The Primacy of Love

Love offers us the only model there is for truly human accomplishments.

There hasn’t been a moment in history when nature was brought to such an extreme degree of denaturation, and no time when such a firm will to recreate it by stripping it of what enslaves it has reared its head.

Stimulated by the conquest of commodities, the sciences have clarified one side of the planet by plunging the other side in night and ignorance. So many truths have been rolled about from tide to tide; in the blocked ports so many ships about to set sail are rusting. All voyages have stopped short in the sole, changing scenery of creeks stuffed up with soot.

To get to know things means nothing anymore if we do not come to that knowledge by means of self-enjoyment above all — that’s the key to knowledge. No knowledge is worth anything at all without the consciousness of love, and there is no love that is learned without a love of life.

Love is Irreconcilable with Economy

In the same way as life as we commonly study it is not life, but merely its economized form — an essential durability called survival — in the same way, love cannot be confused any more with the mechanisms that have conditioned it to the point that they’ve passed themselves off as the substance of it.

The debacle of patriarchy, then of feminism (which briefly filled the vacancy in a position of power), has taken the emotional out of an ensemble of functions that corrupted its meaning and charm: the exchange of rights and duties, the calculations of profit and loss, the struggle between the strong and the weak, the competition that rules over the war and peace of families, and the familial enterprise following in the footsteps of financial success. A demarcation line has traced itself out, with an accrued precision, between the high places of the heart and the territories under the control of the mercantile spirit.

What lovers do in a businesslike way undoes their love. The jealous appropriation of partners, women treated as conquered cities, the conjugal gearworks of frustrations and aggressiveness, the hygienic satisfaction of genital pleasure, the discredit of tenderness as a proof of weakness, of infantilism, of sickness or madness — so many archaic traits which those of us taken in by life refuse to identify with amorous passion.

These obvious things are happy banalities, which paradoxically, do not come out into the open easily on their own — love becomes lucidity when it cannot let itself be blinded anymore.

This is confirmed by the dislocation of the traditional family, which up to now failed to amalgamate the affection naturally given to children and the ignoble commodification where love is exchanged for submission, where protection sets itself up as power, where the birth of the humanity of the future only adds future workers to the production line.

The Ideology of Tenderness

Praise and derision of the commodity: at the same time as a new consciousness is denouncing the imposture of loveless love, the market of material and spiritual values sets up shop and puts up billboards selling tenderness, it “promotes” the sweetness of the soul and voluptuous agreement only in order to celebrate the great accomplishments of socialism and toilet paper.

The scapegoats, Prometheus, and Christ have furnished the first version of an illustrated propaganda of the body sacrificed to work, the body torn from life for reasons of marketability. The advertised image of love proposes the last version. The castration of desire has only changed form.

However, the final abstraction of the living rubs up too closely against the passions that it parodies and recuperates; it will not resist for much longer the will to authenticity, which is being reborn in each of us like a childhood to be perfected — even if the fear of AIDS sustains for awhile the spectacular virtues of a disembodied sexuality and perpetuates the ancestral fear of loving beneath the gaze of a phallic and HIV positive image of Christ.

The Original Sin

The fear of love is a fear of life. It comes from the prohibition promulgated by commodity civilization on the freeness of enjoyments. Love doesn’t have to only be given through sacrifice, dammed up in the body and with the body only to escape through the mind and into the mind. The ridiculous conflict between the “angelic” and the carnal has filled the body so greatly with terror and frustration that it can hardly stop oscillating between chastity and rape — to which its deplorable movements often are reduced.

The body became evil incarnate in “original sin”, in the women, in a murderous self-hatred, in the “sorcery” and “witchcraft” of natural freedom. What is illustrated by the AIDS plague is the last condemnation of love, and I think that only the force of a love which rejects definitively the procession of judges and of their guilt-trips will really be able to erase the effects of AIDS and its insult to love.

The Natural Freeness of Love

There is no love for others without self-love.

