The emergence of love is a sudden appearance of the demonic, and is by no accident inexplicable:
. . nearing its desired end,
our intellect sinks into an abyss
so deep that memory fails to follow it.
(Dante, Paradise, canto 1, ll. 7–9)
How and why does one fall in love? The question is senseless, because when it comes down to it, the lover could only reel off the tangible reasons, even a million of them, but all that would not exhaust the sensual totality that is the object of love. The lover would protest most strenuously against the object of his love being reduced to a “sensual totality,” because he would sense (rightly) that in doing so his own inner boundlessness was being forced between boundaries. “Love, on being delimited, evaporates,” Unamuno wrote. The object of love cannot be spoken about, being almost unnamable. (I am in love with somebody, I will say, but in doing so I have said nothing about either the individual or my feelings.) In a certain sense, the object of love per se does not exist except as an object modified by movement and direction, and molded to the lover’s own image. No one sees the beloved as the lover does, and that is why it is impossible to speak about the cause of love. The paradox of love: the object exists (after all, it is visible, can be induced to speak, can be violated) yet is nonetheless intangible, always slipping out of one’s grasp. Uniqueness and perpetual vanishing from sight: that is the reality of love, a paradox of which unresolvability is the essence. It is another matter that although the lover is eager for resolution, would like to “grasp” the object of his love, doing so would immediately lead to a limitation (in the best-intentioned sense of the word), which contradicts the essence of love. Love does not brook resolution. Love cannot be fulfilled; man in love can only truly be in love if he has not gained his object — and vice versa: unattainability precludes the possibility of relief. Reciprocal love does not exist: two people cannot be in love with each other at the same time; mutual attraction is not love but affection. “If there is a kind of love,” La Rochefoucauld writes, obviously speaking about the melancholia residing at the bottom of love, “that is pure and unmingled with our other passions, it is one that is hidden in the depths of the heart and unknown even to ourselves” (
Collected Maxims
, V: 69). The lover longs for and would like to appropriate
the beloved, and thus is at the mercy of his beloved. It is no accident that one customarily talks about the
object
of love: in comparison to the inner vitality of the lover, an object is lifeless, neutral, and passive. The beloved ceases to be human and turns into an object. Thus, the lover always ends up in an excruciating trap: he creates for himself someone to be at the mercy of his creation; he falls in love with a person who will appear as an object, and that object, for all its defenselessness, subjugates him. The young Thomas Mann wrote as follows to his wife-to-be in June 1904:
Silly little Katia, still going on with that nonsense about “overestimating” and still maintaining that she cannot “be” to me what I “expect” of her. But I love you — good Lord, don’t you understand what that means? What more is there to expect and to be? I want you to “be” my wife and by being so make me madly proud and happy. . What I “make of you,” the meaning I attribute to you, which you have and will have for my life, is my affair, after all, and imposes no trouble and obligation on you. Silly little Katia!
(Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–1955, 38)
The objects of love are “defenseless,” since they permit themselves to be fallen in love with, and possibly are even unaware of it, yet they gain the upper hand over the “creator” (Pygmalion). Though the lover thinks of himself as the stronger, he is unable to avoid being enslaved. His irresistible masochism does not permit him to be on equal terms with the beloved. He longs for such equality, knowing full well that only it will afford a resolution, but since he is incapable of grasping the beloved, he cannot regard himself as equal in rank. Equality — the lover knows this, but cannot resign himself to it — is ruled out from the start, the physical differences alone foredooming it to failure. But even beyond the question of bodies, it is a pipe dream if, in calling someone my equal (for example, in friendship), I selectively
accentuate only those of his or her qualities that are important for me, paying no attention to the rest. That, however, is precisely the result when one attempts to place divergence and dissimilarity in equality of rank. Equality in rank is conceivable only in theory (the formal aspects of political or legal equality are another matter), whereas the essence of love is that it strives for a very specific equality in rank, that is, wanting to make one’s own, possess, devour, identify oneself with every particularity of the other. Those theories about the origin of mankind (Plato, Blake) according to which women and men were born from a hermaphroditic creature are very pertinent, since love, by its very existence, ought to believe in the possibility of this reunion. It does not yearn for marriage or procreation; it is at a loss when faced with the possibility of all kinds of practical solutions, because its intention runs beyond them into a world of imagination, faith, and, in the final analysis, nothingness (“Love expires as soon as gods have flown” [Hölderlin,
Death of Empedocles
, 1.4]). The lover strives for the other to exist solely for him in his or her entire concreteness, yet at the same time the other is a completely abstract being (that is, unattainable, unprocurable). He or she is something that cannot be had. The lover would like to combine perfect abstraction and blood-and-flesh uniqueness — that is why his fate is always tragic. In mundane life, the lover will usually achieve his goal, win the hand of the loved one, but that is already a compromise: he has renounced everything that sustained his love, sheer movement and longing having been altered into a closed position, faith into something evident.
The lover is in a state of constant inner turmoil; therefore, his ideal is well balanced. This, however, is unattainable, because as long as love lasts, it is necessarily fraught with dissatisfaction, and when it is fulfilled, it is no longer love. The lover sees equanimity as a compromise, and love must be perfectly free of any compromises. He does not know stability and is constantly suffering on that account — suffering because his love is not fulfilled, though if it were to be realized, it would no longer be love, since reality is always a result of compromises. Love is a peculiar state: its essence is movement and elusiveness, in contrast to all other relationships, which, even in the midst of the change and evolution typical of relationships, possess a kind of stability, bourgeois reliability, and verifiability. Love is not a relationship, but a one-sided disposition. All relationships presuppose a sort of objectivity, but in the case of love, even the object is not a “real” object, but rather a belief, an illusion. The lover is thus necessarily solitary, and besides suffering, that is the other cause of his melancholia. This solitude is at the same time delightfuclass="underline" the lover finds that through his feelings he conducts an intimate conversation with the absolute, which, due to its indefinability, he would justifiably call nothingness—for to converse with the absolute, to be in love, is nothing other than to live from moment to moment with recognized nothingness, to accept dispossession. For that reason, the lover’s suffering is associated with autonomy of the highest order, all the more so because the existence of the other is not determining, not influential, just a “pretext.” The object of his love does not have to do anything, does not have to behave in any particular way or reciprocate — love is in any case blind, though that blindness is like Teiresias’s, giving rise to inscrutably profound knowledge. (“The lover would be more divine than the beloved because God was in the former but not in the latter,” Thomas Mann puts in the mouth of Socrates in Death in Venice.) The lover “creates” the object of that love, who, were she or he not a heretic, would fittingly worship the lover as her or his own god and creator. No other person in the world would pay her or him so much attention; there is no one to whom she or he could turn with such confidence as the person in love with her or him. Man is “fragmented”; only God can be hoped to behold us as a “complete whole”—or our lover, since he is also our creator. “Only love (l’amour) is true knowledge,” says Gabriel Marcel. “It is legitimate to approach adequate knowledge; for love, that is, and only for love, the individuality of the loved being is scattered into I know not what kind of heap of abstract motifs” (Marcel, Journal métaphysique, 63). For the object of love, it would be enough to glance into the lover’s eyes to see his or her true nature. Yet the glance of a lover is just as devastating as God’s; to be able to look God in the face, we must also become God. A true lover becomes frightening; the beloved is startled and runs away terrified; he or she is scared of the lover, in the same way that one, even while on earth, would rather choose hell than God when the time comes. The lover is a solitary god who in his own way is just as pitiable as anyone who fails to find his own god.