From Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire:
Though love necessarily begins with desire, it doesn’t end there. When one falls in love, one falls for the other’s way of enjoying itself, for the other’s satisfaction with its own form of failure, its satisfaction with the absence of the object that would realize desire. Love targets the point at which the subject exceeds itself and is not self-identical. According to Joan Copjec, “when one loves something, one loves something in it that is more than itself, its nonidentity to itself.” We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity. In the act of love, one abandons oneself.
Pg 180
One can never have the love of the other because one loves what the other doesn’t itself have. Even when the other desires us, something in the other remains outside our control. To subdue fully the otherness of the other and master it would effectively eliminate the other as a lovable entity. Thus, a successful love would destroy its object at the exact moment it achieved total success. Love always leaves the subject with a sense of its failure or incompletion, but this incompletion must be experienced as the indication of love’s authenticity rather than its absence.
Pg 183
Romance eliminates the lost object that predominates in love and replaces it with the object of desire. This flight from the lost object and from loss as such occurs throughout the capitalist universe, but nowhere is it as apparent as in the domain of love.
Pg 184
One loves the failure of the beloved object to achieve self-identity and not any specific trait (except insofar as it embodies this failure). This is why someone genuinely in love cannot give the reasons for the love that she or he feels. Once there are reasons, one has left love and entered into romance.
Pg 185
For Rougement, we opt for romance over love in order to keep our desire alive. He notes, “unless the course of love is being hindered there is no ‘romance’; and it is romance that we revel in—that is to say, the self-consciousness, intensity, variations, and delays of passion.” Romance here is the obstruction of love, the delay in its realization. Romance, as Rougement sees it, allows us to continue to desire and to avoid the act of love.
Pg 186
The soul mate is the commodity in the form of the subject’s complement. This is why the idea of the soul mate has such importance for capitalism. The subject experiences itself as lacking whenever it desires, and no object can fill this lack. But the promise of the soul mate is the promise of completion, an object that would complement the lacking subject perfectly and thereby ameliorate its lack.
Pg 192
Mark Carrigan 