act of God dying on the cross. Hegel is the first thinker to see the profundity of the transformation that Christianity inaugurates. When the infinite reveals itself as ignominious, we know that nothing is free of contradiction.” (McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 10) Hegelian contradiction can only be understood through the logic of love: “Hegel’s logic is not the logic of Aristotle or the rationalist tradition; his logic develops out of love. [...] And yet love would not be love if a distinction between subject and beloved other did not remain. [...] Love thus enables the subject to translate difference-the difference between the lover and the beloved-into contradiction. As his thought matures, Hegel identifies this structure of identity in difference as the basic form not only of all thought but of being itself. The first insight into this structure comes to him in the formulation of Christian love. Love provides the avenue for granting contradiction a privileged ontological position.” (Ibid., p. 99)
If, for instance, we look at cinema, there are myriad motifs of such contradictory love:
Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) is a revelatory example of how love enacts and sustains contradiction. The film starts by portraying Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American expatriate in Casablanca, as a cynical, sheltered and self-interested businessman who seems unconcerned about others; despite the tumultuous times, he has a comfortable life with a stable income, casual sex affairs, and has the local authorities in his pocket. But his stability is disrupted when a former lover Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), comes to Rick’s cafe with her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a renowned anti-Fascist and fugitive Czechoslovak Resistance leader. Her arrival uproots his life as he, for reasons unknown to the viewer at first, becomes bitter and aggrieved―yet again, we see an example of the violence of love. As the story develops, we learn that Rick was stranded by Ilsa in 1940 in Paris when they both fell in love and decided to flee the city together during the Battle of France. But Ilsa never showed up at the train station, leaving him in the dark with only a note saying she could not come with him. In the present day, due to Victor’s politics, the couple is in dire need of the sought-after “letters of transit”, official papers that allow its bearers to travel freely around German-occupied Europe. They are priceless to the refugees stranded in Casablanca, particularly to Victor, who Nazi officials are targeting for arrest. A petty crook Ugarte (Peter Lorre), who dies in custody, has the letters and gives them to Rick right before his arrest. Eventually, Rick finds out that when Ilsa fell in love with him back in Paris, she thought Victor to be dead, only to find out on the day she planned to flee with Rick that her husband was still alive and in need of her care. Thus her reason for leaving him was only to nurse her sick husband. Ilsa begs Rick to give the papers to her husband for his sake and professes that she still loves Rick and will stay with him in Casablanca. He’s left to decide to either use the letters for himself or give them to Victor. While at first, he makes Ilsa believe that she will stay with him, at the last moment, Rick makes Ilsa board the plane to Lisbon with Laszlo, saying, “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life [she would regret it if she stayed with him]. In letting Ilsa go, he demonstrates his love for her in its truest Thomistic form by willing the good for the other without regard for himself and yet gaining something. As Todd McGowan theorises, “Love deprives Rick of everything, yet it provides him with a satisfaction that completely outweighs what he has lost. At the end of the film, he is on the run without anything, including Ilsa. Nonetheless, his satisfaction at the ending contrasts with the tedium of his life before Ilsa’s arrival. Rick falls in love without regard for his own interest. The contradiction of love destroys the stability of Rick’s life. But this contradiction also animates Rick’s subjectivity by giving his life a value it otherwise wouldn’t have. The disruption that love causes derives directly from its contradictory status. Love forces the subject to recognise that it is not a self-identical being but a being whose identity is out there in the other.” (Ibid., p. 112)
Hegel de-sentimentalises love. By treating it as the animating principle for his system, he demonstrates what love is for “being qua being”20 without the ostentations we attach to it, which conceals its reality. And the de-sentimentalisation necessarily allows Hegel to construct a metaphysical system with contradictions and antinomies (which Kant saw as an obstacle): “The universal is therefore free power; it is itself while reaching out to its other and embracing it, but without doing violence to it; on the contrary, it is at rest in its other as in its own. Just as it has been called free power, it could also be called free love and boundless blessedness, for it relates to that which is distinct from it as to itself; in it, it has returned to itself.” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 532) At the absolute level, reality itself which Hegel effectively delineates as Being, Essence and the universal Concept, should be understood through love as “the concept does not exist in isolation but relies on a negation that undermines it while simultaneously sustaining it. [...] The concept becomes the enactment of contradiction.” (McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, p. 100) The paradigm for Kantian analytical thinking is arithmetic, whereas for Hegelian ‘concept’-ual thinking, it’s love, notably, love that allows contradiction and difference: “Arithmetic allows for the free substitution of one number for another, while love insists that no possible substitute for the beloved exists.” (Ibid., p. 101) If we take an arithmetic operation such as 8 + 9, both 8 and 9 are independent and mutually exclusive to each other, they are subjects that could be freely substituted without affecting each other internally, and differences are only external, i.e. replacing 9 with 10 doesn’t affect the “inner workings” of 8. But in the logic of love, two people (or subjects) cannot be freely substituted without affecting each other, as love categorically does affect a person’s inner life. If it doesn’t, then it isn’t love. Of course, this doesn’t mean Hegelians neither practice nor see the value of mathematics, but for them, it’s love, not arithmetic, that’s the paradigmatic starting point for their thinking. Accordingly, one could assume Hegel would be disheartened with the modern state of love as it has become much like the logic of arithmetics with the rise of the aforementioned dating industry (or love-industrial complex) where we’re subliminally told by the prevailing ideologies that we could find the perfectly compatible person without any contradictions. And if we haven’t found that person yet, we could simply substitute them with another one from the myriad options in the “relationship marketplace”, similar to returning a product at a retail store. But this is not love—it’s arithmetics. And “those who add up the number of partners that they have had are not talking about love. When we start doing arithmetic, we stop loving. Mathematicians may be great lovers, but they aren’t great lovers as mathematicians.” (Ibid., p. 102) For a mathematician to be a good lover, they have to first and foremost jettison the principle of substitution from their relationship and see the person they love for the infinite unsubstitutable subject that person IS with the concomitant differences, contradictions and antagonisms that are idiosyncratic to them bar none. And it’s these idiosyncrasies that affect our subjectivity and being in this world despite not negating us, nevertheless changing us as we change the other.
