Matt Lee:
Hello and welcome to another session of our conversations about concepts. This time we're going to be talking about love. One of those concepts that seems to be almost everywhere sometimes. We've had a nice bunch of people getting together with us today. So as usual, we're going to go around and ask each other to give a little bit of an introduction as to who they are, what they're interested in and how they encounter the concept. love in their everyday life. Can I begin with you Yeshai?
Yishai Barth:
Yeah, can everybody hear me okay? So my name is Yishai Barth. I am a PhD in the sociology department at Cambridge University. My... Specialty is medical sociology and I'm doing my dissertation in sort of innovation in the rehabilitation sector as it intersects with disability theory and critical disability theory. you know, my, my kind of wider academic background is in social philosophy and communication theory. I am, I self-identified as being on the spectrum. I am, I was born with cerebral palsy. I've been, you know, lifelong, you know, activist in things, in all kinds of things related to disability law, pride, right, culture, obviously I'm using disability with quotes around it in that context. yeah, so that is generally speaking my background. I think in the interest of disclosure, you know, The way I am encountering love as a concept as opposed to a phenomenon most in my life right now is really has to do with a kind of... piece of theoretical work I'm doing outside of my primary research that is linked to my primary research about sort of the pursuit of health and well-being and sort of an idea I have about, you know, what people have to do to engage in a sort of meta-level practice of... optic development, know, development of the self where you're not taking in other people's systems or algorithms for it, but instead designing and building your own. And that element of that, that I am thinking about and sort of working to construct has to do with what I call philotic connection. you know, the word philotic being taken from the Greek for love. And basically, I think as an introduction, it would just be best for me to explain that I have a very specific conception of what love is. that I work with in my research and my everyday life, which begins with the assertion that Love is a form of attention, which is a conclusion that I come to because you can't love something that you haven't paid attention to. And so then the question becomes, okay, what form of attention is it? And what I realize is it's the form of attention that we pay to that which we have an interdependent Positive developmental relationship with or an interdependent growth relationship with growth in the sense of positive development Meaning that when we have the sense that when something else grows we grow When we grow something else grows when that thing stagnates we stagnate and when we stagnate it it stagnates so you know mutual interdependency of growth that to me is what gives rise to the practice enactment reaction and experiential phenomenon of love. You know, I hope that serves as at least a form of what you were asking for, Matt.
Matt Lee:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much. Dorianne, how about you? Could you introduce yourself?
Doireann Larkin:
Hi there, I'm Deryn Larkin and I work at Goldsmiths. I'm the convener of the MA in understanding domestic violence and sexual abuse and I spent a lot of my career working in that sector of the domestic violence sector, working with survivors and working to educate young people about how to build healthier relationships. My own research at the moment is looking at the experiences of adults who care for aging parents who were abusive to them when they were children. So the concept of love shows up a lot in that as well as care and transaction and all the challenging ways that presents itself. So think because of my background being very much in the bad side of love and the violence and abuse, I might be considered that I might be an anti-love person. A lot of my work has been around helping people to end relationships, but I think actually the opposite is really true because when we work in the abuse sector, we often spend so much time talking about these are all the things about abuse, this is what bad stuff will happen if we allow it to continue and we sometimes forget to also say but this is what the alternative would look like, this is how good it could be if the relationships were loving in a positive way and were healthy. So I think a lot of the campaign that I do is around promoting positive love as much as it is about preventing negative. And I think some of my ways of understanding it and because as well, you know, within this work, you're working with people who are quite vulnerable, who have been hurt a lot. to lead with love is really important to try and help to repair. And I think of an act of love in the same way of an act of empathy of requiring that sort of dexterity where you are standing within the feelings of the other person and of yourself at the same time that you don't lose yourself or lose the other person within that concept. I think that's where my starting point is for today.
Matt Lee:
Thank you very much Dorian. Anna-Pieter, can I come to you? Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your encounter with the concept of love?
Anna-Peter (they/them):
Sure. Hello everyone, lovely to meet you all. So I'm a trainee psychotherapist training at Goldsmiths at the moment. My background before that was in psychology. I was doing some research on non-binary identity formation and kind of queer community dynamics in London. And before that, which I do think has largely informed my perspective on life, I've worked for... basically a decade in the human rights sector with various charities in different countries of the world. Women's rights, LGBT rights, etc. And yeah, I'll come to how that has influenced how I think about love. But just in terms of how I encounter it, I think love is very dominant in my life, actually. It's a... It's a feeling and an action that I embody a lot and I consciously try to integrate. And I kind of think of it as just on like a somatic level, I think of it as this warm fuzzy feeling that I get in my chest that then very much like propels me to do something about it, so to say. So it always propels me into action and that action very often is some kind of expression of love. And I really like what Isha said actually on love being a form of attention, I think that is linked. But in terms of how that then translates into my interest of love, I think what I've been thinking of quite a lot coming up to this podcast is parameters of who gets to be lovable. And by that, I mean who are the actual people, but also what are parts of ourselves that get to be loved and that are deemed lovable and what are parts that are deemed unlovable. This is something that I've seen as a theme emerge quite a lot in conversations with other trans and non-binary people. Sean Fay actually has a new book on it as well called Love in Exile. And it's also something that I struggle with in my personal life, kind of trying to elevate the sides of myself that I do think are worthy of love and shutting down those that are not. And all of this is of course tied in with kind of socio-cultural and economic structures that we live under. I'll stop there for now because I feel like I could go on forever.
Matt Lee:
Okay, Daniela, thank you. Anne and Peter, sorry. Daniela, next, how are you? Encountering love and tell us a little bit about who you are.
Daniela:
Thank you, I'm glad to be here because of Steph. I am a historian, I am doing a PhD at UCL, in the Institute of America. But I am interested in love. Always our question, as you all, our academic questions are because of some personal issues. So I started to... explore to suicide many years ago so and it's obvious but I saw was suicide is an expression of lack of bonds so that's why I thought, okay, I need to explore, understand something to the bones in life. So that's why I think in love and especially I want to understand I don't know why people, but why people spend, waste their life with other or for others. So that's why my approach is historical. So I am research about Chile, my country, because of the sources. in the last decades of 19th century and the first decade of 20th century. So my approach to love is personal, to understand. I am in the because of love. Because my parents wanted to be here to study a PhD and when I arrived here I didn't speak. any English so it has been a difficult period but very exciting at the same time so that is my approach. Thank you.
Matt Lee:
Thank you, Daniela. I'm going to ask you, Eric, go on. You introduce yourself and tell us something and then I'll ask you, Stefan Leo.
