May 12, 2008...9:27 pm
zizek on love pt.1
Zizek on love. Seems to be an overplayed theme but I’ve recently experienced some of my own turmoil that has confirmed certain aspects of Zizek’s brief love monologues for me, but has also lead me to disagree with a particular concept of love that Zizek puts forward.
Zizek’s ideal definition of love in that first video is a love that does not idealize the beloved; rather, love is characterized by Zizek as the acceptance of a “person with all of its failures, stupidities, ugly points.” With this concept of love in mind the beloved becomes “absolute for you” and as a result you are able to
“see perfection in imperfection itself…”
This seeing of “perfection in imperfection” seems to follow the logic of the negation of negation. Zizek succinctly defines “negation of negation” as the shift of perspective which turns failure into true success. In the Parallax View, Zizek uses the example of Muhammad Ali’s 1996 Olympic Games torch lighting as an example of the negation of negation. The frail Muhammad Ali, suffering from the trademark symptoms of Parkinson’s disease during the lighting, became truly great not through smashing his opponents in the ring but through the “dignified endurance of his debilitating illness” in the public eye.
Negation of negation is a primary characteristic of the gaze of love, but I must argue against Zizek and say that love is impossible without the idealization of the beloved.
Love is impossible without idealization because the gaze of love imbues the beloved with an idealized phantasmic second body. This second body is precisely what Zizek describes as seeing “perfection in imperfection.” What we see is not the actual person with all his/her “failures, stupidities, ugly points” but rather we see our own projection of that second body which sees these imperfections but ignores them. It is only when we fall out of love that we realize the idealization of the beloved that takes place. When we fall out of love we see the imperfections as imperfections, the love falls from our eyes and what we see often turns out to be something quite unexpected. The negation of negation is negated (haha, maybe) and we are left with a NOT. With raw imperfection (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing).
In part 2 i’ll turn to a second zizek video.
2 Comments
May 20, 2008 at 2:21 am
Interesting examination..
However, it seems to bring to mind something.
When I think of true love, it seems that real, true, authentic love is that old married couple who have spent the last fifty years together and know each in a deeply real way. Completely and deeply cognizant of each other’s faults and flaws. They squabble and fight, often annoyed by each other, but so totally authentic, they can be completely honest about it, all the while continuing to adore each other.
I picture the two of them sitting together eating breakfast in that cute old couple kind of way, laughing and enjoying each other even while they make fun of each other, pointing out where the other has failed…
I remember once seeing a documentary about couples who had endured 50+ years of marriage.. and many of those couple’s relationships had even endured through affairs and infidelity
However, it was the couples that were able to acknowledge the failure of their significant other, embrace and yet continue to love that were able to continue…
The couples that had fallen in love with an idealized other who would always be perfect and unable to fail them — those were the couples that once infidelity struck the relationship were no longer able to remain together… that ended in divorce.
Should not true love endure even infidelity as it acknowledges the ability of one’s own self to fail?
It seems that the truer love was really the love that embraced failure, acknowledged flaws and yet continued to work towards loving the other.
What you describe, is, I think, what society does often call love these days… But to me it borders more on Zizek’s selfish, evil love. The love that is purely self-centered — that structure of imbalanced love that consumes and seeks to control the other.
May 23, 2008 at 9:11 am
I agree with you that “true love” comes from embracing the reality that mistakes are often made, even serious ones such as infidelity regardless of the type (emotional, sexual etc.).
I think that type of love, however, is an exception (as you seem to acknowledge) of a sadly established rule.
I think you’re right though, the love I describe is the evil and imbalanced love, but it is, unfortunately, the dominant ideal.
In my last paragraph I tried to put a positive spin on things. Sometimes falling out of love can show you that what you were in was an imbalanced love, and I think that’s where those old couples you describe fit. They’ve experienced the vicissitudes of love and have possibly acknowledged that there is really no such thing as a true achievable ideal of love because it’s a creation that is constantly being refined and reshaped by hard work.
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