AGNOSTIC LOVE

A Subjective Proof Of Love

« All the delights of the earth »

Comblement / Fulfillment

The subject insistently posits the desire and the possibility of a complete satisfaction of the desire implicated in the amorous relation and of a perfect and virtually eternal success of this relation : paradisiac image of the Sovereign Good, to be given and to be received.

'“Now, take all the delights of the earth, melt them into one single delight , and cast it entire into a singleman- all this will be as nothing to the delight of which I speak.

I fulfill (I am fulfilled), I accumulate, but I do not abide by the level of lack; I
produce an excess and it is in this excess that the fulfillment occurs.
Fulfillments: they are not spoken, so that erroneously the amorous relation seems reduced to a long complaint.

In reality, it is unimportant that I have no likelihood of being really fulfilled. Only the will to fulfillment shines, indestructible, before me.

An Aesthetic Vision Of Love

« The other’s Body »

Corps / Body

Any thought, :Any feeling, any interest aroused in the amorous subject by the loved body.

I was looking al everything in the other’s face, the other’s body: lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, the luster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; I was fascinated -fascination being, after all, only the extreme of detachment- by a kind of colored ceramicized, vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understanding anything about it, the cause of my desire.

A Conceptual Art Of Love

« Images »

Image / Image

In the amorous realm, the most painful wounds are inflicted more often by what one sees than by what one knows.

The image is presented, pure and distinct as a letter: it is the letter of what pains me. Precise, complete, definitive, it leaves no room for me, down to the last finicky detail: I am excluded from it as from the primal scene, which may exist only insofar as it is framed within the contour of the keyhole.

Here then, at last, is the definition of the image,of any image: that from which I am excluded.

The image is peremptory, it always has the last word; no knowledge can contradict it, "arrange” it, refine it.

The images from which I am excluded are cruel, yet sometimes I am caught up in the image (reversal). I convert my exclusion into an image. This image, in which my absence is reflected as in a mirror, is a sad image.

A romantic painting shows a heap of icy debris in a polar light; no man, no object inhabits this desolate space.

What wounds me are the forms of the relation, its images.

The image-as the example for the obsessive-is the thing itself. The lover is thus an artist; and his world is in fact a world reversed, since in it each image is its own end (nothing beyond the image).

A Voyeuristic Act Of Love

« Replacement »

Identification / Identification

The subject painfully identifies himself with some person (or character) who occupies the same position as himself in the amorous structure.

Identification is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.

I devour every amorous system with my gaze and in it discern the place which would be mine if I were a part of that system. I perceive not analogies but homologies.

The structure has nothing to do with persons; hence (like a bureaucracy) it is terrible. It cannot be implored-I cannot say to it: “Look how much better I am than Others.”
Inexorable, the structure replies: “You are in the same place; hence you are Others.” No one can plead against the structure.

A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world.