Kant and the Transphobe at the Door
Yet again, we live in bleak times—‘again’ because humanity will always face societal antagonisms, and we will inevitably find a scapegoat to pin these on, be it Jews, blacks, refugees, gays, and recently, trans people. Populist fascists will ignore the structural problems—which for modernity are those imbued by neoliberal capitalism—and instead conveniently pick out a minority group as being the root cause of social and existential ills, not allowing us to be in organic unity with the cosmos, which the fascist desires. Scapegoating is a time-tested technique for fascists because it enables them not to do the difficult work of tackling the systemic issues individually within societies’ deadlocks and contradictions and instead conveniently pin it on a minority group. And in our times, the scapegoat is trans people, who rightists, particularly American conservatives, vehemently attack. So replacing ‘Jew’ with ‘trans’ in Hitler’s Mein Kampf won’t change the book’s overall theme much.
In keeping with the times, the famous Kantian thought experiment of the Nazi at the door looking for any Jews you’re hiding has to be revised. In our zeitgeist, it’s a transphobe you’re dealing with instead of Nazi and trans people you’re protecting instead of Jews. (N. B.: Transphobia is ultimately a fascistic ideology, so structurally in its form, it’s no different to Nazism.) The Kantian question posed is if a transphobic mob is hunting down trans people, and you’re hiding them in your home for protection if directly confronted by a transphobe and asked, ‘Are there any trans people you’re harbouring?’, should you tell the truth? Following the categorical imperative, Kant would say you should tell the truth at all costs, even if it means putting the lives of the trans people you’ve given refuge at risk. For most of us, this moral imperative comes off as being a cruel and cold-hearted calculation that surprisingly comes from the greatest philosopher since Socrates. And it misses the Sartrean21 notion that we have to be radically responsible for our decisions and cannot rely on a priori doctrine of God, the state, science, etc. So normatively, I presume most of us would lie to the transphobe to protect the trans people—at least, I certainly would.
But how can we reconcile blatantly lying with being a moral person? If truth is a virtue, how can one be virtuous while lying? It’s only possible through the Christian Hegelian revolution. Western Philosophy since Kant has essentially concluded that the purpose of religion is to impose a moral law—or, putting it more colloquially: ‘the purpose of following a religion is to be a good person.’ But Christianity substitutes love for the law; Hegel saw that “Christ did not intend to start a new religion but to free the existing one from its retreat from the moral law into a legalistic morass of rules.” (Ibid., p. 103) This is Pauline Christology: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13) Since love allows contradiction, if one’s life is based on the logic of love, then lying to the transphobe is the right existential act. And in that vein, if you’re a Christian, you will do everything in your power, even if it means transgressing moral laws and societal norms of the day, to protect the downtrodden and marginalised people like those in the LGBT+ community.
The love Hegel speaks of isn’t solely romantic, nor is it the narcissistic infatuation with the other where one tries to subsume them. In fact, if love were purely self-serving, telling the truth to the transphobe would be fine as it ensures you as a subject won’t violate the moral law, and (practically speaking) you can rid yourself of the trouble of trying to protect the trans people. Hegel sees love as a “profound disturbance for the subject’s identity. [...] When the subject loves, it doesn’t just seize the other but encounters the other as a disturbance of the self.” (Ibid., p. 105) And paradoxically, it’s this disturbance that allows the subject to find the truth about themselves. Hegelians usually demonstrate such love in romantic contexts, perhaps because it’s most conspicuous in romance: for instance, Žižek writes in his analysis of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that “it’s the perfect case of this dialectic of truth22 arising from misrecognition.” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 66) This misrecognition Žižek identifies is caused by love’s disturbance caused within Elizabeth and Darcy as individuals. They feel an intense attraction towards each other, which, at first, they try to fight due to social reasons and their idiosyncrasies: Darcy’s pride makes his love appear to him as something unworthy and “when he asks for Elizabeth’s hand he confesses openly his contempt for the world to which she belongs and expects her to accept his proposition as an unheard-of honour. But because of her prejudice, Elizabeth sees him as ostentatious, arrogant and vain: his condescending proposal humiliates her, and she refuses him.” (Ibid.) And in Elizabeth’s case, she wants to present herself as a dignified and cultivated woman. But Darcy gives her the message: “You are nothing but a poor empty-minded creature full of false finesse.” (Ibid.) This mutual misrecognition causes a deep tension within Darcy and Elizabeth as individual subjects, but in the work of love, they find a higher truth about each other and themselves. The apparent obstacle of Darcy’s pride and Elizabeth’s prejudice retroactively gives way to creating a favourable outcome: “The theoretical interest of this story lies in the fact that the failure of their first encounter, the double misrecognition concerning the real nature of the other, functions as a positive condition of the final outcome. [...] Only the ‘working-through’ of the misrecognition allows us to accede to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our own deficiency - for Darcy, to free himself of his false pride; for Elizabeth, to get rid of her prejudices.” (Ibid.)
