Amor e Badiou

Alain Badiou, filósofo francês, tomado por Zizek como um Platão ou um Hegel, é um dos poucos na sua área - ver aqui - que se dedicam a reflectir sobre Amor. Recentemente foi editado em livro uma espécie de entrevista que Badiou concedeu sobre este tema, como o título "In Praise of Love", e em relação ao qual resolvi deixar neste blogue os seguintes excertos:

"I think - in quite different terms, naturally - along the same lines, namely that love encompasses the experience of the possible transition from the pure randomness of chance to a state that has universal value. Starting out from something that is simply an encounter, a trifle, you learn that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity. And you can even be tested and suffer in the process."

"Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the

perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality, and is thus central to philosophy, as Plato was the first to intuit." 

"Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcissistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship.

Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.

In fact, Lacan also engages in philosophical ambiguities in relation to love. The idea that “love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship” can indeed be interpreted in two ways. The first and most obvious is that love is what the imagination employs to fill the emptiness created by sex. (...) But Lacan also thinks quite the opposite, that love reaches out towards the ontological. While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock... love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life thus disrupted and re-fashioned."

"I mean truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be."

"When I lean on the shoulder of the woman I love, and can see, let’s say, the peace of twilight over a mountain landscape, gold-green fields, the shadow of trees, black-nosed sheep motionless behind hedges and the sun about to disappear behind craggy peaks, and know - not from the expression on her face, but from within the world as it is - that the woman I love is seeing the same world, and that this convergence is part of the world and that love constitutes precisely, at that very moment, the paradox of an identical difference, then love exists, and promises to continue to exist. The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze. Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world."

"I think we should approach the question of love from two points that correspond to everyone’s experience., love involves a separation or disjuncture based on the simple difference between two people and their infinite subjectivities. (...) In other words, love contains an initial element that separates, dislocates and differentiates. You have Two. Love involves Two.

The second point is that precisely because it encompasses a disjuncture, at the moment when this Two appear on stage as such and experience the world in a new way, it can only assume a risky or contingent form. That is what we know as “the encounter”. Love always starts with an encounter. And I would give this encounter the quasi-metaphysical status of an event, namely of something that doesn’t enter into the immediate order of things. (...) The encounter between two differences is an event, is contingent and disconcerting, “love’s surprises”, theatre yet again. On the basis of this event, love can start and flourish. It is the first, absolutely essential point. This surprise unleashes a process that is basically an experience of getting to know the world. Love isn’t simply about two people meeting and their inward-looking relationship: it is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but £rom the perspective of Two. And that is what I have called a “Two scene”."

"However, love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say

that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world."

"I am really interested in the time love endures. Let’s be more precise: by “endure” one should not simply understand that love lasts, that love is forever or always. One has to understand that love invents a different way of lasting in life. That everyone’s existence, when tested by love, confronts a new way of experiencing time. Of course, if we echo the poet, love is also the “the dour desire to endure”. But, more than that, it is the desire for an unknown duration. Because, as we all know, love is a re-invention of life. To re-invent love is to re-invent that re-invention."

"I believe that love is indeed what I call in my own philosophical jargon a “truth procedure”, that is, an experience whereby a certain kind of truth is constructed. This truth is quite simply the truth about Two: the truth that derives from difference as such. And I think that love - what I call the “Two scene” - is this experience. In this sense, all love that accepts the challenge, commits to enduring, and embraces this experience of the world from the perspective of difference produces in its way a new truth about difference."

"But chance, at a given moment, must be curbed. It must turn into a process that can last. This is a very difficult, almost metaphysical problem: how can what is pure chance at the outset become the fulcrum for a construction of truth? How can something that was basically unpredictable and seemed tied to the unpredictable vagaries of existence nevertheless become the entire meaning of two lives that have met, paired

off, that will engage in the extended experience of the constant (re)-birth of the world via the mediation of the difference in their gazes? How do you move from a mere encounter to the paradox of a single world where it is revealed that we are two? It is a complete mystery. And this is what really nourishes scepticism about love. People will say, why talk about great truth in respect of the quite banal fact that So and So met his or her colleague at work? That’s exactly what we must emphasise: an apparently insignificant act, but one that is a really radical event in life at a micro-level, bears universal meaning in the way it persists and endures."

"That is how chance is curbed: the absolute contingency of the encounter with someone I didn’t know finally takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny, and

that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright. Moreover, the declaration of love isn’t necessarily a one-off; it can be protracted, diffuse, confused, entangled, stated and re-stated, and even destined to be re-stated yet again. That is the moment when chance is curbed, when you say to yourself: I must tell the other person about what happened, about that encounter and the incidents within the encounter. I will tell the other that something that commits me took place, at least as I see it. In a word: I love you. (...) It isn’t at all easy to say “I love you”. That small sentence is usually thought to be completely meaningless and banal. Moreover, people sometimes prefer to use other more poetic, less commonplace words to say “I love you”. But what they are always saying is: I shall extract something else from what was mere chance. I’m going to extract something that will endure, something that will persist, a commitment, a fidelity. And here I am using the word “fidelity” within my own philosophical jargon, stripped of its usual connotations. It means precisely that transition from random encounter to a construction that is resilient, as if it had been necessary."

"The problem then resides in inscribing this eternity within time. Because, basically, that is what love is: a declaration of eternity to be fulfilled or unfurled as best it can be within time: eternity descending into time. That’s why it is such an intense feeling. (...) So love remains powerful, subjectively powerful: one of those rare experiences where, on the basis of chance inscribed in a moment, you attempt a declaration of eternity. “Always” is the word used to declare eternity. Because you cannot know what that “always” means or how long it will last. “Always” means “eternally”."