Love is the simplest of human relations, and that’s why they’ve tried everything to complicate and denature it. To the extent that the life-force is reluctant to transform itself into work-force, a new simplicity will restore love to its right of absolute sovereignty. Technical progress has produced so many inventions which have never made individual happiness any greater that each of us is inclined now to put our genius into amorous passion, and not any longer into the mechanicalness of business, for it is only within that passion that enjoyment is learned and experienced in reality.

Nothing’s more important than the birth of love, except for its daily rebirth. We know that love’s blurring and disorders come from childhood unhappiness, but where will the healing of that malady come from if not from the opportunity — most often refused — that adults get, to ensure that in every amorous encounter they will establish the absolute predominance of affection over the ensemble of mercenary preoccupations?

True life begins from the moment that love is given without constraint to children. There, the eternity of the living affirms itself. Between parents and children, between lovers, there are hours and days when affection, clouded and obsessed by what is so totally contrary to it, lacks both the time and the desire to pour out; but that changes nothing when it comes to the feeling of its indissoluble presence, because affection is part of an unchangeable reality of the heart, like the eternity of the sap irrigating the trees across the rhythms of the seasons.

“You can do anything, because I love you, and you owe me nothing.” Such is the leitmotif without which I can conceive of no specifically human learning.

A love so concerned with helping children love themselves that everything undertaken by those who are full of that love, from the first gestures to the greatest joys of life, has a great chance at bringing them happiness.

The era of the creators will commence with a love which is given and not exchanged.

Love Excludes Sacrifice

True love has only ever existed in a nascent state. Like human beings, like their civilization, like authenticity in its first eruptions or generosity in its natural freeness. We only have the beginnings — and unhappiness seems to urge these beginnings of everything to get taxed by puerility and weakness, and demand that they end up swamped by well broken-in mechanisms, which suggest “strength” and “security”.

The thirst for beginnings has come with time. Having nothing more to learn or expect from death, we have only got the choice of starting everything over again, where none of the things that had begun creating themselves end up being finished.

The death agony of the religions, which we watch thrash about today with their last twitches of rage and hypocrisy, is unveiling what they always were — a crime against life. But the critique that denounces them is no longer a critique of the spirit, that is, a critique of the essence of the religions. The consciousness of the living kicks them into the ecumenical gutter more surely than could all the sacrilegious vituperations, which ring out like the funeral orison of the corpse of religion.

All beings grow from the affection they are capable of giving. Such is the secret, or, rather, the experience of plenitude, which was so close to the heart of each of the people that the religious folk have poured their trashy exhortations to sacrifice upon.

Now, he who sacrifices himself to give love only gives an example of sacrifice. To die to oneself in order to help others only helps them die in turn.

What derision it is to claim to give pleasure to others without pleasing yourself! How can I offer pleasure if I renounce my own? Pleasure is a natural freeness, a grace that is gathered up, not exploited.

Sacrifice is irreconcilable with enjoyment, because it is by means of its mutilating effects that the language of the body becomes the verboseness of the mind, that libidinal energy is sold for a wage, that the will to live denies itself and becomes a will to power.

These are no longer the days when the maternal stork drew the free-flowing knot of guilt around the necks of children for their entire existence. From here on out, love will learn to love itself by loving everything that’s alive. Who said anything about loving everything and everyone? I can’t love the messengers of death, the tortured ones who drag their cross behind them for the benefit of a world that kills them. There’s too many amicable things to attach myself for me to blame those who destroy themselves, and I don’t see any greater guarantee against their suicidal proselytism than seizing from instant to instant the thread of life which is spun around everything that has heart.

We have everything to learn about love, about love freed of the economic mechanisms that denature it. And I’m not trying to teach anyone any lessons here, neither about the practice of amorous relationships, nor about the art of purifying them of what denies them. The only learning that’s worth anything comes from the self, from the increased consciousness that comes from individual experience. As it happens, it is everyone’s responsibility to find the sovereignty of love wherever it manifests itself absolutely, to recognize it, in the convulsive beauty of pleasures, for what it really is — the gravitational center of the body, destabilized daily by work. Love is the true nature of the human.