Eric:
So my name is Eric and I work with Matt on the Freudian spaceship. I suppose in just reflecting about love this morning I was consumed and overwhelmed once again with administration tasks and reflecting on the experience of having less and less time to actually be human. the expression that was used to be attentive to life, to people, to things, to my thoughts. And I wondered to what extent love is an escape from the incapacity to be attentive or to have space or to what extent love is potentially an opening up of a space, a space to be alive, to dream, to engage, to be joyful. In my own work, I've moved more and more away from Freud and more towards Forenz. Now both of them made the comment that psychoanalysis is a cure through love. But Freud tends to present it as a positive transference in which Freud is a blank screen and Freud becomes the beloved. And he works with what is projected onto him. Whereas for Forenz, it's actually the capacity to love the client, the patient. And I suppose in my, when I'm doing analysis, I'm curious about clients where one struggles to love the client. In what Anna Peter spoke about, those bits that almost seem unlovable. And in a sense, I think part of the challenge is when it comes to love, it's also about the not just the... the affirming bits but also those unaffirming bits. I have a very bright student who suggested I read a book called On Being Trance and Feeling Bad and in a sense it's the question when it really comes to love is can we embrace the complexity of that person or do we simplify things and then the other dimension in terms of love that I ponder is in terms of activism in terms of the non-anthropomorphic, in terms of the quest for life, in quest of something that is more than simply just human, something that expresses a continuity, an affirmation that goes beyond just some sort of human identification. I think I'll stop there.
Matt Lee:
Okay, thank you, Eric. Stefan Leo, you can work out how to do this yourself. Introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about your encounter.
Steph And Leo:
Hello, is that better? Hi, I'm Leo. I guess I'm a bit of an add-on to this call in some sense because I guess love isn't particularly, love is obviously very important to me in some sense, but it's not like a theme which has been hugely prominent in the academic work I've done. But for a little biographic sketch, I used to work at Goldsmiths with Steph and also Eric, and now I work with Yishai who I've known for a number of years. Yeah and I also work on the Freudian spaceship and so I'm going to be editing this with Steph afterwards I think so I'm just here to kind of absorb the thoughts and so on. I'm Steph, think I know some people here. and I'm also somewhat of an outsider to love, I think, in every sense. So I'm here to learn, but my research, I'm psychosocial studies postdoctoral researcher in the Stacks department. And my research has looked more at care than love. Obviously they are very related or should be, but I'm used to thinking of what it means to coexist in good ways without love in a way or without that necessity to have a love relation and the difficulty of doing that and the efforts that people make to try to give people what they need when they don't necessarily have love as a driving force and particularly how people love or make sense of love what they do with love in this particular moment when it feels like there's both a scarcity of love as a resource, but also a sort of saturation of love in terms of what you're expected to perform for your work, for your family, and for other people in the world. And how therapy tries to help people with that, with problems of love. So. My thoughts about love are very elusive and open. It feels like a very overwhelming idea, so I don't know how to think about it. So hopefully this conversation will help me to do that.
Matt Lee:
Okay, thank you everybody. ⁓ me just mute that. Thank you everybody. Yeah, okay, I'll briefly introduce myself. My name's Matt Lee. I'm sometimes called Razor Smile and I'm a philosopher outside of the academy and a sorcerer and a revolutionary and love operates in all of those realms in many sort of ways. But generally speaking, I think it's interesting that as a philosopher, I probably would avoid
Steph And Leo:
Okay.
Matt Lee:
the concept of love. You tend to avoid concepts that are far too broad, far too ambiguous and literally can like take on any sense of meaning depending on how you orientate yourself and it's a weird concept in that sense because it has the same kind of role that life does inside philosophy. So when people start talking about life in philosophy you're always wondering what's hidden here? What are you? What are you hiding by using this term, this broad, vague concept of life, particularly when there's been so many problems in what we call vitalism? And I have the same kind of worry about love. Is it a concept that hides what we should be talking about? Maybe it's care, it's openness or closeness, but love seems to often be a kind of stand in for something else that we're talking about. As I say, as a little bit, does life sometimes. But as a human being and as a revolutionary, I would often motivate my activities with the word love. So in that sense, when people talk about, when someone was saying, you know, the warm fuzzy feeling then leads to an act of expression. Yes, I completely understand that. And I think that's exactly it. You feel connected. You feel a body relationship and then it motivates you to then do something else. So there's a very ambiguous relationship I think I have with love. Has anyone got any initial comments or thoughts that have popped into their heads so far?
Yishai Barth:
Can everybody hear me again?
Matt Lee:
Yes, we can hear you, you sure.
Yishai Barth:
I mean, so, you know, the, I think... The first thing that comes to mind for me is, you know, around the relationship between love and conditionality and particularly how that relates to the issue of charity and justice. And the reason it comes to mind is because, you know, One of the things that I think gets really complicated is, you know, I don't think, there's a certain sense in which think unconditional love has no meaning, right? That it has to, that love has to, in order to be genuine and order to be meaningful, it has to pertain to... a specific and apprehensible aspect of being or even totality of being. I think, you know, often times we think of sort of unconditional love or sort of pre-attentional love as some sort of, you know, high Kantian virtue. And the problem is that it gets into this dynamic of charity, which in disability theory can be very problematic because if I extend, if I enact, I regard with love because there is just a moral imperative to, but I don't actually hint at based on aspects of a person's being, then it's more than probably empty. And even if it isn't, there's an innate power dynamic where it's like, you know, it's sort of... love in resistance to what would otherwise be an injustice instead of love that celebrates or actually values something positive. And I guess the reason I'm putting it there as an introduction is because oftentimes when we talk about love in the context of activism or really love as practice in the social sciences or even love in as having a role in therapy or care, that issue of of, you know, unconditional love or love as a sort of prerequisite automatic imperative comes up and the idea that you, that that might be a problematic aspiration is often what I've found people have a lot of difficulty with. And I understand why, but also I can't get out. I've never been able to escape the logical constraint that if you don't have some constraint on it, again, as I said, it sort of empties out and loses meaning.
Matt Lee:
you
Anna-Peter (they/them):
Yeah, to follow on from that, think the concept of unconditional love is such a fascinating one and one that I've noticed is really prominent in pop psychology these days. I often feel quite bombarded with this message that one should be experiencing unconditional love from their partner or even from their loved ones, whether they're friends or parents, etc. And I personally find myself very drawn to that concept to the point that I even at some point had a fight with my therapist about whether it's real and try to defend that it is real. But I also, I really see your point, Liesch. There's a certain, almost a sense of superiority or like a moral imperative in it. that makes it tricky because then are we really loving that person for who they are or are we loving them to prove that we are capable of that love and therefore to prove that we are those superior beings who can accept someone for who they are. And just to kind of contrast that I find myself really oscillating between this idea of love and then kind of more like a commodified slash utilitarian love that I also see depicted quite a lot where people are talking about what am I getting out of this relationship? How is this person feeding me in one way or another? Which then is very transactional. And I don't, yeah, I see these as two polar opposites and often don't really know where to land between them.