Similarly, truths arising from a subjective disturbance can also be found in non-romantic contexts. If we take Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) goes through such a transformation via a violent disturbance of his subjectivity. Spielberg accurately portrays Schindler as a callous pragmatist. He has no grandiose humanistic concerns and, if truth be told, is the worst kind of businessman; he’s a con artist, war profiteer, narcissistic womaniser and a Nazi party member. Nonetheless, the movie arc eventuates in his transformation: he uses his “business acumen”, i.e., bribing party officials, Machiavellian tactics, etc., which he once used in becoming wealthy to now protecting his Jewish workers from being sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Schindler goes from being a profligate opportunist to using every bit of his fortune to create a safe haven in his factory and protect lives. The violent disturbance in his self culminates in the final scene before he flees the factory to escape the advancing Red Army. The workers give him a signed letter attesting to Schindler’s attempts to protect Jewish lives and a ring engraved with a quotation from the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” At this point, he goes through Lacanian subjective destitution where his socio-symbolic order is destroyed; he sees the inherent lack of the nonsensical big Other, i.e. the Nazi party, state officials, etc. and every signifier that gave Schindler’s life-world significance and meaning is lost. When he says to Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), “I could’ve got more out… [...] I didn’t do enough,” apart from it being an ethical damnation of himself, it’s also an acknowledgment of the absurdity of his social reality where he ignored the suffering of the Jews (and other “non-Aryans”) and took part in the pomp and grandiosity of the Nazi party officials while realising the complete impotence of them, his big Other23.
If we revisit our protecting trans people from the transphobe scenario and juxtapose it with Schindler’s List, it’s no different effectively. So, knowingly or unknowingly to you, in your psychic and existential disturbance, one could expect you to go through a subjective destitution similar to Schindler in your act of love. As your socio-political order is destroyed, i.e. your false belief that society is relatively just or the Western world has finally reached social justice, etc., you are forced out of yourself24 to encounter a new, and hopefully better, big Other.
Coda
The metaphysical case for love has to be made because it needs reinvention and is in dire need of rescue from postmodern pragmatism and neoliberal psychologism. But to speak of love metaphysically doesn’t mean it’s only for the select few—it isn’t only for philosophers, poets and artists. While true love’s rare, everyone can learn to love if they allow themselves to and, more importantly, to not shy away from the love event by treating it for the event it IS by assuming it and working on the project of being in love. Indeed, while exploring love metaphysically and existentially is crucial, we nevertheless discover in the course of life that love is the highest form of human experience, surpassing all other modes of existence. Love is what makes a homosapien a human being, so either you thank yourself for giving way to love, or you regret that you didn’t and never allowed yourself to be fully human.
Consumerism acts by creating false needs in us, the subjects. They aren’t genuine needs that satisfy us but are imposed by our society (or life-world). When you succumb to ideological demands and strive to fulfil these needs, you realise they are unfulfillable; nonetheless, you will keep desiring more, consequently losing your freedom. For more context, read C. 1 of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and watch this video by Julian de Medeiros explaining Žižek’s theory of Coca-Cola.
The original quote from Kierkegaard’s journals: “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” (p. 89, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)
I’m not criticising Dr Shannon Curry, as she doesn’t need to include this caveat in every public conversation. Expecting her to do so would be unreasonable; unlike Jordan Peterson, she never claims to be more than a psychologist. However, I only point out the error of our cultural zeitgeist. Her case serves as an example of this phenomenon.
In classical Freudian theory, the Castration complex is the anxiety caused for the subject (that’s, in effect, you and I) by the fear of emasculation; despite the masculinised terminology, this is experienced by men, women and other subjects, albeit differently. It always encompasses a constitutive lack or loss. Although, for Lacanians in particular, castration occurs when we enter the symbolic world of language and sacrifice our jouissance to the big Other (the field of signification, e.g. sociopolitical law, culture, etc.) As Žižek writes: “This gap between my direct psychological identity and my symbolic identity (the symbolic mask or title I wear, defining what I am for and in the big Other) is what Lacan (for complex reasons that we can here ignore) calls ‘symbolic castration,’ with the phallus as its signifier.” (How to Read Lacan, p. 34) And we are “barred” subjects the moment we become social creatures due to what we loose (although that which is lost doesn’t exist but is something “the subject unconsciously fantasises was taken from her/him at castration”) Žižek continues, “This is what the infamous ‘symbolic castration’ means: the castration which occurs by the very fact of me being caught in the symbolic order, assuming a symbolic mask or title. Castration is the gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic title which confers on me a certain status and authority.” (Ibid.)
