"[...] the false can have an affirmative power and [...] the deep opponent of both the true and the false (and life) is stupidity – defined as the desire for simple oppositions, for common sense and for transcendent life- denying values."
Williams feat. Deleuze
Williams feat. Deleuze
“I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.”
Judith Butler
"When you remember to become what you are – a subject-in-becoming – you actually reinvent yourself on the basis of what you hope you could become with a little help from your friends."
Rosi Braidotti
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
Jean Baudrillard
Only the yearning for sustainable futures can construct a liveable present. The anticipation of endurance, of making it to a possible “tomorrow”; transposes energies form the future back into the present.
Rosi Braidotti
“The other is a threshold of transformative encounters. The 'difference' expressed by subjects who are especially positioned as 'other-than', that is to say always already different from - has a potential for transformative or creative becoming. This 'difference' is not an essential given, but a project and a process that is ethically coded. “
Rosi Braidotti
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt
Prior to being a generous life-style in the service of others, altruism is indeed the foundational principle of a self that knows itself to be constituted by another: the necessary other.
Adriana Cavarero
This ethic finds therefore a fundamental principle in the recognition that every human being, whatever her qualities, has her unjudgable splendor in a personal identity that is irrefutably her story.
Adriana Cavarero
"I don't really identify with the label 'bisexual,' nor does it feel like it accurately describes me...I see myself as queer, since queer to me is not just about who I love or lust, but it's about my culture, my community, and my politics. The truth is, even if I were with a heterosexual guy, I'd be a queer dyke."
Tristan Taormino
Tristan Taormino
"Ma le mine vaganti servono a portare il disordine, a prendere le cose e a metterle in posti dove nessuno voleva farcele stare, a scombinare tutto, a cambiare i piani."
Mine Vaganti, 2010
"Alles wat enige status heeft, heeft ook een vorm van macht en macht corrumpeert altijd en moet geridiculiseerd kunnen worden. Als dit niet meer kan krijg je enge toestanden - een dictatuur of zoiets."
Hans Teeuwen
"Omdat het feminisme in geen geval een zoektocht naar absolute zuiverheid, naar het Gulden Vlies van de waarheid is, moeten we aan het begin van het nieuwe millenium een talent ontwikkelen voor het compliceren van zaken, teneinde te kunnen overleven in deze complexe tijd."
Rosi Braidotti
"You are always in love with an inappropriate being. That is part of the definition of being in love. You always wake up and discover that it's the wrong object and it's too bad that it's too late."
Donna Harayway
"There is nothing deeper than skin."
Paul Valéry
Donna Harayway
"There is nothing deeper than skin."
Paul Valéry
"Het is mij opgevallen dat er in Nederland veel wantrouwen bestaat jegens het gebruik van filosofisch ingewikkelde taal, die snel wordt afgedaan als onleesbaar of als jargon. In de Franse filosofische traditie, waarin ik ben opgeleid, is er veel meer begrip voor een complexe intellectuele stijl van denken en schrijven. Net zoals de waardering voor wijn en olijfolie in Nederland de laatste decennia is gegroeid, hoop ik dat ook deze meer Latijnse manier van filosoferen de Nederlanders zal smaken."
Rosi Braidotti
Rosi Braidotti
"There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatifc experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
Diane Arbus
Long after, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx.
Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question. Why didn't I recognise my mother?"
"You gave the wrong answer", said the Sphinx.
"But that was what made everything possible", said Oedipus.
"No", she said. "When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn't say anything about woman".
"When you say Man", said Oedipus, "you include women too. Everyone knows that".
She said, "That's what you think".
Muriel Rukeyser, Myth (1935)
To appropriation without consciousness and to consciousness without enjoyment criticism opposes the enjoyment of what cannot be possessed and the possession of what cannot be enjoyed.
Giorgio Agamben
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Hannah Arendt
Prior to being a generous life-style in the service of others, altruism is indeed the foundational principle of a self that knows itself to be constituted by another: the necessary other.