Yishai Barth:
So, just to disrupt, you know, anytime anybody invokes a oppositional binary around me, I kind of have this automatic DeRidian instinct reflex that I have to try to collapse it. I can't really help myself. So the thing that I'm going to say is, you know, I think, again, there's a bit of crypt theory here where, you know, all... unidirectional or unilateral dependency between one entity and another creates a danger of injustice. because it creates the sort of conduit for violent power. That's sort of a really, really core aspect of Crip Theory, of Disability Theory more broadly. And so the way that body of theory kind of answers that is to say instead of having a dependency-based model, right, what you have to have, because you can't have an independence model, because independence is an illusion and a paradox so what's left is interdependence so that it is a thing that in order for or you know and if you if you read love through that model in order to be healthy right love does have to be in exchange if it's only you know one directional then then then you know you have that issue of dependency and so then the question that that that arises is you know obviously you know we used the word transactionalism because it invokes ideas around capital and capitalistic structures and the problematics that that brings. And yet, in its core meaning, transaction means exchange. And I almost feel like You know, there is no form of love that is genuine, that is authentic, unless there is an exchange, you know, unless there is an exchange that comes from it. And on a almost physiological level, I mean, but really a psychophysical social level, of full biopsychosocial, I'm not sure that human beings are capable of enacting love, experiencing love where there's not the sense of their potential for their own growth. I don't, know, there is the commitment, you know, to look past prejudice and bias and other, you know, perception distorting factors to see the potential in growth where we otherwise might not, you know, where we have to dig for it. Yes, and I think that's where some of the kind of facet of the idea of unconditional love can be helpful. It says no matter how you might change or what struggles you might go through, I will Continue to look for and search for and try to enact the ways we can mutually grow together But I do think that there is a certain part of it that where the self has to be involved so that there is a kind of You know exchange or transaction if that makes sense
Steph And Leo:
Would it be helpful to think more in terms of then maybe what is the work that the concept of love does? Why do we continue to hold on to it if it is something that is never fully realized or never works out as we dream it to be? Then what is it that we do with it either politically or in relationships with people? What do we need from love that makes us keep coming back to it again and again and again?
Daniela:
I think something about it, it fascinates me to think in love like a... True, weird concept, but for me... Maybe because I am a historian and not philosopher. It's not so weird. It's more a contradiction, I think. It's like a diotema. I don't know how do you say in English, diotema, doitema, something like that. Do you understand in Plato, the woman that speaks with Socrates, say that, okay, love... is a way to go outside to itself. And God, it's the same idea in the psychoanalysis or in some authors in psychoanalysis, it's the relationship, is the relationship. It's a good, to me, way to define love because like it's many things, maybe... we can think in love like a religion but just to say I don't know if you you watch the Simpsons and in one episode Homer said because God is love but and and he said God loves you and he's going to kill you. So that is the contradiction in the love I think. It's like I love you but I need you to me. That is my idea about it.
Doireann Larkin:
Sort of reminding me of, sorry, I think I've often thought about with the concept of love is that like anytime when we have language to try and define something that's this complex human experience, it's this one word that we use that represents millions and billions of permutations of these individual kind of dyads that we have. Every person's one is different, but also every relationship I have with somebody else is its own unique thing. And we need to find some way to sort of define it all. but it oversimplifies and I often think about this time a friend of mine years ago was talking about when she came out she'd had relationships with men before and later on in life she came out as a lesbian and she was saying that when I used to have relationships with men I knew the script and I would follow it because I knew what I was supposed to be doing but I didn't really know a lot about being gay and she was talking specifically about sex but also think wider in love as well how because she hadn't got one of those scripts for it she had to just figure it out with the person that she was with. I remember really kind of blowing my mind like yeah that's what it's supposed to be like is that we're actually supposed to with each individual that we meet conceptualize it differently and so I think you know when we're talking about why do we want it or what do we want from it. Whenever I work with students I often spend a lot of time with that. Why do we even want relationships in order to kind of get to why it's so difficult to leave ones that aren't serving us. And a lot of it is following this. because it's part of what we're supposed to be doing. This is the part of my life that I'm supposed to be at. you know, there's the love feelings that we talked about when Anna Peer was talking about the somatic kind of warm fuzzy feeling. But that's only ever one small part of what they're talking about. It's also a much wider, you know, this is how I have access to family, to certain kind of social status, to financial assets being pooled. There's this wider practical kind of set up for it. And a lot of it is transactional. And I agree with Yashay that that's doesn't mean that everything in our interactions is transactional and it should be to a certain extent. If we're not getting and receiving then the power imbalance becomes too strong. But I think it's one of those things that benefits me to think fresh every time and in each dynamic about what that concept means.
Steph And Leo:
Cool. But maybe I'm just thinking about this word transactional. Maybe my kind of issue with it in relation to love is that it seems to kind presuppose the two rational decision making process, whereas doesn't love have this kind of basically traumatic compulsive dimension to it, like where you fall in love and yet, you know, it's not a choice you've made, it's something which kind of spontaneously happens to you. I don't know, transactional feels I don't know, like too premeditated somehow. But yeah, I'll just, I'll leave it there.
Matt Lee:
It's there's something also, I mean, was interesting when you were saying script, you there's no script in this other form. And one of the things that we kind of were thinking a little bit about me and Eric beforehand was the love story and the amount of love stories and the variety of love stories and the kind of ubiquity of love stories. And it was a conversation I had with my own daughter and my partner. a couple of weeks ago when we were talking specifically about sort of particular forms of love stories as a lost story. And they're predominantly a kind of, you know, the greatest love is the lost love. The greatest, I mean, in literally the film, the love story, there's a death at the end. And I mean, these are the kind of set up as like the most important love you could ever encounter is the one that you struggle for all your life. And as you consummate it, it goes and it's, and you've had it and it's in a sense, you know, in the past. But those stories are forms of relationship. Those stories often, you know, we could almost remove the word love. This is a philosopher's trick. You know, you remove... If you replace it with a different word you see what the truth value is. We can remove the word love and use the word relationship, positive relationship. That would be the encounter with it, positive relationship. Because obviously there are negative relationships, relationships of oppression or relationships of hatred and relationships. So there's something I think interesting around this way in which we somehow want to validate positive kinds of relationship with this idea of love. but it's also, I think, rebound into particular human ways of dealing with things. And this maybe speaks to Steph's point about the compulsion. It looks like other animals other than humans, other things other than humans act like they love each other. When we look at the animals, nuzzling and cuddling and all these kind of things, these look like moments of love. Is that? Is that just an anthropomorphisation or are we too stuck in the anthropocentric?