Peter Rollins interprets castration via a theological lens, provocatively saying, “The psychoanalytic answer to the question: ‘Is their life after death?’ is yes, and we are the evidence. To be alive is to be castrated; to have actually passed through death; weirdly, psychoanalysis proves the existence of life after death because to be a subject is to be marked by death, by a fundamental loss.”
The core of what we are is a void, something traumatically missing, which is what makes us Human beings desiring creatures. But we desire something that doesn’t exist substantially; for Lacanians, an Objet petit a (or object a), translated directly to “object small a” in English: “The Objet petit a is the void or lack you unconsciously pursue in the hope that the attainment of this missing part of yourself will give you an ontological completeness.” (The Dangerous Maybe, Michael Downs) Our desire is caused by this constitutive lack (French: manque); that is, we are beings that are always lacking, ergo always desiring. Although what we lack isn’t something with positive content, i.e., more money, travelling, intimate relationships, God, etc., rather the lack itself is the object that doesn’t exist: [object a] emerges as the remainder of the very operation of castration [see 6], an object which fills in the lack opened up by castration, an object which is nothing but this lack itself acquiring a positive form.” (Sex and the Failed Absolute, Žižek, p. 232). Desire without lack cannot exist, so to understand what lack entails, one ought to look at how desire makes us act in our life-world (one’s socially, culturally or evolutionarily established network of meaning): Capitalism is ideal to exemplify this phenomenon as it functions primarily because of the desire caused by our lack. As Todd McGowan writes, “Capitalism has the effect of sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire. As subjects of Capitalism, we are constantly on the edge of having our desire realized, but never reach the point of realization. This has the effect of producing a satisfaction that we don’t recognize as such. That is, capitalist subjects experience satisfaction itself as dissatisfying, which enables them to simultaneously enjoy themselves and believe wholeheartedly that a more complete satisfaction exists just around the corner, embodied in the newest commodity.” (Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Costs of Free Markets, p. 11) Since our lack is unfulfillable and our desire is unmeetable, we are the perfect subjects for capitalist dynamics because paradoxically, Capitalism works by not working; we’re always kept on the edge of having our desires met by, in fact, NOT having them ever met in reality. All of these ideological machinations are thanks to our constitutive lack.
Žižek succinctly explains the Real as “That which resists symbolisation.” But he annotates this explanation, saying, “If I just say this, you understand it in a purely abstract way; in a way, it means nothing.” Because the Real isn’t a positive entity that merely resists symbolisation but appears as an antagonism and traumatic split in our symbolic order—the linguistic and psycho-social reality in which we participate (regardless of if we believe in it or not) to render meaning to our lives via customs, institutions, laws, mores, norms, practices, rituals, rules, traditions, etc. of culture and society. So the Real can only be seen when there’s a break in the symbolic order. As Žižek writes, “... for Lacan the Real, at its most radical, has to be totally de-substantialised. It is not an external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network, but the fissure within the symbolic network itself.” (How to Read Lacan, p. 72) In a romantic relationship, the Real would be if you come home one day and find your partner in bed with someone else. The split of what you thought you had—a committed relationship—gives rise to what was behind the veil—although this does NOT mean that the veil wasn’t true and what actually entails your relationship is infidelity, lies, etc., and now you’ve seen the reality of things; in fact, thinking so, thinking that you’ve taken the proverbial red pill and now know the truth would be part of the illusion itself. Such is why the Real is never substantialised into a symbolic object, i.e., it appears only in the contradiction of what you thought your relationship was and seeing your partner cheating on you, which could then lead you to excavate what was repressed in your partner and yourself leading to this event (or not).
Žižek states, “‘Ideal ego’ stands for the idealised self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, the way I would like others to see me); Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and impels me to give my best, the ideal I try to follow and actualise; [...] Ideal ego is imaginary, what Lacan calls the ‘small other’, the idealised mirror-image of my ego; Ego-Ideal is symbolic, the point of my symbolic identification, the point in the big Other from which I observe (and judge) myself.” (How to Read Lacan, p. 80) There’s a distinction between ideal ego and ego deal. For instance, Andy Bernard (Ed Helms) from The Office (American version) portrays these concepts and their differences conspicuously: when introduced in season three, he’s an annoyingly narcissistic character, mainly due to how his ideal self at work is shown. Most of his introduction is a farcical rivalry with Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) in an attempt to gain favour with the manager Michael Scott (Steve Carell). His tactics to win favour and social standing as the newcomer amongst his colleagues is the ideal ego pulling him towards an idealised image of what he “ought” to be amidst the Other. In contrast, Michael acts as an instantiation of the big Other that Andy obsequiously tries to please (although, as we, the viewer, know, Michael’s impotent, as the big Other always is in the Real [see 9]). In this case, Micheal is Andy’s ego ideal whose “gaze he tries to impress with his ego image”. Unlike the Other (the rest of Andy’s milieu), Micheal represents a self-relating entity distinct from Andy, yet he unconsciously knows it has authority over him.
