How Does Love Give Itself "As" Itself?

Love is always becoming other than itself because love is characterized by self-emptying (Kenosis). Love opens possibilities, so it must clear away cancerous repetitions of the same, or as the phenomenological "Epoché" would have it, it must "bracket presuppositions," in order to let what gives itself in love appear "as" itself. Love knows through an intercourse that does not reduce the "otherness" of the "Other," which is to unify without the equivalences of identification or of objectification. One of the worst and most persistent misunderstandings about Hegel's dialectical synthesis is that it reduces the positive and the negative terms of the dialectic to a unity in which one becomes the other without remainder. No! it is a holding together of a contradiction in which the otherness of each opposing term makes a third thing appear, which is the failure of synthesis, or the productive contradiction of love. The "refractory zone (Deleuze)" of Lacanian "non-rapport" between lovers that forms when these two terms are "brought near (Deleuze)" in the dialectic is a third non-object, which is unable to become an object, or a conceptual object of knowledge, because there is too much about it to objectively unify. The failure of symbolization at the heart of the Lacanian Real's "absolute resistance" to symbolic unification is the too-much indeterminacy of being "as" a becoming to determine through the equalities of identification. Knowing what is indeterminable through the intercourse of love must be done analogically with the phenomenological "as," which is knowing the beloved "as" it shows itself. The "as" of analogy is what allows being to become in relation to knowing without being determined by that knowing, so that love is always a revelation that makes "visible the invisible in its invisibility" without reduction to what intentionally appears, as Jean-Luc Marion would have it.

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co