Adriana Cavarero
This ethic finds therefore a fundamental principle in the recognition that every human being, whatever her qualities, has her unjudgable splendor in a personal identity that is irrefutably her story.
Adriana Cavarero
Consider the situation in which one is named without knowing that one is named, which is, after all, the condition of all of us at the beginning and even, sometimes, prior to the beginning. The name constitutes one socially, but one may well imagine oneself in ways that are quite to the contrary of how one is socially constituted; one may, as it were, meet the socially constituted self by surprise, with alarm or pleasure, even with shock. And such an encounter underscores the way in which the name wields a linguistic power of constitution in ways that are indifferent to the one who bears the name. One need not know about or register a way of being constituted for that constitution to work in an efficacious way. For the measure of that constitution is not to be found in a reflexive appropriation of that constitution, but, rather, in a chain of signification that exceeds the circuit of self-knowledge.
Judith Butler
"Any relationship which one takes seriously unwinds into the world. Any relationship of love taken seriously makes one more worldly."
Donna Haraway
"You, who are you? You who are not nor ever will be me or mine."
Luce Irigaray, "I love to you"
Donna Haraway
"You, who are you? You who are not nor ever will be me or mine."
Luce Irigaray, "I love to you"
Stumm ist nur die Gewalt, und schon aus diesem Grunde kann die schiere Gewalt niemals Anspruch auf Größe machen.
Hannah Arendt
You think intercourse is a private act; it's not, it's a social act. Men are sexually predatory in life; and women are sexually manipulative. When two individuals come together and leave their gender outside the bedroom door, then they make love.
Andrea Dworkin
Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.
Judith Butler
Wir fangen etwas an; wir schlagen unseren Faden in ein Netz der Beziehungen. Was daraus wird, wissen wir nie. Wir sind alle darauf angewiesen zu sagen: Herr vergib ihnen, was sie tun, denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun. Das gilt für alles Handeln. Einfach ganz konkret, weil man es nicht wissen kann. Das ist ein Wagnis. Und nun würde ich sagen, daß dieses Wagnis nur möglich ist im Vertrauen auf die Menschen. Das heißt, in einem - schwer genau zu fassenden, aber grundsätzlichen - Vertrauen auf das Menschliche aller Menschen. Anders könnte man das nicht.
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
"How is it that in a society like ours, sexuality is not simply a means of reproducing the species, the family and the individual? Not simply a means to obtain pleasure and enjoyment? How has sexuality come to be considered the privileged place where our deepest "truth" is read and expressed? For that is the essential fact: Since Christianity, the Western world has never ceased saying: "To know who you are, know what your sexuality is". Sex has always been the forum where both the future of our species and our "truth" as human subjects is decided.
Confession, the examination of the conscience, all the insistence on the important secrets of the flesh, has not been simply a means of prohibiting sex or of repressing it as far as possible from consciousness, but was a means of placing sexuality at the heart of existence and of connecting salvation with the mastery of these obscure movements. In Christian societies, sex has been the central object of examination, surveillance, avowal and transformation into discourse"
Confession, the examination of the conscience, all the insistence on the important secrets of the flesh, has not been simply a means of prohibiting sex or of repressing it as far as possible from consciousness, but was a means of placing sexuality at the heart of existence and of connecting salvation with the mastery of these obscure movements. In Christian societies, sex has been the central object of examination, surveillance, avowal and transformation into discourse"
Michel Foucault, Politics Philosophy Culture, 1988
‘The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, . . . ‘
Hannah Arendt, Vita Activa
"It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins.…The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amount to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before."
"It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins.…The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amount to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. The fact that man is capable of action means that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world. With respect to this somebody who is unique it can be truly said that nobody was there before."
Hannah Arendt, Vita Activa
Desire is a non-profit mechanism and its contribution to meaningful production is simply the form it takes to express itself: desire is always the desire to express and to make things happen.