Having said that, in true love, one has to always move from the ideal to the Real for love to keep realising. To paraphrase Todd McGowan - when falling in love, one shouldn’t fall onto a comfy couch and lie there like a sloth but keep falling with your partner. As Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “To be loved means to be consumed by fire. To love is: giving light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure.” (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)
Egotism is not necessarily bad. In fact, to do the work of love, one needs a sense of self, perhaps even an over-inflated one at times to believe one is lovable. Because authentic love never entails two becoming one in the sense that the two disintegrate as individual egos, but (to paraphrase Alain Badiou) the two remain two in their infinite subjectivities while simultaneously experiencing a disjuncture in their experience. Such is why love is hard. Because if two become one, there wouldn’t be any Otherness to your lover, and the relationship would simply be a peculiar kind of self-love. Thus egotism is needed to understand that one’s lover is separate from you and vice versa. Furthermore, it’s infinitely better to be an egoist with the concomitant flaws than to embody false and duplicitous humility.
For Lacanians, object petit a (or object a for short) is NOT an object with any substantial positive characteristics, so it’s not a physical object like a tree or smartphone subject to empiricism nor an abstract mathematical object, i.e., numbers, sets, etc. Žižek characteristically demonstrates the workings of the object a with a Jewish joke. To paraphrase one - “the Jew” is treated as a sublime object by antisemites; that is, the Jew is elevated to something more than what they are with the typical antisemitic tropes, e.g. the Jews control the weather, own the media and banks, and more recently are globalists, etc. So a Jewish person could play a good practical joke on an antisemite. Let’s say they come across one who’s openly antisemitic and confronts the Jew inquiring how “their kind” have all this power. He could reply, “I’ll show you, but you must pay me a fee first.” And after receiving the money, he could continue making up some nonsense like “First, you take a dead fish; you cut off her head and put her entrails in a glass of water. Then, around midnight, when the moon is full, you must bury this glass in a churchyard…” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 69) until the antisemite eventually realises he’s being fooled and that “there is no secret at all, you [the Jewish person] simply want to extract the last small coin from me!” (Ibid.) While this joke shows the absurdity of antisemitism, Žižek theorises with it how an antisemite is a quintessential example of the object a operating: “The fascinating ‘secret’ which drives us to follow the Jew’s narration carefully is precisely the Lacanian object petit a, the chimerical object of fantasy, the object causing our desire and at the same time—this is its paradox—posed retroactively by this desire; in ‘going through the fantasy’ we experience how this fantasy-object (the ‘secret’) only materialises the void of our desire.” (Ibid.)
Lack [see 8] is what causes the object a to come into being. Although it’s not causal where our inherent lack causes the object a to exist with a positive substance similar to how things (apparently) work in the physical universe. But it exists purely as a “positive negativity, a ‘substantial’ void, a reified emptiness.” (Michael Downs, Lacan’s Concept of the Object-Cause of Desire (objet petit a)) It can’t exist without the subject’s desire, nor can desire exist without it. So it’s retroactively posed as we desire our lost enjoyment—which never existed in the first place, but we nonetheless hope to attain it in hopes of completeness. For instance, I recall a conversation I had with a friend I met when on holiday in New Zealand who was backpacking, and after spending almost a year on the road, she headed back to Germany, her home. She now tells me that when travelling, after some time, she keeps thinking of resting and heading home (or going to another place), whereas when back home, she wants to once again travel to another country. The proverbial “travel bug” is an ideal example of the object a in action: what we desire is never the city or country itself, no matter how beautiful or exotic the destination may be, but always something more, something in excess that we enjoy purely in the pursuit. And this excessive enjoyment (or surplus jouissance) is what the non-existing object a gives us. So we always enjoy dreaming of travelling to a variety of places than actually doing it because the moment we arrive somewhere, the object a moves elsewhere along with our desire (a case in point: Paris syndrome).
Žižek writes, “Although jouissance can be translated as “enjoyment,” translators of Lacan often leave it in French in order to render palpable its excessive, properly traumatic character: we are not dealing with simple pleasures, but with a violent intrusion that brings more pain than pleasure. This is how we usually perceive the Freudian superego, the cruel and sadistic ethical agency which bombards us with impossible demands and then gleefully observes our failure to meet them. No wonder, then, that Lacan posited an equation between jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty.” (How to Read Lacan, p. 79) For Lacanians, pleasure always is connected to pain; thus, jouissance untranslated into English ensures it’s not perceived as only a pleasurable evolutionary drive to eat, sleep, reproduce, etc. In fact, our libidinal jouissance de-naturalises us as subjects. Because we’re biological beings, who’re animals that nonetheless fall outside the category of ‘the animal’, findings of psychoanalysis exemplify this phenomenon best. For instance, if a person tirelessly works on a vocation they love, e.g. being a writer, scientist, engineer, etc., their happiness and well-being are often sacrificed for their work; as the colloquialism goes, they lose themselves in the act. When you’re deeply passionate about a craft, there’s always an element of self-destructiveness it entails. Humans acting in such a way is antithetical to behaviourist theories that are voguish in pop-psychology today, where human and non-human agents act solely on positive or negative stimuli, emotions, mental states, etc. While B. F. Skinner can explain how mice and pigeons act in certain ways, his theories cannot account for jouissance, the excessive violence we impose on ourselves when (to use the above example) we quite literally ‘work ourselves to the death.’ Jouissance, though, is not always connected to one’s motivation to work because one could argue that by engaging deeply in a vocation one loves, we find a “higher pleasure” in the pain of sacrifice. Perhaps this is true, but it still doesn’t explain how jouissance manifests in other peculiar ways (which can be found by a psychoanalyst). For instance, when Pink sings, “You’re an asshole, but I love you. [...] I hate you, I really hate you, so much, I think it must be true love.” (True Love, 2012), that’s because of jouissance: most relationships work not because two people are perfectly compatible but instead because they find pleasure in the discomfort of their incompatibilities; the tiny flaws and imperfections are what allows two people to be romantically involved—of course, this can certainly manifest in pathological ways where people stay in abusive and destructive relationships. In any case, how jouissance manifests in us, positively or negatively, doesn’t invalidate its’ reality that makes humans unnatural beings.
