(10:10 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Broken Hearts

Love brings an end to the opposition between gift and propery without surmounting and without sublating it: if I return to myself within love, I do not return to myself from love (the dialectic, on the contrary, feeds on the equivocation). I do not return from it, and consequently, something of I is definitively lost or dissociated in its act of loving. That is undoubtedly why I return (if at least it is the image of a return that is appropriate here), but I return broken: I come back to myself, or I come out of it, broken. The "return" does not annul the break; it neither repairs it nor sublates it, for the return in fact takes place only across the break itself, keeping it open. Love re-presents I to itself broken (and this is not a representation). It presents this to it: he, this subject, was touched, broken into, in his subjectivity, and he is from then on, for the time of love, opened by this slice, broken or fractured, even if only slightly. He is, which is to say that the break or the wound is not an accident, and neither is it a property that the subject could relate to himself. For the break is a break in his self-possession as subject; it is, essentially, an interruption of the process of relating oneself to oneself outside oneself. From then on, I is constituted broken. As soon as there is love, the slightest act of love, the slightest spark, there is this ontological fissure that cuts across and that disconnects the elements of the subject-proper--the fibers of its heart. One hour of love is enough, one kiss alone, provided that it is out of love--and can there, in truth, be any other kind? Can one do it without love, without being broken into, even if only slightly?

The love break simply means this: that I can no longer, whatever presence to myself I may maintain or that sustains me, pro-pose myself to myself (nor im-pose myself on another) without remains, without something of me remaining, outside of me. This signifies that the immanence of the subject (to which the dialectic always returns to fulfill itself, including in what we call "intersubjectivity" or even "communication" or "communion") is opened up, broken into--and this is what is called, in all rigor, transcendence. Love is that act of a transcendence (of a transport, of a transgression, of a transparency, also: immanence is no longer opaque). But this transcendence is not the one that passes into--and through--an exteriority or an alterity in order to reflect itself in it and to reconstitute in it the interior and the identical (God, the certainty of the cogito, the evidence of a property). It does not pass through the outside, because it comes from it. (Transcendence is always thought as a self-surpassing: but here it is not at all a "surpassing," and even less "self-"; transcendence is the disimplication of the immanence that can come to it only from the outside.) Love does not stop, as long as love lasts, coming from the outside. It does not remain outside; it is this outside itself, the other, each time singular, a blade thrust in me, and that I do not rejoin, because it disjoins me (it does not wound, properly speaking: it is something else, foreign to a certain dramatics of love).

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