Rosi Braidotti
Desire is never a given. Rather, like a long shadow projected from the past, it is a forward-moving horizon that lies ahead and towards which one moves. Between the no longer and the not yet, desire traces the possible patterns of becoming. These intersect with and mobilize sexuality, but never stop there as they construct space and time and thus design possible worlds by allowing the unfolding of ever-intensified affects. Desire sketches the conditions for the future by bringing into focus the present through the unavoidable accident of an encounter, a flush, a sudden acceleration that marks a point of non-return. Call it falling in love, if you wish, but only if you can rescue the notion from the sentimental banality into which it has sunk in commercial culture. Moreover, if falling in love it is, it is disengaged from the human subject that is wrongly held responsible for the event. Here, love is an intensive encounter that mobilizes the sheer quality of the light and the shape of the landscape. Deleuze’s remark on the grasshoppers flying in at 5 p.m. on the back of the evening wind also evokes non-human cosmic elements in the creation of a space of becoming. This indicates that desire designs a whole territory and thus it cannot be restricted to the mere human persona that enacts it. We need a post- anthropocentric theory of both desire and love in order to do justice to the complexity of subjects of becoming.
Rosi Braidotti
When you remember to become what you are – a subject-in-becoming – you actually reinvent yourself on the basis of what you hope you could become with a little help from your friends.
Rosi Braidotti
It is the intelligence of radically immanent flesh that states with every single breath that the life in you is not marked by any signifier, and it most certainly does not bear your name.
Rosi Braidotti
What we are is bound up with things that existed before and after us and some of which go on after us. Death does affect it, of course, but “death does not have the power to make it not have been” (Lloyd 1994: 132). Being dead does not reduce one to the status of a figment of other people’s imagination, but it dissolves the self into an interconnected continuum with nature as One. Whatever happens - and death always does happen - we will have been and nothing can change that, not even death itself. The future perfect paves the road to the continuous present.
Rosi Braidotti
Nomadic spirituality is profit-free and even anti-profit. It is beyond the ego and its metaphysical life-insurance policies. It enjoys and experiences joy in giving everything away in what used to be called a mystical merging with the cosmos. The same suspension or erasure of the boundaries of the self can also be found in eroticism, in that jouissance which, for Lacan, was best expressed by the ecstasy of Saint Teresa as depicted by Bernini.It is feminine in its fluidity, its empathy and yearning for otherness in a non-appropriative mode, in non-closure and intensity.
Rosi Braidotti
Nomadic post-secular spirituality is not a morality of fringe benefits, but rather an ethics of non-profit. It is beyond metaphysical life-insurance politics. It enjoys gratuitous acts of kindness in the mode of a becoming-world of the subject. Joy in giving something away for free – even if you're not sure of having it; give it for the hell of it, let it go for the love of the world.
Rosi Braidotti
"Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is."
Giorgio Agamben
Derrida on love
As Hannah Arendt would say, they love their ʻwhoʼ. One does not love the what of the beloved, one loves instead who he is. Moreover, one often loves him in spite of what he is. ʻYou are the only oneʼ [ʻSei unicaʼ, ʻsei unicoʼ]lovers tell each other. In this way they reiterate what is obvious about the existent, namely, that when it appears once again, as it had already appeared at birth, it is without quality. Qualities, which define what this woman or this man is, render them similar to many others, and thus co-opt them to the various communities of taste, inclination, ideology or passion:ʻinauthenticʼ communities in which the with consists in sharing the things we love or the ideas we think. The community of lovers, instead, is a privileged relation where two singularities couple themselves together in spite of their qualities and thus in spite of their defects. To say, as one sometimes does, ʻI love your defectsʼ is part of the truth of the amorous game. What is taken for granted in this game is that ʻI love you in spite of your defectsʼ or, better, ʻI love your defects because they are yoursʼ – that is, ʻI love who you are, although I disapprove of what you are.ʼ Maternal love speaks the same language of this ʻin spite ofʼ, the language – which is, in a sense, immoral – of the ʻbeyond good and evilʼ, where the judgement on what the beloved is becomes powerless before the appearance of who the beloved is.