Yishai Barth:
So, just to jump off of that, Matt, I mean, I have to be the, you know, kind of stick up for my friends in the material sciences here, given that, you know, that there's not that much of the representation on the call. And I just say, you know, I think there's been just such a plethora of research in the, you know, animal neuroscience space that says if you really look at it, you know, in terms of all the, all the things we can observe and we can measure, and obviously that is limited by technology and all kinds of aspects of technology, but I think, you know, it's really hard to draw an ontological distinction between, you know, love as animals exhibited and love as humans exhibited. think, you know, also just to answer what Leo was saying, it's like, again, I think it's dangerous to get too hung up on the word transaction and its particular mono, like modern and contemporary semantic connotation in, you know, again, we associate transaction with the rational, as you say, Leo, because the word gets tossed around in economics a lot. But if you think about it, what it actually means is action in motion. Right? As in literally, you know, moving action as opposed to static action. Right? So it adds an additional, it's just a, it's it's a metal here, there, air of, of, of change. And what that, and that, and that I think comes back to what, you know, we're all, what, what other people have been saying, which is that it's about. relationality and I think the really interesting question which I'd like to you know explore is is obviously I think there are many forms of positive relationality between people between people and things between people and animals that are not necessarily loving ones Right, you can have respect, can have reverence, you can even have awe, can have camaraderie, you know, ⁓ and I mean, some would, I think there would be some people who would argue in all those things is maybe a kind of love, but then some wouldn't. And so where I'm really interested in exploring is, you know, Is there something to the ontology of love that's more than an attribution of virtue quality to a type of relationship?
Eric:
I'm thinking about Frantz Fanon and at the end of Black Skin and White Masks he says, make me a body that can always question and at end of The Wretched of the Earth he speaks about creating of a new species and there's obviously a relationship between those two things but for me what I get from that is something expansive and for me it's an expansive love it's it reminds me of the distinction between Deleuze and Fanon, not Fanon, Deleuze and Lacquo. Where Lacquo we love because we lack and we're trying to fill up some lack. Whereas in a more Deleuzean and Fanonian perspective there's the possibility to love beyond yourself. To allow for something to expand. to embrace something beyond just what can I get from this to invite a new species to invite something to go beyond you to invite connections that you can't even imagine
Steph And Leo:
I think following up on what you're saying Eric, one of the things I like most about the idea of love, and I don't know how much this corresponds to the experience, but is the way that it's one of the few... experiences of people wanting to just... throw themselves into a relationship where they don't know what will be the outcome of that. I think mostly people do what is quite safe for them, but with love, this drive, this willingness to just throw themselves into this relational space and want to be changed by it as well, which is a kind of a miracle for human beings to actually want to be changed, I think, in ways that they don't understand in advance. that's a very sort of risky thing to do for a person. I think the concept of love makes me remember that there are those times when people do throw themselves out of what is comfortable for them and that's quite hopeful from a political perspective as well that people can want to change in ways that might be quite frightening and that they don't know what will happen in advance but also in a relational sense that they do that.
Matt Lee:
I mean, I like that, I like that idea of the people sort of launching themselves into the new relationship, but I would, I mean, as someone who's been married like 35 years with three kids and grandkids and all this kind of stuff, so I have a particular form of love. Expectation is also kind of crucial. So the fact that I can expect certain things, that I can, in a sense, almost rely upon those and their collapse would be a sign that something was wrong. So that's not launching, that's a baseline, that's a kind of harbor to come home to. That's almost the exact opposite.
Yishai Barth:
Matt, think you froze and I think the last thing we got was Harbor to come home to and then...
Daniela:
Hi. Hi.
Matt Lee:
right, yeah, I was saying that there's a sense in which there's the launching out moment, but also in long-term love. The love is the harbour that you come home to, the space that's sort of, you know, expectations of welcoming. You know, you're after a ridiculous day's work or something like this, you know, a moment's love at home is kind of expected when you come in, and you expect to give it as well. Maybe less so with kids, but even there. there's a kind of expectation from them that they have a safe space to walk into and you're trying to give them something that they want and that they can block the rest of the world out from. that also seems to be something that seems to me often connected particularly with human stories of love. They seem to be enclosures. They seem to be places that carve themselves out from the world. And this speaks to sort of Dorian's, the new script, seem to have to... There's a concept of the love language that people have.
Yishai Barth:
You know, one of the ideas that's really interesting to me about that, that I've just recently been toying with, is this idea that, you know, again, you know, I think, I think, again, love, and it's kind of already been alluded to by a number of people, love is a capacity, love is an ability, you know, it's not a, and it's not, it's not a universal... thing where it's like one just has the ability to love period full stop it's What kinds of things what kinds of people who? does one have the capacity to love or to be in love with and Those capacities, you know develop and refine over time and there are various forms of trauma and injury and you know that disrupts that capacity and you know, it can sometimes be restored sometimes be expanded sometimes be contracted, all those things. And it's, you know, I think a fascinating thing connected with, you know, the dynamic of the family and sort of kinship groups that it's like there is, you know, there's the love of you know, people that we meet, right? That you think, my God, the way that that person, the way that this person is capable of... loving is so potent, right? And we feel this sense of fortune or privilege or advantage because we are benefiting from the unique capacity of someone specific to love in a particular way. And it then turns into, you know, this thing of... For example, with parenting, it's like, sometimes we think how extraordinary it is for those particular children or for those particular adults that they are, you know, parentally loved by, you know, such a person. But it's interesting, even though that can empower in all these unique ways, we never think of it as, or, I shouldn't say never, but we rarely, never in an assumption say, there's an injustice in the fact that those... people that or that person there is empowered or advantaged by being loved by this person as a parent and I am not or this other person is not and yet given that it can be such a source of power if you go according to sort of typical power theory reading it would create an imbalance and an injustice and so there's the issue of what do you do with that?
Daniela:
in one book in Sarakmet, The Promise of Happiness, I think this solve the question of happiness in a brilliant way. She say, I don't want answer the question about what happiness is, but... more what do happiness do to people so i think in this idea for love that idea i think is brilliant from her
Eric:
I'm thinking of Judith Butler's concept that community or recognition is established by what we can and can't more. Those that we can grieve and those that we can't grieve. But I'm also wondering if that's sometimes what is propagated as love. I'm thinking that there's something, isn't there, whilst I agree with the concept, on the other hand, think it's also problematic. Should we be able to grieve and love everything? Or should there be some discernibility? And what are the risks of being able to grieve and love everything? But what are the risks when we don't? So it takes me to a place of complexity. I'm not sure how to think that through.
