Editors' Introduction, "Deconstruction and the Survival of Love" (original) (raw)

2018, Oxford Literary Review

The complexity of love in the history of philosophy, literature and culture seems perfectly conducive to deconstructive reading. From the beginning, love has flittered between the pinnacle of spiritual union and the messy, corporeal meeting of bodies in sex. Between, that is, the form of forms in the Symposium, at the heart of philosophical inquiry, and the gossip of schoolboy crushes and flirtations. Love cradles the serious and marginal, the immaterial and material, the language of unity and the dissemination of reproduction, the faith of vows and the ploys of betrayal. It doesn't seem to have a place, while simultaneously residing at (or in) the heart of life itself. But embodying both unity and dissemination, materiality and immateriality, is not love too conducive to deconstruction? It is undeniable that, within Derrida's corpus, the archive dedicated to love is slight. Outside of a handful of texts (such as The Post Card, The Politics of Friendship and 'Aphorism Countertime', and another set of texts with elliptical and often cryptic reference to love, such as Memoirs of the Blind, 'The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable' and 'There is No One Narcissism'), Derrida's thoughts on love remain undertheorized and underdeveloped. It has fallen on Jean-Luc Nancy, Peggy Kamuf and Nicholas Royle-as well as the rich traditions of psychoanalytic, feminist and queer thought-to give us anything like a full deconstructive articulation of love. In Derrida's own writing, it is as if love could never quite be the object of deconstructive thinking; as if love, because it is too profoundly deconstructive, could only be addressed through other figures, such as friendship, declaration, performance, narcissism, affirmation, democracy, time and life.