Quest for Meaning, Fall 2007

The Loving Self

The Art/Techne of Love in an Age of Technology

When human beings have finished, they are just beginning, and when
they stop they are still perplexed. What are human beings, and of
what use are they?
Sirach, 18.7:8

Upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves.

Song of Solomon, 3.1

All human toil is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not satisfied.
Ecclesiastes 6. 7

Like taking blood from a vein, I want to see what I can draw out of this title.
Love in the Age of Technology may give on to think about Viagara or the latest in
electronic satisfaction. The title may even provide an occasion to think about
Gabriel Garcia Marquezs book, Love in the Time of Cholera. Indeed one may
conclude prematurely and rightly so since all conclusions are premature, that the
art or techne of love is a messy affair with or without cholera.
To take measure of love and technology, to measure its length and
circumference, hollows, planes and surfaces is already to play the card of
abstraction. To speak of love is to already assign a limit to that which is beyond any
limit; that is, if the mystics can be believed.
To speak of love is to be confined within the technology of speech and
writing; to be ground down in the gears of discursive machine that travels too fast.
I believe that we are far from understanding not only what love is but what it is
that we love when we love. Tied within the passions of both ignorance and hate as
Plato has taught us, love remains the dearest and most obscure of words.
Shakespeare echoes Plato when he writes these lines:

Heres much to do with hate but more with love. Why then, O
brawling love, or Loving hate.
Romeo and Juliet, Act1 . Sc.1. 180

In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant wonders about the
radical perversion of the human heart( Book 1, Sec 3) But this is old news.
Countless examples show that what has been done in the name of love has been
otherwise than love. Following Kant, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
argues The law of the heart, as I have said is a bigger nuisance than paranoia
( Position of the Unconscious).

Allow me a long quotation from the French psycho-analyst Jacques Lacan:

I can tell you a little tale, that of a parakeet that was in love with
Picasso. How could one tell? From the way the parakeet nibbled the

1
 collar of his shirt and the flap of his jacket. Indeed the parakeet was in
love with what is essential to man, namely his attire. The parakeet
was like Descartes to whom men were merely clothes
(habits)...waking about...clothes promise debauchery when one takes
them off...But this is only a myth.... To enjoy a body when there are no
more clothes leaves intact the question of what makes the ONE, that
is the question of identification. The parakeet identified with Picasso
clothed. The same goes for everything involving love. (Encore, p.6)

Lacan forces us to answer the question, What do I love when I love you?. Lacan
like Nietzsche shows us that when the poets speak of love, they are lying. Diderot
writes,

Bring your lips to mine so that out of my mouth

my soul may pass into yours.

These words only show us that if love is in the mouth then dentists would have to
be the masters of love.. Here the Other becomes a prosthetic denture that we
wish to have glued to ourselves ; so that we may drink from the same source; one
set of lips passing into the other.
What is it that we love? The sparkle of the eyes, the radiant glow of a made
up face, corpse like fresh? The way we may be held, brought to the height of
pleasure, or not? For Lacan, we love the image and the imaginary with the
outcome that the singular unique person is not loved.
The ancient Greek poet Sappho writes of love but her words could also be
used as an excellent description of the Norwalk flu:

For when I glance at you even an instant I can no longer utter a word
My tongue thickens to a lump and beneath my skin breaks out a
subtle fire
My eyes are blind
My ears filled with humming
and sweat streams down my body
I am seized by a sudden shuddering
I turn greener than grass
and in a moment more I fell I shall die.

Returning to Lacan, we can ask how we treat the remainder of the body of the
ONE who is clothed? The other is turned into an image, an idea, an object to be
enjoyed in a certain way. Lacan asks:
Do we treat the other as breast or phallus, thus setting the tone for an oral
love affair where the other becomes an object to cling to, to demand, reject and
return?
Do we adopt an anal approach to the other, falling or dropping in love and
then fleeing once the object is reduced to something that smells.
Are we blinded by the object, never seeing how we are deceived and how we
deceive in being-love-struck?
Is the object-body reduced to a voice that groans or screams and gives out
orders then remains silent, resulting in the compulsion to hear the voice just one
more time as on an answering machine?

2
 For Lacan the law of the heart is a bigger nuisance than paranoia for a
number of reasons. He writes, It is clear that in everything that approaches it,
language merely manifests its inadequacy (Encore,45) In other words the saying,
I love you for Lacan, is already an abstraction to which one could respond until
when? or so what or I love myself through you. In Lacans words,

We see in what sense these effects agitate, stir things up and bother
speaking beings.... It must with the help of this feeling lead, in the end
to the reproduction of bodies. But isnt it possible that language may
have other effects than to lead people by the nose to reproduce yet
again in the body to body. (Encore, 46)

There is deception and agitation within the body to body fusion; but two has never
become One. Thus for Lacan the problem is how can there by love for an other?
since, the ONE everyone talks about all the time is, first of all, a kind of mirage of
the ONE you believe yourself to be (Encore, 47)
The ONE you believe yourself to be, is not the ONE that you are since you
are an Other reduced to what the Other wants you to be for them. So the
remainder or the leftover, which is what remains REAL is ignored and hated as it
circulates between these two trying to become ONE.