Mark Carrigan

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To love means to find oneself with a ridiculous object

From The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two by Alenka Zupančič pg 174-175:

To love – that is to say (according to the good old traditional definition), to love someone “for what he is” (i.e. to move directly to the Thing) – always means to find oneself with a “ridiculous object,” an object that sweats, snores, farts, and has strange habits. But it also means to coninue to see in this object the “something more” ….. To love means to perceive this gap or discrepancy, and not so much to be able to laugh at it as to have an irresistible urge to laugh at it. The miracle of love is a funny miracle.

Real love – if I may risk this expression – is not the love that is called sublime, the love in which we let ourselves be completely dazzled or “blinded” by the object so that we no longer see (or can’t bear to see) its ridiculous, banal aspect. This kind of “sublime love” necessitates and generates a radical inaccessibility of the other (which usually takes the form of eternal preliminaries, or the form of an intermittent relationship that enables us to reintroduce the distance that suits the inaccessible, and thereby to “reusblimate” the object after each “use”). But neither is real love the sum of desire and friendship, where friendship is supposed to provide a “bridge” between two awakenings of desire, and to embrace the ridiculous side of the object.

The point is not that, in order for love to “work,” one has to accept the other with all her baggage, to “stand” her banal aspect, to forgive her weakness – in short to tolerate the other when one does not desire her. The true miracle of love – and this is what links love to comedy – consists in preserving the transcendence in the very accessibility of the other. Or – to use Deleuze’s terms – it consists in creating a “circuit laughter-emotion, where the former refers to the litte difference and the latter to the great distance, without effacing or diminishing one another.”

The miracle of love is not that of transforming some banal object into a sublime object, inaccessible in its being – this is the miracle of desire. If we are dealing with an alternation of attraction and repulsion , this can only mean that love as sublimation has not taken place, has not done its work and performed its “trick”. The miracle of love consists, first of all, in perceiving the two objects (the banal object and the sublime object) on the same level; additionally this means that neither one of them is occulted or substituted by the other. Secondly, it consists in becoming aware of the fact that the other qua “banal object’ and the other qua “object of desire” are one and the same …. one becomes aware of the fact that they are both semblances, that neither one of them is more real than the other … The other whom we love is neither of the two semblances (the banal and the sublime object); but neither can she be separated from them, since she is onthing other than what results from a successful (or “lucky”) montage of the two.

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