Love is the Refinement of Desires

Love is not the transcendence of sexual needs, the street-theater farce of angels and the beast. It is the unity of the body, making order out of the chaos of desires, refining their original brutality, identifying itself only with the evolutionary principle of the human species — that all enjoyments tend to perfect themselves.

Love, given over to its sensual majesty, to the bloody torrent wherein sharpened senses give each particular being its own specific meaning, abolishes the rotten, old and disgusting obedience to heaven, to spirit, to the intellectual function, to the separation of people and things, of people from each-other and in themselves.

Transmutation will replace transcendence.

The Ubiquity of Love

Love becomes conscious of a symbiosis which must be created between nature and the being of desire.

Love is the transmutation of the sexual impulse into a pansexuality which corresponds most authentically to the expression and communication of the human.

Seeing everywhere the phallic and vaginal symbols that frustration impresses into their over-excited senses, the sexually obsessed are really receiving the discourse of nature, but registering it in its negative form, in the blabberings of compulsion, in the neurotic reaction of a mind troubled by the dissatisfaction of the body. Between them and impassioned lovers, there is only the distance between corporeal fullness and its absence. Being able to read environments is the same as this as well as the contrary sense of this. Here, love gives meaning to a landscape where analogical virtue discovers, in the rustling of leaves, the smell of hay, the curves of a street, the lava-flow of a wall, the gesture of a passerby, all the graces that distinguish loved beings. There, the wind in the trees, a warm gust of wind, or the gallop of a horse, incite to the brutalities of soldiers, since the mind that feels them is taken in by a spirit of exploitation for which the only thing that exists is the rigor of repressions and the aggressive decompressions of their incapacity to reach orgasm. There’s no preaching, no sermon, no political declaration, no attitude, no tic that is decipherable if one tries to interpret it in that mindset; it is, as Groddeck showed, the only primary reading that nothing escapes.

The language of enamored lovers has kept the imprint of an original language. These whisperings, these murmurs, this modulated cries, these syllables of swaying hips, which “well-informed” people mock the infantilism and animalness of — do they not express, as they do in animals and infants, the respiration of enjoyment and the state of tension that brings one to it? It’s an arcane language that the breath of amorous momentum brings the living to themselves with. It’s present in the embrace that unites the mother and child, nourished at her breast or cradled in her arms, and I would say that it perpetuates itself in the intimacy of one’s dialogue with oneself. Don’t those beings who learn to love themselves, and who secretly sharpen their desires to better realize them, don’t they talk to themselves as they talk to the children they once were, and to whom they promise to fulfill so many vows and so many prayers addressed to the fairies in the fervor of youth? The incantations of the grimoires, the psalmodies of sorcery — they are but the tortured foam that appears atop a deeper and more effective magic, contained in the force of desires and on the bridges that the libidinal energy of the whole body builds to connect itself with the reality of a world which must be changed.

There’s all sorts of room to believe that a sensual language is on its way to gaining power wherever the economized language of the social contract loses credibility. In other words, the signs of affection by means of which the living recognize themselves from person to person and from individual to landscape are defeating, little by little, the content of common discourse, and, even more simply, of what is said.

The Sovereignty We Must Create

The bankruptcy of a reality-system determined by the economic mechanisms that run it has brought out of its torpor a subjacent reality, secularly repressed by the history of the commodity. Love gains a sovereignty in that sub-reality that it exercises at the place from whence profit and power once reigned. It carves out a path for the general refinement of desires, which indicates the transcendence of primary needs and bases the only really human progress there is on the quest for enjoyment.

The closed world of interiority opens little by little upon a springtime of fertility, which banishes fear and anguish, dissolves the neuroses of the past, brings pleasures out into the broad daylight and plants the fallow earth from whence the commodity withdraws.

Love revokes the violence of frustrations, and invents itself a violence full of tenderness. The caressing hand erases the hand of power.

All we need to propagate abundance is to love without restraint, calculation, or prudence, until the point where we can finally hear innumerable hearts rising up with the song of the earth.