Why do wage labourers who hate their job and dread working endlessly for simple survival keep working apart from the rare protest (or outburst of violence)? Why does the working class (regardless of one being blue, white or pink collar workers) seemingly act against their self-interest, succumbing to the exploitations of capitalism? Why do people complain about the current socioeconomic conditions yet not partake in political movements attempting to change them? You could thank jouissance for that because it makes us act against our self and class interests. Indeed jouissance is what lets people participate as agents of capital in an inherently exploitative market economy that we all consciously know isn’t working. So we need to analyse society by incorporating the findings of psychoanalysis into economics and sociology. As Michael Downs states, “Marx’s biggest error was underestimating how much human beings actually enjoy acting against their own self-interest (pleasure) due to the workings of their drives (jouissance). [...] This intrinsic antagonism of wage labour plays itself out, psychoanalytically speaking, in the fantasy spaces of the workers as they compute, gauge and tally up how much jouissance their coworkers are unjustifiably enjoying at their expense (based on their level of productivity). Libidinally speaking, to be a wage labourer is to scapegoat all other wage labourers. Now, the reason why this is an inherent transgression and an ideological obfuscation is due to how it keeps wage labourers from ever focusing on the even greater antagonism, i.e., the one between labour and capital.” (Wage Labor and Jouissance: Why the Left Needs Žižek to Understand Workers)
It was Albert Camus who brought into vogue Absurdism by writing, “Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, p. 26) But Camus’ existentialism is too juvenile; his defiance against life’s meaninglessness is no different to teenage rebellion against one’s parents’ authority. While at first, defying the symbolic authority is amusing, grabbing God by his metaphysical balls and cursing him for condemning us to push stupid boulders up mountains that roll back down momentarily invigorates you, it’s still an immature response to life’s fate. Rebelling against God for the sake of rebellion is no different from a child crying in public for attention from their parents.
And what’s more, Camus ends his essay by saying, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” (Ibid., p. 119) An awfully conformist category! Imagining Sisyphus accepting his fate and settling for happiness is no different to the slavish cowardice of Stoicism or New Age narcissism. Isn’t Sisyphus the ultimate postmodern nincompoop? He merely accepts the hegemonic ideology, withdraws and decides to find happiness within, much like most people these days. One sees Sisyphus’ pusillanimity in contrast to Job from the bible. When God needlessly makes Job, a righteous God-fearing man, suffer because of his warped deal with Satan, he doesn’t just sit down and take it; he doesn’t keep pushing boulders up the mountain without any protestations. In fact, any reader of the Book of Job cannot imagine Job being happy because he clearly isn’t when, for instance, he laments, “What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me. I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil.” (Job 3:25-26) Job’s furious and wishes he’d never been born. And when his three ostensibly wise theological friends succumb to the hermeneutic temptation and attempt to explain away Job’s suffering, he doesn’t buy their sophistic rationalisations. Job accepts that his suffering is meaningless. While Sisyphus decides to carry on despite his condemnation, Job declares, ‘I Would Prefer Not To’ and accuses God of injustice. Contrary to the mainstream Christian reading of the story, the Book of Job is not only about the necessity of faith but (as Žižek theorised) Job is engaging in the first critique of ideology aeons before Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, that is, Job exposes the big Other—God, in this case—to be impotent, contradictory and unjust as Job’s suffering has no ultimate purpose. One can imagine Sisyphus and Job in our times. Sisyphus would buy into the propaganda of the Military–industrial complex and not be critical of the Iraq War, myriad proxy wars, Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc. and keep pushing his boulder up the mountain, i.e. paying taxes, being a consumer, etc. Whereas Job would truly be a revolutionary and be in perpetual protest, questioning the system and the mendacity of the big Other—governments and private corporations, in this case.
