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Love’s bite

is deeper,

Tiger

By Agnes Poirier

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____December 7th, 2009

GUARDIAN.CO.UK

Love’s bite is deeper, Tiger

___Links are in GREEN

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A curious saga unfolded

across the media last week.

Hour by hour we were fed reports

on the Tiger Woods car crash,

his refusal to meet police,

and speculation about

extramarital affairs.

The best-paid sports star

in the world barricaded himself

at home and apologised for his

“transgressions” and “failings”.

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But this did not stop the alleged

“love cheat” being lectured about

Truth with a capital T.

Indeed,

so many words ring false in this

modern chronicle of love:

hero,

zero,

recompense –

as well as truth.

If this saga proves one thing,

it is not Woods’s “malice”,

but that love is threatened by

the world’s two leading ideologies:

libertarianism and liberalism.

These two 21st-century diseases

concur to make us believe that love

is a risk not worth taking:

as if we could have,

on one hand,

a safe conjugality;

and on the other,

sexual arrangements that will

spare us the dangers of passion.

Both are illusions.

In a remarkable book that has just

come out called Eloge de l’Amour

(Eulogy of Love),

the French philosopher Alain Badiou

ponders on the nature of love,

and how Judaism,

Christianity,

philosophy,

politics and art have in turn

treated and considered this

universal event:

the bursting on to the stage

of our lives of this

most unruly agent.

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Badiou was struck by an

advertising campaign last year

for Meetic,

a European dating website.

Its slogans:

“Get Love without the hazards!”;

“You can love

without falling in love”;

and

“You can love without suffering!”

In other words,

Meetic offers the public 100%

Guaranteed Risk Free Love.

This prompted Badiou to comment:

“Love without the fall,

love without the risks,

is just another piece of propaganda,

just like the presumed security

of arranged marriages or,

for that matter,

the American invention

of a zero-casualty war.

Love is what gives our life

intensity and meaning,

thus full of risks,

in my opinion worth taking.”

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For the philosopher,

the other threat to love

today is the liberal dogma:

one that denies love its

importance by making it

another extension of hedonism

and consumerism.

As Rimbaud said,

“Love must be reinvented” –

against the dictatorship of

security and comfort.

Placing himself between the

extremes represented by

Schopenhauer‘s pessimism and

Kierkegaard‘s absolute,

Badiou starts from Plato –

for whom love is an

elan towards idealism –

and distances himself

from French moralists,

who traditionally view love

as the ornament to desire

and sexual jealousy.

For him,

love is not truth,

but a construction of the truth

with someone who is not

identical but different.

It is also a pig-headed attempt

to make an event last in time.

“Obstinacy is a

strong element of love.”

Artists have always preferred

the figure of love as an

all-consuming encounter,

revolutionary perhaps,

but doomed from the start,

as in André Breton’s Nadja.

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In the arts,

obstinate love hasn’t

much inspired artists.

Except one perhaps:

in Samuel Beckett,

Badiou sees the real

champion of love.

For Badiou,

Beckett’s Happy Days is far more

romantic than Tristan and Isolde.

“Think of this old couple who

have pigheadly loved each other:

magnificent!”

Badiou refutes the romantic notion

of fusion and the dissolution of

oneself in the other’s gaze.

He insists that love is built

on the alterity between lovers,

and says –

in opposition to religious thinkers –

that children are steps along the way,

not love’s final destination.

For all these reasons,

Badiou links love to

revolution and resistance:

a revolution because it implies

contradictions and violence;

and a resistance to today’s

tyranny of puritanical lecturing,

hypocritical public confession,

naming and shaming,

and the ultimate fantasy –

the infallible hero.

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_Agnès Poirier

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Jaimee Grubbs sexy photos

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