Steph And Leo:
Yeah, I'm just building on your point, Eric. I'm just thinking about, when I think about it, my own relationships, guess, like, feelings of love seem to be more pronounced when there's a kind of, yeah, when, you know, it's a kind of a pithy saying that, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Like, love seems also bound up with... with mourning or with death or something like that. Also maybe challenging this idea of relationality as being kind of integral to love. Historically one of the purest depictions of love is the kind of unrequited love, like the love of something in which there is no reciprocity. Yeah, I don't really know where I'm going with that but I guess I'm kind of intrigued by that interplay between like a love and also like absence somehow.
Anna-Peter (they/them):
I'm just following up on that point around grievable bodies and also Yishai's point on the inequality of some people being loved and others not. My problem, as much as I love Judith Butler, my problem or my questions from that text is more like a frustration of why do we need to talk about Why do we need to be stuck on the grieving when we could be talking about the loving while people are alive? And the other day, I think on Saturday, I was walking down the street and I came across this poster commissioned by the mayor of London that said, you are loved and you are wanted. It was really striking and it landed with me in quite a strange way. I mean, my subjectivity is kind of moving through London as a trans person. There's rising trans hostility. So I'm also an immigrant here. So I kind of read those messages through those two lenses and I thought, okay, the mayor of London wants to reassure me. It felt phony and it felt phony in the similar way where refugees and trans people and marginalized people are mourned after they die, but they are not loved while they're alive. And I think that kind of comes back also, I really fascinated by what you mentioned about the script story and again, scripts of who gets to be loved and how do they get to be loved and do they need to be dead to be loved?
Eric:
That's just really interesting. I like what you're saying. I just want to be enthusiastic. I want to express love for what has been said.
Steph And Leo:
think it makes me go back again to this question of what is the work that love does for us and in that case it makes it acceptable somehow for people to die that we haven't cared about enough in life if we're able to love them as a mourned object of love. I often think this about the number of crime dramas that are being made, you know, there's a completely unrealistic amount of effort made by the state to investigate the murder of a woman who's been killed. And everybody is so invested in the justice for this dead woman who's often been raped. And that would never happen in real life because of all the reasons we know about. sort of an obsession with doing justice by the dead once they are dead and what makes what is the work that that's doing.
Doireann Larkin:
I'm still kind of thinking back, I'm still saying a little while ago about the launching idea of love and how you give yourself and that, just take the risks in it. And I think in the way when love works for how I consider it is when both are doing that, both are launching and giving completely and sacrificing and say, I'm going to do all this for you. it's not an act of totally giving up because the other person is doing that for you while you're doing it for them. And so it kind of picks up on both sides of it. and then allows you that in the domestic violence world we talk about space for action often that a relationship where that's not happening where you're giving and the other person isn't or that person is oppressing your space for action is limited and what domestic violence perpetrators have in common with oppressors and dictators is that they distract and they exhaust and they gaslights and their biggest enemy is that you have time to think and to assess your situation and kind of go is this what I want for myself or not? So the negative love and the power and oppressive one restricts restricts our space of action until we don't know each other. The positive love does the opposite of that. It's this expansive space that it creates for us. It provides us with that kind of confidence, that lift to be able to think, who am I? What do I want to be? know, Matt was talking about being in the mindset that you do things for each other so that, you know, you can rely on that. You just know that that's going to be there. There's a certain sort of safe harbor within it, which allows that. So I think what Yashay talked about being loved as being power and being privileged is really, I really agree with that, that actually it is something that people who have that have so much more opportunity and have more space to extend themselves. I think when I am just doing this conversation thinking about what does that concept give or what does the experience give, I think that space for action is coming up.
Yishai Barth:
So if I can jump in, one thing I just want to mention off of just, Darian, what you were saying way early on about scripts, again, just to kind of push back there. I've often had the impulse that I want more scripts, not less. I want way more scripts. I want scripts cubed. like the you know because because essentially again sometimes i feel like love is this Thing like nuclear power. That... It is so potent that when... That it's almost dangerous to experiment with it. It's almost very dangerous to be in uncharted territory because... love is one of those things where even when you have the absolute best of intentions and cultivated empathetic perception and all those things which is a big if and a big set of not often met conditions you can still end up doing terrible harm to yourself and to the other and you know there is a certain sense in which the reality that one can inflict you know that kind of harm even when one is disciplined, unconscious, and highest to avoid it can be such a profound source of despair. know, and like one of the terrible things that I came to, that I think I've come to realize in my life, right, is that the truth is, you know, there are situations in the human condition where one person's empowerment can be another person's oppression or abuse. like these things are not fixed ontological universals it would be a relief if they were but they're not and you know so that so that you know these are times when the golden rule fails right when you know we try to help someone or empower someone as we were helped or we were empowered and it does harm instead of good, right? And as a result, it's like I, you know, look at situations where, you know, there's something new and there is no script and you're just totally experimenting. And all I think of when I end up in those situations now is no matter how exhilarating and interesting and growth catalyzing, might find this, which often times I do, bear in mind the fact that there's no script here means your risk of doing terrible harm while you're experimenting and navigating and flailing in the dark is drastically increased. And so a huge part of the praxeology that I'm exploring is how do we sort of take from the repertoire of scripts around love that we have and then, you know, tailor them, fit them to, you know, relationships rather than trying to start from scratch.
Doireann Larkin:
I think it's, sorry, it's a different perspective the way looked at it but I could completely see where you're coming from with it as well. suppose my resistance to the scripts is when there's only a few scripts, you know, if there were more that would be different with the few, yeah.
Eric:
Just... you go ahead, I'll come back.
Yishai Barth:
that's what I was saying, want, because I was trying to drive at that, the problem is how few of them there are, not that they're there, there should be oodles and oodles and oodles more.
Doireann Larkin:
Yes, and my resistance to the narrow one then as well as how much I think it distance people from their ability to recognize their own pleasure and their own actual enjoyment of something because they're satisfied by the fact that they're following a script that they haven't stopped to realize actually yes, everything is going in the right chronological order, however, I'm not having a good time where this isn't pleasure for me. Whereas if there were more different versions of that that were more prevailing then we could skip between the ones until we find what actually resonates.