As many have noted, the language of lovers is asocial. And it is obvious that this should be the case because society – all the more in the modern understanding of the term – is the competitive stage on which only what one is or has counts for anything, in accordance with the principles of iterability, exchange and substitution. Every beloved is unique for the lover, just as every child is unique for the mother, because the existent is constitutively unique. It is not difficult to understand why, for millennia, lovers have challenged social rules and conventions, transgressed caste distinctions and subverted hierarchies. The joy of love lies, in fact, in the nakedness of an appearing that cannot bear qualifications. Here the existent simply exists in the with of reciprocal exposure, which makes a perfect and exclusive community of lovers even though, contrary to birth, its occurrence is repeatable. It is then possible that the lovers will remember the twofold movement of the relation with the mother, at once passive and active; the originary pulsion towards self-exposure. All the fragility of the finite is found again here, in the wholeness of the existent who refuses, or even mocks, every internal distinction between its flesh and its spirit and touches an other existent. The only active distinction is now that of two unrepeatable singularities who distinguish themselves by appearing together. There is no fusion of lovers into unity despite the immemorial myth, false because it is false to celebrate existence in rites of dissolution, turning the pulsion of love into a death drive.
The myth tells us how love and death, eros and thanatos, willingly merge – despite some circumstantial shudders – in the seductive myth of dissolution. The mythical perfect community that devours the individual is again at work. The two existences, fusing into the one-all, disappear in the whirlpool of no-where: the very same place, according to a well-known variant of the myth, from which they emerged, namely the mother. Birth and death, the eternal seduction of the inorganic, would thus amount to the same: provided that the finite, if it is allowed some fleeting shimmer of glory, burns in the act of its annihilation; provided that the infinite preserves its primacy and death its voracity.
But, despite the ancient myth, lovers do not want to die, merging one into the other. Instead they want the full splendour of the finite according to the reciprocal uniqueness that exposes and distinguishes them in the with. Loving each other, they are simply reborn to the inaugural and relational fragility of their existence.
Love, in fact, does not offer any protection against the fragility of the who. Its exposure is total and irremediable: it demands to be accepted, not to be annihilated. The sexual rite is thus not one of fusion, annihilating uniqueness, rendering the act vain. It is, if anything, the rite of repeating the beginning: exposing again the naked exposure, as yet covered by nothing, which inaugurates the appearing of the existent. Seen in this way, the newborn is the very prototype of the existent without qualities because its body, face and gender are not at all qualities of this existent but rather the spiritual matter of its uniqueness. Appearing in indifference towards their qualities – an indifference which is maximized in the orgasm – the lovers thus come to repeat the beginning of their existence. They do not return into the womb of the mother; on the contrary, they are ousted again into the inaugural nudity of appearance.
While not condoning its falsity, we can understand the blunder on which the credibility of the myth hinges. It is, in fact, the very experience of orgasm that is often identified with death as the perfect community, where pleasure would coincide with the annihilation of the individual in the autonomous and impersonal logic of the flesh. But what dies here – or better, what is already dead – is nothing but the subject adorned by its qualities. The loss of meaning of what one is and knows oneself to be, the complete oblivion of oneʼs own personal qualities and social markers, is mistaken for the death of the self. However, we are dealing with a repetition of birth, experienced by a self without qualities who, in virtue of this magnificent stripping, can suddenly remember the originary coincidence of life and existence. The prevalence of the body here only signifies the inherence of the existent to the body, the spirituality of the flesh and carnality of the spirit, which makes their indiscernibility the miracle of uniqueness. The lovers have undressed themselves in order to caress their naked bodies; it is, however, only in the orgasm that the nakedness of existence is really such in so far as it cannot be dressed up with any quality.
