In its early stages, every love-life, and maybe every crass love-affair as well, retains a universal moment in spite of its particularity. Insofar as the love is realized and consummated, this universal moment vanishes in the tragi-comic complications of daily drudgery and bustle, and the idiosyncrasies of the sated couple. But a postponed realization that rather naïvely precludes this process of devaluation, no matter how immature it may be otherwise and no matter how deluded it may tend to become, preserves the pathos of attraction in connection with a particular and yet almost completely unknown member of the species.[1] Although there is no doubt that this cannot be turned into a simplistic “platonic” prescription, those capable of the requisite distance are perhaps blessed with a certain serenity even in the world that still cannot promote it on a universal scale.[2] Otherwise, that is, in a world where the universal could be reached in a less circuitous fashion, this proposition would be anachronistic, if not monstrous indeed. The difficulty is with an indefinite “meanwhile.” For an indefinite postponement of a love’s realization tends to complement an indefinite postponement of this utopian social project, as they have a common root in language.[3] The ridiculous notwithstanding, the two forms of contemplation are entwined. Put differently, this argument applies, mutatis mutandis, to socialism (and self-imposed exile) as well.

Footnotes

1. Cf. R. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, New York: Hill and Wang, 1978 (first published in 1977), p. 134:

I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other (”I know you—I’m the only one who really knows you!”); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.

2. Cf. op. cit., p. 40:

A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. “I shall be yours,” she told him, “when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.” But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

3. Cf. op. cit., p. 234:

So desire still irrigates the Non-will-to-possess by this perilous movement: I love you is in my head, but I imprison it behind my lips. I do not divulge. I say silently to who is no longer or is not yet the other: I keep myself from loving you.