Matt Lee:
Yeah, this is part of the interest we had in so many love stories, so many different forms of the love story and often not forms that look traditional. it reminds me of a story my wife told recently. is a historian, so she teaches history at school, but she had to go and cover an English class and they were teaching Romeo and Juliet. And because she's doing cover, she's not doing like, know, prep for the exam. She's doing the expansive kind of moment of critical conversation getting the kids to engage and talk and think about what's going on and she presented the story of Romeo and Juliet as a story of stalking. They were looking at the balcony scene and quite reasonably it looks like a stalking scene and then she pursued the sort of possibility of it being gaslighting and the other kind of elements that happen and this is a kind of abusive relationship and then she made the point that Shakespeare didn't write love stories. He wrote tragedies and comedies and so even on Shakespeare's own terms this isn't really a love story, this is a tragedy and this was interesting for them. The kids were deeply responsive to this because they perceive something to be a love story and then reorganizing that into a different form of script opens up what a love story could be. Because in a sense, it's still a love story, but it has that element of tragedy now. And I think this is an interesting point. If there are, as we think, so many different forms of love story, so many different possible scripts of love, what is it that seems to be pushing them, reducing them, making them into a kind of desperate form that everyone is so desperate to get hold of rather than the multiplicity and sort of spread of their possible forms.
Anna-Peter (they/them):
Just since we're
Eric:
I just want to come back to what Anna-Pieter was talking about. And it reminded me of two stories I'd like to share or two experiences. The one was around a dear friend of mine, John Pegg, who used to be an HIV and queer activist in South Africa. And he used to smuggle antiretrovirals into the country. This was in the days when there were no antiretrovirals. There's an irony to the story because John ended up getting murdered but John was very good around working with death and one of the big points he made and he continually taught me is that somebody is alive until the last breath and it's this concept that people are often prematurely grieved. that they grieve before they're actually gone and is there a capacity to be alive to that person right until their last breath to see what is alive in them and how incredibly painful and difficult that is and then the other story I remember one speaking on a think it was a television program in South Africa. And it was a documentary on a lesbian activist from the communities who had been subjected to... so-called corrective rape and it was a story about her courage and the talk was about well what is courage and and I think what came through and in the conversation with her it was the courage to be alive to what was joyful in her It wasn't simply the courage for her to be able to stand up and speak to power and to actually make her story known and to challenge but it was the courage to actually be true to what she loved. The courage to not limit her love expression just to sexual expression but the courage to actually love another human being. And so for me there is something about, it's that capacity to be, to come to the support of life. The capacity in the Kenyan term, or it should be true to our desire. But I would prefer to frame it in Delusian terms, the capacity to be as alive as one can. to come to the support of life and I think that is what she was doing. She wasn't subsumed with internalized self-oppression or if we could talk about it as the super ego. There was the capacity to try to be as alive as she could be and the courage to do that.
Steph And Leo:
I wonder, Eric, if another way of thinking about the same kind of connection to coming to the aid of life and being courageous, and Sara Ahmed writes about this, is how love is also a language used by fascists to claim love of the land or love of a race and how that changes how we think about... the positivity that is often attributed to love and what it makes permissible to say you're doing something in the name of love and you have courage in the name of love.
Eric:
Yes, absolutely. I mean, from writes about capitalism and love. mean, absolutely. Absolutely, I agree with you. Absolutely. And I think that's what takes us into a gray area. And it returns us to your question is what happens on the name of love? and or Matt's question does it hide something and is it still is it a useful concept or not and and how much is it constructed by maybe a western narrative or a capitalist narrative is there where one can reclaim the term or should one even let go of the term or can one queer the term so to speak or can one do something with it i think i think that's an absolutely valid point because it could end up being anything and just get subsumed yeah i agree with you i don't know how to respond more to that you
Steph And Leo:
Or maybe another way of thinking is that there is always violence inherent in love, as Isha was pointing out, and that you can't have the good parts without also the potentially disastrous parts of love, and that's just what we're kind of dealing with, that we keep being drawn back and back and back to it, like moths to a flame, and we don't know whether it will... maybe love is also always... as Daniela said, going to kill us.
Yishai Barth:
I mean, sort of in answer to your question, Eric, to sort of bring a little bit of Prague School analysis in for a second and just say, sometimes there are just metonymic concepts that are so vast that in the... natural course of communication in a sort of bartien's hence that's almost a little bit contian it just gets legitimately applied to a lot of things because there is a fundamental religion alley and you know it's why at the beginning i provided the working definition that i did because you know although the way i see it is yes i can say i'd love the music of motzart yes i can say i'd love sushi yes i can say i love cambridge yes i can say i love of you know romantic partners that i've had yes i can be you know say i love to play games and all these words and you know and and and yes that you know a a a a kind of strict you know semantic read in in in in some schools of semantic thought would say there's no there's no connecting you know it's it's just a stand-in concept that absorbs everything but i would say it's also possible to step back and see even though it's an incredibly wide territory, there is actually that connection that in some way there's this thing outside of myself that is entangled with my growth process. And I think it kind of ties into what you were invoking about Duluth's earlier, that it's like, yes, okay, you can say that there is this kind of love of loving that which is beyond yourself, right? But I also think that in a way it undoes itself in a Doridian fashion because I don't think there's a way to love something genuinely without at the same time making it in some way a part of you. Right? Like, even if it is alien, even if it is strange, even if it is beyond the parameter of what you previously, you know, and so in the moment of loving beyond... yourself or your own being you're also in that moment growing beyond yourself in terms of becoming something more expansive expanding growing and so I don't you know I I think I think You know that many languages and because I don't think it's just English and I don't think it's just placed in arts I am that many languages link these things around you know sort of relational growth, know relational positive development across all these realms of meaning with single earths and attached to them a certain amount of sort of baseline or requisite Positivity or importance I don't think is coincidental and I don't think is something that even if we wanted to Let go of it or get rid of it. We really could because I think it's too important to our Ability to Be met cognitively cognizant of the ways in which we thrive and flourish or don't
Daniela:
I think this discussion is very interesting. The other day, first, I think that, like you all, the love is impossible to sing without thinking ethics. Because the problem, the definitions, is always the same. You can't not... do a definition about this topic, but at the same time, it's our problem. Because in the name of love, many terrible things people do. But the other day, I listened to a program, a podcast, political podcast, and someone said, OK, the ethics position. works in very small groups, for big groups, the law exists. So that's idea, but applied to the love or the idea to the love maybe could have sense, I think. I don't know if I explained very well my idea, but... That's it.
Matt Lee:
I think that makes some sense because I mean when Anna Peter was talking about the poster you know or when I think of someone talking about you know like the brief mention of fascists and their use of love and you know if someone says to me I love the white race or I love the American nation or the British nation To me that feels like a misuse. It feels like a deliberate kind of, you know, a deliberate manipulation, a deliberate misuse of a word that you're trying to grab the effect from the fuzzy feeling that you encounter in everyday life with like a small group of people, either your family or an individual, and you're trying to sort of grab hold of that effect and mobilize it for this other thing that it doesn't really extend to. And there's a sense then of like, is... We're talking about love being expansive, but maybe it's not extensive. Maybe it's expansive through its intensity, and it's a kind of intensive expansiveness, but one that has to already close off and close something out, in a sense, because it's making another little world, it's making another little space, it's making another little, you know, set of whirlpool intensities over here. So perhaps there's something there in terms of the relationship between intensity and extensity. You can't love everything in the same way that you'd love someone. But the other thing that I was kind of bumping along about there was whether you could describe a love story as something that was negative. When you were talking about growth, it struck me that in a sense, if the story you were telling was kind of tragic, it was kind of a story of destruction. you wouldn't call it a love story. There still has to be something in a sense that you'd want to have done that. The love story is one that you feel like should have happened rather than should not have happened. And in that sense, there's a kind of strange affirmation in that space. No matter how the love story turns out, it would still have to be something you would want to have happened. You can affirm as positive and to repeat again and to use Nietzsche's kind of eternal return test.