There is a great deal of sense in the proverbial expression ʻlove at first sightʼ. At first sight one cannot see anything but the physical appearance and thus one can only fall in love with the beauty that it incarnates. But we know very well that it is not so. Instead we fall in love with who shines through that body and that face; these become beautiful because they are her/his body and her/his face. They are beautiful because they are unique and felt to be such with an intensity that is beyond argument because the criterion of this beauty no longer belongs to the sphere of judgement, perhaps not even to the sphere of taste. It belongs to the sphere, indifferent to qualities, of what is unjudgeable; to the sphere of the sudden manifestation of an existent. The equally proverbial brevity of love depends, in fact, on the supervenience of the qualities of the lover, beneath which who we used to love succumbs. And then we are surprised that we did not notice before what he was and is. In the luminous revelation of the existent that occupies the whole erotic stage, we could not see the quality which makes him similar to many others, qualities which are susceptible to judgement. Love is blind – that is, without judgement – precisely with respect to what all others see. It experiences another type of gaze: a gaze that comes from the crushing experience of the fragility of the finite. The finite is fragile not because it is exposed to solitude but precisely in so far as it appears. Indeed lovers fully perceive the fragility of their appearing, and because in the fragile glory of the existent the with of their community is here also a reciprocal trust – trusting one in the touch of the other – they entrust themselves to the other. It is said, in this regard, that women know how to touch the beloved with gentleness because of their habit of handlingʼ newborns. The truth is that the existent, when it exposes itself completely, is fragile, and all the more so in its adult flesh. The maps of the erogenous zones are therefore ridiculous technical supports (a product of the scientific community of sex) for those who ignore that they are touching an existent in the wholeness of its exposure. This is precisely the community of lovers: a relation that constitutes the existent as intimate exteriority.
Adriana Cavarero
Desire is a non-profit mechanism and its contribution to meaningful production is simply the form it takes to express itself: desire is always the desire to express and to make things happen.
Rosi Braidotti
Desire is never a given. Rather, like a long shadow projected from the past, it is a forward-moving horizon that lies ahead and towards which one moves. Between the no longer and the not yet, desire traces the possible patterns of becoming. These intersect with and mobilize sexuality, but never stop there as they construct space and time and thus design possible worlds by allowing the unfolding of ever-intensified affects. Desire sketches the conditions for the future by bringing into focus the present through the unavoidable accident of an encounter, a flush, a sudden acceleration that marks a point of non-return. Call it falling in love, if you wish, but only if you can rescue the notion from the sentimental banality into which it has sunk in commercial culture. Moreover, if falling in love it is, it is disengaged from the human subject that is wrongly held responsible for the event. Here, love is an intensive encounter that mobilizes the sheer quality of the light and the shape of the landscape. Deleuze’s remark on the grasshoppers flying in at 5 p.m. on the back of the evening wind also evokes non-human cosmic elements in the creation of a space of becoming. This indicates that desire designs a whole territory and thus it cannot be restricted to the mere human persona that enacts it. We need a post- anthropocentric theory of both desire and love in order to do justice to the complexity of subjects of becoming.
Rosi Braidotti
When you remember to become what you are – a subject-in-becoming – you actually reinvent yourself on the basis of what you hope you could become with a little help from your friends.
Rosi Braidotti
It is the intelligence of radically immanent flesh that states with every single breath that the life in you is not marked by any signifier, and it most certainly does not bear your name.
Rosi Braidotti
What we are is bound up with things that existed before and after us and some of which go on after us. Death does affect it, of course, but “death does not have the power to make it not have been” (Lloyd 1994: 132). Being dead does not reduce one to the status of a figment of other people’s imagination, but it dissolves the self into an interconnected continuum with nature as One. Whatever happens - and death always does happen - we will have been and nothing can change that, not even death itself. The future perfect paves the road to the continuous present.