The point being the absurd Camus portray is too optimistic and subsequently conformist. He lacks the existential depth of what it would truly mean to face the absurd. It perhaps is the case that if we’re to genuinely face the absurd, it’ll be too traumatic for most of us. Similar to encountering the Lacanian Real [see 9], the absurd could destroy us in its unravelling of all symbolic meaning. So we should go to Camus’ progenitor Kierkegaard to understand the properly traumatic character of the absurd. What must have been Abraham’s existential state when God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Moriah? This is what Kierkegaard explores: “There were countless generations who knew the story of Abraham by heart, word for word, but how many did it render sleepless? [...] The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety, Abraham is not who he is.” (Fear and Trembling, p. 58-60) For Kierkegaard, the absurd never existed abstractly; it could only be known in all its contradictions and paradoxes within an instantiation of one’s life as we see his knight of faith, Abraham, confront the irreconcilable task God gives him in sacrificing his beloved son Isaac. God calling him to commit filicide is infinitely inexplicable; it serves no universalist ethic, and Abraham cannot explain his actions. It’s not mere ineffability Abraham’s stuck with, but rather, his act cannot be symbolised in any way within his socio-symbolic reality; thus, he keeps quite concealing everything from Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac. One could only imagine his anguish as his psyche is stretched and mangled to an unbearable extent. If I were in his position, I’d commit suicide, but Abraham didn’t, making him the Kierkegaardian knight of faith. If truth be told, one never could imagine such terror, which is why Kierkegaard says Abraham only “believed on the strength of the absurd, for there could be no human calculation.” (Ibid., p. 65) The absurd cannot be rationalised and tolerated so that we can move on with our lives (much like Camus’ Sisyphus). But properly experiencing the absurd will violently uproot your entire life, sometimes to the point of death—it may be this datum that Camus unconsciously wanted to convey, but he lacked the melancholia Kierkegaard knew so well.
For Badiou, authentic love is an event: “Love always starts with an encounter. And I would give this encounter the quasi-metaphysical status of an event, namely of something that doesn’t enter into the immediate order of things.” (In Praise of Love, p. 28) The fact of two lovers’ infinite subjectivities encountering each other through difference and disjuncture gives the love event no place in the existing socio-symbolic order.
Geist (Spirit) is a central concept for Hegel’s philosophical edifice. It can be used in terms of both the individual self and intersubjectively, as Hegel believes we find our subjectivity (or selfhood) in others. Through the recognition of the other in us and us in them, Spirit becomes “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’.” (The Phenomenology of Spirit, s. 177, p. 110) Namely, we as subjects find our self-consciousness and freedom in others while they do so in us. In that vein Spirit can also be used to speak of an entire nation or culture collectively without negating the individual; hence colloquially used terms such as zeitgeist or even team spirit in sports are apt when speaking of Spirit—although for Hegel, Spirit has a more concrete reality, specifically an unfolding through history (NOT in the Maxian or Fukuyamian teleological sense), over a simple mood or shared feelings of a group of people. While Spirit did have mystical and religious connotations from the outset, it shouldn’t be understood purely in those terms, i.e. the omnipotent Holy Spirit in contemporary Christianity, a conscious anthropocentric universe in New Ageism, etc., as Frederick Beiser writes, “Hegel never understood spirit as something existing above and beyond nature but as the highest organization and development of its powers; even the self-awareness of life was implicit within life itself.” (Hegel, p. 112) It’s impossible to do the concept justice in a footnote, but the critical point is that Spirit is not God—at least not according to how God’s understood by modernity as a transcendent super-being beyond all other beings—and it’s not teleological. As repeatedly explored in this essay, the verity of love where two lovers find their true nature in each other while nonetheless not negating themselves or their lover is the Hegelian metaphor for how Spirit functions where the subject-object identity is found in difference. Furthermore, the other crucial Hegelian concept of ‘dialectic’ is seemingly inspired by Hegel’s reflections on love: “The opposing movements involved in the experience of love - its externalization and internalization, self-surrender and self-discovery - Hegel will later call ‘dialectic’.” (Ibid., p. 115) Without Hegel’s early reflections on love and Christianity, he wouldn’t have been able to go beyond Kantianism and develop his philosophy that incorporates difference and contradiction. Such is why Žižek, the foremost exponent of Hegelian theory in our time, states, “Hegel really is the ultimate Christian philosopher: no wonder he often uses the term ‘love’ to designate the play of the dialectical mediation of opposites. What makes him a Christian philosopher and a philosopher of love is the fact that, contrary to the common misunderstanding, in the arena of dialectical struggle there is no Third which unites and reconciles the two struggling opposites.” (Less Than Nothing, p. 112)
Frederick Beiser describes the Concept as “the inherent form or inner purpose of an object, its formal and final cause. The formal cause is the essence or nature of a thing insofar as it is the cause or reason for its activity; the final cause, is its purpose, the goal of its development. Hegel thinks that these are forms of causality are linked in the Concept, since the final cause of a thing is to realise its inner nature or essence. Hegel insists that the Concept is a concrete universal because it is internal to the thing, and not an abstract universal, which is external to the thing and true only for the consciousness that attempts to explain it.” (Hegel, p. 316) And Todd McGowan theorised that this realisation for a thing in “its inner nature or essence” incorporates contradiction which Hegel modelled after love.