Steph And Leo:
Just to address that point, I watched a film a couple of years ago, a French film, was called something like A Fine Day's Morning, maybe people have seen it, but it was about a woman who's caring for her father, who was a philosophy professor who has dementia, and it's basically him losing his intellectual capabilities. and her going through this process of seeing the aspects which she thought she loved about him, i.e. his giftedness in that domain, slowly wither away. And it's about what is left when all that stuff is taken away. And I guess the conclusion of the film arrives at is that there's a love which endures beyond those empirical details of his character or something like that. I think just also to touch upon this kind of idea about like fascism as well and maybe this is also kind of like a slight pushing back on Yishai your point about the... expansion of different narratives. Because isn't the issue of like the inappropriateness of the kind of fascist use of that term, in that what they're using it to describe is a very regimented sense of narrative or tradition which they're bringing into their life. In a sense, it's a kind of overly fixed narrative which they're using. And I guess like I'm all for like the importance of having like different media depictions of different types of romantic relationships and so on. But at certain point, in a romantic, a genuine kind of romantic event, surely there's a point at which those kind of narratives have to break down and give way to some new, perhaps more like improvisational approach to navigating one's life. So I don't know if like just a kind of multiplicity of narratives really actually resolves the issue with the of traumatic kernel of love somehow.
Eric:
I want to just push back a little bit. remember doing therapy with an Uncuanto Esisua ANC activist and they were saying, they were talking about setting up bombs in the days of apartheid. And there was one occasion where they were about to set off a bomb and they didn't because there were some children. And the comment was, if I can no longer see the humanity in my enemy, then I'm no different to my enemy. So I would say, of course the fascists can love. And I think it would be highly problematic for us to say that the fascist cannot love. But I also want to position this slightly differently. I'm wondering if it is about position. One of the things I say to my students is when you're working therapeutically or analytically to ask yourself the question, am I asking this because of my need or because I think it could help therapeutically? And sometimes it might be both. Now, you could say there's a naivety or you could say maybe one always wants to claim something in the process of responding. But sometimes, and this is what we believe analytically, there is unconscious to unconscious communication. And there is a taking up of a position where it is not an ego communication or persona communication or a rational communication. It's almost like an improvised jazz response which responds to something that is present. It responds to something that is present. that enables something, to use the word, expansive or a new assemblage to be formed.
Yishai Barth:
so I think that there's a sort of link that I want to draw between what Eric or just said and what Leah just said. think, you know, when I was talking about scripts, one of the things I think that's important is, you know, I was talking about it sort of more in a pragmatic... way and saying, know, these are starting points, not that they would encompass the entirety of a relay of melody, right? And, you know, you can, I mean, again, we can look at this, you know, in the structure of... you know, musical forms or sports games, know, that you do have structures and then have an infinity of possibility for unfolding within them. I don't, and I think to what Eric was saying, I think, you know, if the script is being used, you know, as the communication between... ⁓ you know egos the the you know what it what it leaves room for if it's done right is the sort of improvisational calm response to happen on that subconscious or unconscious level i think what's where that where that gets really interesting with regard to the fascism question is you know i think it's it's not only that you know fascists i think You know, can genuinely love which of course they can it's that you know I think there there is a kind of You know, I think you can love something Morally wrong as in you know, something can I think help you or those around you to grow genuinely, to genuinely flourish, to genuinely thrive that, you know, undeservedly or un- illegitimately oppresses or exploits or in some way harms the other. Right. And so it's like, you know, sometimes you end up with, you know, your sort of fascistic performer who I think uses the term love for the nation or love for a tradition as as stand-in and really is misusing the term of but I think actually the more dangerous fascists are the ones who are being honest about it and are actually expressing in genuine love for the you know and I mean maybe maybe maybe it maybe it it yeah yeah because because because they themselves are growing or are expanding and there's just an, you know, kind of like the kind of indifference that Elie Wiesel talked about as the underlings worse than was worse than evil. You know, the underlings worse of atrocity, worse than evil. Well, that simply said, I am growing the people. I am networked with or growing and I am indifferent to what this does to the other. I am indifferent to what this does to the stranger. I am indifferent to what this does to the marginalized. But the interesting thing about that is I think, you know, where somebody has, you know, not that much genuine external love at all. there's a certain weakness, there's a certain hollowness that with the kind of fascists who do have that sort of genuine love that's just problematic and immoral by virtue of the fact that it's indifferent to the welfare of the other, those fascists are, I think, always the ones that are the most dangerous.
Eric:
I just want to make one last comment. In having worked with torture survivors, we observed different forms of torturers. And there was one form of torturing where there was just absolute indifference from the torturer. There was another form of torturer who was highly intuitive, highly, highly intuitive to the needs of that person. And then there was a third form of torture who just hated those forms of enjoyment which were not the same as theirs. And I think what's at stake here is when love is based on these kinds of methodologies, particularly the hatred of those forms of enjoyment or jouissance which are not the same as mine. So there's a loving, but alongside that there is a hatred of that form of enjoyment. and subjugation of those forms of enjoyment which are not the same as mine and an attempt to eradicate it.
Anna-Peter (they/them):
I I'm just following on on that and apologies if I repeat a point because earlier I missed a few minutes, my laptop died. But I was really intrigued by the distinction that you made Dorian about space. And I think you said positive love opening space and negative love closing down space. And I kind of I'm now really connecting that to that point that Eric made earlier of the hatred and subjugation of other forms of enjoyment and therefore paired with that closing down of that aspect of the loved ones space. And then I'm thinking specifically of long standing relations inside families. where one would still declare their love for a child or they would still declare their love for a grandchild, but actually the version of them that they love is an older version. And the space has closed down around them and there's no new forms of Jewish songs can enter for that person. It's just kind of that relic and that corpse of who they were. that does actually continue to be loved. And I think that's the whole interesting thing about it. There is love there. It's just that that love is not anymore for the person that's alive. Sorry to bring death into this again. It seems like I'm on that journey today.