Rosi Braidotti
Nomadic spirituality is profit-free and even anti-profit. It is beyond the ego and its metaphysical life-insurance policies. It enjoys and experiences joy in giving everything away in what used to be called a mystical merging with the cosmos. The same suspension or erasure of the boundaries of the self can also be found in eroticism, in that jouissance which, for Lacan, was best expressed by the ecstasy of Saint Teresa as depicted by Bernini.It is feminine in its fluidity, its empathy and yearning for otherness in a non-appropriative mode, in non-closure and intensity.
Rosi Braidotti
Nomadic post-secular spirituality is not a morality of fringe benefits, but rather an ethics of non-profit. It is beyond metaphysical life-insurance politics. It enjoys gratuitous acts of kindness in the mode of a becoming-world of the subject. Joy in giving something away for free – even if you're not sure of having it; give it for the hell of it, let it go for the love of the world.
Rosi Braidotti
"Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The lover wants the loved one with all of its predicates, its being such as it is."
Giorgio Agamben
Derrida on love
As Hannah Arendt would say, they love their ʻwhoʼ. One does not love the what of the beloved, one loves instead who he is. Moreover, one often loves him in spite of what he is. ʻYou are the only oneʼ [ʻSei unicaʼ, ʻsei unicoʼ]lovers tell each other. In this way they reiterate what is obvious about the existent, namely, that when it appears once again, as it had already appeared at birth, it is without quality. Qualities, which define what this woman or this man is, render them similar to many others, and thus co-opt them to the various communities of taste, inclination, ideology or passion:ʻinauthenticʼ communities in which the with consists in sharing the things we love or the ideas we think. The community of lovers, instead, is a privileged relation where two singularities couple themselves together in spite of their qualities and thus in spite of their defects. To say, as one sometimes does, ʻI love your defectsʼ is part of the truth of the amorous game. What is taken for granted in this game is that ʻI love you in spite of your defectsʼ or, better, ʻI love your defects because they are yoursʼ – that is, ʻI love who you are, although I disapprove of what you are.ʼ Maternal love speaks the same language of this ʻin spite ofʼ, the language – which is, in a sense, immoral – of the ʻbeyond good and evilʼ, where the judgement on what the beloved is becomes powerless before the appearance of who the beloved is.
As many have noted, the language of lovers is asocial. And it is obvious that this should be the case because society – all the more in the modern understanding of the term – is the competitive stage on which only what one is or has counts for anything, in accordance with the principles of iterability, exchange and substitution. Every beloved is unique for the lover, just as every child is unique for the mother, because the existent is constitutively unique. It is not difficult to understand why, for millennia, lovers have challenged social rules and conventions, transgressed caste distinctions and subverted hierarchies. The joy of love lies, in fact, in the nakedness of an appearing that cannot bear qualifications. Here the existent simply exists in the with of reciprocal exposure, which makes a perfect and exclusive community of lovers even though, contrary to birth, its occurrence is repeatable. It is then possible that the lovers will remember the twofold movement of the relation with the mother, at once passive and active; the originary pulsion towards self-exposure. All the fragility of the finite is found again here, in the wholeness of the existent who refuses, or even mocks, every internal distinction between its flesh and its spirit and touches an other existent. The only active distinction is now that of two unrepeatable singularities who distinguish themselves by appearing together. There is no fusion of lovers into unity despite the immemorial myth, false because it is false to celebrate existence in rites of dissolution, turning the pulsion of love into a death drive.
The myth tells us how love and death, eros and thanatos, willingly merge – despite some circumstantial shudders – in the seductive myth of dissolution. The mythical perfect community that devours the individual is again at work. The two existences, fusing into the one-all, disappear in the whirlpool of no-where: the very same place, according to a well-known variant of the myth, from which they emerged, namely the mother. Birth and death, the eternal seduction of the inorganic, would thus amount to the same: provided that the finite, if it is allowed some fleeting shimmer of glory, burns in the act of its annihilation; provided that the infinite preserves its primacy and death its voracity.
