Can Philosophy Love?
eBook - ePub

Can Philosophy Love?

Reflections and Encounters

Cindy Zeiher, Todd McGowan

Share book
  1. 336 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Can Philosophy Love?

Reflections and Encounters

Cindy Zeiher, Todd McGowan

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

How can we articulate a philosophy of love? This volume stages encounters between contemporary understandings of love and philosophy. It considers particular continental philosophers who think about love and its relation to desire and sexuality. The essays in this collection contend with philosophy and psychoanalysis as lines of thought that expose love’s role in all knowledge. Drawing on the work of key thinkers such as ĆœiĆŸek, Badiou, Lacan, Hegel, Vattimo, Caygill, Levinas, Menshikov and Marx, this book puts love to work as a way of understanding the subject of desire as a figure of knowledge shaped by the event of love.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Can Philosophy Love? an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Can Philosophy Love? by Cindy Zeiher, Todd McGowan in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Critical Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2017
ISBN
9781786603241
Edition
1

Part I

Love, Hegel and Lacan

Chapter 1

Hegel in Love

Todd McGowan

Conceived in the Break

When does Hegel become Hegel? From the publication of his first book The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy in 1801 to his final lectures in 1831 on logic, Hegel displays a remarkable philosophical consistency. Though some Marxists contrast the radicality of the early Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) with the conformism of the late Philosophy of Right (1821), the two texts exhibit an almost complete continuity.1 Throughout his philosophical career, Hegel sticks with the dialectical system that he develops early on, which always concludes with some form of the absolute (absolute knowledge, the absolute idea, the absolute work of art, etc.). To locate the origins of this system we must look prior to Hegel’s published books and examine his earliest writings. The break that defines Hegel as a thinker occurs during the late 1790s prior to the publication of his first book. This break defines him as a thinker by separating him from Immanuel Kant.
Hegel begins his intellectual life, like many from his generation, as a Kantian. Kant’s conception of freedom through the moral law shapes the young Hegel. But Hegel emerges as Hegel at the moment when love enters his philosophy. Though Hegel is a thinker that we associate with an absolute commitment to logic rather than with love, it is love that enables Hegel to break from the spell of Immanuel Kant and to begin to forge his own philosophy in which logic would predominate. Hegel’s logic is not the logic of Aristotle or the rationalist tradition; his logic develops out of love. When logic comes to assume the role that love plays in Hegel’s early thought, it retains the same structure that Hegel sees at work in love. Hegel is the first modern secular philosopher to make love the point of departure for his entire philosophical project.2
Love fascinates the young Hegel because it represents the identification of contraries and the sustaining of contradiction as a positive force. When one is in love, one unites one’s own identity with that of the other. The lover and the beloved become one in their way of finding satisfaction. Lovers do not just privilege the other’s satisfaction over their own but adopt the other’s satisfaction as their own. And yet love would not be love if a distinction between subject and beloved other did not remain. The act of love requires at once the elimination of difference and its perpetuation. It is the identity of identity and difference, a contradictory identity that enables Hegel to navigate a way out of the one-sidedness of Kant and Fichte’s philosophy that he had inherited.
In the act of love, the lover allows the beloved to have more value than the lover herself or himself, and yet the lover remains the source of this valuing. The value of the other outweighs that of the subject but only because the subject grants the other this value. Through the subject’s own act, the subject affirms its own secondary status. Love thus enables the subject to translate difference – the difference between the lover and the beloved – into contradiction.3 As his thought matures, Hegel identifies this structure of identity in difference as the basic form not only of all thought but of being itself. The first insight into this structure comes to him in the formulation of Christian love. Love provides the avenue for granting contradiction a privileged ontological position.
After it appears in Hegel’s early writing, love never vanishes from Hegel’s system. That said, love plays a role in the beginning of his philosophy that it would not play in the fully developed system. Though references to love abound in the system, love takes up a position within the system rather than remaining the animating principle of the system. For instance, in his later writing on politics and right, Hegel identifies love as the bond that unites the family, which is the beginning of ethical life.4 Here, love is essential for the establishment of an ethical order. But the concept (Begriff) has taken over the central place in Hegel’s system. As it has done so, the concept has assumed the structure of love. Hegel discovers his version of the concept through exploration of love, even though he never articulates this relationship between love and the concept or announces the turn from one to the other.
In Hegel’s thought, the concept is what it is but also is what it isn’t. That is to say, the concept does not exist in isolation but relies on a negation that undermines it while simultaneously sustaining it. In order to be what it is, the concept must involve itself in what it isn’t, which parallels the structure of love. If we try to keep a concept pure from its negation, we lose the concept itself, just as trying to have love without the other deprives us of love. The concept without its negation becomes nonsensical, which is why the concept of nature, for example, must include the unnatural. When we try to define nature as a concept, not only do we have to have recourse to the unnatural in order to define it, but we inevitably demonstrate that there is a point at which the distinction between the natural and the unnatural breaks down.
