From Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire pg 180:
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.”5 We seek love to escape the constraints of our symbolic identity and to enjoy our nonidentity. In the act of love, one abandons oneself.
From pg 183:
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.
I'm lying on the ground now
And you walk in through the only door
Well, I have lost my eyesight like I said I would
But I still know
That it's you, in front of me
Coming back for even more of exactly the same
Well, are you a masochist?
To love a modern leper on his last leg
You're not ill and I'm not dead
Doesn't that make us the perfect pair?
Sit with me and we'll start again
And you can tell me all about what you did today
What you did today
Mark Carrigan 