While I use the term “uninitiated” to be tongue in cheek, it’s also to convey the significance of reading Hegel after Slavoj Žižeks’ epochal The Sublime Object of Ideology and For They Know Not What They Do. Žižek perhaps is the predominant reason for Hegel’s renaissance in our time, giving way to the Žižekian-Hegellians who read Hegel as a philosopher of contradiction, negativity and paradox dispensing with the infamous formula of the dialectic as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis.’ The post-WW2 Hegel is not the absolute system builder who’s caricatured as proclaiming that all of history realised itself in his philosophy. Furthermore, along the same lines, the non-pragmatic readers of Hegel understood the importance of Christianity, specifically Christian love and Christ’s Crucifixion, to Hegellianism, where the absolute (God in this case) is shown to be incomplete.
Metaphysicians consciously or unconsciously always study “being qua being”, that is, what exists after all the characteristics of an entity are stripped away: “By parity of reasoning, in the phrase ‘being qua being’ Aristotle means to filter out all features of beings beyond the bare fact of their being beings. In focusing on beings just as beings, and in no other way, Aristotle seeks to study beings as they are in themselves, in their own right.” (The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle) If, for instance, we take a hammer: it can be studied through the properties and behaviour of its matter; being qua chemistry, it can be studied through its fundamental physical structure; being qua physics, it can be studied as a tool; being qua technology, its effects on human behaviour can be studied; being qua anthropology, and so on. But being qua being is studying the hammer as ‘IS,’ whatever that entails, which metaphysics explores. Although worth noting that metaphysics does not transcend the physical world nor comes before or after it. But studies entities as IS amidst and before any category, quality, characteristics etc. Of course, one could see how such a study could be infinitely complicated when we consider the being of human subjects, which is why Heidegger calls ‘Dasein’ for good reasons.
Read P. 30-31 of Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre.
The dialectic of truth Žižek theorises on is the Lacano-Hegelian phenomenon of truth being inaccessible directly but requiring an initial obstacle, i.e., a failure or misrecognition. We see it unfold if, for instance, we take Hegel’s theory of repetition in history apropos Julius Caesar’s death: the deterioration of the Roman Republic resulted in Caesar’s amassing of personal monarchical power, which was a necessity to save the state. And yet a state based upon the will of a single individual was contrary to the spirit of Republicanism. Accordingly, the conspirators against Caesar (Brutus, Cassius, etc.) allowed the state to remain a Republic formally, in the ‘opinion’ of the people. But paradoxically, it’s the death of Caesar which gave way to the truth of autocratic Caesarism, that is, Caesar’s murder was the reign of Augustus, the first Caesar: “The Truth thus arose from failure itself in failing, in missing its express goal, the murder of Caesar fulfilled the task which was, in a Machiavellian way, assigned to it by history: to exhibit the historical necessity by denouncing its own non-truth - its own arbitrary, contingent character.” (The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 64)
While theorising about the future is useless because, as Hegel famously formulated that the owl of Minerva takes flight only with the falling of dusk—meaning philosophical comprehension of a given epoch takes place after its already come to an end—we can still speculate on how the logic of our time will unfold amidst the AI revolution. We see techno-optimists like Yann LeCun who are emphatically for the progression of AI while those like Eliezer Yudkowsky crassly state, “AGI will kill you”, and its development needs to be shut down. A Hegelian response would be that both these theses will misrecognise each other; humanity will deal with AI wrongly, and we retrospectively will posit a symbolic meaning to what AI ‘really’ IS. Nonetheless, the truth of AI will unfold due to this error because of the “dialectics of overtaking ourselves towards the future and simultaneous retroactive modification of the past - dialectics by which the error is internal to the truth, by which the misrecognition possesses a positive ontological dimension.” (Ibid., p. 74) We can only get at the truth of AI through the inherent error ontologically internal to the truth. So we cannot have our cake and it too by taking the good and jettisoning the bad of AI even if its progression is halted, as Eliezer would prefer. The only way to approach AI is through dialectical critique, where we work through inevitable contradictions and mishaps.
One could argue that Schindler never truly believed in the Nazi ideology and only partook in the big Other with an insincere distance. But as Žižek theorised, this is exactly how belief apropos ideology functions. For an ideology to sustain itself, it doesn’t require true fundamentalist believers, but subjects who have the Other believe for them while nonetheless partaking in the ideological edifice. Paradoxically, no one effectively believes in the first-person, yet the ideology structures our social reality. A typical demonstrative example that perhaps is now out-of-date in secular society is the belief in God by a church congregation. If we ask most congregants if they believe in core Christian doctrines like the resurrection of Christ, that is, a dead person comes back to life; if they’re honest, they would say they don’t but still tacitly claim that the others do sincerely believe in such miracles. And since they have outsourced their belief to others, they can still participate in the religious rituals and allow the ideologies to have a material impact on their social reality. Such belief, of course, isn’t unique to Christians but applies to neoliberal capitalism too (or, in Schindler’s case, Nazism), which functions much like a religion. We don’t truly believe the free market will save us or even does what it claims to do; nonetheless, we partake in it uncritically.
I got this insight from Frank Ruda in From Catastrophic Messianism to Comic Fatalism – Part 1.