But, despite the ancient myth, lovers do not want to die, merging one into the other. Instead they want the full splendour of the finite according to the reciprocal uniqueness that exposes and distinguishes them in the with. Loving each other, they are simply reborn to the inaugural and relational fragility of their existence.
Love, in fact, does not offer any protection against the fragility of the who. Its exposure is total and irremediable: it demands to be accepted, not to be annihilated. The sexual rite is thus not one of fusion, annihilating uniqueness, rendering the act vain. It is, if anything, the rite of repeating the beginning: exposing again the naked exposure, as yet covered by nothing, which inaugurates the appearing of the existent. Seen in this way, the newborn is the very prototype of the existent without qualities because its body, face and gender are not at all qualities of this existent but rather the spiritual matter of its uniqueness. Appearing in indifference towards their qualities – an indifference which is maximized in the orgasm – the lovers thus come to repeat the beginning of their existence. They do not return into the womb of the mother; on the contrary, they are ousted again into the inaugural nudity of appearance.
While not condoning its falsity, we can understand the blunder on which the credibility of the myth hinges. It is, in fact, the very experience of orgasm that is often identified with death as the perfect community, where pleasure would coincide with the annihilation of the individual in the autonomous and impersonal logic of the flesh. But what dies here – or better, what is already dead – is nothing but the subject adorned by its qualities. The loss of meaning of what one is and knows oneself to be, the complete oblivion of oneʼs own personal qualities and social markers, is mistaken for the death of the self. However, we are dealing with a repetition of birth, experienced by a self without qualities who, in virtue of this magnificent stripping, can suddenly remember the originary coincidence of life and existence. The prevalence of the body here only signifies the inherence of the existent to the body, the spirituality of the flesh and carnality of the spirit, which makes their indiscernibility the miracle of uniqueness. The lovers have undressed themselves in order to caress their naked bodies; it is, however, only in the orgasm that the nakedness of existence is really such in so far as it cannot be dressed up with any quality.
There is a great deal of sense in the proverbial expression ʻlove at first sightʼ. At first sight one cannot see anything but the physical appearance and thus one can only fall in love with the beauty that it incarnates. But we know very well that it is not so. Instead we fall in love with who shines through that body and that face; these become beautiful because they are her/his body and her/his face. They are beautiful because they are unique and felt to be such with an intensity that is beyond argument because the criterion of this beauty no longer belongs to the sphere of judgement, perhaps not even to the sphere of taste. It belongs to the sphere, indifferent to qualities, of what is unjudgeable; to the sphere of the sudden manifestation of an existent. The equally proverbial brevity of love depends, in fact, on the supervenience of the qualities of the lover, beneath which who we used to love succumbs. And then we are surprised that we did not notice before what he was and is. In the luminous revelation of the existent that occupies the whole erotic stage, we could not see the quality which makes him similar to many others, qualities which are susceptible to judgement. Love is blind – that is, without judgement – precisely with respect to what all others see. It experiences another type of gaze: a gaze that comes from the crushing experience of the fragility of the finite. The finite is fragile not because it is exposed to solitude but precisely in so far as it appears. Indeed lovers fully perceive the fragility of their appearing, and because in the fragile glory of the existent the with of their community is here also a reciprocal trust – trusting one in the touch of the other – they entrust themselves to the other. It is said, in this regard, that women know how to touch the beloved with gentleness because of their habit of handlingʼ newborns. The truth is that the existent, when it exposes itself completely, is fragile, and all the more so in its adult flesh. The maps of the erogenous zones are therefore ridiculous technical supports (a product of the scientific community of sex) for those who ignore that they are touching an existent in the wholeness of its exposure. This is precisely the community of lovers: a relation that constitutes the existent as intimate exteriority.
Adriana Cavarero