Yishai Barth:
You know, I think very unfortunately, I think at least as I think about it with, you know, my definition of love, there is no form of love that does not entail an implication of both grief at the loss of you know, that which is loved or hatred at the threat of that which is loves, right? And the thing is, you know, there are certain kinds of things that like, you know, we never experience the hate of because they don't threaten anything that we love. But the thing is, I think what I've been forced to reconcile myself with is any time anything genuinely threatens the ontic equilibrium of something I genuinely love, some part of me to some level of intensity comes to hate that thing. And the thing is that there is a sort of immediate, you know, kind of egoic imperative that says destroy it, subjugate it. You know, ⁓ neutralize by whatever the most expedient means is neutralize its capacity to threaten that which you love and and and and you know, I think So so that so that so that You know trying trying to trying to you know Stop Trying to undo that dynamic. I haven't found a way to to to to Go about that what it becomes about it's about saying no reconfigure your Understanding so that you don't attribute the threat where the threat doesn't exist You know and and you know because I think you know I Pragmatically speaking I don't think an organism can thrive by being passive in the face of things that genuinely threaten that organism's growth. don't think that's compatible with reality in the way that we live. think there's no imperative of justice that really has ever practically manifested in a potent way that at some level isn't a hasn't been about protecting that which we love from that which we hate.
Steph And Leo:
yeah, maybe just to touch on what you mentioned, I remember reading a some kind of like psychoanalytic case study where Maybe was like an essay by Adam Phillips where he was talking about the way in which, I guess like the profound ambivalence in love where like you love and hate in equal measure. You hate because the thing you love you're so dependent on. And in some sense that dependency is a form of subjugation. So often like imagine acts of violence towards the thing that you imagine yourself to love are actually the fantasy projections which conceal your own kind of yearning to destroy that thing.
Yishai Barth:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think what that links to also is that, you know, again, there's another basic crypt theory concept. The more a thing satisfies a need and the harder that need was originally to satisfy, the greater an intensity of dependency is then manifest. Right? And so it's like, and in a certain sense, we can often trace a sort of growing of the intensity of the experience of love to the greater and greater of a degree to which a need is satisfied. And oftentimes I think when we have, again, to use the cliche phrase, love hate relationships, right? It's like, What happens when you have a single object or entity and it's Contributing to and impeding your growth at the same time Right or or or supporting and threatening your growth at same time and I think that can create this dynamic of ambivalence and I think it can be particularly hard when we observe That someone that we love or are relating to in a loving way is is in some way actively destroying or even just transforming that which we love about them, right? Because then the very person that we love is also a threat to that which we love. And that can also, I think, create that paradox in a really complex way.
Steph And Leo:
So.
Matt Lee:
I'm going to just, we're going to be coming to the end of that conversation shortly, so I'm just going to get everyone to go round once more and have a kind of check out sort of conversation, of just the last comments, your last thoughts, something you feel like you haven't quite said yet or that is sitting there on the tip of your tongue. And I'm going to go to you Dorian to begin with and then I'll go to you Anna Peter.
Doireann Larkin:
Thank you. There's a lot I think that will still be kind of milling around that I'd love to continue with everybody maybe through the other conversations. So there's particular other than earlier on today by coincidence in something I was reading there was a quote that said women and love are underpinnings examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture so we've been doing some very dangerous work today I think.
Matt Lee:
Thank you for that. Anna Peter.
Anna-Peter (they/them):
I love that. I love thinking about this conversation around love is dangerous. And I think it is maybe the thought that I am left with is just the capacity for love to be incredibly destructive. And I think a lot of us have reflected on that in different ways. The image of leaping into something, the image of being drawn to something all the way to love as a word being used to justify horrible acts. and fascism. So yeah, I'm just really mulling over this ambivalence. And I think the last point that I wanted to add to that, and that I think I will go away and think about more is whether love for nature could actually disrupt that ambivalence and whether that could be something that could go beyond that love and hate tug and pull that we're describing.
Matt Lee:
Okay, Daniela?
Daniela:
I love this conversation as well. the idea, really I am not convinced, I don't agree really with the radical idea about hate, love and hate. I think I prefer to think, of course, in many cases in the history is like that. but in a more ethical position, maybe I prefer to think in the love like, as you say in another way, maybe more like a focus in one thing and not in another thing. So this is problematic. It's very problematic, but more than hate love despite of... the capacity of destruction of the love. That's it and thank you.
Matt Lee:
and you say
Yishai Barth:
yeah, I mean, I guess I would, you know, I think... you know, the term creative disruption comes to mind, right? Because again, you know, there's a line from the film Collateral Beauty that comes to mind where if love is... creation and death is destruction, then time is just the landscape in between them. And what I think that we're sort of getting to is that, you know, life is a... mean, love is a creatively destructive force and a destructively creative force. And I think the... Sometimes, sometimes maybe it's maybe what we're thinking of as ambivalence around love is not actually ambivalence. Maybe it's just holistic comprehension. of what the underlying ontology of love is more holistically in terms of how it's enacted, what its consequences on the human experience can be.
Matt Lee:
Okay, and Stefan Leo, last comments.
Steph And Leo:
I actually really liked that final point which you made, Daniela, just about love as a of radical, well not radical, love as a focus, a form of focus somehow. I think that really, yeah, I like that. I guess I was very intrigued also by Matt, your earlier point, which I guess we didn't really explore, but the question of whether, to what extent can we apply love as a category to the non-human animal? I guess I'm going to be thinking about that a little bit. But yeah, it was a great conversation. So I guess thanks everyone for taking part as well. Thanks everybody for me. It's helped me to think a bit more about love and I suppose it would have been nice maybe to speak a bit more about when you're talking about the kind of love that is a long marriage love of more repetition and turns into something else and I think the more names we can have for the different kinds of love the more to territorialize this zone the less that it becomes a case of love and hate which is very much which feels like the emotional climate right now, which is very dangerous I think.
Matt Lee:
Okay, thank you all. That was a really interesting conversation. I'm gonna end the recording now. ⁓ one sec, go on, Eric, go on.
Eric:
Now just a quick comment, was just thinking of Deleuze where he says that we need to think about the fascist within all of us, we need to think about the fascist within the group and also the concept that the unconscious is like a group. So I suppose when we're talking about love, suppose which part of us is talking about love? If we see ourselves as a group, are constituted by many different characters. And I suppose I'm also curious then if we are a group, there's one part that's a fascist, there's also another part that is potentially becoming animal or is akin to an animal and can love like an animal and I think for me that produces some hope.
Matt Lee:
Okay, an interesting source of hope. I'm gonna ask you all just to leave your computers open for little while. There'll be a little thing that says it's uploading. It will finish. You can close. It's just the way it works. Many thanks for your conversation. Love you to meet you all and I will see you soon I expect.