If we look at the case of cloning, this becomes clear. Cloning represents a human intervention into the cycle of natural reproduction. The natural world itself reproduces through asexual or sexual reproduction, not through cloning. And yet, humans developed the process of cloning through their investigation and mimicking of natural reproduction. The break from nature that occurs with cloning also exhibits characteristics of a natural phenomenon. Cloning is both natural and unnatural, which reveals that nature is not simply identical to itself but involves what negates it. This in no way means that the concept of nature has no sense or that we must abandon it. Instead, we must think of every concept as a certain form of contradiction, on the model of love.
Throughout the Science of Logic, Hegel describes the concept in these terms. What Kant dismisses as an antinomy of reason, Hegel takes as the definition of the concept. Contradiction doesn’t undermine the concept but rather animates it. Along these lines, Hegel claims, ‘If a contradiction can be pointed out in something, by itself this is still not, as it were, a blemish, not a defect or failure. On the contrary, every determination, anything concrete, every concept, is essentially a unity of distinguished and distinguishable elements which, by virtue of the determinate, essential difference, pass over into elements which are contradictory’.5 Opposition does not undermine the concept but defines it, so that the concept becomes the enactment of contradiction. This conception of the concept gives Hegel his radicality as a thinker, and it stems directly from the concept’s origin in Hegel’s discovery of love.
Hegel contrasts conceptual thinking with analytical thinking. Unlike the former, the latter does not share the structure of love. Conceptual thinking reveals the relationship of identity that exists within what appear to be simply external differences. It never remains content with difference that doesn’t involve relation. To put it another way: conceptual thinking grasps the internal contradiction lurking within external difference. As a result, it makes evident the mutual dependence of every entity. External differences hide internal contradictions because nothing can be thought or even can exist in isolation. For analytical thinking, the case is entirely different. Differences are simply external and have nothing to do with each other. One can treat each entity as independently existing and analyse its interactions with other entities as entirely contingent relations. According to analytical thinking, every apparent contradiction masks the play of pure difference.
The model for analytical thinking comes from arithmetic. Hegel calls arithmetic ‘the very opposite of the concept’ because of the way that it deals with difference, ‘because of the indifference of the combined to the combining’.6 One adds 5 + 7 but there is no internal connection that occurs in the act of addition. The number 5 has no necessary relation with the number 7, and one could substitute a different number for 7 without changing the operation. The operation is not conceptual, as Hegel sees it, insofar as it holds the entities in an external relationship with each other. This type of thinking blinds the subject to the inability of identity to exist without difference and the inability of the concept to exist without contradiction. When taken as the only model for thought, analytical thinking misleads because it does not take the structure of love as its starting point. The idea is not that we should avoid working math problems but that we cannot take arithmetic as paradigmatic.7
The contrast between arithmetic and love is instructive. Arithmetic allows for the free substitution of one number for another, while love insists that no possible substitute for the beloved exists. The moment anyone suggests the adequacy of a substitute, we know that they are not in love. Similarly, love rejects counting. Anyone who adds up the number of partners that she or he has had has lost touch with love. Mathematicians may be great lovers, but they aren’t great lovers as mathematicians.8
Like love, conceptual thinking refuses a merely external relation between identity and difference. To put it in the language of love, conceptual thinking in Hegel’s sense refuses to use the other but rather identifies itself with the other insofar as the other remains recalcitrantly different. In this sense, every act of love is a failure to integrate the difference of the other into the identity of the subject, while every conceptualization is a failure to integrate the difference of the other into the concept. This failure defines love and the concept. Love and the concept are the names for the way that otherness disturbs identity. Hegel is the first to see that the failure of the concept to integrate difference is actually its success, that there is no success beyond this contradictory identity. He arrives at this insight as a result of seeing love, rather than mathematics, as the model for the concept. There is no identity outside this disturbance, no pure identity. Each love relation and each concept fail in a specific way that gives them their identity.
Neither love nor the concept promises a mystical connection to the other. The unity that they provide does not erase the contradictory status of the relationship. The other’s difference remains difference that disturbs both love and the concept. This disturbance is crucial to Hegel’s understanding of love and the concept, and it gives both their revolutionary status. Everyone knows the dangers of falling in love. Not only can one endure trauma when the other abandons the relationship, but even a successful love relationship leaves the subject’s satisfaction in the hands of the other.
Though no concept has suffered a lifetime of anguish after being spurned by its beloved, the structure of the risk in love and the concept is actually the same. Rather than marking a point of thought’s mastery over being, the conc...

Table of contents