We live in the age of the ‘post.’ Because of this, it seems that—to those who accept and promote this notion—there are many things that should no longer trouble us, things that have been famously heralded as dead: the death of the author, the death of “man,” and, of course, God is dead too. Despite these erasures, nagging itches remain like a stubborn rash of the heart. Confronting, or avoiding, these itchy spots in the human condition seems to be at the heart of what it means to live as a human person. The Socratic dictum, “know thyself,” has never been completed nor has it ever been left behind altogether. This may seem highly inconvenient for those who might have hoped that these ‘posts’ would actually erase and kill the things they appeared to be aimed at; but it should come as no surprise to those who have read what ‘postmodern’ theorists—none more clear on this point than Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida—and understood what they meant. It seems indisputable that these things, these itchy spots, have reappeared again and again in critical discourse, as they should.
As Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Zizek, and many other theorists, would likely agree, metaphysics, ontology, the questions of fundamentals and origins are here to stay. The problems of God, mystery, and the mystical nature of the cosmos remain, with or without ecclesial or clerical mediation. The stark sense of my own personhood and the same, yet altogether different, selfhood of those around me—or, to put it another way: humanism—is as salient as salt to flesh or, for writers, words to a page. Yet, for some odd reason, these things are all too often misunderstood to be properties of the past, neatly contained in the naïve pre-‘post’ era. In a strong cocktail of Marxist activism and post-metaphysical sentiment, we find this overwhelmingly simplistic caricature of the ‘post’.
This ‘post’ supposedly liberated us from these essentialist and oppressive themes and… well, you see, that’s just the problem: We helplessly return to them empty-handed in one form or another, time and time again. Many theorists and academics seem immune to this problem, but, unless my assumption that “all humans love” is incorrect, then, they too confront love in all its beautifully tragic, and itchy, reality. I have been very encouraged, however, by the ongoing developments of a ‘post’ that seems particularly different and distinctly productive, precisely because of its unoriginality and lack of direct utility, that is, its ability to tackle the questions that come like the rain and suggest answers that come out like we do, messy and mysterious, repulsive yet adorable. This ‘post,’ poststructuralism (which I understand to be an unoriginal space [after-structuralism] describing the incomplete successes and failures of the previous ‘posts’ to find a way to say things without throwing anything away and, at the same time, not falling victim to paralysis or revolution), offers an entryway to a return—something that means to turn again, not a romantic or nostalgic desire for “better days”—to the things that the mangled ‘posts’ of the past and present (and, I suspect, future) might have too hastily thought to be able to live without.
But this return is not literal nor is it perfect. It goes on between the beaten paths worn by the common wars of science, politics and so on, and, oddly enough, realizes that that space in-between, the abyss, is impossible to navigate without fiction. It is neither innocent nor guilty. It is real, dynamic, and can be verified in the raw flesh of life itself—which I mean as something real-to-me, real-to-us, and real-within-the-(im)possible. Here, I argue, we find love.
For me, an imposing reply to the questions of ontology, God, and the human person (that are the same question, if not the same thing altogether, at some level) is made intelligible and meaningful in the mad eros of love. This love is not sentimental in the sense of being psychologically misty or epiphenomenal, to the contrary, it is sentimental in the sense that it locates an intuitive foundation, origin, and a degree of firstness that makes some—but certainly not all—sense of the nagging questions I mentioned. More sense, I would argue, than the various other fundamentalisms we find in the spectrum of right to left. But the ‘more’ of this sense is not a quantitative comparison nor is it a matter of metaphysical totality; it is simply a matter of fidelity to what we can hold in our hand, at least for a fleeting moment.
In fact, the point of matter is not even about what we intentionally hold as a matter of will or intellect, it seems prior to scholastic categories. The clave here is not a matter of what I hold; it is a matter of what holds me. What is it that holds us lost long before we willfully and intellectually question our very existence? In the mad eros of love I think we find our answer. Namely, that, without desire we are left with nothing. Lacking eros we are existentially undone, rendered meaningless and unintelligible to others and ourselves. Without that originary intuitive sentiment of this or that we have no inertia to exist or be. In fact, before the phenomenon of being itself, we find le phenom érotique, the erotic phenomenon. Despite the myth of Descartes cogito, we do not think first. Cogitation does not verify our existence or our being. Before being and before thought—that is to say, before the ego cogito—we exist as a lover, as an ego amans.
Again, this is not an obscure semantic account; it is an ontological contention. And a fundamental one at that. And it says something all too incomplete. In our own experience of erotic phenomena we know that love is complex, excessive, and, many times, contradictory. But it cannot contradict itself without itself. A new or conflicting desire—like “No, I changed my mind, I want that one instead.” or “Oh happy dagger!”—cannot appear as pure reason or sensory evidence without another desire to replace or complicate the previous one. An erotic intuition can only be replaced by another or several same-and-other ones.
To contend that love in the eros of intuitive desire is a fundamental aspect of the human condition is to return to that “great god” of Plato’s Symposium and, at the same time, to continue the rejection of the all-too-tidy, and ultimately oppressive, essentialism of Platonic metaphysics. What I mean to say is that a post-structural account of love can say the things it means to say without saying them outside of the drama of life. It is to say things in their tragic sense.
But what is this tragic sense? In Aristotle’s Poetics, it is a form of drama that is “serious, complete, and possessing magnitude.” It is the sense that Miguel de Unamuno conveyed as a sense of life in persons and towns as he puts it in his title: Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida en los Hombres y en los Pueblos. For Unamuno, this is the life of Don Quixote—a type of Christ—a person who is “of bone and flesh, who is born, suffers and dies—above all dies—who eats and drinks and plays and thinks and desires, the person who sees and hears, the brother, the true brother.”
Tragedy is what ontologically is in a way that is not bound to the metaphysics of the past that never died nor bled. Tragedy is in the flesh—that naked, vulnerable, and lonely flesh that keeps us humble, sober, grateful, and in love. Love must be tragic because it cannot pretend to be immortal and leave us alone to mourn and die. Love should not abandon us to the maelstrom of life and death without regard for our body or our soul. We are astonished by the tragedy of love.
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