I would have responded yesterday but most of the day was spent at the hospital. Daughter Rose is pregnant with triplet boys. Triplets never go to term. But if they are born too early they will have lots of perhaps permanent health and developmental problems - if they live. Rose is 29.5 weeks, which is too early. She needs to get to 32-33 ... Thursday night Rose went into labor, and hence to the hospital, in a kind of emergency way. Turns out they are keeping her, probably for weeks, to ensure that they can keep her from going into labor (via magnesium sulfate and other muscle relaxants) til the boys are developed enough to be born. So, as you can imagine, kathy (wife) and I have been rather busy, either on the road or at the hospital, which is about 40 miles from here.
I tell you all this as it is entirely relevant, I think to the discussion. Any parent and soon-to-be-grandparent going through what we're going through would look at you in disbelief were you to say that love is nothing but a linguistic-cultural trope. But you would be in fact at least partially correct. I mean, what's happening to Rose is **typical**. Otherwise, how would the hospital and its staff know what was happening to her, and how would they have developed the tools and the language to to deal with it?
I think (given this experience, and something else I'm about to write about) that love, and its language, is indeed just as those lines from Petrarch/Manning would have them. But, and this is important, I think the problems begin when we try to separate the linguistic-cultural from the natural-biological, as if human culture were somehow an unnatural island in the midst of an otherwise entirely natural world. And if we didn't try to separate our own experience of love from the typical human experience of love (which, art at least would tell us extends as a fact beyond the western world). I think that there are plenty of reasons why the separation of the personal from the typical takes place, and they too are bio-neuro-psychological, as well as economic etc.
Anyhow, I wonder if you are familiar with Alain Badiou's work, and his discussion of love as one of the four authentic events (the other three being art, science and politics) (see below for more on what's meant by an event).
[Note: on my way to Badiou I stumbled upon this, a comment appended to a Nina Power post (I love (!?!?!) Nina Power by the way) by one "Christoph": In love as elsewhere, it's true that the basic "semiotic entity" (Eco) is anything that can be used to live. Even an orgasm. Communication is love, and love is communication. As Luhmann has said, "we are often unable to answer the question "Do you love me?" but we cannot answer it by silence either, which is why it is advisable not to pose the question in the first place."]
Anyhow, Badiou (below, IT = his Infinite Thought, which is in fact a long difficult wonderful read), as cribbed from a review here.
Spaces of Experimentation:"Truth is the central notion of Badiou¹s philosophy: truth is what disturbs\\ destroys\\ interrupts the order of knowledge or politics. What is true forces us to commit ourselves to some new idea or new world of ideas. Truth occurs in an event to a subject, and it cannot fold itself into preformed or known categories. It proceeds in the subject in an act of faith on the one hand, but (being unknown and therefore unsayable) proceeds by chance and adhering to the lessons of the event. What is unnameable thereby becomes a kind of clean slate upon which the singular event and subject force their existence, generating something new in the face of the unknown. Hold on(!), I hear you say: what about Badiou's ontology? And what does he mean by Œevent?
Badiou understands mathematics as ontology : maths speaks of or writes being (IT: 10). From this point of departure, he is able to draw on set theory which he argues makes no claims concerning the nature of being, nor concerning the adequation of its categories to being² (IT: 13). Indeed, Badiou¹s ontology is subtractive; it speaks of beings without reference to their attributes or identities. In effect, all qualities are subtracted.
Already it is clear that there is a disconnect between ontology proper, the formal language of set theory, and meta-ontology, Badiou¹s ranslation of set theory¹s axioms and theorems into philosophical terms. This review does not dwell on set theory however, and is instead more interested in the notion of event which recurs throughout the book.
Badiou has a dramatic view of the event. For him, an event is a major historical turning point, or moment of rupture in time and space, which brings something new into the world² (Bassett, 2008: 895). This is not the same as an ordinary event, such as a birthday, a sporting event or even death ; it is a totally disruptive occurrence (IT: 20) which is rare and unpredictable. Interestingly, although he employs the notion of rupture, Badiou is keen to stress that events cannot easily be recognised within a
given state of affairs and thus have no well-defined location.
Badiou suggests a certain fidelity to the event whereby it is named and believed to exist. He argues that ³not every human being is always a subject, yet some human beings become subjects; those who act in fidelity to a chance encounter with an event which disrupts the situation they find themselves in² (IT: 5). Thus, an occurrence becomes an event to the extent that it is injected with subjective significance. Put differently: the singular truth, arising in an event, happens to (or calls into being) a subject."
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I can't wait to go through your book again, this time with a new and infinitely sharpened eye.
All best, cheers,
John
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